But they are right about one thing: Democracy IS the enemy of capitalism. The capitalists would like us to believe that free markets will automatically correct the evils of capitalism. But there is no such thing as a free market where there is no proper government. As Chris Hayes reminds us, “In the absence of proper government, the strong will always take from the weak.”

And the only proper government is a democracy. Democracy is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for freedom. The capitalists feel that the necessary AND sufficient condition for freedom is property. And I suppose they’re right, if you have enough property. That the strong take from the weak is just the natural order of things. There are makers and there are takers…and as far as they are concerned, the takers are contemptible.

Trump’s base, by the time it’s done eroding–say, the end of the year–has a floor of, I’d guess, 20%. The dead-enders, the revenent, the white supremacists and the nazis and the precious assholes of the alt-right, 20% total, round numbers. And they were just vote fodder, manipulated and marshalled into voting for Trump.

And when Trump has passed and we turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the Trump has gone there will be nothing.…what will fill the vacuum?

That “conspiracy” of which you speak. I think the quotes are a bit cowardly; less so is to call the “Conservative Movement” a conspiracy of ideas, force-grown in hydroponic astroturf in a hothouse built by several billion dollars of billionaire money.

You might remember, a while back, I was reading Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains”, about James Magill Buchanan. He was Charles Koch’s first muse, and can be credited with writing the blueprint for the conspiracy of which you write; which could be summed up as destroying democracy and instituting oligarchy. MacLean quotes from Buchanan’s papers about his rabid belief that democracy is the enemy of capitalism, and his strategic plan that acknowledges the need for stealth because of the toxicity of their goals.

I’d forgotten until after I started this post where MacLean discovered Buchanan’s papers: In the abandoned offices of his think tank, at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.

Ironic how history comes full circle. But maybe not so ironic. MacLean recounts how Buchanan thrived in the Commonwealth of Virginia of the 1950s, a deeply reactionary oligarchy that ran the state with the iron fist of Southern Culture. Those boys weren’t having any truck with the Federal government’s push toward desegregation of the schools, and were so enraged they actually shut down the public schools for three years until finally forced to reopen them. And it was Buchanan who secured the favor and patronage of the good old boys who ran Virginia by obligingly using the backwater economic department at UVA to develop the theoretical framework of that defiance: “public choice economics”. Which can be summed up as “Democracy is the enemy of capitalism, and the rabble is coming to steal your stuff! Guaranteed by Science!”. AKA “property uber alles!” Which caused Charles Koch to get rock hard when he first heard about it.

And here we are. And the Koch brothers and their wealthy allies who form the loose network called, with some truth, the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy”, are still here too.

And here I didn’t think I could be any more worried. Thanks, hank!

Then Pence is lame duck- unable to advance his agenda, and the virulent Trump base fracture what remains of the GOP…

As disastrous as all that would be for our nation, it is the least catastrophic…

You REALLY don’t want to know the worst case scenarios…