As Regime Change Looms in America, the Pompous Elite Furiously Grab on to Power

KUMASI — To understand America, you must first understand Donald J. Trump, who is now the presumptive nominee of one of the major political parties, the Republicans, in the upcoming November 2016 presidential elections. More to that point, one needs to understand the people, and these are real people – I shall refrain from calling them the masses – who have laid the foundation for the rise of Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump is no bogeyman of American politics as some pundits, born and bred in the ivory corridors of elite pomp and pageantry, would like you to believe.

America’s democracy is pinned down by two movements – whiteness and capitalism. The latter may as well be rightfully called greed. Let no one confuse you about the place of American capitalism in world history. It belongs, correctly, to the bottomless abyss of cronyism and exploitation. It is not, as some would like you to believe, a system based on any Free Market principles nor is it based in part or in full on the nature and idiosyncrasies of modern society.

Truth be told, once upon a time the principles of Democracy itself, as a way to govern, or lead, or represent the people, were laid down by the ancients of Kemet. I shall not bore anyone with the details of ethics and principles in democracy as they were penned by those astute thinkers of Africa fame. I shall however relate the current state of affairs in the US with the gibberish understanding that Plato had for his mentors in Africa.

Why? The rise of Mr. Trump as a Republican, which in itself should warrant as careful an analysis as the rise of the Clintons as Democrats, and the call by America’s elites to impeach him before he had actually run for president underscore the misunderstanding of the principles of democracy, or may I call it, the lack of fully grasping the ideas of democracy – as they were espoused in Kemet – first by Plato and far down this line, hook and sinker, the American elite.

Plato would paint the following picture of a truly matured democratic state:

“The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled…Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.”

Plato, of course, was no genius nor was he endowed with any magical powers of clairvoyance. His analysis of how democracy can turn into tyranny is a complicated one that is more keyed toward ancient Greek societies than the African societies in which his mentors had lived. Nor does his analysis supply an all-encompassing narrative about American democracy today.

In the contemporary global order, infused with American elite ideology at every interstice, the institutions of the “masters who want to rule the universe” hold enormous power, not only in the international arena but also within their fifty disparate but federal home states, on which they rely to protect their power and to provide economic support for their political machines by a wide variety of means – through the interplay of whiteness and capitalism in one hand, and in tandem the despised interaction between Black Prophetic Thought and socialist ideals in the other hand.

You cannot stay disillusioned for long before you have discovered that the American elite, since they ordered the first Native Americans to be slaughtered off the land, have sought to paint America first as the beacon of whiteness and capitalism in the western world, and second as the “shining city on the hill” that all other nations and peoples – in particular Blacks and those who promote anything but capitalism – must look up to.

When we consider the role of these monsters who seek to be the “masters of mankind,” we turn to such American policy priorities of the moment as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the investor-rights agreements mislabeled “free-trade agreements” in propaganda and commentary. They are negotiated in secret, apart from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists writing the crucial details. The intention is to have them adopted in good elite American style with “fast track” procedures designed to block mainstream discussion and allow only the choice of yes (or hence, yes).

The designers regularly do quite well, not surprisingly. The people on the other hand are incidental, with the consequences one might anticipate. Only this time, part of that consequence – of mass suffering – is the prospect of a real regime change, led by no other than an outsider-elite, billionaire nonetheless, by name Donald J. Trump. Will American democracy give way or would the designers hold on to power by any means necessary?

Plato’s parochial understanding of democracy, to which American elites champion with high falutin’ classical references and Arnoldian [Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy] political values, contains more perturbations than I can summarize here. His disdain for democratic life was fueled in no small part by the fact that a democracy had executed one of his Greek associates, Socrates – another plagiarist of African works. The wrinkles of the time, I think, warped his thinking or obstructed his clear understanding of democratic principles.

Still, Plato would have been astonished at the seeming stability of American democracy thus far. Though there’s no way he would have understood the foundations of that stability – whiteness and capitalism, which I shall call unseemly greed. Spurred on by the immense wealth generated from its Slave Plantations for three hundred years, buoyed by the inheritance from the British Empire of a world-domineering architecture and granted the right to print fiat currency without checks and balances, America staged an unprecedented stability in democracy over the last couple of centuries even as it kept, and continues to keep, more and more people out of its embrace – particularly African Americans, first through slavery, second through Jim Crow and third through mass incarceration.

It remains, in my view, a miracle of constitutional craftsmanship and international mummery that the world has not caught on to the hypocrisy of American democracy until Donald J. Trump arrived on the scene.

Few Americans now claim there is no place they would rather live. If anything, that proves that whiteness as a means of human exploitation and capitalism as the means to shackle people to economic exploitation are not immortal, nor should we assume that they are immune to the forces that have endangered western democracies based on Plato’s ideology so many times in human history.

Recent research shows that capitalism — the American way, at least — is an abysmal fit for an advanced technological world. Capitalism as we know it is an exceptionally poor fit for the technological revolution we are beginning to experience. We desperately need a new economy, one that is not capitalistic — based on the mindless and endless pursuit of maximum profit — or one where capitalism has been radically reformed, more than ever before in its history. This is the central political challenge of our times.

To a large extent, the American elite, especially its business class who have transformed the nature of world commerce through an effort in globalization for decades, have also transformed the conventional thinking to opine that the more advanced technology becomes (including robots and automated means of production, service and communication), the more beneficial it will be for humans. Yet this way of thinking is patently and categorically false. Although this is not the essay’s theme, this point is central to understanding the rise of Donald J. Trump.

The idea that technology will create a new job to replace the one it has destroyed is no longer operative; nor is the idea that the new job will be better than the old job, in terms of compensation and benefits. Capitalism is in a period of prolonged and arguably indefinite stagnation. There is immense unemployment and underemployment of Americans, which has emboldened the working classes to revolt against the American elite and their purported ‘wisdom’ within the current election cycle that has raised Donald J. Trump to the pulpit of the Republican nomination.

A billionaire himself and no matter what a con artist his political opponents and fellow elites portray him to be, Trump advocates for decent jobs for the American people. He is intent on building a wall to curb immigration into America which would invariably force businesses to hire Americans, not illegal aliens, at a living wage. He has promised his voters that he will better China, Mexico, Japan and other nations at trade, nations that currently profit more from trade with America than America profits from them.

There is in America, a downward pressure on wages and working conditions, which has resulted in growing and grotesque inequality. Workers have less security and their finances are far more precarious today than they were a generation ago; for workers under the age of thirty, the present situation is a nightmare compared to the 1970s.

The state of the American economy is the most potent contributor to Trump’s rise in the Republican Party. However, now that he faces off with Hillary Clinton in the general elections come November, there’s another more niggling contributor to Trump’s success that the Clintons and their fellow Democratic elite fear more than the state of the economy.

In part, the Democratic Party, to which President Barack Hussein Obama and his wife Michelle belong, have pandered to African American voters for decades. That pandering is coming to its end as promises made by the Obamas have backfired in full glare of a watching Black community in Flint, Michigan, daily poisoned with lead in their tap water by their own government. African Americans are worse off today than they were before the Obamas and their mafia elites from Chicago, Illinois, took office.

Furthermore, even ostrich-branded policies from the Clinton’s so-called ‘golden age’ have finally removed their heads from the sand. It is now clear that Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill alone wreaked irreparable damage and havoc on the African American community, so much that the Black community is now torn between playing to the Democrats’ identity politics, which means going against the ‘racist Republican Party,’ or joining forces with Trump’s promises – notoriously race-branded to effect by Fox News and Bill O’Reilly (he doesn’t like Trump) as white working class promises in order to alienate Blacks and Latinos – in hopes for a better economy, irrespective of the bombastic language with which he delivers his message.

Although it will be farfetched to say that the vast majority of African Americans do not abhor some of the racist elements of the Republican Party, still the economic pressures of the times are becoming a unifying theme among Trump supporters – whites and Blacks alike.

The identity politics is not new to both American political parties. In the past, the issue of whiteness, or put another way the insecurity of white-inferiority to Blackness, has so energized white American working classes that whatever politicians promise them, regardless of the harm to their own economic well-being, so long as it contained conditions for ‘putting Blacks in their place’ which meant Blacks should be poor and dying and should never receive a hand-up from their elected governments, they voted in favor of these policies.

African Americans have for quite some time faced that fact quite calmly that most white Americans do not like them, and are planning neither for their survival, nor for their definite future if it involves free, self-assertive modern manhood, as the famous Sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois once put it. “This does not mean all white Americans. A saving few are worried about the” economic situation in Black neighborhoods; a still larger group are not ill-disposed, but they fear prevailing public opinion.

There is no doubt that the great mass of white Americans are, however, merely representatives of average humanity. They muddle along with their own affairs and scarcely could be expected to take seriously the affairs of strangers or people whom they partly fear and partly despise. But Trump, buoyed by the pressures of an Obama economy, is changing that terrain and that political outlook, opting more for Americanism [Make America Great Again, if it was] and nothing else.

At best, it appears as if Americans are going to get the one they’ve always wanted, the one who could proudly exclaim, “God Bless America [black and white] and no place else!”

American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the slave holding Founding Fathers read their Plato no matter how parochial that ideology was and still is and devised ways to hold on to both their whiteness and promote capitalism. Just keeping to American history, George Washington regarded the common people who formed the militias that he was to command as “an exceedingly dirty and nasty people [evincing] an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people.”

To guard the strain of democracy that the elites of America wanted, from the ‘exceedingly dirty and nasty people’ and the so-called ‘tyranny of the majority’ of Trump’s voters and the perceived ‘passions of the mob,’ they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power. What Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders call, “rigging”.

Mainly, the two issues – whiteness and capitalism – were used to undermine and tame the ‘tyranny of the majority’ white population and the perceived ‘passions of the mob’ who evinced an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class. So long as whiteness was used to separate white America from the rest, there was no doubt that although white Americans knew the facts, yet they remained for the most part indifferent and unmoved often voting against their own interest if it also circumscribed the interests of African Americans.

Voting rights were then tightly circumscribed. The president and vice-president were not to be popularly elected but selected by an Electoral College, whose representatives were selected by the various states, often through state legislatures. The Senate’s structure (with two members from every state) was designed to temper the power of the more populous states, and the term of office for Senators (six years, compared with two for the House) was designed to cool and restrain temporary populist passions. The Supreme Court, picked by the president and confirmed by the Senate, was the final bulwark against any democratic furies that might percolate up from the House and threaten the Constitution.

This separation of powers, imbued in every extent with whiteness and capitalism, was designed precisely to create sturdy firewalls against democratic wildfires — the ‘tyranny of the majority’ and the perceived ‘passions of the mob’ – against the day that white Americans may awake and realize their interests, if they are to rise from the dust, are inextricably linked to the interests of African Americans.

The time has come, the American elite have reached a threshold where they can no longer use political, racial and economic tactics to hold down the masses any further. Regime change is nigh, Trump is born, by the people, for the people, and they shall trample anyone under foot who dares to stand in their way. That snare may be broken.

Not yet. The elites are putting up their fight – their last stance is Hillary Clinton, a lady who seems incapable of keeping the passcodes to her top-secret emails at work. Before it all goes crumbling down, the elites are prepared to risk it all to save the face of the machine, their regime that they have used to first dominate an emaciated Black America and second, the rest of the dying white American working class and then a nonchalant world.