The Trump-Musk Doctrine: Death Is OK!

[applegrove]

The Trump-Musk Doctrine: Death Is OK!

From climate change to nuclear weapons to lethal disease, the Trump administration seems to have decided that preventing mass death isn’t really government’s business anymore

Liza Featherstone at the New Republic

https://newrepublic.com/article/193290/trump-musk-cancer-nuclear-bird-flu?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tnr_daily

"SNIP........

Perhaps, in retrospect, the most important turning point in the evolution of the contemporary far-right elite occurred in April 2020, just a month into a pandemic that would ultimately become a mass extinction event, killing more than seven million people worldwide. Condemning public health restrictions, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said, “There are more important things than living.”

Patrick, who has proudly stood by that ghoulish statement, meant that the government had a higher obligation to keep the capitalist economy moving than to save any of its citizens from premature death. This sounded shocking to many people at the time, but it’s a philosophy that Trump, Musk, DOGE, and company have now fully embraced.

Our nation’s founders would not have agreed. The point of human society and government, wrote John Locke, the seventeenth-century Enlightenment theorist from whom Thomas Jefferson and other American founding thinkers got many of their ideas, was that people need to band together in community to protect each person’s “life, liberty and property.”

Screw that—especially the “life” bit, is what the political right has been saying for a while. Contemporary conservativism has largely jettisoned the notion of a government’s “duty to protect” its citizens, a phrase that goes back to the Reconstruction era. But never has the rejection of the “duty to protect” found such vivid and chilling expression as it has in Trump’s second term. The Trump–Musk administration has morbidly committed itself to an enthusiastically pro-death agenda.

..........SNIP"

[AltairIV]

1. times change

We've come a long way from the republicans bitching about death panels to now just wanting to exterminate huge portions of the population.

[applegrove]

3. Death panels was just a lure to fight something they abhored: good healthcare.

Last edited Fri Mar 28, 2025, 02:50 PM - Edit history (1)

Yesterday, Canadian Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre put out an ad where he implied Canadians would be wrapped in the protective arms of his conservatives if they voted for him. That is pandering with nanny government imagery. We know they hate that but, with Pierre Poilievre tanking in the polls, it is war and liberal imagery it is.

No doubt the intellectual movement conservatives already had deathisuseful on the agenda when they used the 'death panel' imagery to try to stop Obamacare. In fact, going back to Eisenhauer, I think, they have hated sick people getting treated in a fair and efficient way.

[Prairie Gates]

2. We're post-biopolitics now, as the philosophers might say...

Neo-feudalism was always going to abandon biopolitics, which was capitalist in its essence. The writer of the piece sees in the phrase "There are more important things than living" an extreme desire to "keep the capitalist economy moving." But nothing could be further from capitalist ideology and practice, which must attach itself to and appropriate life as its only concrete means of appropriating labor power. He's right that the MAGA movement abandons this project, but that's precisely what makes them post-capitalist and neo-feudalist. Sixties revolutionaries dreamed of a post-labor world - but the MAGA movement's fundamental ideology is post-labor: rentierism, automation, violence through a warrior class, devotional state religion. Capitalism and the modern state concerned itself with life because it still needed to extract value from living workers. This group feels that those days are historically over, so it's no surprise that the state's concern with life can be dispensed with. Of course, that very concern is what has kept most of us alive.

[Rebl2]

4. Well if

that is their (death) doctrine, may they experience that doctrine sooner than later.