The predictability with which many Americans will slip back into political apathy following the downfall of MAGA would be a terrible mistake of lessons unlearned.
It seems like the political atmosphere is becoming more insane by the day. The despotism of the current Administration wreaks havoc on civil liberties and human rights. The landscape of discourse seems further divided, with each side of the false left versus right paradigm stuck in their own reality devoid of reason.
The public is exhausted and overwhelmed, purposefully inundated with an information overload of unspeakable horrors committed by the rich and powerful against the most vulnerable of the population.
As we discussed last week, this is done with a purpose to be deliberately psychologically debilitating to induce apathy and acquiescence.
Understandably, for many people, when the current regime falls from power they'll breathe a deep sigh of relief and say "phew, glad that's over." Yearning for a false sense of normalcy that comes with the embrace of the politics of yesteryear, the smugness of "defeating fascism in the United States", and a complacency that things are "finally back to the way they were".
Yet this is all an illusion. And a particularly dangerous one at that.
It is an illusion that threatens to undermine the most basic understanding of how we got here in the first place.
The illusion fails to recognize that the totalitarianism of Trump and his sycophants did not occur in a vacuum, but rather as the inevitable outcome of unchecked power and creeping authoritarianism for more than a century over.
Americanized fascism did not simply rear its ugly head in 2015.
Let us not forget as far back as February 20th, 1939, Nazi rallies were held in New York's Madison Square Garden.
History.com">Source: History.comNor should it be forgotten that Adolf Hitler's genocidal crusade for racial purity was directly inspired by the American Eugenics Movement.
Or the fact that Wall Street financiers and the Western political elite with the help of American and British intelligence agencies covertly financed and supported Hitler's rise to power. And American businesses such as Standard oil, General motors, Ford Motor Company, IBM and more directly supported the Nazi war machine.
American political elites such as the Bush family under their patriarch Prescott Bush, and other financial oligarchs the likes of the Rockefellers attempted to orchestrate their own fascist coup, known as the Business Plot, to overthrow the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States.
Their plot failed, but the ideology persisted after the war with Operation Paperclip, and throughout the Cold War the American military industrial complex and it's intelligence apparatus would directly support neo-fascist paramilitaries the world over.
Support for fascism is as American as apple pie.
So when people yearn for the politics of old, a sense of normalcy from before the Trump era, when they look upon the regimes of George W Bush and Barack Obama with fondness, this is an ideological trap that overlooks the most basic of facts that Trumpism did not arise in contrast to the old American political model, but as a culmination of it.
The American liberal would scoff at the notion that Barack Obama, too, was a fascist. Of course Obama himself does not identify as such, but that is the nature of American imperialism, corporate oligarchy, and the dictatorship of capital that is central to the American experiment, the Western geopolitical power structure more broadly, and which is the product of an adherence to statism overall.
After all, it was the Obama regime that tacitly backed the Neo-Nazi overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014, that built ICE from the fledgling organization created under Bush into the militarized jackboots that now serve as Trump's police state Gestapo. It was the Obama Administration that built upon every atrocity of the Bush Administration before him both domestically and abroad, just as Bush did in his tenure, and just as every other presidential predecessor before them that led to the rise of Trumpian authoritarianism.
So when these most insane political parasites are no longer in power, the people ought not to allow themselves to be lulled back to sleep, to fall into a false sense of security eager to embrace the politeness of previous predators or the opacity of oppression that comes with viewing the American political system with blinders of red and blue.
For the same establishment that will come after Trump is the same establishment that came before Trump, and is the same establishment that Trump serves. An establishment which maintains a status quo of corporate monopoly, exploitation of the working class, the oppression of marginalized communities, and wars of colonialism.
It's perfectly okay to look forward to the days when the current wave of despotism is behind us, but the people cannot allow themselves to slip into a blissful complacency just because one head of the Hydra has been removed. Resistance to the establishment, rejection of the inherently oppressive institutions of the state, must continue until liberation is realized.
