Let us be clear. America is in the crisis it is in today because since the Reagan years the Republican Party has systematically stripped away power from ordinary people and given it to big business. They have done this by pretending that the corporately controlled ‘free market’ always delivers the best results, and that anything which impinges upon big businesses’s liberty to do what it wants is evil.
In the course of this operation they have had to pretend that reality is not real. Hence the attacks on science, and any kind of non pro-corporate knowledge. Hence the pretense that many established businesses are not destroying the world we live in. They have attempted to distract people from the growing realisation that the ‘free market’ system is not delivering its promises, by encouraging hatred of fellow Americans though ‘race pride’ or by curtailing the liberties of ‘minorities’ to act openly. They use anti-abortion and ant-gay rhetoric to win over evangelicals to the worship of Mammon and the destruction of God’s creation. They have systematically opposed any attempts by Democrats to lessen the effects of business dominance, until the Democrats gave up or joined in.
This devotion to corporate power, and ‘free markets’ is why the corporate sector gets so much subsidy, why you pay proportionately more tax than big businesses, why so many jobs went overseas, why illegal immigrants work for crap wages, why inner cities are desolate wastelands, why corporations got bailed out after the financial crisis and what tens of thousands of Americans lost their homes through shonky contracts and pro-business laws.
This is the reality.
Will Trump break with the Republican fantasy? Probably not, as he has benefitted from it.
However, people can remember the origin of the problem and work towards ending the cause.
