"How did we come to this?" people ask themselves, "How did we end up with a president so openly corrupt, who flouts the law, who enriches himself and his family with no shame or guilt? And how did we end up with a major political Party so willing to kowtow to a would be dictator?"
Clearly these people have not been paying attention.
The current Administration is not an anomaly except in its brazenness,, and is the inevitable evolution of the pro-business attitude endlessly promoted by Wall Street and its employees in Congress. If government should be run like a business installing a CEO as president is the obvious step. That this particular CEO had failed at every business except self-promotion was an unforeseen characteristic, but the idea that a White Businessman would save all the economic, racial, and gender privileges of the aristocracy is not new. American presidential history is littered with undeserving businessmen being elevated to the highest position in reaction to some progressive threat to the power of the owning class, and each time they have relied on the fear, the prejudice, the economic panic of the White Working Class to propel them to the White House. If this were the late 1800's Trump would not be outstanding in his unfitness for office, he'd be typical.
And remember - that's the era Wall Street tycoons look back to fondly: The time of the Robber Barons. While they use images of antebellum South and heroic Confederates to whip up the fearful White masses, it is the time of unregulated economic power they long to return to. Yes, some are un-Reconstructed traitors, waxing rhapsodically about the rights of slaveowners and generals who lost, but mainly its about weakening a federal government of, by, and for the People. That is what the economic aristocracy hates, and why they've spent these centuries and thousands of millions trying to convince the average worker that the greatest threat to the workers is the workers united, to convince the workers that their boss is unendingly a better friend than a fellow worker of another skin tone, that war is a matter of Freedom rather than one of profit, and most importantly that any and everything is better if someone is getting rich from creating or providing it. Profitability has become fundamental to our nation, and now we reached the inevitable point where openly profiting from government itself is acceptable.
When Gordon Gecko said "Greed is Good" it was an ironic warning, but it also was a reveal of a fundamental belief of Capitalism - unless someone is getting rich the product will suffer. This is an has always been bullshit spouted by those trying to get rich by providing services or products, but it has been hammered so endlessly for so long that so many now accept it without thought. We elect businesspeople as supervisors and council people as if they knew anything about running a not-for profit - which is what government is. We elect businesspeople as lawmakers when they know nothing about writing laws. We would not hire these people to fix our cars because they are not mechanics, but we would hire them to run our government because they used to sell cars.
The workers have been brainwashed into accepting that the boss, simply by being the boss, has been endowed with enough knowledge to run not only a local business but a local government. So it is no surprise so many workers came to believe that the most famous billionaire would be the natural leader of their country, and that any seeming corruption is either over-our-heads-business brilliance or fake news created by those who are jealous.
So when we look back - if we look back at all - on those millennia of plebeians and serfs and peons and proletarians who, to our modern minds, foolishly accepted and fought for their own oppression by a useless aristocracy we have to understand that they are the political ancestors of a modern working class which is ready to blindly accept and fight for the rule of the monied few.
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