Get the Hell Out of My Way by Joseph Natoli

 

“You can! You must. When those few are the best. Deny the best its right to the top – and you have no best left. What are your masses but mud to be ground under foot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?”

– Ayn Rand, We the Living, 1936

John Galt, a multi-billionaire hero in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, is on strike until the “masses of the mud” bend to the will of The Best and, government needs to get the hell out of the way of those few who are the best.

When it comes to spouting truly despicable horseshit – “selfishness is a virtue’ –Rand reeks. But she’s got followers in high places: “Rand’s controversial “objectivist” ideas have been invoked by generations of conservatives, from Reaganites to the Tea Party, and now Donald Trump.”

Right now, a multi-billionaire regime is being set up by electing just one man, and this done by popular vote, by those Rand would call masses of mud. You need only scan those President-Elect Donald Trump has given key governmental positions: Private Predators, on and offline, with an animus to laws and the bureaucracy that enforces them.

This subjugation of the many by the few comes as no surprise as such has always been part of “winning” in “The American Dream” as well as the force behind “American Exceptionalism.” Egalitarianism has always been the soft and fuzzy dream of useful idiots, in the eyes of the Winners. Do you think we might be deceived into thinking Donald Trump cares about the people he will “make great again”? In what ways is he, himself, great?

It seems clear that this country has made Ayn Rand’s dream come true. What “Make America Great Again” means is not picking up the thread again that might lead to an egalitarian democracy but being free to sow the whirlwind of anger, hatred, greed, vengeance and crushing domination. The “masses of the mud” need be ground under foot, says Ayn Rand whose “thought” was pre-“trickle down.” The neo-liberal supply side trickle-down economics cannot be so un-Beatitudes because Christians are a key bloc of the Republican Party.

Not that President-Elect Trump bends his will to either Ayn Rand or neo-liberal Reaganomics, or the will of Congress, of The Constitution, or trials by jury, or the Trump Bible he’s selling, or Reason. “Get the Hell Out of My Way” does capture the whole of his ideology.

He’s won a popular vote promising to pave with gold the road ahead for Rand’s “masses of the mud.” Contemporaneously, he wants to pave the road ahead for those who have won in the Capital competitive arena, protecting and expanding his own stake in the game. At what point will this contradiction become obvious to his MAGA supporters?

There’s clearly danger ahead in dismantling government services that obstruct The Best in their profit-making because such services benefit “the masses” who rely upon them. When you can afford private health care or are a shareholder/owner in this profiteering industry, cutting Medicare and Medicaid is not fearful but profitable for you. When your retirement pension is your dividend paying stock portfolio, Social Security is unimportant to you. The wealthy don’t pay FICA taxes beyond 168K, which, if they did, would keep SS solvent. There is no incentive here for The Best to do so.

The fastest track Trump could take to losing his MAGAs is here, and it seems likely that his newly appointed Department of Government Efficiency run by two multi-billionaires (The Best) will jump on this track.

When the thrill of “cleansing” and tearing down, of prosecuting the prosecutors (aka destroying trial by jury for instance) wears off and the Many realize that they are under plutocratic rule, the way back to a Constitutional democracy may already be forgotten, or the rule of Just Get Out of the Way may lead to a clash different than imagined before Trump’s victory. This is a rule that historically shows us that the multitude often doesn’t “get out of the way.” They storm a Bastille. Or, they get absorbed by The Borg, or a TV autocrat they love.

Few would doubt that right now we no longer have the best of what is in us, the better angels of our nature, willing to “get along with each other.” Not seen, but Lincoln hoped they existed. Perhaps this is so because both our political parties have openly supported, as is the case of Republicans, or cowardly acquiesced, as is the case of Democrats, to the belief that it is inevitable that the “artificial state” will rise, that human labor will be replaced and become extinct, that the Capital class, the multi-millionaires who pay homage to Trump, have always been the destiny of the country, that somehow deranged self-interest is in all our best interest, pace The Golden Rule of self and others. (See, Jill Lepore, “The Artificial State,” The New Yorker, Nov. 11, 2024)

At the bottom of all this remains the still fundamental struggle between Labor and Capital, between workers and owners, although the so-called party of the working class, the Democrats, have long ago ceased acknowledging this struggle.

However, Capital has not forgotten and remains furious over the New Deal, a time when the Democratic Party’s president, FDR mobilized a country and its mindset on the side of Labor in the Labor/Capital struggle. But as that Democratic party leaned away from struggle and leaned into the side of Capital, as if there was a “third way” in a knife fight in a phone booth, there’s not been much getting in the way of The Best. 

From that perspective, one regulation is too much, one NLRB vote on the side of labor is too much. Not to say that it’s been easy to put up a fight when money is speech and The Best have it now at obscene levels, and the discourse their money pays for drives deep into the zeitgeist.

How long does it take to sidle minds away from thoughts like egalitarianism, redistribution to achieve modest wealth equity, profit goals as not synonymous with democratic goals, progress not zero-sum at all, labor deserving a fair share of profits, the support of anti-autocratic discourse, practices and institutions, and Market Rule as not a political platform in a Constitutional democracy?

The two existential issues, the wealth gap and global warming, that should have been upfront in the recent election, were absent, in the same way Labor has been absent from the Democratic Party’s interests. Recuperation of this party does not lie in finding somehow who grabs media attention and can channel the passions: anger, hatred and a plan of revenge. Both Clinton and Obama channeled hope, not a passion but a promise of the future.

By the 2024 Presidential Election, it was clear to everyone, including the Democrats, that the promise was unfulfilled, and that anger had grown. The passion Democrats can rekindle is that of agon, of a fight, a struggle against being ground under the feet of The Best.

There is a history to this struggle that Democrats have walked away from.  Revisit the words and actions of key figures in labor history (from Chavez to Debbs and Reuther, Harry Bridges, Kshama Sawant, Mother Jones and Emma Tenayuka, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, A.O.C., and Sherrod Brown) because these are the words and actions that will sustain a party tugging against plutocratic and autocratic power, the so-called Best.

It very well may be that the Democratic Party cannot make this transformation and a new party representing those Rand calls “masses of mud” is required. Either Democrats are too committed to the “artificial” state that they accept and won’t fight, or too long committed to matters that are marginal in the lives of 80% of the population, or both, the fact remains that neither the wealthy nor the majority are with them.

Think of the situation as a tug of war in which the tugging is back and forth, Capital is running from the New Deal and Labor is complacent, resting on past strike victories, not broad but self-serving, until Reagan slaps them aside and gets away with it in 1981. No longer playing defense, Capital rushes offense with Reagan’s supportive economics of the Best as the path to global power.

By the time Democrats regain the presidency with Bill Clinton, the switcheroo from material well-being made for all to increasing the prosperity of those at the top is established. Obama is so far removed from the Labor/Capital tug of war when he walks into the Great Recession that he, a Democrat, automatically wants Capital to clean up the mess Capital has created.

The winners of global competitiveness are already positioned at the top and everyone else is a welfare petitioner who should get a job. It’s suddenly the “reality” of the way things work, an inevitable movement of Capital. Bend to NAFTA without considering Labor. Globalized Capital is an untouchable future. This is a mythos that has caught hold. The newest spin of Capital is AI which is touted to transform the world although “the likely effect of AI will make an already broken political system even worse.” (Lessig, quoted in Lepore)

If you place alongside this 16 years of Democrat presidential residence, which moves the Labor needle not a centimeter, with Republicans, staying up at night reading Ayn Rand, and so pulling the Capital end of the rope, what you get is no struggle at all. 

A man with no historical sense, no interest in competing ideologies, and amused by the Constitutional foundations of the country walks into power because the lines of opposition to such had disappeared almost a half century before.

The omissions of the Democratic Party were there for all to see for a half century. This Party makes its own switcheroo by building platforms for whoever and whatever is on the marginal fringes while at the same time pushing out of sight that percentage of wage earners who are not invested, are not dividend recipients and are clearly not owners, regardless of the “independent contractor” flimflam.

And they are not in any marginalized grouping struggling for identity. They are not subaltern. They are what Hillary called your “Everyday Americans.” How many are thought to be pushed out of sight? Enough to win the popular vote for Trump.

Meanwhile, back in the mud of the masses, things ain’t going so well. Why? Sit down for an all-night Monopoly game to find your answer. It’s an economics that will leave one guy with all the paper money and all the property, old money and newly gentrified. 

In the second quarter of 2024, the bottom 50% of Americans held 2.5% of the total wealth. The wealth gap before the French Revolution was not nearly as bad as what it is in the U.S. today. Masses in the mud stormed the Bastille. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Reign of Terror, Napoleon. 

We’ve done no revolution. Why? Our Napoleon, or more precisely the guy in the asylum who thinks he’s Napoleon, has stepped in as the answer to all those masses in the mud. Think of it as Trump grabbing the dropped end of the rope and now pulling for those masses in the mud. But he’s not. He’s pulling for himself.

Now, Trump doesn’t have the erudition to fill any kind of important position but like a carny spiel man, he doesn’t have a knowledge base to pull a crowd into a tent. He established himself as a powerful man in TV world. That spin and spectacle leached into real political life. So established, he doesn’t have to prove he knows anything. He need only assert. He’s the smartest epidemiologist around. Listen to his advice and not Dr. Fauci. He’s savvier than Putin, former head of the KGB. He knows that global warming is just changeable weather, and human actions don’t affect the weather. NATO is what weak countries, not the U.S. needs. And so on. How much a threat is power in the hands of someone like this?

He’s enchanted enough voters to win the popular vote. He’s a cult master, whether the enchanted are drinking the Kool Aid or waiting for comet transport, his raw selfishness in some kind of symbiosis with center stage exuberant deranged charisma has pre-empted blood in the streets twice. If Trump had not appeared, The Best would have pushed the mud masses closer to bloody revolution, and the Democratic Party would have been busy with bathroom legislation.

If Trump had not won the 2024 Presidential election, his Jim Jones disciples would have bloodied the streets in his name. Because the so-called defenders of the mud masses, the Democratic Party, had lost the respect of the MAGAs, their power to calm violence is nil. Positioning yourself on the side of “basic rights” for the marginalized when the “masses of mud” are screaming about the price of bread, is and has been poor political positioning by a political party. “Basic Rights,” which didn’t seem to show up from 1787 to 1868, seem afterward to be capriciously and arbitrarily basic, given the fact that humans are fractious when it comes to who the Celestial Disseminator of Basic Rights might me.

On one hand, visions of greatness in the past are visionary, but on the other hand we see in the past one wage earner per household on a union won salary and retirement pension and health benefits. Ironically, Trump’s promise to renew the greatness of the past has nothing to do with Labor but all to do with widening the distance between the finances of Labor and those of Capital. Whatever financial security existed in the past he will work to destroy, not serving Ayn Rand’s crackpot “philosophy” but his own brand of self-serving derangement. He also has no interest in awakening the past to its blindness to those not inside the white male centrism club.

So, if Trump can only make the financial lives of the masses in the mud worse and also not nurture humanitarian impulses, his own life it seems devoid of any humanity, what is it that works here in the Trump/Labor bond?

From the side of Capital, he’s the Judas goat that leads the laboring classes to vote for Capital. He offers a prominence he has in his own success achieved for them. He can save them by returning the past to them. Workers paid a share of profits, workers receiving secure wages in secure positions had been since the so-called Information Age, scheduled for extinction. There has been no political party defending them from this. But Trump has given Labor a renewed sense of importance simply by recognizing that workers exist. That’s what he’s doing at his rallies.

The Best cannot fathom what is going on at Trump’s rallies because he is engaged with those who, The Best, of wealth and meritocracy, have erased from their lives. One touted perk of being wealthy is to be able to live away from those who are not wealthy. Hillary admitted to having lost touch with all those working-class people who clearly saw she didn’t see them. But Trump sees them. He’s a user and abuser but on the very important level of recognition, however he manages this, he makes them feel that he sees them.

In a Plutarchic order, wage earners fade while dividend recipients claim ownership of the country. The new Vanishing Americans: the wage earners. AI and robotics may totally extinguish that part of us that seeks recognition and so, in that Brave New World fashion, lobotomize our need to be seen as who we are.

Amendments: Regarding Joe Biden and Donald Trump

Biden did more to move the needle toward Labor than any president since, perhaps LBJ but certainly FDR. Making those moves in a world already owned by The Best, the owners and not the wage earners, were legislative moves that were surely going to meet with all the opposition money could buy. Could the Biden regime have done more to publicize the boldness of what he was doing? I believe even the best effort wouldn’t have caught on. Half the country is too far removed from valuing what he did, and the other half knows what he was about and pulled out all the plugs to stop him.

Also, there was no Biden regime. Still far too many leaning into Capital, afraid of ringing an anti-Capital note. The Party sabotaged its own anti-Capitalists (I have Bernie in mind) and their ignoring labor did not assist Sherrod Brown, surely the one Biden should have endorsed for the presidency back in 2021.

Donald J. Trump does not have a regime of power, regardless of how many subjects who will declare fealty. So far, Trump’s nominees should be in jail not in Washington. His is not a structured derangement. If Mao had the sort of misfit posse Trump is gathering, his Cultural Revolution wouldn’t have gotten off the ground. Ditto Stalin who could efficiently round up hordes and deport them to Siberia. Trump’s immigration roundup will go up to the moment “the Border Czar” tactics, seemingly a roughneck promising roughneck tactics, make headlines.

Trump doesn’t measure up as the sort of autocrat/dictator to get anything done beyond some tirades on Truth Social. His minions, if they survive review, have all the qualifications needed for immediate disaster in whatever post they’ve been given. And if investigative reporters “follow the money” thy will surely be led to Trump misappropriations.

None of that will escape exposure. Claud Cockburn, the father of Alexander Cockburn, a co-founder of CounterPunch, believed that most effective “is to tell truth to the powerless so they have a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions.” (Patrick Cockburn, Believe Nothing Until It is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism, Verso.) Journalism, Jill Lepore writes in The NewYorker, “is as eager as it ever was to perform its essential accountability function, but it is also impaired by financial struggle, declining trust, and disruptive new technologies.” 

I would add that the finances of Capital are being deployed now more than ever to subvert investigative journalism as well as its witnessing of the facts. Certainly, this is because Trump is so vulnerable in every direction to exposure.

Neither the Republican Party, which has signed its soul over to Trump, nor Capital which needs to see the laboring, wage earner class in Trump’s pocket, which this election has shown is where it has chosen to be, wants Trump taken down, as Nixon was, by the Press. Surely, the lesson Trump has learned from Nixon was two-fold: don’t get caught and take down the Press before it takes you down.

It’s late in the game of Labor vs. Capital with Capital owning the field, but it’s also too late for Trump & Friends to shut down the Press, online and offline. There is absolutely no legacy that can emerge from this Commedia dell’arte. J.D. Vance will at some point turn on Trump to save himself. However, Musk will be the first to rocket off followed by other multi-millionaires who will fade as Trump fades. Ayn Rand, and her disciple Margaret Thatcher, didn’t believe society existed, only the individual. Well, you don’t create an ongoing regime from a beginning like that.

In an unrelenting storm of rants, idiotic conspiracies and personal threats and attacks the new technologies have managed to obscure those facts revealed by investigative journalism. This is a foul and degenerate use of cyberspace, once billed as a democratizing venue, a liberation of every citizen’s voice, voices that we now see were best left screaming in basements.

Given this state of chaos, it is more than strange than so many voices enamored of hearing themselves have heeded Trump’s voice, rabid in echoing and hurrahing his deranged “weave,” a one-man destruction of language and meaning. 

In a politics celebrity driven and wealth worshipping within a culture that has 188 major Protestant denominations and untold evangelical and Pentecostal and Holiness, plus Judaic and Catholic no moral sense seems to exist. From a solely Judaic-Christian moral view, Trump should not get a vote of support. But given the charade of a moral mission in the U. S., Trump should have been expected decades ago.

The key question at this point is how will Capital save or salvage the Trump regime? At what point will he be abandoned by the globalist Capitalists who long ago gave up American labor for cheap labor wherever it can be found? And it could be found. 

At what point would Trump’s destruction of international defenses against wealth redistribution nation states, against those who see U.S. “free enterprise” as predatory, as no more than exploitation and imperialism that power practices as it hides behind its democratic and humanitarian front, compel Capital to do what Labor cannot do: defeat him.

Joseph Phillip Natoli’s The New Utrecht Avenue novel trilogy is on sale at Amazon. Time is the Fire ended what began with Get Ready to Run and Between Dog & Wolf. Humor noire with counterpunches. 

-CounterPunch

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/29/get-the-hell-out-of-my-way/