The next four years are set to be a wild ride, but I intend to thread the middle.

By that I mean that to defeat Trump we must scrutinize, modify and adapt our resistance. Furthermore, we cannot fail to acknowledge that the red/blue cultural war is a serious distraction from seeing the US economic/political/military reality, where both parties and their corporate media cheerleaders, not just Trump, are malign actors causing serious harm. I wrote this last week: “I despise Trump for totally different reasons than the average American liberal, but for the same reasons I despise Biden and the Democrats and hold them responsible for their series of disasters, crimes and genocides.”

I’m mulling this over as we make the transition from one evil to another. While a distraction, the red/blue cultural war is dangerous because ideologues on both sides are irrational, where reason is wasted and so there is a need to tread carefully. The tussle over Trump eliminating USAID is a good example. Liberals are defending a government entity they argue is spreading democracy and universal values but USAID is also a CIA cutout that facilitates color revolution regime-change ops, while propagandizing the American public.  The agency was created in 1961, at the height of the Cold War, by President Kennedy in order to administer aid programs that fostered economic and social development in foreign countries. It sounded nice on paper. In reality, the agency became a powerful force in America’s global pacification efforts. USAID quickly developed a reputation for savagery, where it trained death squads, schooled foreign police departments in effective torture techniques, and utilized black propaganda.

Naturally, the Democrats, who, with Russia-gate, have transformed into cheerleaders for the intelligence agencies that comprise the deep state, are opposed and have been protesting in front of USAID headquarters after President Trump agreed to shut USAID down. This is your Democratic Party, where there’s been no protest about Trump’s assault on the National Labor Relations Board, but they love them some spooks.

Nevertheless, Trump looks to cause serious disruptions in our world, not just with his actions but with the counter actions that will inevitably reverberate through the complex systems of our modern society.

It’s not that Trump’s actually popular, he’s not. After promising a populist revolution to help American workers it appears that he’s poised to govern like all of the Republicans since Reagan by reducing taxes on capital, on the rich, and increasing taxes on the labor on workers, especially the lowest income workers.

Here’s where we need to pause. Both parties and the corporate media have brought us to this point with their policies. The Biden Administration was mostly a continuation of neoliberal economics and one of the main reasons Kamala Harris lost was that the the Democrats were associated largely with an inflation driven by their corporate benefactors. Indeed, the interest of the donors who contributed $1.1 billion to Harris was always purely transactional and (as events have proven) they rapidly switched their allegiance to Trump. So the national Democrats have absolutely no one that can serve as a plausible opponent to any Trump policies, the Party’s historic pro-working class branding has been destroyed, and the Party totally lacks the money and infrastructure needed to move forward.

But Biden, or whoever was running the government, was just following a bipartisan trend of socialism for the rich and savage neoliberalism for American workers. This allowed the oligarch’s to loot the country, courtesy of their bought and paid for politicians. Critical mass was reached in the 1990s whereby the wealth of the oligarchs was increased to the point where it bought explicit political control.

It’s fitting that Donald Trump is a buyer and a seller in our post Citizens United world, as well as the most transactional president in our lifetime but what do they say about chickens coming home to roost?

The rise of neoliberalism brought a concerted decision made by capitalists with the explicit backing of the government that they would offshore and outsource US production to other countries because, of course, they wanted to exploit labor arbitrage. Everyone wants to forget this history in their zeal to blame Trump but the plutocrats who own the country hated the New Deal compromise with labor and have long sought to break the back of unions. Then there was the privatization of the commons, where American infrastructure was seized by corporations in the process erecting tollbooths and making the US economy high-cost. These were choices made by both parties, the corporate media, and all of the leading economists, who cheered the privatization and assured us that it was way more efficient than “big government.”

Trump seems set to exacerbate the problems with his ham-fisted tariffs. Because even if you put tariffs on everything, the US can’t produce anything because they’ve lost our factories as well as all of the manufacturing workers. It’s gonna take generations to bring back. And because the costs of production in the US are so high, because you have to give workers healthcare. You have to give workers education to their children. You have to give workers housing, but if all of that is insanely expensive because it’s all been privatized, it doesn’t matter if you have tariffs because those wages have to be higher to make up for the cost of education and healthcare and housing.

Then there’s the American empire. Democrats seriously seem to think all the outrage over Trump is going to magically erase Biden’s wholehearted support for the Israel genocide of Gaza, where the US provided the weapons, bombs, intelligence and most importantly deployed the whole of the western media/propaganda machine in an effort that Winston Smith would have recognized. I really don’t believe that everyone has forgotten the Democrats culpability. I think permanent damage has been done, especially in the eyes of young people. I think Americans will focus on Trump because he’s the president now and his abuses need to be highlighted and criticized, but I don’t think they’ll ever forget the way Biden and the Democrats showed us who they really were through 15 months of mass atrocities.

If that was not enough, there’s the US sponsored proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, where Blinken or Sullivan or one of the many deep state apparatchiks, thought it a good idea to lob rockets into Russia, while senile Biden nodded along.

The problems we face are bi-partisan yet there will be intense pressure to choose a side in the ongoing cultural war. A true intellectual critiques their country, party and themselves. The dirty little secret that none dare broach is that Trump is us. He represents and exemplifies what we’ve allowed this country to become, and we’re all culpable, myself included.