In the early 1930s, upset with President Franklin Roosevelt, some well-placed businessmen plotted to stage a coup and install Gen. Smedley Butler (an odd choice, given Butler's independent character) as a fascist "President", or at least there's reason to believe they were plotting that.
Butler wouldn't go along with it, the plot failed, and FDR, thinking it best to not disrupt the country too much, never brought it out in the open, if in fact he did not outright encourage a general belief that the whole thing had never happened.
Read the recent Robert Reich item here:
The dangerous anti-democracy coalition
American oligarchs are joining Trump and his faux working-class MAGA movement
Reich reports that Elon Must recently held a billionair's gathering with the tehme of defeating Biden in which he invited; well. . . :
The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary.
You've heard of Murdoch, of course, the Australian-born billionaire who owns newspapers of a certain type, and who has recently been opposed to Trump. And you've heard of Michael Milken. Certainly you've heard of South African born Elon Musk.1
Consider this quote by billionaire Peter Theil.
The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron. 2
Consider that somewhat alarming? Well consider this, from the same individual:
But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
Theil contributed $15,000,000 to J.D. Vance's campaign. And according to Reich:
Just 50 families have already injected more than $600 million into the 2024 election cycle, according to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness. Most of it is going to the Trump Republican Party.
One of the really remarkable things about politics of the last 20 or so years has been the swamping of right wing money into it. Rank and file Republicans like to worry about George Soros, but it's really the far right that's getting the cash infusion, and it's showing. It had a major impact on altering Wyoming's politics existentially, taking a more or less "leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone" brand of local Republicanism into far right populism. Early on, that was accompanied by lots of money. So much so that one frustrated legislature told me that those forces were "buying the legislature".
The amazing thing to see is the degree to which those who have radically different economic interests simply follow along. Again, the far right likes to call everyone else "sheep", but the analogy actually applies to Republican voters far more, who vote against their own economic interests continually.
The extremely wealthy can use their wealth in any number of ways. It's notable that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates weren't on the list. But that this occurs at all is troubling, to say the least.
Capitalist may believe that their interests serve everyone else, and that "freedom" would be "preserved" in an odd sort of Pax Capitalismus with a Cesarean Trump at its head, and probably as a figurehead but wealth, business and capital doesn't exist for the wealthy, but for everyone.
Panem et circenses, hatred and discontent, and false internal enemies. Sadly, the trend is well-developed, helped on by a Democratic Party beholding to its own blood soaked, genitals obsessed left wing.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Footnotes:
1. There's something concerning here that two really rich guys who were not impoverished when they showed up here are now messing with American politics in some fashion. This, as much as anything, shows how screwed up our immigration policies are. Both Murdoch and Musk ought not to be in the US at all.
2. It's getting impossible not to note the real rise of misogynistic commentary by the far right.
It's not the comments of people like Harrison Butker so much, as the comments by other characters on the far right. Butker's comments have to be taken from the position of traditional Catholic thought. In some Evangelical corners of Christianity, however, there are now some really beyond hostile views of the current roles of women. Interestingly, these same forces seemingly have no problems with conduct well outside the Christian norm, ranging from Trump's serial polygamy to Theil's homosexuality.
All this should give the far right pause. People like Trump, or Theil, clearly aren't in the traditional Christian camp if their own conduct is observed.
