Obama’s “Transformation” & the Coming Trump Dictatorship

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Stalin’s dictatorship, too would be expected to foster ‘a permanent condition of stress by creating enemies at home and abroad and/or by imposing upon the population gigantic tasks that would be unlikely to be carried out in the absence of the dictatorship’ as well as, ‘a charismatic image of the dictator,’ ‘a utopian goal, carefully kept in a remote future’ and ‘proscription of any deviating values, supported by threats and acts of repression.’

-Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, Penguin, New York, 2017, p. 306.

Observations and reflections of seemingly no relevance to your daily comings and goings jump out at you sometimes and make a strong, unexpected connection to your unrelenting, all-consuming nightmares. Jumping out at me was this account of Stalin’s dictatorship by the prolific historian of the Soviet era, Stephen Kotkin.

So, how might remembering a long dead, mass-murdering Bolshevik connect us to twenty-first century America as we nervously, anxiously wait for January 21st: what is going to follow in the wake of the most extraordinary political resurrection in its history? The Orange Man cometh – a man despised by half the county and loved by the other.

To connect Kotkin’s “Stalin’s dictatorship…” with twenty-first century America, the change of a single word will suffice: “Trump’s dictatorship, too would be expected to foster ‘a permanent condition of stress by creating enemies at home and abroad … supported by threats and acts of repression.”

Reflect for a moment on the recent election. Given the Democrat candidate’s severe “limitations” and the four-year rolling disaster that was the Biden simulacrum of a Presidency, almost verbatim, a looming “Trump dictatorship, too . . .” would be the best, no, the only real talking-point the Harris Presidential campaign could muster. Trump II would erect the Fourth Reich, right here from “sea to shining sea.”

“Harris says Trump ‘is a fascist’ after John Kelly says the former president wanted generals like Hitler’s.”

The voters responded with:

So, why was the prospect of Trump’s jack-booted feet resting on the Oval Office, Swastika-embossed coffee table not sufficiently scary for the electorate to opt for the prospective “savior of our democracy” installed undemocratically as the nominee by the Pelosi-Obama camarilla? A bit of history:

In 2016 a blustery TV-reality show star and real estate mogul – and former Democrat – mocked and pilloried by the mainstream media and Hollywood, defeats the seemingly invincible Clinton machine in cahoots with treasonous Republican party grandees. He then spends four disastrous years, double-crossed by his appointees, getting twice impeached and twitting away until his account gets cancelled. On he goes to lose the dodgy 2020 election to the swampiest of The Swamp creatures who, for good measure, was only firing on two of his eight, modestly powered cognitive cylinders, falls down a lot and talks to dead people.

Come 2024, sailing boldly into the hostile primary-election headwinds of the GOP establishment, he trounces the feckless Indian, what’s-her-name, for the party nomination. Biden’s Justice Department wolves come after him tooth and claw with four criminal indictments and a mind-boggling eighty-six charges – with every CNN report – “He’s finally finished.” Oh, then two assassination attempts last summer “foiled” by the Secret Service whose modus operandi for protecting Trump was formulated by Alfred E. Neuman:

President Biden’s Director of the Secret Service

Trump then goes on to destroy (popular vote and electoral college) an Obama-selected, “joyful,” vapid affirmative action stooge – adoringly slobbered over by the legacy media, Oprah and the Hollywood idiots – who blows a billion dollars-plus on the worst Presidential campaign ever run.

A script of these eight years as a screen-written fiction drama for a Netflix production would simply beggar belief.

The “Trump dictatorship” stratagem did not get the traction hoped-for in the election outcome by The Swamp lever-pullers. This was because either (a) what the American people had been living under already resembled a dictatorship, or (b) they thought a Trump dictatorship would be an improvement over the status quo of open borders, the terror unleashed by the government’s woke commissars and an economy headed for the cliff.

Let’s break out the elements of Kotkin’s “Stalin’s dictatorship” and see how well they translate for the feared Trump dictatorship. First there is the matter of “a charismatic image of the dictator.” Now, whatever one might care to say about Donald Trump, “charismatic” may not be what first jumps to mind. His detractors, however, refer to his “evil charisma.”

The closest we have gotten to manufactured charismatic imagery in recent times was the cult of personality that enveloped Barack Obama. Remember him? He liked to think of himself as a dictator – a “fundamental transformation of America” was his plan. Not content with jurisdiction over the U.S., he was going to “heal the planet.” That was then. Now, between flitting back and forth from his several mansions, he and the Misses have settled for churning out agitprop for Netflix, no doubt, for modest remuneration. Yes, “sort of God,” as Newsweek’s Evan Thomas hailed him, this fast-talking deity was the slender black guy with “no negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” a “community organizer” from Chicago, Hawaii, Indonesia, wherever. He modestly referred to himself as “The One” during the 2008 Presidential campaign replete with swooning maidens at his rallies, God-comparisons by “serious” journalists, and fake Greek columns for the backdrops of his speeches.

The gods exist to be worshipped and Obama’s “Hope and Change” shtick was sustained for a season by the massive collective sycophancy seized upon by the media establishment, the entertainment industry and academia. The cult of Obama, however, was a celebrity cult and Americans in their embrace of celebrities are, if nothing else, a fickle lot. Obama’s charisma has had the same staying power as the fizz in a glass of Pepsi left overnight on your kitchen counter. Click on this video for five minutes of formerly “The One,” minus the mojo, during the 2024 Presidential campaign hectoring a captive audience of “brothers” from “the hood.” Sexism and misogyny – yawn. When he’s not pretentiously, preacherly annoying, he’s boring, five minutes of him a cure for insomnia. And the voters didn’t seem impressed, especially the black guys who understood that Obama’s Kamala was about as “black,” and one of them, as she was smart.

But now from charisma to “a permanent condition of stress by creating enemies at home or abroad….”

“A permanent condition of stress” is what Americans were already feeling after four years of Biden. Permanent stress was, actually, one of Obama’s changes, minus the “hope” – the transmission belt of his “fundamental transformation of America.”

The elixir of “racial healing” he peddled in 2008 was a bait-and-switch intended to sucker white voters who would discover that it was “a utopian goal, carefully kept in a remote future.” Late in his Presidency Obama revealed to us that “racism is still part of our DNA that’s passed on. We’re not cured of it.” Whoa! What about: “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America”? This was not good news, at least for some of us “folks” in white America. The “our DNA” in case you’re wondering, is white people’s DNA. Translated into practical-political terms this means that racists are here for the duration, enemies, you might say, of a permanent nature. No “cure” to be found. Instead, BLM rioters in 2020 and Joe Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland designating “whites supremacists” as “the biggest domestic terror threat.” Donald Trump’s shocking 2016 upset victory over HRC may have been a case of “buyers’ remorse.”

From Obama’s presidency, politics descended into untrammeled tribal warfare, and warfare is all about friends and enemies. He let it slip out in a 2010 Univision interview sounding less like a President and more like, well, one of those banana republic Colonels who’s just pulled off a coup. “We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends.” Obama, however, had stumbled on to something: enemies exist to be punished; that’s the whole point, and when you practice politics as warfare, that’s the only rule.

The existence of these enemies Obama had put in his sights for punishment is what makes our “permanent condition of stress” permanent. Moreover, it should be obvious that, whatever the particular threats political enemies might exude, persistence and endurance are of the highest importance. A completely vanquished enemy is no longer an enemy, and without him, the status-quo with all of its limitations and imperfections conveniently ascribed to his wiles, belongs entirely to the victor, an undisputed but tainted possession, moreover, that does not work completely to his advantage. On our enemies, we depend for our longevity more, perhaps, than on our friends.

Stalin’s dictatorship was extremely fortunate in the early stages to have had Hitler and Mussolini as his enemies. The racial and national superiority claimed by the Nazis and Fascists and their affinity for violence and military aggression made them the perfect foil for the Soviet’s phony “peace” propaganda and the promise of humanity’s revolutionary march of progress toward a world of equality, harmony and plenty and a socialist workers paradise. The Soviets were the “progressives” of the 1930s; they had divined the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice and were, in stark contrast to the Nazis, bending right along with it. Nazi Germany was militarily vanquished by Stalin partnering with FDR. His 1936 Constitution of the USSR (Article 123) established “equality of rights for all citizens ‘irrespective of their nationality or race, in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social, and political life.’ Advocacy of racial or national exclusiveness, or hatred or contempt, or restrictions of rights and privileges on account of nationality, were to be punished by law.” Sound familiar? “Equality of rights for all…”? Why did it take us here in the “land of the free” so long to get with the program?

Who then are the enemies that now foster this “permanent state of stress” that produced a second term for Donald Trump? These are “enemies within,” those who oppose or are indifferent to the coercive moralism of the self-proclaimed “progressives” who run The Swamp. In continuity with practice of the Soviet-era progressives employing the ominous swastika-blackshirt imagery of the 1930s, these MAGA enemies are the same sort of racial supremacists crushed by the Red Army, fascists; “fascism” meaning opposition or resistance to progress. Only moral defectives and mental pygmies can be against progress which is why “fascist” rolls so effortlessly off the tongue of a progressive whenever he encounters someone not of his ilk.

Progress, however, is conveniently and hopelessly abstract and remains always an elusive goal, one, as noted in Kotkin’s observation above, “that is carefully kept in the remote future.” The future is never where we are at, and thus it serves to defer accountability for current failure and as the ideological fulcrum to justify the application of whatever force is necessary to prepare everyone for arrival, someday, at that morally pristine destination of perfect equality, progressivism’s ruling motif.

All progressives, whether of the 1930s Bolshevik-genre or twenty-first century American social justice warriors, are enthusiasts for coercion, since not everyone comprehends their current fallen state and only those who are willing to submit to the purification rituals get to continue moving toward the promise land. Those who do not are, as Hillary Clinton put it so bluntly during her 2016 Presidential campaign, “irredeemable.” When you have the power, what exactly will you do to a large, intractable class of misfits that will not involve massive coercion? Had she been elected, Hillary’s irredeemables would have felt her revenge; a bit like Stalin’s kulaks of the 1930s.

For today’s progressives, who were so enthralled with the promises of Obama and now preparing “resistance” to President Trump, their “friends” and “enemies” no longer break out into Bolshevik-theorized hostile classes (oppressed-proletariat versus oppressor-capitalist) but into racial tribes (oppressed-people of color versus white-oppressors). The driving force of this hostility is racism, and it is barely an exaggeration to say that twenty minutes cannot pass without Americans being reminded by some angry or condescending “authority” from the chattering classes what a racist society we live in. They watch the mobs assault historical monuments, benignly regarded for hundreds of years, now proclaimed “racist.” Speech that does not conform to the standards set by self-proclaimed victims of racial discrimination and oppression is proscribed as “hate speech,” and harassment and banishment meted out to the transgressors. “Whiteness” and “white-privilege” are officially the marks of moral turpitude and require the bearers to undergo confessional “struggle sessions” reminiscent of the Mao’s Red Guard in action during the Cultural Revolution.

There was no push back on Obama’s “diagnosis” from any of the culture shaping institutions. Indeed, this seems to be the received, state-enforced wisdom, the foundation of the ruling orthodoxy, and so once again Stalin’s last-century terror-command state described by Kotkin bears resemblance to the “virtue—command” regime that rules in twenty-first century America. We now, as did the Russians in the 1930s, face the “proscription of any deviating values, supported by threats and acts of repression.”

The irony of the anticipated Trump dictatorship is that we are already living under a dictatorship. This one has no Fuhrer or grey tunic-wearing party General Secretary who personally sets the standards for “correct” thinking enforced by an elaborate apparatus of state-terror. The proscription and repression for us is different, more insidious and sophisticated. Instead, a hoard of mini-Stalins (race-careerists, political opportunists, globalists, and cultural Marxists) throughout the land sniff into every corner of American society for any scent of racism. The American-Stalinist orthodoxy is the judgment that racism, the defining core of American history, dominates every aspect of its social order. Redemption comes only by remaking America into a multicultural rainbow that reflects the diversity of the planet, a “gigantic task,” as Kotkin put it, imposed upon the population such that it would “be unlikely to be carried out in the absence of the dictatorship.” The desirability of a “multicultural” future is not a debatable proposition: to raise questions or doubts is a high-risk enterprise. Professional advancement, academic respectability, social approval and mobility, all rest heavily on conformity to the affirmations of the fixed faith. To achieve “diversity” and “multiculturalism” requires massive, sustained coercion exerted by an “enlightened” elite with unlimited power.

The regime has opened the borders to millions of third world people and denounced as “racist” Americans who resent not only the financial and social burdens they impose, but also fear the loss of their culture and heritage. The journalists and media advocacy-functionaries, perform Pravda-like, rewarded for their fawning with access to corridors of power. From the corrupt, dissolute entertainment industry, we are subjected to a steady barrage of barely disguised works of leftwing agitprop. Little Stalins infest the workplace as sensitivity enforcers policing such things as the use of gender pronouns, searching for micro-aggressions, expanding the world of victims whose feelings require constant protection from the bigots who fail to grasp the imperatives of diversity and inclusion.

As 2024 draws to a close and Americans anticipate the inauguration of Donald Trump, the “dictatorship” question is paramount. Will he be dictator enough to roll back the onslaught of twenty-first century American Stalinism? Can he drain The Swamp?  Does he want to?

Perhaps, to address Swamp creatures, Trump should reprise Oliver Cromwell’s speech at the dissolving of the Rump Parliament in 1663.

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice. Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government … a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money. Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? …

Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance. Your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse this Augean stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings in this House; and which by God’s help, and the strength he has given me, I am now come to do.

I command ye therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place. Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!