The Search of Donald Trump's Florida Home: What Is the Context, What is the Meaning? ~~ dmorista

 ~~ article written by dmorista ~~

The Search of Donald Trump's Florida Home: What Is the Context, What is the Meaning?

The General Situation

The FBI conducted a very polite, and prearranged, search of Mar-A-Lago, following many months of requests by the National Archives for the return of something like 12 - 15 boxes of documents.  The Bureau alerted the Secret Service over 24 hours beforehand that they were coming to Mar-A-Lago to execute a search warrant.  That Search Warrant was probably the most carefully written, and reviewed, right up to the highest level of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Attorney General himself, ever produced in the history of the DOJ.. This was the first search of a former president's home in U.S. history, though certainly not the first search of Presidential records.

The right-wing blogosphere and social media has come alive with howls of outrage and threats of violent attacks on the left and the liberals.  Kevin McCarthy has threatened Attorney General Merrick Garland with relentless investigations should the Republicans take back the House of Representatives in November.  The more rabid members of the House delegations, including such luminaries as Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Bobert have made outlandish threats.  And the real vicious material comes from the ranks of the right-wing populist Trumpian Fascist movement.  However the response by Trumpistas near Mar-A-Lago has been pretty limp.  The few demonstrators were greatly outnumbered by reporters and police.     

One thing that this search indicates is that there is a major split in the ruling class over  how to respond to the ever deepening and worsening crisis of the U.S. Empire.  The main issues are not new, in fact the contradictions and problems have been festering and worsening for decades.  The sides of the schism in the ruling class are not really new, the hard-liners are willing to continue to strip Americans of any remaining personal rights, social benefits and protections, tattered and inadequate as they already are.  And they are more than willing to use massive violence to enforce the ongoing transformation of the working and middle class people of the U.S., into a computer-age version of serfs.  Demographic trends, including a disillusioned cohort of young whites among the Millennial generation, are moving against the hard-liners; and they feel a need to move quickly before the growing resistance to immiseration grows even larger and more powerful.  The other major faction, I will call them the Centrist Faction, think it would be easier, more profitable, and sounder over the next few decades to accommodate themselves to some of the scientific and demographic realities of the future.   We should note that the Centrist Faction would be firmly located in the Center Right to Far Right in most of the world.

The Hardline Faction  

The Hardliners, who had previously been aligned with the Tea Party and other far right movements mostly associated with the Republican right, found a new standard bearer, and one who connected with a major share of the U.S. populace, in Donald Trump.  Trump was particularly skilled at fanning the flames of hatred and resentment and making vague promises to the reactionary base of the the American Right; while delivering standard agenda items favored by the elites, such as yet another massive tax cut for the rich, and appointing 3 ultra-right wing Corporate friendly Theocrats to the Supreme Court, along with 20% of the overall Federal Judiciary.  The hardliners are also associated with the far-right grassroots in a malignant set of initiatives and movements.  The various attacks instigated and led by the hardliners are intended to make life difficult for working people.  That is not an unintentional by-product, it is the main purpose of these assaults; along with the increase in profits extracted from the work of disenfranchised people.  If women die from botched abortions or from other health problems that drugs used for abortions cannot be prescribed, well that is just tough shit for them.  The point of view of the hardliners is that a population that is constantly struggling just to survive cannot put up much resistance to their ever harsher levels of exploitation.    

One major example of attacks on the living standards of the great majority of the U.S. population is public education; I will use it as an exemplar of what is happening in all areas of American life..  For about 3 generations public education was a pillar among  the social institutions that served the needs of working class and middle class families,  during the New Deal and Great Society Days.  It has been under serious attack for a couple of decades, including the theft of many public schools that private interests then converted to for-profit Charter Schools.  Arnie Duncan, Secretary of Education in the Obama Administration, was a big proponent of Charter Schools; and Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education during the Trump Regime, had been attacking public schools for her entire adult life.  Without as much success as she wanted, in Michigan, her home state, funding for private school from the state government was turned down by the voters in a proposed amendment to the State Constitution, and in defeats in elections one in which her husband ran for governor.

But the latest wave of attacks with extremist dominated state legislatures and would-be dictators like Ron DeSantis have reached an entirely new level of viciousness.  The defunding of public education had long ago led to low pay for teachers and an unspoken requirement that they spend significant amounts of their salaries to equip their classrooms.  The last few years, however, have seen new attacks, such as demands that teachers arm themselves to repel AR-15 wielding gunmen, and sometimes physical confrontations with parents over issues like wearing masks during the Covid-19 Pandemic.  As an article in the Washington Post noted:

“We used to ask teachers only to work long hours, discipline the children parents failed to parent, coach a team, head a committee, run the bake sale and carve pieces off a meager salary to buy school supplies.

“In the past two years, America also has suggested they carry guns to protect kids, risk their health to go into classrooms of unmasked children at the height of the pandemic, endure preposterous culture wars over curriculum that question their experience and education, all while withstanding shrill and unfounded accusations of 'grooming' children for sexual purposes.”  

(See, “There’s no shortage of teachers. We’ve just driven them out of schools”, Aug 8, 2022, Petula Dvorak, Washington Post, at  < https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/there-s-no-shortage-of-teachers-we-ve-just-driven-them-out-of-schools/ar-AA10rZA5?rc=1&ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=6867fbf9f25147ca8f54cbf65087414d >)

Public Education, on both the K-12 and Higher Education level has been savaged by this ongoing campaign.  But it is only one aspect of the overall attack on the living standards and rights of the general populace.  Here I will list just a few of the more obvious attacks on the life that most Americans live.  The free availability of military weapons has led to an endless series of mass shootings in the U.S.; reproductive freedom, already on the ropes after 49 years of restrictions pushed by the right-wing, has now been overturned; mass surveillance is now conducted by both public and private entities; we still live without adequate public transportation in most places in the U.S.; the ruling class still lavishes billions of dollars worth of weaponry on its dubious allies and clients in the world; meanwhile a growing proportion of Americans do not get enough to eat; the fossil fuel interests make sure that the sorts of measures needed to actually contend with Global Warming are not implemented or are implemented so slowly that they are not effective; and of course the U.S. prison Gulag continues to be the world's largest such operations with the U.S. far outstripping any other nation in terms of the percentage of its population that is imprisoned, and the prisoners are regularly and shockingly abused physically and exploited financially; and there are numerous other issues as well.

These issues demonstrate something of the agenda of the far-right hardliner faction of the U.S. ruling class.  Many of them think they can continue to rule over a country that remains a world power, even if its educational standards are abysmal and the population is largely impoverished and resentful, and it has lost its once significant high-technology advantage.  The leaders of the Hardline Faction think the U.S. can maintain its technological edge by recruiting bright young technologists and scientists who are eager to flee authoritarian regimes, especially those where they have little in the way of economic prospects.  The result would be a South African version of a world power.  But, if that gambit does not work out, this faction of the ruling class also appears to be willing to ride the U.S. down to horrific Third World conditions and internal chaos while they maintain their personal power and wealth.

The Centrist Faction

But what of the somewhat less dangerous, and a bit more reasonable, major faction of the U.S. ruling class.  These people are not as well organized nor do they have the drive of the Far-Right Hardliners.  But they have been generally in power for the past 75+ years and have given a couple of major political gifts in recent months.  

Standing high among the issues and events that are favorable to the political prospects of the Centrist faction was the leaked draft of Samuel Alito's arguments for overturning Roe v. Wade, and the subsequent Supreme Court ruling that actually did so.  It exposed the virulence and medieval nature of Alito's thinking and that of the 4 other justices that voted with him in the total overturning of Roe v. Wade.  He actually quoted one figure who was a witch burner and stated, in a footnote, that there is a shortage of babies available for adoption and that this would be alleviated by prohibiting abortion.  The total overturning of Roe unleashed the antediluvian thugs, serving in many state legislatures, to begin passing very harsh legislation.  This ended the 49 year fool's paradise that many women had lived in, in which they could support right-wing Republicans who trumpeted opposition to Roe but, as long as they did not deliver, it was all an abstraction.  Those days are over and large numbers of American Women, who were previously politically inactive or who were even supporters of reactionaries, have become enraged and energized.  The horrors that have now been unleashed on women and girls by retrograde abortion and reproductive health care are legion and are waking lots of people up to the reality of the menaces to all people of reproductive age.  Here is an excerpt from one article, discussing one case among  hundreds. “ …. A Nebraska woman is facing felony charges for helping her teenage daughter obtain an abortion earlier this year. Her daughter, who was 17 years-old at the time and 22 weeks pregnant (abortion is illegal in the state after 20 weeks), is also being charged. She will be tried as an adult.  ….  couple of noteworthy items: Law enforcement not only went through the girl’s medical records, but got a warrant for her Facebook messages. That’s where the mother and daughter allegedly talked about how to properly take abortion medication—the prosecutor is also using a message where the teen expressed not wanting to be pregnant as evidence.”  (See, “Nebraska charges teenager with illegal abortion”, “Abortion, Every Day”, Aug 8, 2022, Jessica Valenti, All in Her Head by Jessica Valenti, at < https://jessica.substack.com/p/abortion-every-day-8822#details >)

There is also plenty of evidence that there is growing militancy among the great majority of the population who must work low-paid jobs, who are under the thumb of various types of debt, who cannot afford to buy a home or even a car, who have been crushed by medical debt, or who suffer from any one of many other terrible socioeconomic problems.  

Some of the more intelligent members of The Centrist Faction see a chance to make a major gain in power over what course to take the U.S. in over the coming 10 years or so.  But they are certainly not to be trusted and while they need support from the population demands must be made, not afterwards.

The Basis of U.S. Global Power: During the Period of Maximum U.S. Hegemony and Now.

The U.S. based its control over the Globe for decades on controlling the two ends of Eurasia.  This strategy originated with the ideas of British Imperialist Geographer Halford MacKinder in the early 1900s and was developed and advanced by a variety of other writers.  Notable among such theorists in the U.S. were Nicholas Spykman and Zbigniew Brzezinski.  A version of Spykman's map and theories, with his division into Heartland and Rimland is here below.

The U.S. Empire depends on the loyalty of its allies and clients to maintain this military posture at the two ends of Eurasia.  As the policies and struggles inside  the U.S. have grown more strident and obvious, many allies and clients have begun to seriously question the viability of the U.S. as a great power.  As Noam Chomsky said in an interview with Richard Wolff a couple of days ago, the U.S. is tearing itself apart while still trying to control the two ends of Eurasia.  The reputation of the U.S. is sliding downwards while the struggle for influence over the various client states and regions of the world becomes more acute. 

One example is from Kenya where, at a cocktail party, a confidant of a New York TImes reporter told him that: “ ….   the United States is a good place to get an education, but 'it is no longer a leading light.' ”  Other successful, American educated people attending the party told him that: “They aren't looking to the United States for pointers. The American political model has not produced the results that Africans have been hoping for and now seems to be failing America itself, they told me. The people I met that night all spoke of American power in the past tense.  ….  I was struck by how much had changed since the late 1990s, when I lived in Kenya, and even since my last visit six years ago. In the past, the Kenyans I met expressed admiration for the United States  ….  Today, the United States has become more of a cautionary tale than an exemplar, with Donald Trump's claims of a rigged election, the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 and the near daily news reports about mass shootings. Meanwhile, China has become the biggest player when it comes to financing infrastructure in Africa. It's also not unusual to hear African leaders and even a few Western scholars arguing that the Chinese system of meritocratic autocracy is a better route to middle income status for countries such as Kenya.”  (See, “Many Africans View the U.S. as a Cautionary Tale”, Aug 7, 2022, Farah Stockman, New York TImes)

Africa is the key area in the Global South.  It has massive amounts of resources and a growing vigorous population base.  However Africa faces tremendous problems as the future unfolds.  The current population of the continent is 1.4 billion.  The demographers at the United Nations have projected the population of Africa will grow to 4 billion by the end of this century, (this is their middle projection, like most demographers predicting the future of a population, they have a low, middle, and high population projection).  Africa is still largely undeveloped in terms of modern infrastructure and has rapidly growing cities with huge shantytowns with appalling lack of wastewater plumbing and treatment, clean water sources, intensive crowding, and horrific socioeconomic conditions.  It is clear to these people that the future lies with China and other places in East Asia.  The opinions of people towards the U.S. in more developed places in Asia and Europe are even more negative than in Africa. 

The political, economic, and cultural struggles in the U.S. must be analyzed with an eye to the desire by much of the ruling class to keep using public funds and resources to protect their positions and investments in other parts of the world, and they will continue to do so at any cost to the domestic U.S. population..  When any faction of the U.S. ruling class acts we must be aware of that basic impulse.  The only way to obtain improvements in our conditions here is to make business-as-usual impossible.