The Year in Rebuke

[M]any have mistaken the force of arms for the consent of the people, and reckon conquest as one of the originals of government. But conquest is as far from setting up any government as demolishing a house is from building a new one in the place. Indeed, it often makes way for a new frame of a commonwealth by destroying the former; but, without the consent of the people, can never erect a new one.

– John Locke

I start with a rebuke to Putan, Netanyahoo, and Peachy Carnehan, Michael Caine’s character in the 1975 film, The Man Who Would Be King.

Good news is the investors and dividend recipients did well. The more money you had invested the better you did.

That’s good news for roughly 20% of the population. The idea of a 1% has led Labor into a false estimate of the Capitalist power they are confronting.

Still, just 20% doing enormously well doesn’t make the “good” news so good, speaking from a long-forgotten egalitarian perspective. Some 80% finding it hard to find anything good in 2025, in the macro, means the social contract promising a shared well-being and a common good has broken down.

On the micro level, so much that makes you feel good, like the faces of those you love, are beyond this review. But a personal well-being, whether on the living well/financially well-off level, or the penthouse discovering one’s “true self” level, really do not amount to a rat’s ass, speaking Constitution and Christian wise, if nothing you do “promotes the general welfare.”

“In the beginning was the Word,” the mystical writer John informs us. Thereafter, a world is born. In the year 2025, words are even more ungraspable than John’s “the Word.” Words signifying what the Scientific Method tells us, for instance, in regard to  human agency and global warming, or the efficacy of vaccines now are questioned by every self-authorized DIYscientist. “Truth isn’t truth” Rudy Giuliani tells us, and “we have alternative facts” Kellyanne Conway tells us.

If you’re not convinced that a new world has been born out of a collapse of what words mean, how they are to be interpreted and how common understanding is achieved, spend some hours reading the words that have come out of the mouth of a twice-elected President of the United States. Jeffrey St. Clair has gathered them here: “Goodbye to Language: the Year in Trumpspeak,” CounterPunch, December 25, 2025.

Who or what conditions should be rebuked for our descent into no longer sharing ways of knowing leading to a common grasp of what words mean and thus to a commonly shared understanding? A clever grifter rising to power oiled this collapse but did not create it.

Some may dream that in an After Trump Age when the zone will no longer be flooded, we’ll return to meaning construed rationally. The reign of Humpty Dumpty: “Words means what I want them to mean!” will be over. However, any return to the Western Tradition of Reason and Reality may prove difficult if the zone that has been flooded is the American mind. The American Mass Psyche, neurotically fractured? the American cultural imaginary, plunged a dark abyss of fear, hatred, retaliation and paranoia? If all this is true, or each day close to being true, perhaps it wasn’t a Trump virus that brought us to a low point of our own self-declared “Exceptionalism,” but our own disintegration and degeneration created him?

The question then is not what sort of malignant narcissist or sociopath or grifter/extortionist Trump is, but what in us created him? This is very scary because when Trump disappears from the scene, the flooded American mind will remain on stage. On a brighter note, perhaps just being with him has properly vaccinated us from future epidemics creating this sort of creature?

In seeking what is in the American mass psyche that brought Trump into existence and further what kept us from cutting short his growth, scant time should be wasted on our mythic Fallen nature. Instead, we need a close look at some conditions on the ground that led us away from a shared well-being and distracted a legislative/executive/judiciary eye on the common good and general welfare.

Some would rebuke liberals and progressives for attacking family values, which may be code for Christian morals and virtues, which do not presently seem to be called upon as those who look Latino are netted by ICE. Or, called upon when by accusation alone unidentified people in small boats in the Caribbean are blasted into smithereens. Or, called upon by the suffering and deaths caused by shutting down The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID. Or, called upon for no reasons but those that are evil for crippling agencies such as CDC, FDA, and NIH, or, dismantling the Department of Education, or, undermining all efforts to mitigate global warming and conduct scientific research as done by the EPA, NIH, NSF, and NOAA.  A short list. The moral imperative isn’t triggered. Not even a rebuke from the silent Republican legislators elected to serve the common good.

This is a year in which no moral rebukes are made. From the Dark Side, of course, our President will rebuke the many nasty low-lives that impede his will.

And so, the moral sense displayed in 2025 seems less grounded in the Beatitudes and more in quick fire furies, fears ignited and fueled by slow immiserations blamed on words, ideas, people foreign, threatening and dangerous because unidentifiable.

Whether or not how and why we have degenerated as a country, as a people, cannot conclude with an exoneration of Trump. While I wonder what ails a country that brought a grifter like him to wealth and power, and at the same time shafted all those who couldn’t play in the casino game capitalism had become, Trump took his good fortune and ran it forward. Bullshit and lies, combined with a sociopathic disregard for honor, honesty, decency, loyalty, respect make him a man applauded for his business acumen. As he himself asserted, he used the country’s laws to his advantage. He’s played the casino game of capitalism and won, by which we can assume, like the con man who mocks his mark, he does not, as president, honor the principles of free-market conservatism but rather his own instincts, raw unenlightened self-interest. He is John Maynard Keynes’ most wicked of men but not one, who as Keynes believed, do the most wicked things for the good of everyone. As the capitalist game is for Trump just a paper bag he punched through, as president he discovered that this perfect union establishing justice and so on was also no more than a paper bag a man like him could punch through.

Maybe at some point he understood how the capitalist casino play, based on nothing more determining than a turn of a roulette wheel, would lead to a distribution of power in government ruled by chance, inequities undermining the foundational beliefs of an egalitarian society and electoral democratic governance. This foulness could be the only way he could see a man like him could ever reach the presidency.Trump exhibits the cynicism of a nihilist who has gazed into the abyss of both our governance and our economics.

In his first term he came out like a clever con man making first contact with his mark. He came out defensively, sizing up the Leviathan of this Constitutional electoral democracy. And he found the holes in the fabric, the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of those elected to serve. By combining the grifter’s long game with Don Corleone’s extortion tactics, he brought some 70 million voters into this camp.

Trump could not have reached the success he now has if he had not played on the growing immiseration of the majority brought about by a Monopoly game economics corrupting the representation of power in government. He has made no effort to correct either institution, his interests extending no further than himself. This has meant savaging the presidential oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Along with running an Elon Musk like chain saw through government, he stands to walk away with about $1.8 billion in cash and gifts.

Rebukes that will go on for years will probably be the only paper punches he will take.

On the brighter side, Mayor Mamdani is focused on the casualties of our casino capitalism. In contrast to Trump who has let the bodies fall, Mamdani proposes to take on the power corrupting machinery of capitalism right at the center of Wall St. financialized capitalism. Trump has looked into the abyss and mined it for his own profit. What Mayor Mamdani sees in this abyss and what he is able to do is forthcoming. The hope is that the abyss will not gaze back at him, and so transform the crusader into something of what he is crusading against. It has happened.

What we see in the coming year may be in the Congressional elections a wounding blow to Trump’s mad rush to immortalize himself here there and everywhere. Any electoral obstruction to his will to power in 2026 will be met by him as fiercely as his 2020 presidential defeat. Much is now testing the loyalty of his MAGA followers, but the augmenting possibility that the Epstein Files will reveal that it’s their leader Trump who is part of the Deep State, “the clandestine network of conspirators within the leadership of the financial and industrial sectors exercise power alongside or within the elected government.^”  Those files may expose Trump not as a savior and champion against the forces by which a paranoic MAGA feels oppressed but as a false god, a traitor to their hopes. A cornered Trump may not get the assist from MAGA he has been getting. What percentage are at Kool-aide drinking level would be too small for Trump to use as extortion leverage, a leverage he has used to keep Republican legislators in line.

I leave my greatest rebuke last: the blindness in regard to the damage AI will do to Labor’s last gasp struggle with Capital. Growth of profits and the need to eliminate labor costs has for a long time now  led to offshoring jobs once held by Americans. AI is rushing to eliminate whatever jobs remain, blue collar and white collar. What AI now asks of labor is to just get out of the way. Who profits from this but the owners of AI and its investor class? What do you do with those who are not in this privileged group? Rescue them into leisure as Larry Page suggested, as if life, liberty and leisure was the summum bonum of a democratic society? Will the billionaire class of tech oligarchs clubbing now with the billionaire class of Wall St financial power entertain or confine/restrain all those no longer needed as capitalism finally succeeds in eliminating labor costs?

Whether or not the unchallenged, unregulated advance of AI is rebuked post-Trump depends upon whether getting workers the hell out of the way unsettles an economy that depends some 70% on consumer spending. Also, keeping the same roughly 20% of the Dividend/Investor/Ownership class happy and secure as they are now would most likely change drastically, happy and secure-wise, if those liberated into leisure might not settle down properly but rather unleash a revolutionary fury. One of the things January 6^th’showed us is a blind anger seething at surface level. The American Mass Psyche, in short, is on a short fuse.

Whether all those whose work has been replaced move on beyond work to a cultivation of virtue and a mental flourishing, achieving Aristotle’s eudaimonia, would, if I understand his ethics here, depend on a development through work enabling a proper use of leisure. That level of life instruction is dubious in the service-oriented industries where the greatest percentage of Americans work. What we have already seen is a replacement of workers by automation,. but the AI level now achieved threatens white collar workers, thus eliminating that level of income to which service-oriented workers could advance. Therefore, what AI does is further erode a middle class income, leaving the U.S. in a two tiered wealth society: low and high, where Brazil and Mexico currently are. These are not low GDP countries but rather rich/poor because of long histories of power inequities. This is not the case in the U.S. whose history displays a strong middle class economic power, along with a sense of equity as well as an egalitarian spirit not yet doused.

Right now AI is speeding along with an estimated 50,000 to 55,000 U.S. jobs replaced by AI in 2025.

What AI’s effect on education is in play but it seems that a smart phone with AI research would either push instructors aside, or turn them into magnetic performers, needing to do HBO Special level presentations at each class. Absent that, it’s easy to see that the difficult task of narrating in a classroom a thread by which information is turned into a path of knowing how to know is now facing transformation or eradication.

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