SOONER OR LATER YOU RUN OUT OF OTHER PEOPLES' MONEY.

In a week, Donald Trump has broken the morale of his most vociferous detractors of the left.  Common Dreams contributor John Ripton calls for help from his fellow-travellers.  "Without resistance this regime will ensure that Americans are more vulnerable to climate change and to political chaos, moral decay, and social disintegration."  Yes, Donald Trump was running around California setting fires.  Yes, Donald Trump was running around Chicago looting the Magnificent Mile.  Yes, Donald Trump was running around the campuses chasing Jewish students into the library attic and facilitating the rabbit culture.

I kid.  Common Dreams being Common Dreams, the old socialist incantations are still part of the sermon.

Under the new Trump regime, there will be greater privatization of government services. Elon Musk has already eclipsed NASA in private space exploration and satellite communication. Private healthcare insurers are contracting with Medicare to provide its statuatory services. Social Security will definitely be diminished in important ways ( e.g. raising the retirement age, cutting benefits), eventually leading to all retirement and pension funds being exclusively 501(k) investment plans.

The current political direction has a history that is important for Americans to understand. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the rise of political conservatism dealt a death blow to the programs of the welfare state introduced in the long tenure of FDR's presidency in the 1930s. Over the succeeding decades the Republican Party promoted deregulation of industry and concentration of wealth. Predictably, corporate investors and CEOs have received the preponderance of wealth generated in the decades following 1980. This distorted evolution has led to a Project 2025-style assault on broad democratic participation across society.

Yes, let's pretend that NASA have done anything well since those Mars landers.  Let's pretend that Medicare reimbursement rates contain health care costs, rather than drive physicians to offer elective services out of network.  Let's pretend that "Social" "Security" isn't going to run out of money.

Let's further ignore that Elon Musk made his money selling reliable electric cars to people. Let's further ignore that Bill Gates made his money making a computer in every room available to people.  Let's further ignore that Steve Jobs made his money making Dick Tracy's two-way wrist TV practicable.  While we're at it, lets ignore that Taylor Swift wasn't even born during the Reagan presidency.  She's since made her money singing songs angsty girls can relate to, one download, one CD, one concert ticket at a time.  "Commerce is the discovery and the division of gains from trade, and entrepreneurs, whether they are meat packers or retailers or information technology peddlers, build a large fortune out of a lot of little gains from trade from a lot of people."

In common with losing skippers from the beginning of yacht racing, Mr Ripton blames the voters.

The daily deluge of commercial advertising—itself a result of lax regulation—cultivates consumer and materialist behavior over citizenship and civic responsibility. Thus people are vulnerable to specious persuasion such as corporate advertising and political demogoguery.

The Democratic Party also holds part of the responsibility for the present politics. With the election of Reagan, it too, moved in a more conservative direction. Instead of pursuing a populism that would revive the support of working class, rural, and poor Americans, it engaged in identity politics as an electoral strategy. As it distanced itself from the majority of Americans, it became clear that Republicans were often outmaneuvering the Democrats in Washington even if they lost the presidential elections.

Put another way, neither the Pillage faction nor the Freakshow faction of the Democrats offered an appeal to voters.  Nor could it, when the Freakshow faction imported illegal aliens to Chicago in such a way as to show existing voters that they would no longer share in the Pillage, rather, their neighborhoods would be pillaged.  More amusingly, until not too long ago, Chicago's most loyal Democrat voters were able to do for Barack Obama what Mr Ripton fears the most militant of Militant Normals will do for Donald Trump.  "Private militia and other armed groups of vigilantes are very useful to a repressive government. They can instill fear through threats, militant marches, and other displays of armed resistance and offense."  And so they did, in Kenosha and Minneapolis and Portland and Seattle.

Now, if neither the Pillage faction of the Democrats or the Trumpian faction of the Republicans have an appeal to the median voter, is there not a more productive way forward?  "Isn't there an easy splitting the difference: if there are 'good faith arguments' for keeping Democrats from holding power and for keeping Trumpians from holding power, is there not some way of assembling a majority behind the proposition that individual autonomy, rather than government power, matters more?"

You won't find that in Common Dreams, dear reader, neither from Mr Ripton nor from his colleague Jeremy Brecher.

Trump and his coterie appear to be committed to permanent rule by their followers and their ideology. To accomplish that they need to destroy all possible barriers to their domination. They must break down the institutions of democracy that might stand in their way, for example by restricting the right to vote. They need to eviscerate the institutions of law, medicine, civil service, journalism, and other relatively independent bases of potential opposition. They have to prevent economic actors, including corporations and unions, from pursuing their own self-interest rather than conforming to the regime’s demands. They need to intimidate and silence those who might expose their lies and abuses. They must demolish political obstacles, not only from the Democratic Party, but within the Republican Party as well. They need to paralyze the population with fear and entice it with the promise of a better life, or at least with bread and circuses.

That could be a libertarian argument, nicht wahr?  That is, but for the Freakshow faction having etiolated law and medicine with their culture studies, having discredited journalism as regime media, having put diversity first in the employment offices of businesses.  That corporations have a history of pursuing management fads without careful thought doesn't help their cause.

If you're Mr Brecher, though, you have to nod to all the freakazoids.

Its program is an attack not just on one or another group, but on society as a whole—on the very practices and relationships that allow us to live together in a peaceful and constructive way. They are undermining the foundations of a free and ordered society. They are dismantling the basic practices that make life something other than a war of all against all. And they are hell-bent on destroying the natural conditions on which our life on Earth depends.

The MAGA regime threatens immigrants, African Americans, Muslims, workers, women, children, the elderly, the disabled, LGBTQ+ people, all who depend on government for their health and well-being, and the environment on which we all depend for our very existence. Indeed, it threatens all that holds us together as a society. The resistance to that onslaught is therefore not just the defense of one or another group, but a defense of society, indeed of the very possibility of society.

That's rich, using that old Wobbly slogan while simultaneously appealing to the notion of a "free and ordered society," and then calling the roll of the various factions that have their separate grievances with that ordered society, and noting that each faction has its own rationale for living at the expense of others, which of itself undermines the purposeful human action that we might understand as society.