I’ve been thinking about the contrast between the Republican means of governance and the Democrat way in the wake of Trump’s steamroller approach.
At the Jackpot Blog, Lambert Strether, points out that Trump is a massive repudiation of the theory, put forth after Obama’s election that a president doesn’t possess super-powers. “After Obama’s triumphal election in 2008, the rallying cry of liberal Democrat Obama apologists was “The President is not a dictator,” and those who advocated that Obama use his political capital for good — say, single payer — were accused of practicing the “Green Lantern Theory” (GLT) politics (here explained, deliciously, by Ezra Klein. Of course, the Trump Administration is a living, breathing, belching refutation of GLT. You may hate Trump, you may hate what he does, you may hate how he does it, you may hate why he does it, but if you consider the Trump Administration as a case study, it should put a stake through the heart of GLT.”
But why does Trump seem to possess so much more power than Obama?
Pretty sure it’s because the radical policies Trump is enacting benefit the billionaires and the corporations, hedge funds and banks that they own. I’ve written about this before but Wilhoit’s law says that: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Think about it. As a so-called “progressive”, Obama was expected to enact policies that would benefit average Americans. But we can’t have that now can we? Anyway, that’s not why Obama was elected, as any sort of examination of his donors, who mostly resided on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, would demonstrate. These donors wanted a bank bailout instead of “single payer” healthcare, but we’re not supposed to mention these things and pundits like Ezra Klein get paid the big bucks precisely to obfuscate this reality.
Trump, on the other hand, is an oligarch already and he can be as radical as he wants as long as he keeps funneling money to the usual suspects and bombing the designated targets. And the corporate media, who is owned by the usual suspects, approves.
Ezra Klein may tut-tut Trump’s vulgarity but his plan to combat oligarchy through “abundance” is further evidence of my Green Lantern Theory, which states: because the US is an oligarchy where “the poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all,” Republican presidents have super-powers while Democratic presidents are feeble, 100 pound weaklings.
