Or Maybe They're Just Paranoid and Wrong About It All.

Felix Dzerzhinsky is remembered as the architect of the Soviet police state and intelligence services.  While totalitarians (and wanna-be totalitarians) invariably rule by fear and violence, Dzerzhinsky had the vision to go farther, to co-opt those opponents he could not find or destroy by direct means. He created an entirely false opposition underground (the “Trust”). Exiles and domestic opponents of the new Soviet regime thought they were working together in secret when in fact every word, every plan was known (and sometimes planted or directed) by Dzerzhinsky himself. The regime controlled its opposition.

Some have come to believe something like 'The Trust' is already operational in the USA. The permanent (actual) ruling authoritarians allow the appearance of opposition solely to let the masses think they have a say, to out potentially dangerous opponents, and to direct opposition energies into harmless activity that does not really interfere with the rulers.

The GOP presidential wins in the last 40 years have occasionally been bothersome but never a mortal threat to the rulers’ goals. The growth of government, the vision of technocratic rule, and the ideal of an unaccountable elite move forward regardless of electoral outcomes.

One recent glimpse at ‘that man behind the curtain’ is that “experts” who endorse broad government action on climate or COVID suffer no consequences for being spectacularly and harmfully wrong nor for viciously squelching the real scientists. No “journalists” who reached embarrassing depths of sycophancy with the obviously bogus Steele dossier, the very real Hunter Biden laptop, and the absurdly mendacious St. Anthony Fauci have been fired for professional incompetence. Some got Pulitzers.

The rulers endorse infanticide rather than some 14- or 15-week limit on abortion, not out of some airy notion of women’s rights (which easily disappeared when transgender became au courant), but solely to make the point that traditional values and morality cannot be allowed to intrude on policymaking. The rulers’ hostility to the first two amendments in the Bill of Rights is not just to silence and disarm opponents but to establish the idea that there are no inherent rights, only permissions, and privileges issued by the state.

The ruling party actively cheered the 2016 nomination of DJT on the theory he would be the most beatable. That he actually won was a significant but temporary setback for the rulers. Like some primitive life form responding to a painful stimulus, the permanent party not only successfully reorganized its front group as the anti-Trump party, but its media has conditioned American suburbanites to viscerally reject the MAGA caricature (depressingly often with help from Donald Trump himself).

All other issues about policy or candidate quality have been pushed aside. There is only anti-MAGA. In the new political order, voters will be able (a) to endorse the rulers by voting Democratic, (b) vote for more conventional Republican candidates who will pretend or fail to oppose the rulers, or (c) vent with pre-selected MAGA candidates who will increasingly have no real chance (especially given the dubious new voting systems in place). Our rulers thus magnanimously let us feel good about our wide menu of futile choices. Some Democrats will even be allowed to criticize members of the ultra-wealthy Davoisie in a bit of old-time social justice theater.

Our political debates and labels are deliberately distorted such that “the right” (or what passes for it) is somehow close to fascism, whereas “the left” is seen to be motivated by the nobler residue of good intentions behind socialism. In fact, fascism is just another path for totalitarians when economic class warfare is politically ineffective.

The inexorable blob of media, academia, bureaucracy, and low-IQ groupthink seems like some destructive volcanic sludge rolling downhill to wipe out the real and the free, a threat organized and unleashed by some crazed evil committee of Bond villains. 

Or maybe they're just paranoid and wrong about all this.