If G-d is Dead, Everything is Permitted – Dostoevsky

When Trump Takes Office, Our Government will be Illegitimate, and all Laws, Designed to Succor the Rich, should be Disobeyed

By

David Gottfried

This piece is really two short essays in one.  First, I will explain why the American Political and Legal Systems have utterly failed, lost any semblance of decency or justice and why Americans should show contempt for, and resist, governmental power.  Then I will explain how disjointed and disordered conflicts regarding sexuality catapulted rank and utter fascists into power. 

Trump’s victory was like a phosphorous flare on a battlefield, illuminating the contradictions of our bourgeois, lying, “liberal” state and its prettified, petty rationalizations. 

A)  Trump’s election proves that our legal system is a farce.   He was and is as guilty as sin for his attempted coup de tat of January 6  (and many other transgressions), but he got off “scot free.”

And Trump is free to commit all the crimes his malignant heart pines for in his coming term as the Supreme Court ruled, on July 1, 2024, that a president will be immune from liability for any acts he commits, no matter how sordid and slaughterous, so long as he commits them in his “official capacity.”  But what can you expect from a perverted Supreme Court which is led by a Judge who flies, on his home, flags associated with the January 6 insurrection.

Indeed, our horrid Supreme Court incorrectly refused to take Trump’s name off the ballot, in violation of the 14th amendment which provides that insurrectionists are not permitted to run for national office. Because Trump should not have been allowed to run for president, his presidency will be illegitimate and will warrant our disrespect and contempt.

Trump has proven what red radicals have said all along:  All the professors of Harvard, and all the ancient and fat, dusty, legal tomes from Blackstone to the present, are no match for money and a sufficiently Machiavellian and  mendacious mind.   If you got the bucks, and if you have a lying gonif (Yiddish for thief) of a ghoul as an attorney, you can commit murder and not spend a day in jail.  

Take the immediately preceding paragraph to its logical political and personal conclusion:  If your landlord is a son of a bitch, you should not pay the rent.  You should organize a rent strike.  You should foment discord.   You should become the most combative, mischievous son of  a bitch in the tradition of Emma Goldman and Sacco and Vanzetti.          

Trump doesn’t pay his debts, and he becomes President.  Why the fuck should you pay your debts ?   Maybe you were fed a lot of semi-Puritan BS to the effect that you should pay your bills.  You must rise above the tedious and trying tenets of your middling, middle-class education which was designed to make you sheepish and acquiescent cannon fodder for the contemptable corporate state.   

Your teachers were wrong.  You don’t get ahead by paying your debts and obeying “The Law.”  You do what Donald Trump did and just declare bankruptcy or sue your creditors for wrongs and faults that exist only in your febrile imagination.   How does one thrive and shine and “become all that one can be,” to borrow a line from an army recruitment advertisement ?   Not by becoming a soldier, and  consequently viewed by the incoming administration as a “loser” and “sucker.”   Rather, you become all that you can be by spitting on the law and stealing to one’s heart’s  content.

B)  Democracy, to an extent, made Donald Trump President.  We voted for him just as Germans voted for Hitler.   Ergo, Lenin and Stalin and old-line Soviets were right:  The working class does not know enough to know what is good for them; therefore, political leadership should not be determined by the ballot box. 

This idea will strike many of you as loathesome. It is loathesome, but unfortunately it may be true. When people are hordes of Huns prowling for a pogrom, the raw material of the nation, its citzenry, are too warped to make wise political decisions.

i) The working class, as well as most Americans, never were in accord with the essential ideals of liberalism, or compassion or justice.

ii)  Most white workers were  opposed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting rights act of 1965.   Perhaps they did not want to persecute blacks, but whatever kind-hearted feelings they may have had toward blacks were completely overshadowed by the fear that blacks might make a move on their white daughters.   The old Bolsheviks similarly knew that their Russian masses were far too primitive to understand the cause of their distress and that a Communist vanguard had to lead the people.  The unschooled Russian masses believed that Jews drank the blood of Christian children and sometimes they believed that vampires truly existed; they treated their Tzars like demigods.    

iii)   White American workers never respected the personhood of blacks just as European workers never accepted the personhood of Jews.   Their bible told them that we had killed their lord.  Their minds were closed and adamant in their hatred of the Jews.

iv)  Thomas Jefferson said that homosexuals should be castrated.   Ergo, even the lettered and educated had minds slated to hate.

v) Because workers  have often had hard lives, they often resent the idea that other people, who have also  had hard lives, should be given a break.  (They want everyone to suffer as much as they did.)  This is why many poor people have gravitated toward conservative positions.   This is why many poor people seem almost organically opposed to the fresh air of laxity, kindness or gentility.    John Connoly and Richard Nixon both came from modest backgrounds and were hit men for aristocratic millionaires.  By contrast, Bobby Kennedy’s family was positively lordly as its wealth and power was seemingly limitless, and he became one of America’s finest tribunes of the poor.

vi)  Hard manual labor can be exhausting.  A married person, with children, is, at the end of the day, far too tired to assess politics.  He will plop down in front of a TV.  (He may plop down in front of a computer, but most people watch stupid videos on the computer.  Very few people use the computer to read articles in the Nation.)   As such, his passive mind and wide-open ears are easily inseminated with the party line propagated by Fox News, etc.  So how does the ballot box make for the selection of good leaders when a huge proportion of voters are completely confused and hoodwinked about the issues in contention?   

My thoughts are perhaps best expressed in these segments from a poem I wrote some time ago:

I bludgeon with the bellows

Of undying disbelief

I erect the ghoulish gallows

And guillotine my grief

..

I salivate with sacrilege

I sing my demon songs

I plunder all your privilege

I right the regal wrongs

..

To slice the poisoned heart

Of a judge and a priest

To storm a castle's rampart

And make a king deceased

..

The Courts enrobed in marble

The Laws inscribed with spleen

Oh, to turn it into rubble

And realize this riot-dream

The sunshiny, breezy feminism of the theme song of the Mary Tyler Moore Show infused Kamala’s campaign and ordained her defeat. 

Kamala and the Insufferable Barrage of Feminist Re-runs

Whenever I saw Kamala Harris, she reminded me of the theme song of the “Mary Tyler Moore Show.”   She didn’t have a platform or a program or anything as rude or as masculine as a polemic or provocative point of view.  Rather, by flashing a big smile, and wearing tasteful, colorful outfits, and laughing like a cultured Hyena, she tried to affect the mild feminist ebullience of Mary Tyler Moore.   No matter what she said, her vibes and her aura said, “I am Woman, hear me Roar” – and I’ll do it in a gutsy but sunny way.

Naturally, she was, perhaps, the ideal candidate for a 19-year-old College woman who just starting reading feminist-hued books and is gaga about girl power.

However, most of the country is not composed of bright, twenty something women who are forever enchanted by the all- consuming gloriousness of girlness.  Close to one half of America is male, and many women are fat, old, and tired and would feel out of place in a convocation of upwardly mobile career women who are snappy, sarcastic and salivate for wry, ribald witticisms that skewer middle America.   Also, many women hate other women and are predisposed to vote against women.  (Inter-female hostility deserves an essay, or a book, of its own and may be discussed in the future)

I don’t want to say I told you so (What an insincere point.  Of course, everybody loves to say, “I told you so.”), but I wrote many articles warning my fellow Democrats that their strategy was wrong:   I said a) that suing Trump for allegedly abusing a women, 20 years ago, in a department store would boost Trump’s popularity (We should have concentrated on January 6, when he conclusively established his hatred for Democracy and contempt for the constitution; everyone already knew he manhandles women and most people don’t care, and if you sued him for sexual misconduct, people would infer that he was not guilty of conspiring with Russia against America and that prosecution for tortious sexual advances was just a manifestation of free-floating Anti-Trump bias.) b) explained why Kamala Harris would alienate black men, c) explained how liberals alienate poor people and d) claimed that “liberals” in the Democratic Party evince a largely antimale disposition.¹
 

Sex matters a lot.   It fuels love and hate, pours gasoline on racial tensions, and people will forget their love of democracy without a second thought when primal passions strike the heart.     

Just as sex may have played a part in the rise of Adolf Hitler (Very early in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler rants that that the dark- haired Jewish man lurks in the shadows forever ready to despoil our blond German maidens.), sex surely played a part in Trump’s seizure of the American state.

I readily concede that women have been dumped on by the world for millennia.  Women are denied reproductive freedom, career opportunities, and we dismiss and deny female intellectual capacity, admonishing women to defer, deny and squelch their ideas, voice and talent.  However, sometimes I feel as if I have been hearing feminist grievances, and black grievances, all my life to the exclusion of everything else.

The myriad ways in which whites and males are oppressed are overlooked.  Everything from the grotesque and glaring – white men in prison getting raped by black men and suffering  insemination with HIV – to the relatively commonplace and quotidian – blacks have been admitted to fine schools with abysmal test scores while no such advantages have been given to poor white men who are, by reason of our perverse way of assessing persecution and pain, deemed “privileged oppressors” – are ingrained in the collective memory of whites and males and operated as an electoral juggernaut against Kamala Harris.     

1. https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/trump-the-black-cat-with-nine-lives;   https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/liberals-ignore-14-ways-in-which; https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/why-some-black-men-dont-like-kamala; https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/why-many-poor-people-will-not-vote