jeff bertolotti

Clowns to the right, jokers to the left

“What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement.” — Søren Kierkegaard

What’s taken place across recent American political life, accelerating through the Trump and Biden eras, is not a rupture from democratic norms so much as exposure. The idea that these years represent an aberration assumes a past separation between democracy and coercion. The historical record does not support that assumption. What has changed is visibility, speed, and the psychological intimacy with which power now operates on the population. The irony is that even with the massive amplification of voices, we have still managed to find ourselves even more mesmerised by the hypnotists than ever before.

Trump’s first term made the machinery overt. His governance relied on norm-breaking rhetoric, institutional stress-testing, and loyalty demands. Institutions were not dismantled; they were publicly strained until their fragility became apparent. Internationally, his administration expanded sanctions regimes already known to produce civilian harm. In Venezuela, Iran, and Syria, shortages of food, medicine, and infrastructure stability followed U.S. financial and trade restrictions. These deaths rarely appear in official tallies because they are diffuse, delayed, and deniable, yet the causal links are well documented by humanitarian organizations. Trump also broadened drone strike authority, reduced transparency requirements, and continued proxy conflicts that produced civilian casualties without political accountability. And his base? much like Bidens, Obamas and Bushes, they thoughtlessly continued to worship him without any reservation.

Domestically, Trump normalized crisis as governance. Migrant detention expanded, family separation was implemented as policy, and dehumanizing language became routine. This didt’t invent cruelty; it stripped away euphemism. Destabilization functioned as control, exhaustion as compliance. Democracy was not overthrown; it was rendered performative, brittle, and easily absorbed; as usual, spectacle is god in the USA, and this Barnum capitalized on it like no other. The man may be a hump, but he’s not the dullard that his opposition seems to believe he is.

Biden entered office promising restoration. The tone changed, but the instruments largely remained the same. Where Trump used volatility, Biden used moral certainty and institutional enforcement, same game, different tools. The COVID period marked a decisive shift in the relationship between the state and the body. My body, my choice went right down the shitter. Vaccines developed under emergency conditions were authorized under Emergency Use Authorixation, a legal status that explicitly acknowledges the absence of long-term data. This was publicly known. What changed was how uncertainty was politically treated.

In 2020, scepticism toward the vaccine was framed by Democratic leaders and aligned media as reasonable when associated with distrust of Trump. All the Dems gathered together and said publicly they wouldn’t take the Trump Jab, that is, until Biden got into office, then the vax became the new god of the. The product didt’t materially change; the authority issuing the directive did. Compliance was enforced through infrastructure rather than statute alone: federal employment mandates, healthcare and military requirements, attempted OSHA rules affecting private employment, travel restrictions, and exclusion from public life. Consent was reclassified as an obligation; refusal carried economic and social penalties.

Narrative enforcement accompanied policy. Social media platforms, being the shameless shills they are, suppressed or removed dissenting views, including those expressed by credentialed professionals raising questions about risk stratification, natural immunity, or proportionality. Medical workers lost jobs, faced licensure threats, or were silenced. Speech was not merely contested; it was administratively constrained. The result was not public trust, but conditioned obedience, with compliance framed as a virtue and dissent as a harm.

The human cost of this period can’t be captured solely in excess mortality statistics. It appears in workforce exclusion, delayed medical care, educational loss, mental health collapse, family fracture, and the normalization of surveillance and social punishment. These effects persist as precedent long after mandates end. This administration, along with Trumps have taken this country to places only a hardened dictator could appreciate.

Internationally, Biden’s presidency deepened U.S. involvement in proxy warfare. In Ukraine, U.S. and NATO support extended a conflict producing hundreds of thousands of deaths when civilian and military casualties are combined, alongside mass displacement and ecological damage. The destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline constituted one of the largest single industrial methane releases in modern history. Attribution remains politically contested, but consequence does not require certainty of authorship. The act occurred within a U.S.-dominated security context and served identifiable strategic interests.

In Gaza, U.S. military, financial, and diplomatic support enabled a campaign resulting in catastrophic civilian death, infrastructure annihilation, and starvation conditions. The language of self-defense was used to justify actions described by humanitarian observers as collective punishment. Even conservative estimates place civilian deaths in the tens of thousands, with long-term mortality likely far higher due to injury, disease, and famine. The U.S. role was decisive, not ancillary. To be able to justify these horrendous mistakes made by the US requires much cultural conditioning. If the US has cultivated anything more effective than proagandizing its population, I don’t know what that might be.

Across both administrations, sanctions continued to function as tools of economic warfare against civilian populations. These deaths lack spectacle: insulin unavailable, water treatment disrupted, hospitals unable to operate, the list goes on and on. They don’t register as violence in official narratives, yet they are predictable policy outcomes. Hannah Arendt warned that the greatest evils are often administered bureaucratically, without hatred and without drama. Sanctions exemplify this logic.

Taken cumulatively, the body count attributable to U.S. policy across these years is a range, not a fixed number. Direct military action, proxy warfare, sanctions-induced deprivation, pandemic governance fallout, and ecological harm plausibly account for hundreds of thousands to several million deaths globally, depending on attribution standards. The precise figure matters less than the pattern: harm is diffuse, institutionalized, and insulated from accountability.

Democracy, in this context, functions less as a constraint on power and more as a legitimizing ritual. Elections change the tone of governance, not its reach. Trump ruled through antagonism and instability; Biden through moral absolutism and institutional consensus. One demanded loyalty through fear of disorder; the other through fear of exclusion. Both relied on bewildered populations whose partisan identities outweighed resistance to harm.

W.H. Auden observed that evil is unspectacular and always human. The danger is not monstrous intent but habitual obedience. These years reveal not a uniquely destructive party, but a system that rewards those most capable of converting crisis into compliance. Once bodily coercion, speech suppression, economic exclusion, and distant mass death are accepted as necessary.

What remains is clarity rather than despair. The devastation is not accidental. It is produced by identifiable mechanisms, justified by shifting narratives, and sustained by psychological conditioning. If democracy is to mean more than branding, it can’t survive on restoration rhetoric or nationalist bravado bullshit. It requires a population capable of refusing obedience even when refusal is costly. History suggests such refusal is rare — and that without it, the ledger only grows.

I end this with a quote by Wendell Berry: “We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.”