Who will Trump's cultists blame when they finally understand they've been conned?

(Be aware: NAC is going away soon)

Donald Trump's entire "career" in and out of politics has been one long, sustained confidence trick. The owners of capital "get it," and shill with enthusiasm because they can only gain from the con man's game.

Generally speaking, when the victims of a con game realize they've been duped, they're angry. It may or may not be the con man's fault, but it's not theirs; no one likes looking in the mirror and confronting their own gullibility.

Politically, it's never been about Trump's narcissistic grifting. Rather, it's about wealth consolidating its power and enhancing its vampiric capital accumulation as the populace is distracted by the grift; and, it's about those Americans, primarily white, who've embraced Trump's con game with open arms.


When they realize they've been had, as inevitably they will, who's up to be blamed? It won't be Trump himself, as rejecting a deity is hard work, and he'll be exonerated by having been "stabbed in the back" or some such nonsense.

It won't be the con man's disappointed victims, swindled and left to founder, because the mirror's cracked by the weight of the dominant caste racism and gibberish.

I think most of us already have a suspicion about the answer to this question, and it's not a pleasant one. In a collective sense, why do humans cherish being conned? Now if you'll excuse me, I have a pitchfork to sharpen.

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This "Never Trumper" is hilarious. She cannot countenance the grift, but on the other hand, because providing health care and other basic public services would be both unAmerican and unfair to the accumulators of capital, she just might change her mind. 

Yawn.   

Sorry, I don’t mean to make a pro or con statement about what should happen with health care. I’m saying that some version of socialized medicine exists in most European countries, and I think we would agree that they’re all democracies.

I didn’t suggest that the imposition of socialized medicine was somehow going to end our democracy. I merely said that it was going to usher in things that were irreversible that were not going to be good for our country.

Gary Indiana's Depraved Indifference: “I love America, but you have to admit it’s a country full of morons, we really owe it to ourselves to make some money off them.”

"The fact that we don’t consider grift central to our identity is just baleful amnesia."

In case you weren't aware, here's an introduction to Gary Indiana, who was born Gary Hoisington in New Hampshire.

In 2015 Indiana released an "anti-memoir" called I Can Give You Anything But Love, the title of which mimics the 1928 pop standard by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields ("I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby").

Forgotten Authors No.46: Gary Indiana, by Christopher Fowler (The Independent)

Some authors are less forgotten than ignored. Gary Indiana is an author whom it is more convenient to overlook. He belongs to a special breed of American urban writers who take cool pleasure in dissecting the lives of the rich and ugly, and is possibly the most jaded chronicler of them all. On a good day, he makes Bret Easton Ellis look like Enid Blyton, yet many, myself included, think he might already have written the Great American Novel(s).

Indiana was an actor before working at New York's influential Village Voice as an art critic. He became an essayist and journalist, and wrote non-fiction on cultural phenomena from Pasolini to Warhol to Schwarzenegger. However, his first love is the satirical novel. A loose trilogy lightly fictionalised criminal cases and their accompanying media frenzies: Three Month Fever (1999) follows the disintegrating personality of Gianni Versace's murderer in Miami and the grotesque sensationalism of its press coverage; Resentment (1997) is a work of angry genius based on the circus which followed the trial of the Menendez brothers, wealthy Californians who killed their parents and left a screenplay version of events on their computer; Depraved Indifference (2002) explores more charismatic sociopathy, as a pathetic heiress is killed by mother-and-son confidence tricksters. Indiana's language is precise, literate, painfully honest and shockingly funny. He views these end-times with a reptilian eye, watching who gets to eat and who is eaten. His characters are disappointed with their share of the American dream, and become slowly poisoned by it.

The Bookseller referred me to this piece by Peter Goldeberg in The Baffler: All-American Amnesia. In America, most years are the "year of the grifter," since con games are a long-term pillar of exploitative capitalism.

The year 2019 (and 2018, and 2017, and likely 2020 to come) was supposedly the year of the grifter. Newly reissued by Semiotext(e), Depraved Indifference reemerges ready for the trend. Given the timing, encomiums of “prescience” don’t feel inaccurate.Indiana would probably counter that most years in America have been years of the grifter. In his essay “No Such Thing as Paranoia” on the history of conspiracy theories and the actually conspiratorial mode of American power, collected in 2008’s Utopia’s Debris, Indiana looked back toward the Bush family and didn’t stop until he hit the Robber Barons. Citing a train crash staged in the nineteenth century to manipulate stock prices, the history of the fourteenth amendment’s usage to protect corporations, as well as more familiar sights of modern conspiracism like the Kennedy assassination and Bohemian Grove, he mounts his argument: scams, at least in the upper echelons of our society, are foundational to the United States. The fact that we don’t consider grift central to our identity is just baleful amnesia. While lamenting the American tendency to forget the import of such aspects of our society is a hobby horse for writers on the left, part of what makes Depraved Indifference enthralling is how it turns this symptom into a condition, enlivening it with a certain literality. This is a nasty, satirical, and often hysterical book, chronicling the fate of tremulous selfhood in the face of heedless, all-American hustle.

Con artists, grifters ... they're close enough for musical theater.

The idiocy of the "pastorpreneurs" -- or, the prosperity gospel, as lifted straight from the corporate capitalist playbook.

Don't worry -- Bill Hanson's own personal pastorpreneur is back on duty in today's News and Tribune, evangelizing on a platform of mass shooting aftermaths.

Now about those ten-percent tithes to keep the one-percent ensconced on their thrones ...

A Grift From God, by Meagan Day (Jacobin)

The prosperity gospel promises material riches to believers. It’s on the rise, and no wonder: it’s the perfect religious expression of capitalism, especially in the age of Trump.

Forty percent of Americans are liquid asset poor, which means that if they don’t receive their next paycheck they have no means to make ends meet. Why?

If you’re a socialist, the answer is that society’s capitalist minority is exploiting the working-class majority. People are broke because they are dependent on wages to survive, and their bosses are paying them as little as they can get away with. Low labor costs yield high profits, and the compulsion to maximize profits is the driving principle of capitalism. It’s baked into the economic system and exacerbated by low levels of organized working-class resistance.

If you’re a believer in the prosperity gospel, though, the answer is very different. The prosperity gospel is a movement within American Christianity, also known as the Word of Faith, that says God wants you to be rich, but you have to will his financial blessing into being. Forty percent of Evangelicals are taught the prosperity gospel, according to which the root cause of poverty is faithlessness.

Barbara Ehrenreich took a glance at the prosperity gospel in her book, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. She links it to the overall trend of “positive thinking” that emerged first in self-help and business literature and has bled over into religion. According to the laws of positive thinking, writes Ehrenreich, “You can have all that stuff in the mall, as well as the beautiful house and car, if only you believe that you can.”

From a socialist perspective, it’s cruel enough that the prosperity gospel locates the potential for economic uplift somewhere else besides mass politics and united class struggle, distracting and demobilizing people, and making it harder for them to actually win real society-wide victories. But it gets worse.

Prosperity gospel ministers don’t usually stop at urging positive thinking. To manifest financial success, believers can’t simply have faith. They must demonstrate that faith — preferably in the form of a tithe to the person doing the preaching. As rapper Ice-T put it, “The preacher says, ‘I know God a little bit better than you. If you pay me, I’ll hook you up.’”

Like payday lenders, prosperity gospel ministers see the broke and struggling as a consumer market. Their target demographic is those who suffer from lack, and their product is the promise of abundance, or at least relief. Financially, the prosperity gospel is nothing but a swindle, prying money from people who by definition have very little and desperately wish they had more.

Ideologically, the prosperity gospel dovetails perfectly with right-wing ideology, which views poverty as a consequence of individual failure rather than rigged economic and political structures. As Ehrenreich writes, “Always, in a hissed undertone, there is the darker message that if you don’t have all that you want, if you feel sick, discouraged, or defeated, you have only yourself to blame.”

When times are hard, it’s because you didn’t think positively enough, pray hard enough, or tithe enough. It’s a spiritual spin on meritocracy, the ideological handmaiden to neoliberal capitalism.

The prosperity gospel is one of America’s greatest grifts. Little wonder, then, that it’s made its way to the White House, currently occupied by a master con artist himself ...