I OFTEN point out to people that whilst politicians come and go the System always stays the same, but it is also necessary to keep an eye on the way the System itself is being run. In post WW1 Germany, for example, the entire civil service remained completely unchanged between the Weimar and Nazi periods, indicating that capitalism was merely adopting different masks and that behind the scenes it was a classic case of ‘business as usual’.

We are witnessing the same phenomenon in present-day America, where media scare-stories about the ‘new’ Republican administration seeking revenge on its Democratic predecessors are designed to obscure the fact that there has been a seamless continuity between Biden and Trump. Not merely from Biden’s inauguration in January 2021 until the present day, but from Trump’s first presidential stint from January 2017 onwards.

One area in which it is possible to detect continuity is the judiciary. In February 2017, Trump – or at least his shadowy handlers – appointed Judge Neil Gorsuch as Supreme Court Justice. His mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford (1942–2004), who served as Ronald Reagan’s Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) between 1981 and 1983, had a track record of allowing Big Business to get its own way. Not only did her blatant disregard for environmental issues lead her to reduce the budget of the EPA by 22%, she also threw out cases involving companies that were actively involved in pollution, reversed the regulations of the Clean Air Act and allowed the large-scale application of pesticides in farming. Furthermore, in 1982 when Congress accused her of mishandling a toxic waste contract worth $1.6 billion, she refused to provide the relevant data and became the first EPA director to be accused of contempt. Not satisfied with supporting the destruction of land, in July 1984 she was appointed to the chair of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere.

Her son, meanwhile, has already involved himself in a number of legal cases affecting the environment and with individuals like Scott Pruitt and Rick Perry in the first Trump administration Neil Gorsuch was able to continue his late mother’s destructive legacy. Not simply under Trump, but also under Biden and now again under Trump.

The U.S. judiciary is just one area in which things rarely change. Scratch the surface and you will find many others that make both political personalities and the staged farce that is modern ‘democracy’ seem completely superfluous.