Large Flag Banana republic Flag

The pejorative descriptor for a servile dictatorship, banana republic, fits: Trump and his supporters mean to operate the United States as a private enterprise for the exclusive profit of few elites, the ruling class; it’s evidence of a last ditch effort, the last breath of the American Empire in decline.

The United States under Trump is experiencing severe instability defined by the aggressive pursuit of limited resources and questionable sway in the world; extreme social stratification and a working class under duress living with the reality of stagnant wages; and a ruling-class plutocracy, composed of business, political and military elites.

Trump’s latest break from reality — his retaliation in the trade war and his attempt to order U.S. companies out of China; his Twitter tirade directed at Federal Reserve chairman Jerome H. Powell, an “enemy of the U.S.,” says Trump; the list of grievances the President takes with him to the G-7 summit — further aggravates a deeply confusing period of economic instability perpetuated by uneven (psychologically and literally) economic development.

Take the devaluation of the dollar, a topic of much debate among economists in the past 40 or so years, which makes exports of the nation’s products cheaper in global markets; conversely, a weaker currency discourages imports by making them more expensive, something U.S. consumers depend on, as do many manufacturers of automobiles and technology, and importers, say, of footwear (tariffs can raise children’s footwear by 50%): our consumer economy depends on cheap goods. Either way, the notion of devaluing U.S. currency has created further conflict and confusion in Trump’s circle, adding to the overall sense of instability in the country.

The darkness of the opioid crisis continues; gun violence is a national health epidemic— 100 people die every day because of a gun; 255 mass shootings since August 5th; 583 people have been fatally shot by police thus far in 2019, 992 in 2018; though unemployment has dropped, most job gains are in the low wage service sector; for most workers wages have barely budged in decades; CEOs for the 350 largest U.S. companies earned an average pay of $18.9 million in 2017, a sharp 17 percent increase from the previous year, according to a new study by the left leaning Economic Policy Institute, a 978% growth since 1978; the gap between productivity and a typical worker’s compensation has increased dramatically since 1979. So it goes…

All of it worsening with no solution in sight. The Trump era is a period of obfuscation and deception, violence and inhumanity; the paramount loss of morality is the engine driving the decline of American society. We see this, for instance, in our most watched TV shows from The Handmaid’s Tale and Big Little Lies to City on a Hill, Succession and Euphoria to Our Boys and The Righteous Gemstones. We could go on…The inhumanity of our immigration policy and the border crisis; #BlackLivesMatter; #MeToo; the out of site out of mind ecological crisis…No resolution insight…None…So it goes…

Darkness is visible everywhere we turn; an established monopoly of depravity and violence, an overwhelming disregard for human life, best exemplified in Trump’s White House by none other than Stephen Miller, the prince of darkness who embraces hatred as a prime motivator. Trump himself, revising The Book of Revelation among anti-Semitic tropes, sees himself as “the chosen one,” which he says was sarcasm, yet nevertheless accurately describing an apocalyptic period, in the original Greek, apokalypsis, meaning “unveiling” or “revelation”: we the people are opening up to the deceptions of our systems, economic and political — the callous indifference those in power have for those without power; we desire for something else, something far from the policies of evil directed by the misbegotten “chosen one.”

The central characteristics of a banana republic are political, economic, and social instability, confusion, and corruption. We are here; we’ve achieved this. In the 19th century, the American writer O. Henry (William Sydney Porter, 1862–1910) coined the term banana republic to describe the fictional Republic of Anchuria in the book Cabbages and Kings (1904), a collection of thematically related short stories inspired by his experiences in Honduras, where he lived for six months until January 1897, hiding in a hotel in Trujillo, Colón, when he was wanted in the U.S. for embezzlement from a bank. In the early 20th century, the United Fruit Company, a multinational American corporation, was instrumental to the creation of the banana republic phenomenon; massive repression of citizens and cracking down on dissidents and freedom of speech follow. We have arrived at this too.

The banana republic is a metaphor for how we appear to the world; it describes the closing down of self-reliance and a can do attitude grounded in pragmatism and experience by a narcissistically deprived strongman with delusional aspirations. The tragedy, of course, is that so many are willing to go along, creating a world best captured by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

A cantankerous, devil of a child feuds with the world because of his fragile ego and plays with our lives in a “season of Darkness,” our “winter of despair.” That’s a banana republic if there ever was one.