Gordon Adams — Trump’s Velvet Coup

The Brett Kavanaugh battle is just the tip of the iceberg. I am watching my country going through a slow motion disintegration into civil war, conflict, and the rise of authoritarianism. It’s a velvet coup d’état that controls the means of enforcement: the police, the courts, the political assemblies, the reins of corporate power, advertising and public relations.

In other words, the creeping fascism that Richard Nixon attempted but failed, and which G. W. Bush and Dick Cheney advanced post 9/11, is speeding up under Donald Trump. While Donald Trump is the poster boy, he is a symptom and not the cause, which is the US corporate state. 

Fascism is can involve either corporate statism or state corporatism. Corporate statism is the condition where corporations control the state. State corporatism is the condition in which the state controls corporations. The US is the victim of corporate capture.

The brouhaha over Kavanaugh centers on sexuality, whereas the deeper issue is his stance on corporatism and authoritarianism. In that regard his record shows that he leans heavily toward corporate statism.

LobeLog
Trump’s Velvet Coup

Gordon Adams | professor emeritus at American University’s School of International Service, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, and he was senior White House budget official for national security and foreign policy from 1993-97