Suddenly the Endgame is Here
By: Mike Meyer
Tags: Russia, America, History, Politics, Culture

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ November 4, 2019

This is, technically, the endgame for the US but the whole planet has been drug through the craziness of our political collapse. It is obvious that we seriously underestimated the ugliness and the pointlessness coming.

The image that I cannot escape is the speed with which the USSR collapsed in 1991. While that was the result of the rejection of soviet style government in the Soviet Republics at the end of the 1980s, the USSR was voted out of existence on December 26, 1991. Suddenly it was gone.

While the historical detail is always unique to a time and place, it does tend to rhyme. Patterns often repeat based on consistency in how people and societies respond to similar situations. The post modern pattern seems to be either new oppression replacing old repression or mass demonstrations removing the old repressive government. It can go either way but mass demonstrations are required for any hope of change.

But the fall of the USSR was long thought to be the first shoe to drop with the fall of the US empire as the second. The close similarity of the two modern empires both tied to extreme, conflicting economic models in the last half of the 20th century is very hard to ignore. Only with both gone will space open up making sustainable changes possible for our species survival on a warming planet.

Both systems were structurally based on unsustainable, materialistic growth with different forms of authoritarianism intent on subjugating major regions of our planet. As chaos and the struggle to regain the old empire has shown in Russia, the quest for that kind of power does not go away easily or quickly.

The final transformation of the Republican Party into a criminal group dedicated to racism and authoritarianism is following the same pattern in the US. For anyone over the age of sixty the irony of the Republicans and their Trump figurehead’s reliance on Russian support for destruction of the US Constitution is stunning.

My fear is that the US will go very much the same way as the USSR. Predatory capitalism is now pathological for our species. It will only be maintained by those who would lose all power at its disappearance and have succumbed to greed and selfish domination as their reason to live. But that places the old power elite at odds with the great majority of our population.

It does not take a great deal of study to see how accurately this describes the current US situation. The Trump Party is a clear minority having gained power with a minority and barely legitimate presidency. All effort is on voter removal, gerrymandering, and suppression with white racial supremacy and oligarchic greed as the only functioning policies.

Once the version of communist economics represented by the USSR could no longer be maintained, what was left? The same situation exists now for the US with a minority regime self destructing on the world stage. The form of predatory capitalism that has evolved in the US, GB and elsewhere is no longer viable. National unity based on voting rights, human rights, with rejection of racism and bigotry has been destroyed. What else is there?

The endgame will be played out. The question is not the final result but the delay and suffering in getting to that result. That result can only be a sustainable planetary economy and universal human wellbeing. Maximum diversity is inherently a part of that wellbeing but also the essential basis of innovation and creativity. We need that innovative creativity to survive the coming centuries.

Trump is a psychopath and symbol of all that must be removed but he is only a symbol and not the cause. He and his cohort symbolize perfectly the mentality of the oligarchy. The only truth is greed and exploitation by those able to gain great financial power by any means possible. The concept of justice as a universal set of standards does not apply to winners.

This plays directly to the human predisposition to dyads or binaries as opposites. The winners versus the losers, the ins versus the outs. There is no future for the majority of us in our current climate crisis with this type of thinking. We are, by definition, losers because the winners can make their own reality.

So the endgame for the Trump regime is relative. If Trump is removed, although no one is willing to say that will happen, the question of how to make the changes we need to survive remains open just as it does if Trump and his enablers retain control. Either way the problem remains. The question is how much worse will it get?

The same can be said for the 2020 election. By refusing to recognize the full nature of change required, the debate becomes one of details on the minimum changes that are possible. Minimum change only delays the suffering of major change.

While, as a reassertion of moral standards, the removal of Trump and his criminal gang would be laudable, that effort will likely result in failure. The system is failing despite the constant din of self congratulation on new market highs. Why are life expectancies falling and employed poverty growing?

These are, of course, separate problems from the far larger crisis of the planet’s climate. Their coincidence is just bad luck or, more accurately, the result of greater complexity than we are able to handle. Simplification is not possible. The whole thing must be understood and dealt with. The endgame is the culmination of all of these forces reshaping human organization on this planet.

Within this larger complexity it is easy to lose track with the distractions of a psychopathic performer demanding attention. Such people constantly seek attention by generating outrage that cannot be ignored. There is no escape except removal of the problem.

We have all come to understand the strategy best developed by the USSR’s KGB. Foment confusion and lies until it becomes exhausting to wade through the lies to find the truth. Trump as a low grade con artist and rapist has done this for years. The Roy Cohn strategy: Deny everything as loudly as possible and without let up.

But even if it works, it leads only to plunder for the few and exhaustion for everyone else. This is not a path to survival.

So we return to the similarities between the US in 2020 and the USSR in 1991. When all else fails, exhaustion rules, and things simply fall apart.