Obviously I originally wrote this before the crisis that is a second Trump presidency came to pass, but I think it's still pretty relevant in a political-media environment where influential, otherwise analytical people, keep saying "this is not us" and asking how it's possible for Trump to transform America into an overt fascist dictatorship, seemingly overnight. The reality is that America has literally *always* been a covert fascist dictatorship where the illusion of democratic rights have been subject to the whims of a ruling class who're able to override, curtail, or otherwise eliminate those democratic rights (particularly for certain types of people) at the first sign of trouble for capitalism and their larger financial interests - as demonstrated by the ease with which Trump has been able to install an overt fascist dictatorship in the brief time since he's taken office. Furthermore, anyone familiar with how American "democracy" works has always known this is reality, but have relied on standards, norms, and decorum to prosecute an argument that it would never happen. All of which isn't to say that things haven't changed under Trump, only that what Trump is doing has always been the "break glass in case of emergency" option for the ruling class in a country that has always been dominated by oligarchic power no matter what flowery words about "freedom" and "equality" the founding slaveholders used to describe it.

The simple truth is that America is not really a "country" in the way that our friends in Europe have "countries." Rather the United States even as we know it today, is the result of thirteen public-private partnerships with the British Crown, primarily in the business of genocidal land theft and slavery, reorganizing as a "state" for the purposes of escaping British regulation on those businesses. It was always foundationally capitalist, undeniably white supremacist, and fundamentally oligarchic in nature, and the rich people who really own and control this country have always meant it to be possible for a figure like Trump (backed by Oligarchs like Musk) to save them from you, the extracted class, by easily dismantling the trappings of democracy - then, as now, the ruling class would prefer fascism to sharing with the plebs, on all fronts, and particularly in the exercise of political power.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that we as a people have to *allow* the installation of an overt fascist order because a bunch of cracker oligarch slavers wanted to keep a pull-string dictatorship in their back pockets in case the help got any ideas about deposing them. We don't have to take this, and we can absolutely overthrow the entire damn fascist fuck barrel order by organizing to end it. But if you're waiting for the system itself to react to stop the Pork Reich because "this is not us" I'm sorry to say you've fundamentally misunderstood what America is and who it really exists to benefit. As Stafford Beer once noted, the purpose of a system is what it does, and despite what propagandists and fools have lead you to believe, the American system of governance is currently functioning precisely as designed, and for precisely the people it was created to benefit in the first place - even under Trump.