The reason a reactionary, cyclical analysis of politics is wrong isn't because "muh fascism" or "muh morals", it's because it doesn't account for the fundamental systemic changes wrought by the capitalist mode of production. A single dictator can't control anarchy of the system.

The dictatorship is one of the bourgeoisie as-a-whole. The reason I liked Trump is because he illuminated that. He ripped the mask off the horrible ruling class, and exposed the inability of populism, left or right, to turn a capitalist dictatorship into a meaniful democracy.

He had a few counter bourgeois impulses re war, borders, and tariffs, and despite riding in executive driver's seat, he couldn't do shit. They went full HAM against him from the jump, & he wasn't even a major threat to anything. The bourgeoisie's grip on power isn't weak.

We just watched them run an election where "Socialists", Republicans, alt-righters, dissident nrx people, and ultraleftists, were all backing Biden and shitting their pants about a Trump coup. They burned half the country down, and locked down the other half just to secure a win.

The Republican Party is a shell of its former self, because the mere threat of Trump style divergence from the neoliberal order caused half its flunkies to run to the Democrats, including Charles Koch & half the Bush administration. The realignment is over. A new GOP will emerge.

But the role of the GOP and the Democrats is the orchestration of the same, singular nation state, one that relies upon the ever increasing exploitation of its workers, for its bourgeoisie to accumulate capital. There's no revolutionary potential in bourgeois politics.

It will be uncomfortable for petty bourgeois intellectuals to have to admit it, but Democratic Party is more brutal & revanchist of the two in the present. But don't get it twisted, working class politics can't be advanced by either party nor the capitalist state they administer.

And the reason their petty bourgeois footsoldiers are so horrible and cruel and degenerate, is because this degenerate system of exploitation selects for psychos and narcissists to administer it. The few low key decent ones are chewed up and spat out by the system.

But the petty bourgeoisie isn't threatened. They're not being proletarianised or pauperised. They just exist in a mutant system that runs on death and brutality, and they get fat by manufacturing consent for it, as workers suffer. Of course they're awful, dishonest mongrels.

There IS greater inequality between the top 1% and the 19% below them, but they are still, collectively, living off the exploitation of the majority of the population. It is the bottom 80% who do all the work, and have completely stagnant purchasing power, income, wealth etc.

The 1% and the next 19% are engaged in the same project, maintaining the status quo. The status quo allows them to do very little, control everything, and enjoy all the advances in living conditions produced by the working people below them. That's why they hate the deplorables.

The deplorables, and to a lesser extent Trump, remind them of the morally contemptible position they occupy in society. One premised on brutality and exploitation. Woke ideology is just a giant con game to justify that system, and enact further class discipline on the workers.

And it's not a latent leftism that would prompt me to ask what someone's political project is, and what it's ends are. It's a totalising aversion to the manipulative bullshit of the top 20% and an unwillingness to do the same on the right that Bernie and Bhaskar did on the left.