Trumpism is not a policy program; it is a bargain. A plurality of voters, afraid of losing special status they have enjoyed for four centuries, hires the loudest available con man to protect their right to discriminate, pollute, and refuse collective obligation — accepting that they too will be conned, so long as someone else is conned worse.

What follows is an account of how the Declaration of Independence's promise of unalienable rights has been hollowed out by shrinkwrap contracts, a Voting Rights Act gutted by the Supreme Court, and the quiet constitutional triumph of the limited-liability corporation as a fourth source of power beside religion, royalty, and land. The fix is either demographic patience or a new constitutional convention. Neither is safe.

The Power of Trump

• Why is fascism attractive to some voters?
• Why is religion attractive to some voters?
• Why are conspiracy theories attractive to some voters?
• Why is faith praised?

Because it serves some human con man somewhere and unless you're the con man, the person it's serving ain't you. 

## II.  Unalienable Rights and the Shrinkwrap Loophole

## III. The Fourth Source of Power: The LLC

## IV.  The Court's New "Originalism"

## V.   The Bargain: What Trump's Voters Are Really Buying

## VI.  Two Paths Out: Demographics or a Second Convention

## VII. Footnotes

I.   The Long Con: Why Voters Choose a Con Man

So maybe you might try hiring the best con man around to represent you. You know he's a con man, but he promised to con everyone in your favor! We call that the long con. You join the con and you still get stiffed. Such is life. At least I'm conning everyone else more than I'm getting conned!

I have never seen the attractiveness of living in a fascist state where the prosecutorial power of the state was run by a transactional plutocrat who's sole goal was to suck money out of you in return for 'favors.' The most common favor is not getting beaten up or arrested. The money is in the form of donations to the candidates or the parties (limited, attributed) or to Super PACs supporting the candidate (unlimited, unattributed). 

This is what the local mafia don, crooked cop or corrupt politician does. That's called called the protection racket and it's illegal. That's what the 1970 RICO laws were written to prevent. It's ironic that the lawyer and President Nixon signed the RICO law, then a few years later the threat of using it on him (for ordering the burglary of the Democratic Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel) made him resign from office, it seemed very fitting.

For a detailed explanation of why this corruption enshittifies society see

Supposedly, the politician only goes after more lucrative deals. Politicians sell tax breaks to billionaires and corporations. 

This is not just the Republican's that have done this in the past... Bush the younger did it and the Democrats agreed and the country crashed a few years later in the Great Recession. 

The Great Recession was as bad as the response to COVID-19 where we shut down everything that is non-essential. That was really bad. The cash flow of the world dropped as much as during a worldwide lockdown during the pandemic. The Great Recession was a very bad flu caused by a group of corporations that got paid money to evaluate and pronounce risk. 

Other companies and other people around the world relied on this group to reliably predict the future value of loans. The corporations had been doing this for over one hundred years. The companies used to be partnerships. Partners are liable for what their Partnerships do. If the partnership bilks old ladies out of billions of dollars, they are personally responsible for paying them back. The Partners converted these Partnerships to Corporations. Specifically, Limited Liability Corporations, where they just owned a percentage of the company. Now magically, if the new company bilked old ladies out of billions of dollars, then the partner could lose their investment, but was now not personally liable for anything else. The partners were rich and the old ladies were now out of luck. 

Not only where the old ladies out of luck, but this new corporation could sell itself to the public, who also could only lose their investment and were not personally liable for the consequences of what their money was paying for, like bilking all those old ladies out of their life savings. Or stealing money from everyone who lived in California by faking bids on electricity to control the outcomes of auctions? Nope, you could do that, earn a bunch of money illegally, then not give it back by declaring bankruptcy. Perfectly legal if it was just an honest mistake? Enron was an extreme case that shows the basic bankruptcy of the capitalist system. 

Typically the fine for breaking the law is just factored in as a cost of doing business. For a corporation, it's acceptable to break the law and pay a fine; not admit to guilt, but continue in business without correcting the failure. Again, this is why corporations are amoral and why capitalism as practiced today is a bankrupt theology that is used to steal the wealth of the average person.

The US Government treats corporations as 'people' if they can. This means they can take the rights of a person as declared in the constitution - they can enter into contracts, they can own things, they can agree to have you give up your constitutional rights to a government trial by your peers in their contracts. In other words, whatever is agreed to in the contract cannot be countermanded by any existing law, if the corporation's extra-legal (outside of government) system doesn't agree. And the US Supreme Court has agreed that this is constitutional. You can give up your constitutional rights if you want to. Illogical and unbelievable, but the state of the world we are currently living in.

I guess the "inalienable" part of the Declaration of Independence didn't mean what everyone thought it meant. At least not according to the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who has ruled in this way multiple times. The founding document of United States of America states that:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. 

Everybody agreed, in the founding document of the American Republic, that all men have unalienable rights that the government could not take away; and that these were not their only rights. In addition to equal treatment and the rule of law, Science and Religion agreed that some of the most important rights were:

•  Life,
•  Liberty, and the
•  Pursuit of Happiness.

But wait, didn't I just say the Supreme Court has been ruling that it's perfectly legal for you to give up your unalienable rights? What does unalienable or inalienable mean? According to every dictionary I could find it: "refers to that which cannot be given away or taken away". That doesn't seem like the current Supreme Court agrees with this, does it? 

Ah, but remember, the Declaration of Independence does not have the force of the rule of law. It's just an aspirational argument for how a government should be constructed. It was a declaration of rebellion against the rule of a foreign King.

The amazing thing about it was that it was not a plea to another King to come and run the country, it was a plea to let the people run their own government using Democratic principles. The first time in modern history that a group of people banded together to provide their own government.

Remember that the first version of the government of the United States of America was documented in the Articles of Confederation  and Perpetual Union of the states and lasted for more than a decade before it was overturned and the current constitution was instantiated as the law of the country. 

So the constitution was supposed to be written in the spirit of the justification for it, right? 

The founding fathers gave it their best try and it's still probably the best way to run a government, or at least it's been able to provide the most increase in economic output compared to any other system of government. But it's not perfect. 

The Constitution doesn't guarantee safety from the hazards declared in the Declaration of Independence. Apparently, the current Constitution doesn't even guarantee that you can't give up your unalienable rights. The Declaration of independence says we all have them, but the Constitution cannot be used to let the power of the state enforce them if you give away that which you cannot give.  

We all agree that you can't give them away, but if you do, the state will not enforce these rights. The state will not enforce the rule of law and protect you. In other words... if you agree to the latest 'shrinkwrap' contract for the use of software, you give up your rights of trial by jury or your peers, one of your inalienable rights, the right of the rule of law. You must now negotiate individually for your rights and you cannot use the courts of the government to enforce your inalienable right. It's almost as if you 'agreed' to be a slave or belong to a cult... after opening their software they are now allowed to blackmail and threaten you to keep you in their thrall and it's perfectly legal because you gave them permission to break the law in return for something (a program to run and it's a license, you don't even own this software.)

So the Constitution is flawed. It apparently can't be used to enforce the basic unalienable rights of Americans.

There are two ways to fix this problem. The goal is that we should make the Constitution enforce more of the Declaration of Independence than it does currently. Either change the members of the Supreme Court or rewrite or amend  the Constitution.

Or the Supreme Court could just change its mind and decide that one of the responsibilities of the US government is to enforce the inalienable rights of Americans. That would take the passing of several judges, realistically this will take many years and the Democrats (since Republicans and their judges think it's a great idea to allow you to be thrown into slavery) must manage to get both the Senate majority and the Presidency at the same time.

This seems unlikely in the near term. Given an average age of death of around 80 for an American these days, looking at the data, it seems that the next President may have a reasonable chance of appointing two judges to the bench, if the Democrats manage to get a Senate majority, which seems unlikely at the moment.

Figure 1. Average expected lifespan of the current Supreme Court.

But what are the chances that the Democrats come up with another two Senate seats in the near future? Given that the Republicans still own the majority of the state legislatures and will continue to shamelessly gerrymander and disenfranchise Democratic voters, and the Supreme Court will let them get away with this [1] when they wouldn't let these obviously racist systems get away with discrimination for the last 50 years. This is essentially saying that all the work done to pass the 14th, 19th and several other amendments to extend those inalienable rights to all people at all times, the life work of such people as Abraham Lincoln, isn't really a good idea. The radical right, represented by the Republicans, would rather extend these rights to groups of their fellow travelers (amoral corporations) who could then take away the rights of everyone else, legally, without cost and without retribution or punishment. The radical right is now arguing that disenfranchisement and slavery are A-okay with them. Because this is the only way they can stay in power. Make no mistake about it. It's going back to the time when 'Separate but equal' is acceptable, when discrimination is acceptable and when their friends grab power in a state, whatever they do to hold onto that power is acceptable. 

This is unacceptable to me and to the vast majority of Americans.

This has caused many Americans to become concerned about enforcing their inalienable rights. And the right and the left react differently to this threat. 

The right is afraid of being forced to do something against their wishes, thus they want the ability to forcefully resist this ipso-facto 'violent' (I can do whatever I want and if you tell me differently, even if it harms you, then just tough shit) compulsion, which is supposedly the worst thing that can happen to them. Which is why they naturally resist wearing masks, seatbelts, helmets, permits, inspections and insist on private property and public property that they can pollute and use however they wish. 

The left is afraid of being killed off by actions of others, by being shot at, by being discriminated against, by redlining, by systemic racism, by unequal enforcement of laws, of not being able to vote or to have your rights protected in a court of law. 

The right is against any tax, as that is theft of personal property. You can't force me to cooperate with you for the common good! They think the value returned by collective action can't be of enough benefit to myself and everyone else to justify the forced cooperation, that's just not how insurance works in the real world! And if it is really of benefit to everyone, some person should make money off it!  It shouldn't be left up to a government bureaucracy, it should be up to some monopolist that has no incentive to be moral at all. We should let some corporation (that can harm you and escape punishment from the government) run every collective action. 

The left would much rather have these kind of life and death decisions made by a government that is bound to follow the rules of law or they will get ejected from control and new handlers will be brought in through voting. This is the ultimate control over the threat of government: vote them out. (Another thing the radical right can't stand - letting people vote.)

However, if some of the branches of government are gerrymandered into preventing their change due to self-serving state legislators (as happened in 2010 and is probably going to happen again in 2020, this time with the Supreme Court's go ahead to discriminate against anyone, even other political parties) it won't be very easy to have the belief in inalienable rights be reinstated in our government. 

The Supreme Court decided it's okay to change their minds, ignore all precedent and declare the Voting Rights act unconstitutional because it's not the same as it was 50 years ago, when the civil rights law was passed; which isn't the same as it was 100 years ago during the Jim Crow era, which isn't the same as it was 150 years ago when we had a civil war against slavery. In *Shelby County v. Holder* (2013), the Supreme Court struck down the preclearance formula of the Voting Rights Act — effectively freeing the former Confederate states to resume the voter-suppression techniques the VRA had been passed to prevent.

This is the sorriest excuse for taking away people's inalienable rights ever constructed. It's the argument that shows that the radical right's 'originalist' method of deciding the law isn't a legitimate way of reasoning, it's just an excuse to decide whatever you want. And it's slowly eroding the legitimacy of the Supreme Court itself.

No, the argument hasn't changed since the Constitution was written, it's exactly the same. If there is any way for white supremacists to disenfranchise the rights of others, they will figure out a way to game the system to make it happen. The tyranny of the majority. Soon to be the tyranny of the major minority.

And this is what really has the radical right scared, They will be just one faction among many, which means they would have to finally respect the rights of everyone. They would have to negotiate equal treatment for everyone. They are no longer the largest faction that held out for special rights in the original constitution and threatened to go home if they didn't get these extra rights. They are a controlling minority  that made sure that these rights could be taken away from citizens in their states and that the federal government couldn't stop it. 

Yes, those states that caused the last American civil war are where this faction has majority representation. And according to the current Supreme Court, this is the way it's supposed to be, in contrast to the previous century and a half of court rulings. We've had Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that ruled that there is no such thing as separate but equal. We've had the Civil Rights act and the Voting rights act as law on the books for too long. Those original white supremacists are now dead... well most of them are dead, so they can no longer discriminate against anyone, so, according to the Roberts' Court all of those civil rights laws are just superfluous! Separate but equal is just fine. Different legislatures elected by different groups of people that have different powers but still somehow want to support the same policies of discrimination and disenfranchisement is just fine with the current Supreme Court. 

All Men are Created Equal will not be enforced by the current Supreme Court. They've made it very clear that they will not use the Constitution to enforce these rights. States are now officially allowed to discriminate, disenfranchise and just plain play favorites. Equality under the law is not something this Supreme Court is interested in enforcing because there's just too many 'others' out there: they'd just vote themselves bread and circuses, like the radical right is trying to do for itself and its billionaire oligarchs.

They believe that they can't defend the right to vote on those people: they might vote to take something from us, like forcing me to work together on common goals or restrain me from burning the earth down so I can have my latest gas-guzzling monster truck get me to work for a few cents less a mile, never mind that it will kill all of us soon enough, it's my RIGHT to screw you and the rest of society!

It's all about today and efficiencies. Which is really short sighted. Innovation only occurs with restraints. Monopolies find it much easier to collect rents rather than actually innovate and improve efficiencies. The more of the externalities of a monopoly you make them pay for, the better they respond to and the more efficient they are forced to become. Forcing amoral corporations to protect humans forces them to pay attention to the survival of the planet, in other words forces them to become moral or go out of business. This is the only way to force corporations to be moral. 

But as we discussed before, it's not really that efficient. It does force a trade off between human suffering and money. How much is your life worth these days? The court system thinks it's about $9 million. So if a corporation kills you it's deemed a fair trade if they give your heirs $9 million. No other punishment needed. This values the entire human capital on the planet as $720 trillion (considering a person lives almost 100 years.) That's pretty close to the current estimates of total capital in the world.