The reason this is coming to a head under Trump is that they fear irreparable harm to the U.S. and the rest of the world if they let him exercise his executive power. They are no doubt consumed with the thought that a strategic nuclear exchange could be launched every time he blurts something out on Twitter.
The right and left are at each other’s throats, so the center elevates a caudillo with all the center’s mediocrity to bottle up the class struggle so Wall Street can get back to making money. The caudillo sets a tone of repressive, arbitrary, and unaccountable rule. It’s what he was elected to do. But naturally this spawns counter-conspiracies from those who prefer a different form of the arbitrary executive power that is the only hope for saving capitalism. The factionalism itself expresses an underlying hopeless situation for late capitalism ... the capitalists are like American warlords in Saigon fighting each other to the death over a kilo of heroin because they both know it won’t be long till they have to get that last helicopter before it becomes Ho Chi Minh City. And their one-two punch on civil liberties suggests the future the capitalists (and their political representatives from left to right) have prepared as they try to destroy enough wealth to set back our development enough that capitalism, or some form of class society, can be reconstituted on a more primitive basis: one of dictatorship, war, and eventually fascism.
