Is Trump incompetent or evil? I’ve read this question more than a few times online. It amazes me to hear it and think that people believe it is an either/or choice. Incompetence and evil go together like peanut butter and jelly.
In our culture, we frequently get our view of despotism wrong. I remember an episode of the original Star Trek called “Patterns of Force” which stuck in my brain since childhood. John Gil, a federation observer, goes missing on the planet Ekos. When Captain Kirk and Spock beam down to the planet, they discover it lives under a Nazi regime. They find Gil and learn that he re-created Fascism because it “was the most efficient form of government.”
Nothing could be farther from the truth. The fascists, like all authoritarians, were incompetents, which is why they needed the evil to cover it up. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a closer look at some of their policies.
In 1930’s Germany, the so-called economic miracle was a con job. The whole thing was financed through off-the-books runaway deficit spending for military re-armament. When the bills came due, Germany saved itself first by stealing their own citizen’s property (Jews), then annexing Austria and absorbing their money supply before proceeding to loot the continent beginning in 1939. If the Nazi’s hadn’t launched the war, they would have monetarily collapsed in 1940.
And how about the prosecution of that war? Was that efficient? The Nazi policy of targeting educated, Jewish, members of their society forced emigration which resulted in the United States building the atomic bomb. The vaunted Wehrmacht had 19 different types of tanks, which made resupply and repair difficult in the field as inoperable tanks could not be cannibalized for parts, unlike the Red Army, which primarily employed the T-34 and could keep its operational readiness rate high through standardization.
Fascism fared no better in other countries. Mussolini took power in Italy by claiming the fascists would make the trains run on time, which they failed at, but they did succeed at preventing people from reporting their failures. Spain’s economy stagnated under the Falangists until they replaced them with technocrats in the late 1950s, leading to the Spanish “economic miracle”.
There is nothing efficient or logical about authoritarianism. It is an emotional appeal for violence when the ruling class runs out of ideas and doesn’t want the blame for their management failure. The easiest way to escape blame is to kill those pointing out ruling class failures. This isn’t just confined to capitalist systems. Stalin’s purges or the Cultural Revolution are just two examples from the left side of the spectrum when incompetence needs to be covered with mass murder.
The impetus behind authoritarianism’s growth in the U.S. is the same as it was in any previous country – to hide ruling class incompetence. Indicators of general welfare, like real wages, life expectancy and education have all declined in the United States for the last twenty years, we have record levels of public and private debt and, outdoing their predecessors, our elite have left us an environment that has an expiration date beginning in 12 years. Sounds to me like gross incompetence.
To cover their mismanagement, our elite selected a man to govern whose only accomplishment in life has been his ability to hide his incompetence. He’s actually gotten quite a lot accomplished in his first two years – he expunged federal data and studies on climate change, flooded the zone with lies to mask the truth and set about dismantling the rule of law through a rigged, partisan, judicial process.
Trump is putting all the tools in place to deal with the ripening fruits of his incompetence. Something wicked this way comes, you can bet on it.
Wes Clark Jr. 