I never imagined that I would see a real revolution, at least not in the West. Sure, when I was a student, I fantasised, along with a number of my Edinburgh University lecturers, about a socialist revolution in the UK. Expropriate the expropriators! Ban the bosses! Nationalise everything and abolish money. But, of course, nothing so dramatic ever happens in mature liberal democracies. Except that it just has.
Okay, the Trump takeover of the US government is hardly a communist revolution, and Elon Musk is not immediately obvious as a reincarnation of Leon Trotsky, but what is happening right now is revolutionary – just not quite in the way my student self would have wished.
The seizure of the administrative arm of the US state, the freezing of departmental budgets, the sacking of senior staff, the crash audits, the court actions against dissenting state leaderships and the threatened impeachment of dissenting federal judges…all this is unprecedented in US history.
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