Law, Power, and Justice

The 21st century’s most desirable currency is impunity,” I wrote. “Impunity, the sadist’s conception of freedom, mainstreamed and marketed as the new American Dream.”

Victims positioned as oppressors, the powerful playacting as the powerless, lies told with the smirk of people who love to get caught because they know they will not be punished. The Trump administration was the culmination of America’s worst tendencies, a consequence of institutions so rotted they needed to be gutted and reborn.

People used to admit this when Trump was still in office. They have stopped now that Biden is president and the rot has only festered. The Biden administration has continued Trump policies while refusing to hold Trump and his backers accountable, to the point that Trump can run for president again like Mafia Grover Cleveland.

That Biden was a placeholder president – a stop gap to streamline an aspiring American autocracy into an entrenched one – was obvious by mid-2021. The first, rather large clue was the lack of urgency toward sedition.

Under Biden, the United States became the first country to face an attempted coup and not only fail to punish the coup plotters but allow them to hold office and make laws. There is no parallel in world history. Even Hitler had a prison interlude between his putsch and his presidency. The only thing approaching an equivalent lies in the American past: the refusal to punish confederates and instead let them regroup under new names, leading to the decimation of Reconstruction and the birth of Jim Crow.

They sanctioned Russian oligarchs while letting their proxies fund campaigns in both parties. The most egregious offender is the DOJ. Under Merrick Garland, the best friend of Jared Kushner’s ethics lawyer Jamie Gorelick, the DOJ refused to prosecute Trump administration crimes even after the criminals confessed. They let the statute of limitations run out on the Mueller probe, ignored the repercussions of Trump’s network of mafiosos gaining classified intelligence, disregarded blatant criminality on the Supreme Court, and slow-walked a response to the theft of stolen documents containing nuclear secrets.

This is not a serious country, but a country in serious crisis. This is not a sovereign country, but a country under the tyranny of the minority regardless of who is in charge. We have elections, but we do not have choice.
Biden promised democracy on the campaign trail and embraced dictatorship in office. He fist-bumped MBS, bear-hugged Netanyahu, and announced the appointment of Iran-Contra war criminal Elliot Abrams. Biden was in the middle of waiving 26 federal regulations to build Trump’s Wall when he was interrupted by Israel’s genocide, to which he pledged material support. We don’t know how far the complicity goes, because in an unprecedented move, the Biden administration has decided to conduct arms deals with Israel in complete secrecy.

The most notable foreign policy difference between Trump and Biden has been Ukraine. Biden generated global goodwill for supporting a struggling country being invaded in sharp contrast to Kremlin lackey Trump. But that goodwill is vanishing and Ukraine – now gutted – may end up abandoned.
People will complain I am “making Biden look bad”. I am not “making” anything: these are bad actions, and I am noting that they happened. They were bad under Trump, and they continue to be bad under Biden, and it is necessary to point that out. What matters is who gets hurt, and the victim list is long. Like most Americans, I cannot make policy but only try to survive it. That powerlessness – the knowledge that the worst things stay the same no matter who is elected – is the consequence of elite criminal impunity.

In late September, Biden rolled out an ad bragging about his ability to work across the aisle. Across the aisle sit Republican seditionists, aspiring autocrats, and stooges propped up by dark money plutocrat networks. A person cannot rightly claim democracy is under attack and then brag that they are working with the people trying to destroy it.

Unless, of course, they are partners in destruction. Unless Biden’s proclaimed willingness to work with an authoritarian party is one of the honest things he said.