Until the regressive choice of the Trump Presidential Administration, the American Democratic Republic, with ample justification, boasted of its material abundance, as well as its afforded liberty and demonstrated humanism; the latter, symbolized, among other things, by the Statue of Liberty, the former, incorporated into its Constitutional Bill of Rights. The Nation’s signature grant of freedom of expression was inarguably evinced by a large, independent media, by its free Universities, and a system of Nationwide, unencumbered public library system, museums, and National Public Radio.
The Nation’s statutory and judicial determinations were responsibly charged with the resolution of human issues, “without fear or favor.” The Founders’ politically fundamental principle was the institutional aspiration for a governance, “by and for the People,” as faithfully guided by the citizens’ right to vote. A tripartite architecture of government (“Separation of Powers”) was construed with mutual authority to prevent any abuse by another branch (“Checks and Balances”) as a legal restraint to deter excess and ensure democratic rule.
Despite some discrete (but notably instructive), low points in the history of our Democratic Republic, the Founders’ conception was successfully accomplished, or at bottom, well along in the process, and the Nation experienced the desirable benefits of democratic rule, as well as material abundance. Policies of compassionate capitalism were construed to avoid or ameliorate the harsh personal eventualities of the dynamics of free market capitalism. The mantra of “moving up” by educational advancement has been reliably proven to be a personal dynamic to improved material success.
The comprehensive patchwork quilt of available abundance and quality of American life and opportunity was rudely shredded by the populist elevation of Donald J. Trump to the Office of the American Presidency. His atavistic efforts at authoritarianism, encompassing a philosophical blindness to the constitution and the rule of law, his complete lack of societal moral compass, and his neurotic egocentrism, combined with his ignorance and a warped reductionism, have morphed the Nation from a traditionally reputed avatar of justice and freedom, and a successfully abundant Nation, to a mimesis of reprehensible atavistic tyranny.
Trump’s systemic amoral baseness, diagnosably explored in length in previous writings, appears, as previously observed, to have its singular etiology in a lack of normal socialization, resulting in delusions of grandeur, inclusive, thematically, of a reductionist understanding of National and International issues; contextually including trade relationships. His delusional persona adds impetus to his distorted understanding of interactive world trade issues, including appropriate relationships with the United States’ long-established trading partners, as well as with its empirical competitors. Such a flawed understanding of commerce, international and domestic (as well as other personally perceived interactions), is part and parcel of his sophomoric mindset, that all trades and commercial relations necessarily evince a “winner” and a “loser.”
The latest, and most devastating iteration of his winning-losing neurosis is inarguably demonstrated in his reductive understanding of “tariffs” and the latter’s implications for the Nation’s businesses and its consumers ( to whom he pledged lower prices in his “snake-oil” campaign promises.) In empirical fact, the raising of tariffs is not an aggressive assertion of power against a foreign nation (“winning”) but leads to the inevitable effect of domestic increases in prices, to the consumer in the price of imported goods. Trump’s singular neurotic predelection that all transactions imply a “winner” and a “loser, analogous to his egregious and authoritarian lack of recognition of the American system of human rights, will ineluctably result in a pandemic of empty store shelves as well as the grim potential of a National authoritarian wasteland.
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