There is a perverse dialectic at work when the masses vote for a CEO as leader.

Over the past 50 years the nature of the employment contract experienced by most workers has shifted radically. With the intentional destruction of labor unions by the capitalist class as it outsourced manufacturing jobs, employees were faced with no mediation between themselves and the capitalist class.

The doctrine of at-will employment asserts that an employee can be fired for any reason and for no reason -- except for prohibited forms of discrimination (yes, for those of you who are enamored of identity politics, that's race, gender, national origin, etc.)

So what had previously been viewed as two opposed forces -- the capitalists and the workers -- became a one-way street. Says the strongman: You work here at our pleasure and we can remove your livelihood from you at will. We own exclusive power over your life and well-being. Your only choice is to be submissive, obedient and compliant. The only justice you can demand is that based on identity groups -- women, races, ethnicities, etc. -- not class and universal human rights to basic income, health care (or whatever was originally intended as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.")

With the move to non-unionized, employment-at-will workplaces, employees have experienced themselves as powerless and without protection. In fact they’ve experienced themselves not as employees at all and without any reliable means to support themselves and their families. As the Democratic Party has exclusively emphasized identity politics, it has reinforced that the only possible protections against such violation are race, gender, ethnicity -- even though most who remain employed are too afraid to file legal actions on these bases because of the absolute power of the employer to retaliate based on some other arbitrary claim. And less well-known and disappeared whistleblowers already knew that Eric Snowden would not be treated as a national hero.

In employment-at-will states in the U.S., it's legal to fire someone because you don't like the color of their shoes -- but not because their skin color is black or brown. So why not just pick on people because of the color of their shoes instead of the color of their skin? The better to make them comprehend that they really have no defenses against the power of the CEO class – after all we all wear shoes to work and they might be the wrong color!

Trump has merely made this power dynamic explicit. And sadly those who view themselves as the forgotten people -- who sense themselves as powerless and without the support of collectives or people who share their interests -- have internalized the notion that only the CEO can fix it. Only the CEO who makes deals and wields authoritarian power can make decisions and create change. The rest of us have lost our standing. Trump and Bannon are comfortable exposing these dynamics, because that's all people have known for so many years now. So some see Trump as simply speaking the truth straight-up -- no more sugar-coating by the Obamas, Clintons, and the beautiful people who surround them.

And that's how fascism arises. Ordinary people end up looking to the corporate strongman to fix it, because they've lost any sense of an opposing force which can counter the brutalization in their own lives. Any belief that government provides a mediating force for justice or collective protection is totally stripped away in the era of deregulated, unchallenged, bare-knuckles corporate power. And we are desensitized to the use of open aggression as a means of resolving disputes.

The Democratic Party has simply underlined this dynamic and offered no enabling or countervailing force. As Nancy Pelosi confirmed the other night, they are, in the end, just capitalists themselves.

Fascism occurs when the might of the corporation and the power of the state are joined. Chris Hedges believes that this has already happened and that we can now only resist on all fronts.

I still want to believe that we have a brief window in which to form a people's party that can resist this dynamic -- and even if Hedges is right, the activity to organize our efforts will, in itself, be a form of resistance that could begin a turn – a negation of the right of the corporate class.

I'm sure that the Democratic Party is not a vehicle that will enable us to do that. If there had been a conspiracy to contribute to the rise of Trump, no smarter move could have been made than to choose a charismatic Black leader who would further the dynamic of the merger of the corporate sector with the apparatus of the state. I don't need a conspiracy theory to understand this, but if there were a behind-the-scenes producer-director scripting all of this, there couldn't have been a better production to set the stage for full-frontal fascism than the administration of Barack Obama and the rigged primaries of Clinton's DNC.

We're close to the point of no-return. I don't think we can dither about whether the Democratic Party will somehow find common cause with those of us in the 99%. Won't happen. Hasn't been about that at least since Clinton's New Dem movement, which was the continuation of the rightward turn of Reagan with a more 'fashion-forward' face.

Bernie has given voice to what we’ve been experiencing but had trouble explaining, has provided a counter-narrative, has enabled a populist movement to coalesce after 8 years of obfuscation by Obama and Hillary's cynical use of identity politics in support of neoliberalism. And Trump was happy to mimic the new narrative as he saw the people embrace it. (BTW in 2008, you may remember that Hillary refused to play the woman card. When I stood in a rope line awaiting her appearance at a rally in 2008, I encountered Huma Abedin and asked Huma why Hillary refused to talk about women's issues and her own role in that struggle. Huma responded that we were just supposed to know that without it being said – that it wouldn't help them to get votes if they talked about it openly. So I can see this shift in HRC in 2016 to be at best opportunistic, at worse continued obfuscation of the actual consolidation of her own political trajectory with the goals of Goldman Saks.)

In the 80's I listened in a corporate boardroom as a Goldman Saks consultant described the methods and skills involved in using OPM (other people's money) to further your own ends.

And I witnessed the narratives of corporate attorneys discussing the confab of big steel execs who met in a private club to plan the destruction of the USW -- by taking concerted actions to export the jobs of the steelworkers.

Unfortunately those who espouse conspiracy politics require construction of a superstitious narrative in order to explain the truth they've been experiencing – because the media has abandoned investigative journalism and with it any attempt to ferret out truth and report it (supported by the cynicism of Huma and Hillary in their knowing manipulation of identity politics.) Without the exposure of actual evidence of the maneuvers and strategies on the part of the CEO class to bring them to their knees, everyday people do what they can to articulate stories that encompass the reality of what they are experiencing. And it’s the ignorance of the actual stratagems of the 1% that gives rise to what seem like wild-eyed conspiracy theories. The truth is actually even worse than what’s imagined.

Whether one goes to actual evidence, not only to Hillary's Goldman speeches, but to the speeches of Goldman execs themselves, it's time to end the bases of obfuscation and to build collective forces of support for the vast majority of our people whose lives have been so diminished as the rise of the corporate dictator has advanced.