You're so close to getting it.

Donald Trump is a carnival barker. So was Hugo Chavez, so was Huey Long, So was Benito Mussolini. Historically, carnival barkers have ended up in the church because a pastor who can deliver a rousing message to reassure his flock is a valuable thing indeed. It's a symbiotic relationship - he makes them feel batter about their lives, they puff him up and make him important, everybody wins. I mean that sincerely. A good charismatic leader who values the well-being of his followers? That's how history is made, the good kind.

It goes wrong when the carnival barker is venal. When the barking matters more than who is listening it can take off on its own. I know Rulon Jeffs was a good carnival barker because he absolutely inspired a lot of craziness among people who weren't getting their best shake and they just took it. I know Warren Jeffs wasn't because shit fell apart on his watch.

Note that Warren Jeffs never would have built his own flock. He's too venal. He does not tend to the organization, he makes sure the organization tends to him. That's an important factor, too - the shitty ones usually toil in ignominy because they don't have the makeup to create a self-perpetuating organization. Joseph Smith? Never met the man but you can't deny he started something big. Hell, William Wilson made something that lasts. But for every Hugo Chavez there's a Nick Maduro, for every Rulon there's a Warren.

You know what I'm reading right now? Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto. I keep meaning to read The Condition of the Working Class in England because fundamentally, the basis of Communism was the British being horrible but I needed something audible and the library had The Communist Manifesto. It's puerile. It's accelerationist. It uses the word "highfalutin" which is hilarious. But it is also a deeply unserious work. You know what's an interesting book? 1917: Lenin, Wilson and the Birth of the New World.

'cuz here's the thing. Neither Marx nor Lenin thought Russia was a good spot to debut Communism but the opportunity arose. Neither Marx nor Lenin had any respect for Russia or Russians and it shows. They really figured America was the perfect place for Communism to take root and fundamentally, 1917 is a book about how wretchedly, hopelessly full of shit they were.

Communism took root in Russia because it was a weakly-run hinterland with ridiculous wealth concentration and a history of warlord rule. It was a weak power structure where a weak insurgency could overthrow an unpopular monarchy and consolidate power because once you decapitate a monarchy you're the new king. Lenin Stalin Khruschev Brezhnev Andropov Chernenko Gorbachev Yeltsin Putin Medvedev Putin 110 years right there and really, we shouldn't count Lenin, Chernenko or Medvedev. Stalin ruled almost as long as Katherine the Great.

It did not take root in America because Americans went "huh, the proletariat is restless, let's make their lives suck less lest we find ourselves guillotined." 1917 is fundamentally a book about how structures respond to stress.

_______________________________________

Shah Reza Pahlavi was a weak man. Mossadegh was also a weak man, but he was stronger than the Shah... until that was inconvenient to our purposes at which point we gave him the strength he needed. Tsar Nicholas was a weak man. Lenin was also a weak man but he was useful to the Germans and he was useful to Stalin.

Donald Trump is not a builder, no matter how much he thinks it will make the ghost of his daddy love him. He's an oaf eating sticks of butter like they were Snickers bars, the perfect face of a greedy power structure that has long stopped trying to make anything. The system had to be weak for Trump to happen and, once Trump happened, things could have collapsed.

But they didn't.

________________________________________

This is me calling you out:

but I think you have to concede that if I'd asked you two or three years ago if Trump would be the GOP's guy again in 2024, you'd have said no, right?

It has been patently obvious since January 7th 2021 that the Republican candidate for president in 2024 would be Donald Trump. The Republican Party is in a doom loop. They know it. We know it. Everyone knows it. They sold their soul for this and they were never more than one demagogue away from it happening. I'm old enough that I remember when we thought it would be Pat Buchanan! But no, they needed someone trashier who had been introduced into more living rooms as a virile and successful man-about-town.

But it has been equally obvious that you can't step in the same river twice.

What do you know about Reconstruction? I knew fuckall because there's a lot of hand-waving and coughing and hastily moving on in every history class in the United States so I read WEB Dubois' history and I was shamed. I was moved. I was cowed. Because the 60 years after the Civil War were all about doing anything not to have to fight it again, no matter the costs to Black people, no matter the gains by Southern racists, because oh holy fuck if the British had gotten ahold of the South the rest of us would be a suburb of Canada.

Woodrow Wilson advised Truman a lot, believe it or not. And after VE Day Wilson told Truman that he could have vengeance or he could have peace but he couldn't have both.

And that's the New World Order right there -letting the guys who got all the gold keep it so that the Communists don't try something. I say " Everything else has been a contentious free-for-all to figure out how the fuck to move on" and you go "f we had moved on, the prosecutions would be over, Trump wouldn't still be lying about it, and the GOP wouldn't be helping him do it. "

Yes. You're right. IF we had moved on, yes. Or maybe things would be even shittier, like Reconstruction. But we HAVEN'T moved on. We're all trying to negotiate a way to be friends with the uncles who cheered on someone taking a shit on Nancy Pelosi's desk. We're trying to figure out how to live with the Hang Mike Pence crew. Because you have to win the peace, too.

Winning the peace doesn't mean spooling up fever dreams about JD Vance successfully launching a presidential run. I mean are you fucking serious. The only contenders in the race that even thought about criticizing Trump dropped out early because of course an appalling percentage of the country wants nothing more than to own the libs. That's never going to change. What's going to change is their ability to hurt the rest of us.

Trends of history aligned in 2016 to express a worldwide backlash against neoliberalism. That backlash took the form of fascism, some more some less. Those trends have not been arrested but they have been slowed. And yeah, it fucking sucks. And it's fucking uncomfortable. And it's scary - the Democrats are all in. They're betting on a Republican collapse. They're betting that if they can keep enough people from getting swept up in the vortex they'll be able to make a government again and there's no precedent for this in living memory.

But there is historical precedence. Hitler arose in a shattered economy ruled by venal elites. So did Marcos, so did Pol Pot, so did Lenin. The closest we ever got here was Huey Long and he got sidelined when FDR said "hey those are some good policies how 'bout I just take most of them." Trump?

Trump is the effect, not the cause. If he had more sense he would have stayed out of it. But he was the right person at the right time with the right amount of vanity and the right amount of stupidity and here we are, four years later and the pied piper is still piping.

But there will be no one after Warren Jeffs.