Nothing New
All Been Tried Before
There is nothing that the tRump administration, republicans, conservatives and libertarians are pursuing that has not been tried before and ended with disastrous results. Those results always ended up with the rich swooping in to get more while the poor were left with even less. The promises of lower taxes, deregulation, smaller government and isolationism that these folks continue to purse all preceded economic disaster. Every time.
These people at the beginning of this country were on the side of the British. Conservatives were on the side of the Trail of Tears. Conservatives were on the side of the Dredd Scott Decision, on the side of slave owners, on the side of Jim Crow laws, on the side of the Robber Barons, and on the side of the fascists in the early 19th century. These groups were also on the side of the McCarthyism of the 1950s being so scared of communism that they were silent as peoples’ rights were being violated due to fear.
These groups spend much of their time rewriting history to paint their solutions as the way to prosperity without any proof. In fact, the opposite is true. Their plans always lead to greater and greater wealth for the few and more and more struggles for the lower income levels leading them to work more than one job to meet their needs. More money for the few and less for the many. They then justify their ideas by painting the wealthy as the “job” creators when the actual facts show that small businesses create the vast majority of jobs by a long shot. These groups defend things like mergers and consolidation as ways to save jobs while touting the freedom of open markets, then prevent the development of competition by either blocking them from entering markets or grabbing supply lines or just buying them out. Look no further than the tech industry for this practice as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook quickly gobbled up start-ups and in many cases either buried the innovations or then claimed them as their own. These practices are well documented by Scott Galloway in his book The Four.
It is strange how the conservative/libertarian platforms claim to discourage monopolies, but provide zero, yes, zero remedies to stop them. They claim they just become a “natural” course of business, but they both claim to reject them. In their defense they benefit from these consolidations by board seats and campaign donations. This becomes rather obvious when campaign donations were at one time required to be transparent. Now, not so much, and we only find about them from investigative journalists from mains stream media, but the wealthy now have created barriers for that by purchasing those outlets and then dictating the reporting practices. Remember the fearlessness of the Washington Post in the 1970s? Forget that today. Remember the fearless reporting at the local city and state level? Very few and far between today as they have been bought up by the wealthy right wing trust fund babies. This allows them to control the public perception they desire to perpetuate.
Taxes are theft. Government cannot exist without using violence to forcibly take money from the “job” creators (IRS). Government regulations prevent innovation from happening (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg) by creating rules that make the workplace safer for workers, that protect the environment, that protect investors, that allow for competition, that create retirement fund safety for workers, that create access to quality healthcare for the working class, that prevent companies from KNOWLINGLY producing and selling unsafe products. They want to have unregulated gun ownership and routinely leave out the regulated part of the second amendment. They see that social safety nets promote laziness rather than encouraging people to work. Reading Project 2025 you can see the maturation of the Lewis Powell Memo to strip away years of progress to return power, not to the people, b ut to the wealth. They seek to control every aspect of the working people leaving them to try to find ways up the ladder and when they find one, they pull it up or change the route up the ladder. They filled up the top court of the land with ideologues that will rule in their favor to destroy the administrative state which stands between the people and abuse of the wealthy. Example: March 4, 2025 the SCOTUS rules to allow for for more untreated sewage water to be dumped into the water ways. This follows several rulings since Citizens United that allowed for unlimited money into political elections which has also allowed for the influence of foreign contributions. They no longer recognize ethics, standards and now the law.
The time that tRump likes to refer is a time when all of these things were in practice. The times of high tariffs, little to no regulation, no social safety nets, low taxes, no environmental protections, and zero worker safety protections. No Veteran’s administration, no social security, medicare, medicaid, coal miner deaths were common as were the enormous amounts of injuries in the industrial factories. Workers had no workman’s compensation, if they got hurt, too bad. If they died, families were left without any compensation. It was definitely not the most prosperous time for labor. Not a time when America was great.
Now with the DOGE crew tearing through the administrative state that makes America great and gives us an actual democracy, the Project 2025 creators seek to take us back to those less prosperous times. As Tom Nichols wrote “American may be more proud to be an American under tRump, but less to be proud of.” That is coming so true as the appointees to the cabinet proceed to do all the things they said they would not in their hearings. Retribution, enemies lists, loyalty oaths to the leader are the common actions of the nominees. All of this has been done before and the results brought about suffering for working people. The only winners will be the wealthiests as they will be swooping in like vultures to sweep up assets to enrich themselves. Much like what happened following the Civil War, and the Great Republican Depression of the 20th Century.
Will history repeat itself? Time will tell, but with the carefully orchestrated implementation of Project 2025 it may take decades to rebuild, meanwhile we very well enter a very dark time in which the great American Experiment with democracy will end.
