I should care

What is care in the role of a fascist government?

You care because you want to. You can’t be forced to care under any obligation.

Back in History class, we of course studied Nazi Germany and the causes of the Second World War. With that came a look at the Soviet Union, being, as it was, one of the major participants in that war. Looking back on studies essentially aimed at the school leaver’s certificate (or ‘O’-levels), the scope of the study can strike one as superficial, but occasionally one hits upon a truth, whether by luck or grand insight.

John Clay, the master involved, posed a question to the class, one that did not garner an immediate answer. The question was What is the difference between fascism and communism? The youthful brains started to whirr: they are both authoritarian; they are both belligerent in outlook; they both target sections of society for oppression; they both advocate centralised economic control; they are both militaristic in presentation; they both enjoy popular support … yes, Mr Clay, what exactly is the difference between fascism and communism? I decided to venture a response. “Yes, Vincent?” “They are the two ends of a horse shoe. They seem to diverge in opposite directions, before eventually turning back towards each other. In the end, they are as good as the same as each other, the distance between them being reduced to but a short span.” What a relief to hear the master’s response. “That’s right.”

Well, it’s right and it’s not right. What I want to explore in this essay is how America has veered towards fascism and why. Why its people wanted that, and what they have been blind to. How aspects of fascism meld with consideration of what we care about, and how these things have, in America’s case, been subsumed under an avid desire to appoint Trump to almost a cult figure. In so doing, I will look not only at the facts but at aspects of personal motivation, elements of free will and compulsion, volition and duress. Mr Trump is often cited as the author of The Art of the Deal. He is a deal-maker, and he is a fascist. So, what is the deal with his brand of fascism?

Fascism and communism

First, what is fascism? There exists no fascist manifesto, unlike for communism. But most historians regard the work by Adolf Hitler, entitled My Struggle, to be more or less equivalent. It doesn’t take much of search to figure out that much of Hitler’s playbook is currently being pursued by Trump:

• winnowing out opposition within government;

• playing off adjutants against each other (Marco Rubio and Elon Musk, for example);

• oligarchy and deregulation of industry, whilst making it beholden to the deregulator (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, oil & gas);

• restrictions on free speech (Mahmoud Khalil);

• a section of society deemed bogeymen: the radical left, foreigners (even those already embedded in the US), homosexuals, drag queens et al. (Herrenvolk, Übermensch);

• territorial claims abroad (Lebensraum—Canada, Panama, Greenland);

• an aura of fear (thousands of job cuts in one fell swoop; immigration round-ups, attacks on free speech);

• close ties to groups of thugs (Sturmabteilung versus The Proud Boys, Oath Keepers);

• secretive foreign policy alliances (Molotov-Ribbentrop versus Vladimir Putin).

Benito Mussolini in Italy in fact invented the term fascism, deriving it from the fasces that were carried by ancient Roman lictors (armed guards assigned to those in positions of authority) to symbolise their function (and used to intimidate anyone who crossed them). Wielding such an item was probably also demonstrative of the powerful muscles generally displayed by such gentlemen. The fascist regime in Italy was founded in 1922, and the word was coined just a few years previously, allegedly as an allusion to the group nature of the movement, a binding-together of sticks into a more substantial weapon. I’m not sure if that is true: any movement is a group of people, so it’s a little odd to point only to fascism as a binding-together. The fact that lictors were renowned bullies in ancient Rome offers an equally likely explanation. Be it as it may, the word is fascism, so fascism is what we call it. But what is its difference from communism?

Well, in terms of the answer I gave to John Clay in 1977, there isn’t much of one. Similar to religions, they all express basically the same message: be good, don’t do bad. It’s in the details that the differences arise, some of which constitute fundamental disagreements to some, and manifest tweaks of interpretation to others. So it is with these two political ideas. What brings them so close together at the extremities of our horse shoe is ownership of the means of production, and the small gap represents the slight difference.

Under communism, they are in the hands of the State qua institution. There is fundamentally no such thing as private property in communism. That’s what the word means—living a life entirely within assets and services that are common to everyone, regardless of where they come from, what they earn, who they are. And, because the State is its people, then the people as a common body politic own the State, and thereby own all the State’s property.

Under fascism, however, it is less the State that owns the means of production and more the fact that the State and a relatively small number of magnates within key industries own and run them. The economic model for fascism is much more oligarchy than State monopoly. The only true communist regime today is North Korea, and that country is notorious for the compulsion under which it imposes its centralised regime on the population. China has a mixed system, but all private ownership of the means of production is clearly by leave of the Chinese Communist Party. Communism, for all the poor reputation it enjoys, has always been implemented in conditions that in large part negate the ideas set down by Karl Marx, for one fundamentally cannot oblige a people to their own happiness. The fact that a country calls itself communist is no more indicative of the fact that it adheres to a communist philosophy than a country calling itself democratic indicates that it adheres to a democratic philosophy. Countries design their own designer labels.

Russia is an oligarchy, strangely enough for a former communist nation, although that transition should not surprise us when we observe that the United States is now an oligarchy, having transitioned there from capitalism. A variety of other nations are wanting to emulate the oligarchies, but they need a key. The key to oligarchy. And, once it unlocks the door, it takes economic ruin to get them out again, because they become rich men with tanks. It is not for nothing that the tech bosses in America all have bunkers somewhere in the desert.

Oligarchy

Oligarchy is ownership of the means of production in key strategic industries, like IT technology, oil, gas, heavy engineering, mining, shipping and so on, concentrated in very few hands. That makes the role at the head of such an industry a virtual cabinet position, since economic decisions, and allied decisions outside the pure realm of commerce that feed into those areas, like housing, welfare, job search, are all that government does. (Oh, and it also awards mega-contracts to … key industries. On behalf of the people.) The rewards are great, the responsibility too, but not the answerability, because elections and political canvassing become formalities. However, to be an oligarch, you first have to become an oligarch. So, if oligarchs are so untouchable, so free from having to answer for their role, why do democratic populations relinquish their rights to hold their government to account?

The short answer is: they don’t. It is not until after an oligarchy is formed that the people themselves get to realise that they have done so. Most voters fail to appreciate the consequences of voting for who they vote for. One of the great failings of democracy is the ability post-election of the elected to change their minds, coupled with the inability of the voters to change theirs.

Some people in America are now afeared for their rights, and in that respect one is minded of the poem by Martin Niemöller, a German pastor jailed by the Nazis: it warns that failing to speak up when the authorities cart off the communists, the trade-unionists, the Social Democrats and the Jews will not preserve you from being carted off yourself, for all these previous cartings-off reduce the numbers of people who would speak up for you if they could, but who can’t because they’re already in prison. Maybe they wouldn’t be, if you’d spoken up for them. One thing fascism is not: a numbers game. If they want you, they will come for you, and the best time to speak up for someone is before they have carted off anyone. If they then cart you all off, you’ve lost nothing.

That’s why thousands of people have protested at the arbitrary arrest of Mahmoud Khalil. You don’t need to be Palestinian to speak up for him; you just need to possess a right that you think might yet be taken from you, like the right to challenge a judge’s gratuities declaration, or the right to write to your Congressperson about the conduct of the President, or even the right to vote. And if you still don’t speak up, I guess you’d better be right that your right won’t be written off. Right?

The trick to networking is not to know everything, but to know enough people who know a bit of everything, so that, when they’re put together, they do know everything. That is the principle of oligarchy, and it differs from the principle of cabinet government, if only because of the deemed direction in which authority is bestowed. In the latter, it is from the centre outwards and, in the oligarchy, it’s inward toward the centre. Government itself is powerless, because it’s money that talks, not armies. It is the oligarchs who have the money, but they need the government to get at the reins of power, to secure their hold over what they hold. The way in which oligarchy operates is parlous: the oligarch vows fealty to the head of the government whilst (a) holding him to ransom or (b) grovelling obsequiously. One slip in that relationship can end with a fall from a very high window, as the common parlance has it.

Vote for me, and I’ll give you an immigrant-free America

That was the core message in the Trump election campaign: ridding America of immigrants will make America great again. Socialist governments maintain a high level of cooperation with trades unions: in that case the rules structure is set up to favour workers, and workers get the privileged access to government. Here, it’s the corporate owners who have the quick access. It is fairly understandable that the uneducated masses would want to fast-track their own representatives to the heights of power; but that they would want to fast-track management to those heights is less understandable. And they don’t. What they do is elect a president who will do it for them, and the president whom they elect promises them something completely unrelated in return.

It is not devious for presidents to do this. After all, it’s worked perfectly in every case since 1922; so why would it not work again? For years, The Economist proclaimed that migration benefits the country travelled to, and the country travelled from, and is to be encouraged. Now, migrants eat cats. The story was really too delicious for Mr Vance to let go of, even after it had been proved to be codswallop. It was punchline popularistic, it was apropos, it was memorable, it was funny (if you laugh at those sorts of things), so the fact it wasn’t true just didn’t enter into it. Personally, I would have wanted to know—even if it were—what dire financial straits anyone needed to be in before they would resort to eating a domestic cat? People always look at the story, when they should sometimes look at the stories behind the story. Besides—have you ever tried catching a cat? That is the level of importance that the then prospective Vice President of the United States of America placed on adhering to the truth in his public statements. And people voted for him. So, why wouldn’t they vote for a president who promised to solve all their problems, and make them great again into the bargain, by evicting every last immigrant from the territory?

In amongst the causes of the Second World War and the rise of Nazism comes the scapegoating of the Jewish race. Hitler was not the first to scapegoat them. They’d long been looked down upon in eastern parts of Europe, Russia especially, and, to tell the truth, examination of bones from a group of individuals found in a disused well during digging works in Norwich, England, in 2004 revealed them to be of Ashkenazi Jews who had been slaughtered in a pogrom in the year 1090 (newspaper report here—the identification came from new DNA technology). Jewish persecution is no recent phenomenon. But, when Nazi Germany started its final solution, the Jewish race in Europe formed the cream of the intelligentsia, the liberal professions, from lawyers and notaries public to doctors, scientists, Nobel Prize winners: these were supposedly the root cause of everyone’s misery. The proposition is prima facie so ludicrous as to at least, surely, have invoked the query: really, how so? It is one thing to make yourself the sole source of authoritative utterances, as the Nazi party did on such matters, but it takes a fascist to add insult to the injury by not taking any questions afterwards. That’s one way to know you’re dealing with fascists: they refuse questions with a how dare you? and not just because they have no answer. It’s the new put-down to the progressive.

Is Trump dishonest?

Much of what Trump is doing looks strange: it is not usual to come into office and immediately embark on a raft of such radical decisions such as he has been doing. The tech donations to his inauguration fund (what does one of those do, actually?) look like pay-offs or as intended to earn grace and favour, but are they against the law? I doubt it, but in the end I don’t know if he’s dishonest or not. He’s supposed to have over-valued properties for insurance and other real estate transactions, but the case has been dropped now. I think that, as a deal-maker, he will divulge as much information about matters financial as he absolutely must, probably erring on the conservative side.

The oligarchy, then, are at the seat of American government and how they got there was to buy their way there. The party donations that were made, the concessions that have been given in terms of settling court actions (Apple), the doing-away with fact-checking (such as it even was—Facebook) and the proposal to set up a strategic cryptocurrency fund all point to pay-offs—or consideration—for favours done or to be done. This is an administration that scratches backs that scratch its, and there is no backroom exchange of grubby fivers here, it’s all open and in public view. At least that much of it that is in open, public view is. Transparency means something different in public administration, although stealing money from a bank vault is naturally perceived differently to firing 1,600 employees, and may postulate an interesting proposition in law: if I say I will break the law and then do so, under cover of my own immunity, can I even be accused of dishonesty?

Incidentally, the papers reporting that certain actions taken by the government have been blocked are right and wrong. The block is temporary, until the arguments are heard on the merits. These are actions for injunctive relief, and they are generally always granted to allow the parties a period to prepare briefs. It’s not blocking for all time.

Someone once said that what the communist strives for by dint of his creed, the capitalist strives for by dint of his greed. And what they both strive for is a concentration of the means of production, for the one, in the hands of the State, for the other, in the hands of the oligarchy. That, perhaps more than anything, is what makes communism and fascism appear so alike, though I admit it wasn’t quite at the tip of my tongue that day in History class in 1977.

The things that have us fearing an upsurge in fascism (or relishing it, depending on your viewpoint) might be ascribed to a range of causes: the uncertainty sown by the Covid-19 pandemic and the vaccines offered to combat it; the nutritional value of canola oil; the general public’s willingness to cooperate with and subject themselves to the travel security measures that came in after 9/11, making bona fide travellers into quick-change artists; the precariousness of the gig economy, so that a job for life is viewed as a pipe dream; an acceptance of gouge pricing as an inevitability because the preservation of corporate profits is widely seen now as dictating the average person’s grocery bills; the burgeoning hate content on social media; etc.

Behind each of these, and many other, incidental causes of fascism in 2025’s America lies one constant theme, which perhaps, when we think about it, also offers one way out of this period. It all has to do with care.

Care

Care is a verb like need, or want, in that its shades of meaning are manifold. Take need. The 1936 Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics provided that (article 12) property should be distributed from each according to his ability, to each according to his work (which, astonishingly, dovetails into the Hobbesian idea that man acquires property in land by applying his labour to it, a fundamental precept of neoliberalism), which is a socialisation of the idea of according to his need. Another version has it as to each according to his contribution, and there is semantic argument as to whether that is tantamount to the ancient Ojibway wisdom of the Red River tribe take from the land what you need, and restore to the land what you can.

It all turns on the meaning of need, and because we are all greedy, we all assume everyone else is greedy and therefore need must incorporate some element of greed, otherwise we need to be told what we need, in which case article 12 is meaningless. Well, it probably was anyway (if you’d like to read more about the state of the USSR at this time, see my article about Dimitri Shostakovich, here), but no one ever applied their mind to being honest about what need is, because they know what it means to them, so they assume they know what it means to everyone else. In fact, what need means is related directly to aspects of what we care about (which is what others need), and viewing the world from the viewpoint of others is something that is a rare gift, which Trump does not possess.

These various provisions constitute a principle of distribution that has never once been applied in toto beyond the boundaries of a commune or an aboriginal people, because people who live under capitalism just find it impossible to conceive of a world without capitalism, whose constant mantra is to always say you need more than you actually do need (what we call negotiation). People have seen the Soviet Union from grainy old movies of the 1970s and decided that such a society is laughable, because it restricts so many freedoms. Well, here we are in 21st century America and a man can’t say the word Palestinian without being arrested. So much for capitalism’s freedoms.

Time and again, people hold up their hands in shock and horror when capitalism causes the ruin of us all: the Wall Street Crash, the 2008 Financial Crisis and its generous bailouts, because of too big to fail, the South Sea Bubble, the Darien Scheme, Northern Rock, Black Monday (1987), Black Thursday (2020), Black Friday (1869), the Dot Com Bubble, the list is really endless, especially if you count all the investment fraud that is practised, the fraud on shareholder minorities, the US Federal Reserve’s Ponzi scheme, which has been the very basis for the value of all the world’s currency since 1971, and so on, and so forth. So, the question at this juncture is do you care? And that is why we need to look at the word care.

You care in two ways: in your head, and in your heart. We have the expression I don’t care. It can mean you don’t like something: I don’t care for milk in my tea. It can mean look after: I don’t care for mental patients, I care for the elderly. Sometimes it’s used to mean do as you like: I don’t care how many pamphlets you take, they are free of charge. So, what does it mean in response to the statement: they have arrested a Palestinian in New York on seemingly spurious grounds, and they intend to arrest more where he came from? Do you say I don’t care?

Caring in your head

As I say, you can care in two places, and the difference is important. One kind of caring is in your head. It is subject to rationalisation. You can rationalise yourself into caring, and you can rationalise yourself out of caring. A common area where we are invited to care and then rationalise ourselves out of doing so is the use of fossil fuels. We agree that the climate warnings are correct and we are concerned. But we want a cheap holiday and so we feel entitled to book a cruise or a bargain flight to the Algarve. As long as the choice exists, even though we do so with reservations, we go for the choice that is most amenable to our timetable, or our preference or, mostly, our pocketbook. That is logical, because our pocketbooks are limited, and the number of things to care about seems unlimited: there are plenty more. We shall care about those, instead. We do a trade-off in our own minds: this week, I will care about Sudan, next week, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, oh, and the week after that Gaza will be back on the caring schedule. There’s nothing wrong with that: at least we care about one of them every three weeks. But which of them breaks your heart?

Caring in your heart

What separates most of the world’s population from conservationists, as far the environment is concerned at least, is where they care. Because conservationists don’t care in their heads, they care in their hearts. They will risk death, and meet with it, in Brazilian jungles in order to get to the root of why pirate deforesters are able to get away so scot free with their ecological crimes. This kind of caring is what reduces you to tears when you hear of a negative piece of news.

During the intifada in Gaza during the 1980s, I remember seeing news reports of women mourning the loss of their menfolk, shot by Israeli snipers. Used to the dignified stiff upper lip of European funerals, these burial ceremonies were a shock to the ear and the eye. Most noticeable was the wailing grief of the womenfolk. Inconsolable they were, beseeching Allah with their prayers, to the accompaniment of keening tears. That is rare among men, and rarer still among men in developed countries. They do not show their grief so readily. But they feel it. And what you feel when you feel grief like that, that is what I mean with caring with the heart, and it is a form of caring that cannot be rationalised away. You cannot tell yourself you will care about that next week, because your caring invades you now. If they come tomorrow and take away one of your rights, one that you had taken for granted, that you had assumed had been bestowed by God in heaven above and that no man could ever put asunder, then you, too, will grieve like that.

The distinction between these two types of caring has been skilfully exploited by American politics, on both sides of the House. Principle has been gradually eaten away at with trade-off after trade-off. Unconvinced by Richard Nixon’s statement that when the president does it, it’s not illegal, the Supreme Court of the United States has now all but confirmed the contrary. It did not spring to that position overnight, rather it took 51 long, patient years. A sort of positional Shawshank Redemption shift.

Once the caring paradigm sinks in with you, you can look at every last act of the past two months and see care, or rather its absence, without so much as a pretence or apology, as constituting a prime element of them.

The Potomac River air collision

On 29 January 2025, two aircraft collided over the Potomac River in Washington D.C., killing 67 people. It was the deadliest US air disaster in nearly 24 years. It occurred seven kilometres from the White House. When asked whether he planned to visit the crash site, President Trump replied that he would not do that. And he rhetorically asked whether the questioner suggested he should go swimming.

Of course, the president cannot materially help with rescue efforts or wreckage recovery, those are not in his skills set. When such dignitaries do attend at the site of a disaster, it is to express sympathy and to commend the work being done by emergency responders. But Mr Trump clearly doesn’t see even these tasks as falling within his skills set. Not even if the site is four miles from his front door. Just nine days into the presidency, the Potomac River air collision was perhaps the first full-frontal display by the new regime of the fact it doesn’t care.

Kristi Noem

The appearance of Kristi Noem, the Secretary for Homeland Security, in combat garb preparatory to a number of operations in New York to evict immigrants from certain premises got the attention of the press. To some it looked like cosplay—dressing up as a character from a drama. To others it may have projected the seriousness with which the operation was imbued; perhaps Ms Noem expected the evictees to be shooting at her. I’m sure they were sorely tempted. Cosplay is rife amongst politicians, from miners’ hard hats to hazchem vests, to driving a tank, they are an apt photo opportunity, and so Ms Noem can perhaps be forgiven for projecting one message to me above all others: she’s a government minister, not Robocop; she looked a bit silly, and she didn’t care one bit. The day I find her costume normal, lock me up.

USAID

Fifteen minutes is what the evictees from Ronald Reagan House got to clear their desks and get outathere. That, as I recall, was about how long you got during the blitz evictions from company premises back in the 1990s. Once computers came in, eviction warnings got breathlessly short. Except, in the case of USAID, the records seem to have been nixed anyway.

One woman interviewed on the footpath outside the building, cardboard box cradled in her arms, tearfully recounted how she had devoted 13 years of her career to the institution, only now to see it reduced to nothing before her very eyes. I am naturally sympathetic to her feelings right now. She will be job hunting. She may be suing. But where the tears come from, it’s hard to gauge. The suddenness of the swoop by the bouncers? Ordinarily, a government body exists for long before you did. And it will exist for long after you’ve gone. This would be a different story if she had been a founding employee from day one, and had worked to build it into the branch of government that it had become; surely she was aware that the axe would fall?

Maybe, but the tears came principally, I think, because she believed in USAID, in what it was doing—providing real help from the richest country in the world to the poorest. It was not her mind that cried that day, it was her heart. Perhaps in her dreams she had hoped that a caring America would not shut down USAID. There, she is right, a caring America wouldn’t have done. So, we can conclude that America, right now, doesn’t care, and that is instructional.

Trade tariffs

Lastly, for now, we have the tariffs. These are viewed by economists, Wall Street investors, consumers and trade partners in other countries, generally, as a bad thing. They are not a bad thing. They may be a bad thing to some or all of the foregoing, but they are not a bad thing to Mr Trump and, if you’re to work out what drives Mr Trump, you must work out why tariffs are a good thing to him. He is not tanking the US economy for want of something useful to do, that much we can be sure of.

Caring about what Mr Trump does

So, caring plays two roles in our analysis of Donald Trump. How he got to where he is, is in part a result of people not caring. They endorse his view on ecological matters, because it frees them to engage in activities that bring perceived benefits and allows them to rationalise with themselves and dismiss any lingering concerns they may have had about the state of the environment. Mr Trump offers them a trade-off: vote for me, and you get drill with no bill. And people are eager to grasp at that. There is not enough grief over the current and middle-distance states of the environment to grieve over it with one’s heart, unless one is a conservationist. So it gets rationalised away by the head.

It all depends on where you are and your viewpoint. For instance, during the pandemic, funerals were prohibited. I was shocked when I first heard the news. I empathised with people who, precisely because of the pandemic, were losing loved ones. I was sorry. But I was never sorrier than when my own uncle died and there could be nobody, literally nobody, there to bid him farewell. We grieve most over that which we loved: that is what we care about.

What Mr Trump cares about

Once you work out what Mr Trump cares about, which is strand two to the care paradigm, you will have his Achilles’ heel. We know that money looms large in his life, and ostentatious displays of money at that. Money is without question something he cares about. He may not care quite so much about other people’s money, like that of oligarchs, but he cares about his own. So, where is it? I’m no hacker, but there could be a job to do there for someone who was. I hear there are many of them in North Korea. Russia. And America is not looking at Russian hackers as a serious cyber threat any more. Sounds like a field day.

This is of course a little tongue-in-cheek. Mr Trump has been invested with a huge amount of power and with a minuscule amount of answerability. He has made good on the words of the 37th president. If he has at any time broken the law in such a way as would justify his removal from office, his replacement is ready in the wings in the form of Mr Vance. This is one case where the saying kill two birds with one stone is less a nice-to-have and more of a must. Instead, you have a game of Whac-A-Mole.

But, long and the short, even if Mr Trump walked up to First National Bank with a shotgun and robbed it in broad daylight, I’m not sure you would ever get him into a dock. His popularity rating is okay. People like what he is doing. People always like it when politicians do what they said they would do, and Trump is leaving no time for drawing breath and doing it. He is executing his manifesto at blitzkrieg pace, and there, indeed, lies the cue to return to where we started: fascism.

What fascists do: they tell you not to care about yourself

One thing that fascists do that we haven’t looked at yet: they conduct wars. Germany went delirious when Adolf Hitler declared Germany’s Totalkrieg—total war, which basically means that war needs get prioritised over everyone else, and so the population generally goes hungry. Germany in fact saw no incursion onto its territory in World War I. The destruction wreaked on it by the Allies in World War II was something they had never before experienced (unless they’d been in Belgium or France during the First World War). So, although Germany had memories of being in a terrible global conflict (Hitler even fought in it), its people had no first-hand experience of the destruction (though hunger and social change were key features of Germany in 1914-18). That was a factor in Germany’s thirst for revenge on Versailles: a sense of impenetrability; and the US is the same.

Its wars are always elsewhere. It always goes to war, war never comes to it. The US would never regard Mexico or Canada as a serious territorial threat. So caring takes on a new aspect here. It is one thing for you to care about what happens to others, or to us all, as a result of certain governmental action. And it is one thing for the government to not care about others, even if it’s less palatable for them to stop caring about you. But now looms a third kind of care: when the State requires you to stop caring about you. Because that is fascism. And, though the militias supporting Trump are gunning up, many more civilian Trump supporters are blissfully unaware that a physical fight, fight, fight is in the offing.

When you make America great again, you issue a clarion call, to unite behind the flag, to place your hand over your heart and to recite an oath. People think “America means me”, but it doesn’t: American means you. The US is a country that has always disguised its fascism, by cloaking it in personal freedom. Did you never wonder why you get two weeks’ vacation a year, and Europeans get four? Never thought that that might have something to do with the power of our organised labour, and the power of your organised management?

You’re as free as a bird in America, as long as you fly in the same direction as all the other birds. Conventionality is a discreet way to tell the unruly that, if they don’t toe the line, they’re out on their ear. Baulking at toeing the line in a Christian Nationalist country, as you now are, is likely to be a non-starter and there are parts of the US that abound in conventionality (look south, young man), where, free as you may want to be, and free as we may want you to feel, freedom has its limits when it comes to Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam is the personification of America, who wears hobnail boots and carries an M14 on occasion.

These are all wild predictions, of course, but I imagine a day when these foreign policy mailshots that are coming out of the White House are turned into a crisis, and the folk who today are egging the president and his men (and women) on in their work get turned upon to not only not care for others, but also to not care for themselves. That will be a fine day of reckoning, and we shall then see in how far the misfortunes of others are something to be relished or repugned. By that time, America will not just be America’s problem, it will be mine as well. But timing is of the essence, because Mr Trump will not require his people to stop caring for themselves until he has made sure that his invocation to act thus cannot be refused.

What fascists never do: elections

Finally, one thing fascists never do: hold elections, not ones they’re not sure they’re going to win. Nothing lifts the heart like an election victory, so, if you can engineer one that guarantees success, why wouldn’t you? There are murmurings in parts about possible irregularity in the 2024 vote. No one is crying foul as yet, but, the way this government is progressing, it is in fact looking very like a coup d’état in slow motion, even if everything was indeed ship-shape and Bristol fashion in the election.

When the time is ripe, the old State (together with that pesky electoral system that everyone’s been complaining about for five years) would be served its coup de grace, albeit not until things were in place for the seamless continuation of business under the new ownership. Trump is not that far yet. I suspect that whether there even is a next election will constitute an indication of whether Mr Trump leaves office alive. Read that how you will.

Trump is ruffling feathers, both at home and abroad, but he remains broadly popular at home. After all, people like roller-coasters, at least for the first minute and a half. But foreign governments are pretty roller-coaster-averse. The whole mood will change if Trump ventures into a foreign policy area where he is not welcome. The momentary rift with Ukraine has been repaired with some nifty diplomatic work by the UK prime minister. The US’s role in Ukraine is not insignificant, but if Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered Donald Trump a luxury Riviera enclosure around Odessa, his chances of maintaining US support might be that bit greater. That’s only semi-tongue-in-cheek, given the American president’s ambitions for the Gaza Strip (where he has indeed portrayed himself as going swimming).

But, if the US sent troops to garrison the Panama Canal, or an expeditionary force to Greenland, then Trump would very quickly be in the global doghouse. If the world’s leaders would hesitate at all on that conclusion, they should already be planning to be in it with him.

Final words

In 2016, a US friend of mine was talking to me about having a certain medical intervention done. He would be having it carried out under Medicare before we soon have Trump’s ‘I don’t care’. We normally don’t directly associate what people care about and what they do at work. Even then, we tend to split caring between the caring they do at home and the caring they do as part of their job. And then there is the caring they make a great show of doing as part of their job. But in Trump we have a new phenomenon. He cares about … well, about what (without being too hyperbolic)? Only about money and loyalty.

A politician is in the cooperation business: their job is to forge agreement with opponents and counterparts in a spirit of cooperation. But Trump is a businessman, and business is not grounded in cooperation, but in exploitation. That is what he cares about. And figuring that out will be the job of anyone who wants to oppose him.

What the US is doing is reducing government to silos of commodities. Remember Gettysburg? Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth? Well, this is government of the people, but is it by or for them? What is for the people?

At the moment, Trump is relishing his election victory. Among the right-leaning middle class, his purging of government is unpopular. But not among the lower classes, who are jubilant at his purge of immigrants. That’s what the purge is for: it is a slice of raw meat thrown to the grass-roots support to say “Gee, thanks.” But care is not in any of these silos. Care is what made government flabby, progressive, namby-pamby, woke. If you want to purge government of those things, and the expense they bring, only no care will work. As soon as you have any care at all, you have an argument about how much is enough or too much, and Trump isn’t going there. It’s no care, full stop. We can't afford to care.

No care ultimately means no civilisation. Put it this way: previously, being oppressed (which is what we all are) was endurable as long as those who oppressed us said they cared about us. We were grateful for what we had because they cared. We may have started to doubt how much they cared, but we still deceived ourselves that they did in fact care. It doesn’t matter whether they ever did, in fact, because now they don’t. We can see with the retraction of proudly announced corporate DEI initiatives just how much of that sprang from the corporate heart. And that is the nub of civilisation: it is not trade itself, or science and discovery, or patentable inventions or manual skills. Civilisation is existence in which there reigns an overarching sense of the advancement of humanity as a whole, and what that requires is less egotism and more caring.

Never do anything for nothing, unless it’s for you; that’s allied to if it’s free, you are the product, because that is, without fail, always the rule. Nobody gives things away. So, why should Trump. Everything that Mr Trump is doing, and will do, makes sense. But what sense does it make?

Anthropologist Margaret Mead was once asked what she viewed as the start of civilisation. The inquiry came from someone who expected her to identify some artefact crafted by a primitive human being. Her reply was, “A healed human femur.” She went on to explain that it was the protection, feeding and care by another individual that was unquestionably required to allow such a person to survive to the point of healing of such a fracture that signified civilisation. It’s heartwarming and it’s observant. But at what point, I would ask Ms Mead, did civilisation start to break down again? The day when not only were broken femurs not tended to but, indeed, when other individuals broke the femurs of their fellow man?

Did Trump just redefine civilisation? The turning point will come when people, instead of no longer caring about others, start not to care about themselves. That’s what these purges are about: to have a core of people who not only don’t care about others, but who are prepared not to care about themselves.

The test will come when something like a jackbooted army goose-steps down Pennsylvania Avenue. If 200,000 people line the street to cheer them on, some might go and join them, but I'd run. Because I care.

If you care: https://substack.com/@endlesschain/note/c-100683044.