"Crisis" for Fearless Leader and His Peeps Ain’t Necessarily Your "Crisis"

 Hurricane Helene in Florida

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“I know a lot about overtime… I hated to give overtime. I hated it. I’d get other people, I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay.” 

Trump at a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, September 29th

Crises for autocratic-leaning leaders are often manufactured, embellished, repeated incessantly and often become the litmus test for loyalty to that leader. True or not. Those crises become prioritized to the exclusion of almost everything else. Putin didn’t need to invade and attempt to annex Ukraine, but the message to his people was the Kiev was a fascist government on their border, supported by Russia’s enemies in the West who were conspiring to topple the Moscow regime, holding territory that was always an inalienable part of Russia. There was nothing about that annexation effort that was particularly beneficial to the Russian people, just like the Peoples’ Republic of China’s parallel claims to Taiwan and vast stretches of neighboring seas.

Israeli PM Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu – who had been sending cash-filled truck to Hamas in Gaza for years to “buy” their submission – had long since abandoned the pretense of supporting the two-state solution Israel had embraced in the Oslo Accords of the early 1990s. Facing a continuation in his corruption trial, proverbial hardliner leader and recently unpopular Netanyahu – with the longest tenure as Israel’s prime minister – used the retribution against the October 7th Hama attack on innocent Israeli citizens as the opening salvo to maintain power and avoid a probable conviction. A fierce response was required… but overkill did not serve his electorate particularly well. Israel’s economy is at its worst in almost half a century. But we know his pager/ walkie talkie attack on Hezbollah forces in Lebanon and use of an American-made bunker-buster bomb to take out their leader-founder, Hassan Nasrallah, were wildly popular with his followers… buying him some additional time in power.

Russia and China are each also experiencing profound economic malaise, perhaps even recession. China’s manufacturing sector is no longer competitive with low-labor-cost nations, masses of its educated youth cannot find jobs, the real estate market has collapsed taking more than a few financial institutions down… so China is waging its territorial expansion ambitions (read: Xi Jinping’s personal ambitions) to distract and rally its citizens, allying with Russia in a new anti-American cabal against the US and her allies… but Russia is hardly a solid partner.

“War may be the only thing keeping Russia's economy afloat… According to Jay Zagorsky, an economist and markets professor at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, the Ukraine invasion is likely the only thing preventing the country from slipping into a recession. That's because Russia's hefty military budget is supporting its sagging economy. But that's a temporary solution for Moscow's mounting economic problems… Dilemmas faced by the Kremlin include spiraling inflation and lingering currency and budget issues.

“‘The Russian economy right now is being propped up by large amounts of government spending, so there's not going to be a slowdown in any sector in the economy that the Russia government is buying supplies from,’ Zagorsky said, pointing to Kremlin purchasing uniforms, boots, ammunition, and food as part of its war efforts against Ukraine. ‘So if there was no war, oh yes, I think there'd be an immediate recession.’” Jennifer Sor for the September 29th Business Insider.

The good old USA is hardly immune. Autocrat wannabe Donald Trump pledges to gut the EPA and reverse the Biden’s climate change initiatives, telling assembled masses that the worst that will happen, in 100 years, is a 1/8-inch sea rise. Climate change remains a hoax, even as red state Florida just faced one of the most devastating hurricanes ever. Insurance rates there are skyrocketing. But Trump’s cronies in heavy industry do not want restrictions on their resource extraction (even as oil production today is higher than in his years as President) and clearly prioritize corporate tax cuts above all else. Oh, and his championing the “working man” isn’t exactly what he and his Project 2025ers really believe as the above quote establishes well.

There is an interesting observation from a Yale Professor analyzing what may be a main priority crisis for an autocrat is very large difference from an overall societal crisis that merely affect those non-elite classes. Here are some excerpts from Rick Harrison’s interview, for the Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies i (September 25th) with Dara Strolovitch, author of When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People and Yale professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, American studies, and political science:

Strolovitch: “I use [the term ‘crisis politics] to describe what I argue is a crucial but underexplored dynamic in the perpetuation of inequality and marginalization in the United States: the relationship between the kinds of episodic hard times — punctuated moments of difficulty or violence or economic strife that are typically understood to be crises — and the kinds of ongoing and quotidian [daily] hard times that I argue are more routine and structure the lived experiences of marginalized groups. I call this second type ‘non-crises.’ I argue more generally that crisis politics have become a mechanism for justifying the use of state power to protect privileged groups and for justifying its retrenchment or redirection when it comes to marginalized groups…

“I’m not really arguing that a non-crisis is a crisis but rather that ‘crisis’ isn’t an objective descriptor of an event or phenomenon. And that the same political processes that construct some problems and events as crises — that is, as critical junctures deemed worthy of and remediable through government intervention and resources — also construct other similar or analogous bad things as non-crises. In this way, they are treated as natural, inevitable, immune to — and therefore not warranting — state intervention or resources.”

Trump has stated that raging crime is soaring (it has actually fallen), that carnivorous immigrants are pouring across our southern border (it’s actually pretty quiet down there), that our economy is collapsing (even though it may be the strongest economy on Earth) and that we need to “drill, drill, drill” (although we are producing more oil than ever). Haitian immigrants are eating our pets, and blue states are conducting 9th month abortions … complete fabrications.

The real crises do not even exist: like gun violence, the number one child/teen killer in the nation, racial/ethnic/religious/gender discrimination and climate change-related disasters (fires, floods, intense storms and storm surges, etc.) which are merely normal cyclical weather patterns that will fade with time. Corporate price-gouging is also non-existent, even as hard numbers say otherwise. We have to trust that “stable genius,” as he has also stated as to the crises he has declared… “only I can fix it.” Just like Putin, Xi, Netanyahu, Kim, the Ayatollah, etc.

I’m Peter Dekom, and when elites ignore our real problems and manufacture “fake” crises, you know nothing good with come of those efforts.