The Uncertain Future and the American Election

I seem to recall the partisans of both Fascism (the choice #2 of its day) and Communism (the choice #3 of its day) confidently predicted that the soft, decadent men of money would fall before the thrusting power of their lofty virtue and sheer testosterone.

Did that happen?

As for Putin–he’s one man, and his skin is not steel plate, and virtue does not confer immunity to poison. As the late, great Ambrose Bierce noted, “An absolute monarchy is one in which the sovereign does as he pleases so long as he pleases the assassins.”

Putin should consider employing a food taster, or the modern chemical equivalent, though as he is a shrewd fellow, he probably is doing that already.

But please do go on, all of you prophets of doom. You amuse me.

During the whole post-WWII period, economic conditions have been good predictors of who wins the Presidential election. G0od economy, people vote the status quo and the incumbent. Clinton represents incumbency even if she is not technically the incumbent.

What’s strange or unusual is that the American economy is doing well in some respects — employment is up over what it had been — but wages have been falling or stagnating for a long time. Home ownership is at a 50 year low I remembering reading the other day in a headline.

Most people do not feel immediately threatened by not having a job, but wages have been stagnating. Inflation as conventionally measured is low, but rents are rising and more people now have to rent. Medical care is again rising in cost.

I went with a friend to get a new car yesterday. Interest rates are so low, you cannot really afford to buy a car outright, but leasing a car really puts you in a powerless and precarious position vis a vis the power of the corporate bureaucracies leasing and financing and insuring. So much paperwork! So many hidden fees and petty scams. That kind of misery leaks into attitudes, even if most people don’t connect that kind of thing to politics or the things governments can and should do.

If unemployment were high, and misery more acute, I wonder if the electorate would be more risk-averse.

And, what happens when the bottom drops out after the election? Clinton still seems to me to be highly likely to get elected easily. But, starting out with sky-high negatives, and under the kind of unconstrained assault Trump can push, she may be built for a catastrophic loss of legitimacy in the face of any catastrophic failure: a market crash or sinking an aircraft carrier or something like that.

Well, the longest-lived Communist regime was the USSR, so 74 years (1917-1991). China is still technically Communist, and it’s roughly 67 years old. North Korea’s Communist state began in 1948 (a year before China’s), so if it lasts until 2023, it will become the longest-lived Communist regime.

Capitalist oligarchy with a liberal veneer has lasted, oh, at least three centuries, depending on when you define its beginning. So far, it’s proven better at survival. Most of the world’s significant nations use one variant or another of that system, Russia and China being the only exceptions which matter. But their elites are only human, and decadence erodes discipline sooner or later, for decadence is a species of chaos, while discipline is a species of order–and Mommie Dearest Nature prefers chaos (2nd Law of Thermodynamics and all that). 😈

IIRC, Nietzsche said, “Mistrust those in whom the impulse to punish is strong.”

If old Fred is correct, I’m finding quite a few untrustworthy folks here.

Now that I think about, a rage to punish “sinners” is rather a defining trait for radicals of Right and Left alike.

I often think of myself as eccentric, but visiting sites of radical politics makes me feel normal.

Weren’t there food shortages? ( cf qu’ils mangent de la brioche or however that goes that is often attributed to Marie Antoinette , perhaps incorrectly but I would assume the context of the era was applicable). My general impression of that era was of heightened inequality between the best off and the masses.

IBW,

The last time we were in a situation like this, we elected a guy with a second-rate intellect (which is no insult. A second-rate Ship of the Line was a large and powerful warship) and a first-rate temperament.

Hilliary and Donald are second-rate intellects too. They’re definitely smart people, just not Einstein or Hawking.

Temperamentally though…

That’s why our present prospects in this time of global crisis are rather worse than they were last time around, in the 1930s.

“An oligarchical, dystopian police state reminiscent of cyberpunk novels, if the status quo wins”

This especially is what I think a lot of the better off professionals who support Hillary don’t understand. The current system is failing more and more people, and the only way to keep the neoliberal/neocon consensus afloat is increasing repression. Computers, cell phones, cloud databases, etc. will make that much easier than in the past.

Ben King (among many others) on Twitter has been mentioning “turnkey fascism” as something we are approaching–the apparatus for abuse is there in the government, all it takes is someone with the motive to use it. And it goes beyond that, as the private sector could be mobilized even further than it already is.

I’ve started worrying what my social media history will expose me to in the future. Someone dedicated enough (aided by some fancy algorithms) could link a lot of bits of things I’ve said over time and feed it into a new set of McCarthy hearings. Thankfully I’m no one important, so I’m likely to be ok.

“I now assume the real brains behind the Trump Phenomenon is/are Putin and/or one or more of Putin’s subordinates.”

Oh ffs at this point we need an amendment to Godwin’s law. Oh no wait Putin is the same as Hitler.

Next we can expect some kind of half-assed reference to IBW being 53 – oh no wait we’ve already had it.

Followed by some reference to a deity with a humorous name.

And let’s not forget the mandatory cutesy .gif link.

I know let’s have someone point out that the Clintons have been laundering Russian money through their foundation just to make the resident Clinton shill’s day. Anyone?

We already have a right-wing populist government in Poland. And so far, I have to say, that its bark is worse than its bite.

The meme that 14 million jobs have been created since the Great Recession is constantly trotted out as a sign of how the labor market has healed, but these folks forget to add a detail: since the Great Recession, the US population has grown by 16.5 million. Turns out, jobs growth was smaller than population growth! So per capita – for each of the 323.2 million people in the US – there are now fewer jobs than at the bottom of the Great Recession.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/wolf-richter-what-makes-this-jobs-report-so-truly-ugly.html

Employment is not up, btw, population is.

The “Trump is unhinged” narrative of the media may soon begin to gain traction, and I say this because I’ve noticed Fox News is now beginning to part ways with Trump over his criticism of the Gold Star father who appeared at the Dem convention. The reason is trivial, but the Fox turn is significant.

Also, Trump is now 7 points behind Clinton in polls after the Dem convention “bump,” and that being the last of the conventions, the Hillary lead may not soon fade. Of course, the debates will be the real test.

Other things being equal, though, I doubt there are enough Americans who comprehend just how deeply screwed they really are to put Trump over the top. Which would be a shame in a way, as Trump oddly reminds me of Franklin Roosevelt, the last president who actually was just a bit unhinged and in a way that allowed him to think well outside the box and get some things done during the Depression that wouldn’t have even occurred to conventional thinkers.

Clinton, on the other hand, is very much like Herbert Hoover, who wasn’t the uncaring brute popularly depicted but rather a highly intelligent engineer of the possible who was wholly inadequate to the challenge he faced. Stir in a generous helping of money-grubbing corruption and you have Hillary Clinton.

Three links in my last comment – sorry Ian, could you please release it from comment purgatory?

TIA

Ian: if you care to, you can change the wordpress default numbers of links before one ha to go into moderation. In the left upper corner, choose WP admin> settings> discussion>comment moderation.

Jill Stein just announced Ajamu Baraka as her running mate, so I may just change my mind and vote for a Presidential ticket in the end (smile).

Re: “warmonger”. Reading David Irving’s “Churchill’s War”, it’s evident that rarely has anyone bested Churchill for warmongering. The American ruling class idolizes Churchill however, and sees his behavior as heroic courage and that of his more cautious opponents as contemptible weakness. Bush Jr even referred to Saddam Hussein as “The Dictator”, exactly how Churchill referred to Hitler. Was he LARPing as Churchill?

The reality is that Churchill was a reckless demagogue and a drunk. Worse, he was in bad financial straits, which led him to accept the patronage of a shadowy international cabal. He’s credited for winning the war, but the result was the sudden loss of the empire his country had built over centuries, and the loss of not just Poland (on whose behalf Britain allegedly entered the war), but all of Eastern Europe to the bloodthirsty Bolsheviks for 2 generations. To call it a Pyrrhic victory would be an understatement.

The edifice of self-serving lies built by the Allies after WW2 is crumbling. We should all thank Trump for exposing the bankruptcy of the two-party duopoly while there’s still time to change course.

@ Ian: I was about to say that some ‘Askimet’ thingie blocks most spam at my home website, but it may be due to the fact that I’d bought an upgrade so I could tinker with css codes and such, and of course it turned out to be ‘akismet’, lol. But then, I did that brain-training memory course online, Luminosity? I failed, and got worse, they said. But one day I did happen to notice in an email that the thang was called ‘Lumosity’, so….there is that, heh.

Anyhoo, you can read this, see what you make of it. The More break thingie is on the dashboard of the Old Blogging software (thru Chrome only), dunno about the teeny-bopper turquoise ‘easier’ one. a dotted line between two solid lines. When that one went on line, the citizens rallied in forums, and the Word press hug team said: stfu.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/akismet/

@ markfromireland

Thanks and fully agreed.

In fact, I had just hit the button on my comment when it occurred to me that I should have highlighted Clinton’s bloody hands ahead of or instead of her money-grubbing.

@rkka: The Donald is smart? Well, I suppose so, if one counts a highly developed low cunning which makes him an effective grifter, but I now assume the real brains behind the Trump Phenomenon is/are Putin and/or one or more of Putin’s subordinates.

So just what induced Trump, at the tender young age of 70, to sell his soul to those perfidious Russkies then? Was it the promise of fame? Riches? Women? Trump seems to have covered all those bases pretty well in his life to date, no? And just how, exactly, are they expecting to keep their Manchurian POTUS on their lead after he’s sworn in? Implanted nanobots?

IBW pushing this flaming drivel, BOO citing a convicted Holocaust denier…did someone spike the water cooler here?

markfromireland,
If the goal was to avoid being occupied, they could have just stayed out of the war. All Hitler’s territorial ambitions were to the east. So far from wanting to attack Britain he had an almost sentimental affection for the English. That’s not to say the threat wasn’t legitimate given German strength and Nazi ideology. Anyway, I won’t keep posting on this as it’s off topic.

We have until 2030 to be well on our way to solving the issues of overpopulation and its effects on the planet: global warming, pollution and environmental degradation, ecology disruption and destruction, and resource exhaustion. And when I say “we” I mean mostly developed countries. The deadline for a worldwide response was probably something like 30 to 40 years ago.

This means “we” need to start work on these multiple existential crises six to eight years before 2030, and that in turn means we need to have serious public discussions on them four to six years before that. Why such long lead times? Well, they’re really not that long. You need to develop a consensus, come up with a design for what is arguably the biggest project in human history, and start creating the means to implement it. If you do the math, you see that we have been 10 and 14 years, or between now and 2020, to get our act together.

I don’t think we will make it. These issues aren’t on the table. They aren’t even in the room. As for the more immediate problems of kleptocracy, wealth inequality, and class war. Kleptocracy is still out of bounds and goes unmentioned. Wealth inequality is treated as an odd and perhaps unfortunate natural phenomenon, and class war is trivialized.

Yet to get to a point where we can deal with the great looming problems of our age and to our species, we must first deal with these immediate problems, and we aren’t. Instead we are discussing the relative merits of two shit Presidential candidates in the US. Look at these problems, their size, their urgency, then look at them. I think your reaction, like mine, is “We are so screwed.” And it isn’t just us. The rest of the world is facing the same problems, both immediate and coming. The developing world is already pretty much a deadman walking. It doesn’t have the wealth or social institutions to deal with what’s coming. The developed countries do, but they aren’t using them. Europe, China, and Japan are all slow motion train wrecks. Europe is fragmenting. China is trapped between the diminishing returns of growth and the series of bubbles which that growth created. And Japan is caught in secular stagnation.

So let me put this as simply as I can. If you vote for Trump or Clinton, you are voting for the death of your children. Does that clarify matters? If you are Chinese, Japanese, European, or developing world, and support the current regime, you are doing the same thing.

I found a comment over at Sic Semper Tyrannis by commenter ( and sometimes guest poster) David Habakkuk that seemed so valuable that I will copy-paste the whole thing here so that people can give it the slow and careful readification and ponderization which I believe it merits.
( David Habakkuk is a Welsh-ancestry Great Britisher with an interest and some knowledge of East European, Soviet and post-Soviet affairs.

David Habakkuk said in reply to Edward…
Edward,

As a Brit, this is not my election. But while I am completely persuaded by the Colonel’s analysis of Trump, I do think that this is a case for ‘lesser evil’ voting.

On an earlier thread, I picked up on a paper by the historian and former policy planner William R. Polk, to which Brigadier Ali referred us back in November 2014.

I see that on Polk’s website one can find not only this paper, which is entitled ‘Strategy and Tactics: Is America Losing Its Way?’, but also a range of other materials on issues concerned with nuclear weapons, Ukraine, the Middle East etc.

All this material should I think be of interest to people interested in deciding who, in this election, is the ‘lesser evil’.

(See http://www.williampolk.com/articles.html .)

A hair-raising – if comic, in a Strangelovian kind of way – passage relates to Polk’s description of how, after Khrushchev’s withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba on 28 October 1962, he participated in a ‘war game’ organised by the Kennedy Administration, which dealt with what would have happened if the missiles had not been withdrawn.

In this, the ‘Blue Team’ – the United States – “took out” a Russian city with nuclear weapons.

After deliberating, the ‘Red Team’ – of which Polk was a member, concluded that the only possible Russian response was essentially that recommended by General Turgidson to President Merkin Muffley in the film, in reverse: an ‘immediate and all-out nuclear bombardment of the United States’.

A central lesson which Polk is trying to drive home, all these years later, is that ‘the first lesson to be learned in this near catastrophe was try to understand the opponent’s point of view.’

Put like that, of course, there is a danger that it sounds as though ‘empathy’ need imply ‘sympathy’.

Actually, as the other two case studies he discusses – Somali pirates and jihadists – illustrate, that need not be the case at all.

A serious attempt to understand how people see things may make one inclined to conciliate people – it may also make you convinced you have no option but to exterminate them.

Sometimes, a combination of the two approaches is apposite (see, for example, current Russian strategy in Syria.’

It is a case-by-case matter.

However, neither the Clintons, nor any of those associated with them, have ever displayed the slightest indication of a realisation that, in relation to nuclear threats, the boot is now, as it were, on the other foot.

Traditionally sceptical about Western notions of ‘deterrence’, confronted with the collapse of their conventional power, the Russians abandoned their earlier repudiation of ‘first-use’.

It is not highly likely, but it is perfectly possible, in the light of Western policy both in regard to Ukraine and Syria, that at some point Putin might find himself confronting the same problem as the Kennedy Administration faced more than half-a century ago.

Do you climb down, with all the problems that might involve, or do you implement nuclear threats?

When I heard Hillary Clinton comparing Putin’s actions over Crimea to Hitler’s takeover of the Sudentenland, I knew that this woman was not simply infinitely morally contemptible, but stupid, ignorant, and plain dangerous.

She displays a total inability even to try to ‘understand the opponent’s point of view.’

And then Margaret Steinfels explained to me that ‘Perhaps her foreign policy tendencies are simply leftovers from 1950s Cold War America (we did have to hide under our desks during air raid drills.)’

If indeed new Cuba-style crises may be managed by someone who jumped out of silly Goldwaterite Republican views on foreign policy into silly Vietnam-era leftism, and has now found a peculiar toxic combination of both, heaven help us.

Brezhnevism did not work for the Soviet Union – and it will not work for the United States, or indeed Britain.

(Although, ironically, Teresa May could be less ‘Brezhnevite’ then any of the possible alternatives.)

Reply 02 August 2016 at 01:27 PM

@Lisa – read what I wrote please. At no point did I make any reference to Churchill, I’m well aware of his failings I’m also well aware of his successes. Not least facing down the collaborationists in the British establishment and rallying Britain at a time it was staring defeat and occupation in the face.

As to “unthinkable” – you’re making a very typical amateurs’ mistake. Given the circumstances then prevailing it would have been unthinkable and irresponsible not to have had what was never more than a sketchy contingency plan. I suggest you go away and read the equivalent STAVKA documents which are now in the public domain.

@ XFR August 2, 2016

Nope it’s not the water. IBW is the resident Clinton shill.

B0O on the other hand is a sad sack who sits there posting extreme right wing nonsense spiced with revisionist “history”. He only does it to get attention.

@ Lisa – As a PS – Not that it wasn’t already very clear but the release from embargo of documents from both the Cabinet Office and General Staff make it very clear that the driving force behind it was Kitchener not Churchill. That’s not to downplay Churchill’s role and culpability but he was largely the “fall guy” to use an Americanism. Kitchener and Carden have escaped the excoriation they deserve for a remarkably badly planned and executed series of operations first against the Dardanelles and then against Gallipoli itself. Even Rogan – no friend to Churchill, acknowledges as much in his book on the fall of the Ottomans published last year:

SUCCESSIVE FAILURES IN GALLIPOLI PROVOKED A POLITICAL CRISIS IN Britain. In May 1915, Liberal prime minister H. H. Asquith was forced into a wartime coalition with the Conservative Party. The new cabinet reflected changes in political fortunes. Arthur James Balfour, a member of the Conservative Party, took Winston Churchill’s place as first lord of the Admiralty. Churchill, condemned for his role in the unsuccessful naval campaign in the Dardanelles, was demoted to chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, becoming essentially a minister without portfolio. A new body, the Dardanelles Committee, was created to oversee the Gallipoli campaign, taking the place of the old War Council. The Dardanelles Committee held its first meeting on 7 June 1915 to decide the future of the campaign.

Lord Kitchener was still secretary of state for war and still the most influential voice in the meeting. (It is ironic that, to this day, Churchill takes the blame for Gallipoli when Kitchener was so clearly the campaign’s most influential decision maker.) He presented the Dardanelles Committee with three options. Britain and its allies could abandon the Gallipoli campaign altogether. They could dispatch a major army to conquer the peninsula. Or they could continue to reinforce the small expeditionary force under Sir Ian Hamilton in the hope of making slow but steady progress towards the eventual conquest of Gallipoli.

With apologies to all for wandering so far off-topic.

Since this election will apparently be all about personality and nothing more (again), it’s a curiosity that Trump isn’t being held up as an example of his class. He’s not a rogue, he’s an exemplar. People at “his level” are like that. Nasty, brutal, and with every intention of screwing any and everyone to get what they want. Period. Getting what they want is the only thing that matters to them…

Those who toady up to people like that are like Hillary and Bill, if we want to play that way. They gain certain advantages for themselves to be sure, but at the cost of their souls, etc. And of course at the expense of everyone else, to whom they might throw a bone now and then, but otherwise they ignore.

But the question of what either of these two would do in office is not simply a matter of their desires or personalities. The Presidency is a governmental institution interlinked with the other governmental institutions, and the institutional interest is paramount, not the individual interest of the office-holder (something Obama found out right quick, and the Bush-Cheney regime had to get used to and feel their way forward with until they could start torturing and killing brown people with impunity.) If the president and the institution of the Presidency are at odds, guess which is likely to win? (As they say, “Presidents come and go…”)

Hillary has an advantage in the institutional framework because she knows how it works, where the levers are, who can get things done and who can thwart them, yadda yadda, and she’s socialized to the institutional interests and desires. Perfect fit, right? That also makes her potentially highly dangerous if the institution itself is intent on greater disruption and destruction around the world (particularly wrt Russia and China) in the (supposed) interests of the American Empire.

Much the same would happen with Trump in office, though, regardless of what he says on the campaign trail. He would just make more of a spectacle of it.

The idea that either of these two is the Devil or a Saviour is absurd. Neither will act in the People’s interest (any more than the last several presidents have) because they can’t. If it’s not the institutional desire, then it doesn’t happen.

But it is a perfect opportunity to hammer away at the idea that the interests and actions of the Overclass and its toadies are disastrous to the well-being of the People and the planet, and it’s well past time to make it impossible for them to continue…

“high crime and social dysfunction…”

Actually, the crime rate ( the rate of “street crime”, at least) has dropped quite a bit since the 1970s, due largely to the banning of leaded gasoline. Chronic low-level lead poisoning is especially destructive of the center of the human brain which controls impulses–and very often, the only difference between the criminal and the lawful citizen is that the criminal, for whatever reasons, has weaker control of his (or, more rarely, her) impulses.

But thanks for playing, Ratzi, and please accept these lovely parting gifts. 😛

The actual campus “PC culture” (always wildly overblown) of the 1990s petered out when everyone involved caught on that Sapir-Worf really wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

The “PC culture” of today is a right-wing fraud, a bastard child of security-state dissent-management and covert white “liberal” paranoia at the increasing weakness of the “soft racial caste system”. It’s essentially a rearguard action to preserve white hegemony at the upper echelons of power, pushing back against the merit principle by instituting a sort of tokenism-on-steroids as a sop to discriminated groups while advocating for a bizarre sort of racial “chivalry” to paper over the reality of discrimination. (“Hey, I believe in feminism…I always open a door for a lady.”)

@Robert Dudek,

The reason I believe that the GermaNazi Hitlerians had a total-extermination goal in mind for Poland in particular is that I read somewhere ( can’t remember where) that when the Soviet Red Army liberated Poland and had the time to poke around here and there and find interesting stuff, one bunch of interesting stuff they found was stockpiles of Zyklon B. The amount of Zyklon B they found stockpiled would have been enough to kill roughly 26 million people. The Jews were mostly all dead and the Gypsies partly all dead by then, so who would that Zyklon B have been meant for?

At another time and somewhere else, I read that the Polish population of Poland ( meaning Polish Poles) was about 26 million at the time of Red Army Liberation. o HO! . . . I thought to myself. So THAT’S who all that Zyklon B was stockpiled for. I have no proof. That is just the automatic connection my mind made. In any event, the Poles seem insufficiently grateful even unto this very day that the Soviet Red Army spared them the future of planned comprehensive extermination in detail which I believe the GermanyGov had planned for them.

BlizzardOfOz

Britain couldn’t stay out of the war after France fell, for no other reason that Mussolini attacked them in North Africa, got thumped and had to be bailed out by the Germans.

Even if Hitler has reined in Mussolini and stopped that happening, then Japan’s attacks on the British Empire would have led to a declaration of war by Germany a bit later.

So it was only a matter of time, which Churchill (for all his faults) understood far better than many of his colleagues did in 1940.

The problem was that Britain made a series of disasterous strategic and tactical decisions from 1939 through to 1942 until it finally got its act together, which damaged its war effort badly … and led to its impoverishment post war.

So did the Soviets and Americans at first, but they could afford it, Britain couldn’t. Fortunately for all, no one screwed up strategically more than the Germans did for all their tactical brilliance (thankfully no one listened to Kesselring, Rommel and the German navy).

different clue : As horrible as the holocaust was the Germans were just warming up, their plans were to exterminate another 100 million or so Slavs, the remaining few left alive were to be slaves.

Remember how they started, they exterminated ALL the mentally ill, people with genetic and birth defects, cripples, LGBTI as well as political opponents before they got started on the others.
50% of all those in Soviet territory captured by the Germans …died.
In terms of total population the Gypsies suffered the greatest loss in percentage terms (and no one remembers that little fact).

Most people these days underestimate how bad it really was, heck of lot more than 6 million. And as I said, they were just starting.

Lisa,

But by the time France fell in 1940 the die was already cast. France and Britain had already declared war the previous year because of Chamberlain’s guarantee to Poland. I don’t think it’s at all clear that Hitler would have declared war on Britain on Japan’s account, if there was a chance of an alliance otherwise.

Honestly, I’m just surprised to find mfi a Churchill apologist. I’m definitely going to bring that up next time he goes LARPing as an anti-imperialist.

Some countries (like Denmark) were not touched.

Not true. The Danes managed to get most of the Danish jews to safety in Sweden. The few that remained were rounded up by the Gestapo and sent to concentrations camps where they were murdered.

Lisa,

You call hatred irrational, but what you mean is that you’re unable or unwilling to enter into a worldview (let’s say “empathize”) wherein such hatred is entirely rational.

Churchill hated Germans, whom he derided as “Huns”. Was that irrational? Or was bound up with his love for his own people, whom he saw threatened by the Germans? I’m sure you yourself hate certain kinds of Catholics and other groups, even though you might deny it. It’s natural to hate whom you see as your enemies. Hitler in Mein Kampf describes the process by which he came to hate Jews, having originally recoiled from anti-Semitism like any good aspiring urban sophisticate.

Your idea that Catholics would eliminate transgender people seems delusional. Things would have to turn 180 degrees for the social climate to get there, and it certainly wouldn’t happen in your lifetime. But that’s the West in the current year: an incoherent mish-mash of conflicting and incompatible identities and ideologies, with each man in fear that if things turn the wrong way he might quickly become in danger of persecution.

MFI: Shorthand. What I meant was that a large proportion of their Jewish population survived, due to efforts by the locals and by ones means or another.

BlizzardOfOz: The official position of the Catholic Church is that no social, legal acceptance and recognition of trans people happen and that no medical support (hormones, surgery) be allowed. Trans people are to stay in their birth assigned gender.

That is elimination. Same with gays and lesbians too. They are to become straight or celibate and also no longer exist. It is a clear patriarchal gender binary where sex is for procreation only and non procreative sex (eg masturbation) is a sin. Men’s and women’s roles are clearly stated where men are the leaders and women the mothers. No contraception or abortion is allowed.

At every point and in every country the Church opposes any anti-discrimination efforts or laws and pushes for laws banning LGBT people. Their position on intersex is just as bad, in that they support compulsory surgery (etc) on intersex babies and kids to assign them to one gender ..and that they cannot ever change, even if the doctors get it wrong (which they do quite often).

Here in Australia we have a initiative called Safe Schools designed to reduce bullying of LGBTI kids at schools, the Catholic Church (and others on the right) totally opposes it. This is despite conclusive evidence that it is non acceptance, bullying, etc that cause large amount of harm and psychological damage to LGBTI kids, contributing greatly to their elevated suicide rate.

They hate us and want us all gone. Obviously not the only one, most right wing social/religious organisations are the same. Some like the FRC spend huge amount of money lobbying Govts to attack us. The North Carolina bathroom law was developed and pushed for by the FRC as part of their 5 point plan to eliminate trans people totally.
The NC law also targets (and they have been the biggest victims so far) women who are not stereotypically gender conforming, with many women being pulled up and even assaulted by men because they do not look ‘female enough’. This is also in line with the Church’s teaching, where clear gender roles are stated, women who cross that (even just in presentation) are ‘rejecting god’s gift of femininity’.

It would be nice if they spent as much time on stopping child sex abuse by priests and other church officials and supporting victims, instead of trying to fight compensation claims and cover it up, intimidate victims, etc. But nope….not a big priority.

When (as I was for some of my life) in the male, white, middle class you are not touched by any of this, so it is natural if you are low on empathy and have poor ethics to discount it as meaningless. When it is your life on the line…things are different.