Melting Bones
Until the end of the year, Pluto is back in Capricorn, the sign of skulls and spines.
Like a drunk staggering up to the bar for one more round, the dark god is retrograding back to the degree of the US Pluto Return, the transit that’s melting the country’s bones.
What’s happening to Uncle Sam is very baffling and distressing. But it is deeply worthy of our curiosity. After all, it’s happening on our watch. For astrologers, that is the first point of reference.
We don’t have to like the fact that our institutions are decaying and our social mores are devolving. Pluto isn’t asking for our approval. It isn’t even asking us to come up with solutions. It doesn’t consider birth and death to be problems.
What it would like, if a planet can be said to have preferences, is for us to look with clear eyes at the big swirling mess we are a part of, so that we can get on with the rebirth which will naturally arise.
Staying out of jail
Like all crumbling republics, the USA created a dictator. Ours was more orange than most, but in other respects he checked all the boxes: xenophobic scapegoating, incitement of mob violence, purges of his generals, bad taste in art.
Many have compared our Donnie to Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. But those guys did their evil in order to prop up their countries, whereas our guy has never claimed to do anything for anyone but himself. A better comparison might be Henry VIII: lots of wives, weight problem, careening insecurity.
In this last phase of the Pluto Return, Trump is a full-time trial defendant, deploying ever-more-apocalyptic rhetoric to retake the White House and stay out of jail. Wishing actual death on Hunter Biden and sputtering about a “final battle” like a latter-day Josef Goebbels, the man seems to be flailing in self-destruction.
But the cult he created is alive and kicking, not to mention screaming and tweeting.
Just as an angry athlete might smash a golf club, tennis racket, or baseball bat as if they were an extension of them [without] injuring themselves, Trump sees his base as something that can express his narcissistic rage for him and become violent for him without him doing it directly. — Chauncey Devega
The face of Pluto is no longer Trump, but Trumpism.
Saga of the MAGA
Remember the good old days, when the gulf between red & blue America was merely about race, education, gender and the urban-rural divide?
The Pluto years have turned political-cultural differences into something far more existential. Now, every election is
…a high-stakes election — since the other side wants to build a world that is quite different from the one your side wants to build.—Thomas Edsall
The old Capricorn models can’t help us now. Economics can’t explain how so many
impoverished Americans started to vote for a party whose policies – tax cuts for the rich, globalization, hostility to trade unions – spit in the face of their own economic interests.
Class theory can’t account for why cut-throat partisanship exists even between members of the same class. Religious stereotypes fall laughably short as a guide to understanding why so many Christians are devoted to someone who has made a career of breaking every one of their touted commandments.
Nothing if not flexible, Trump’s base bobs and weaves like downhill skiers when troubling information comes to light. Consider their reaction after Tucker Carlson’s texts were leaked in March, revealing his contempt for The Donald (“I hate him passionately”).
A poll found that the number of Fox viewers who changed their minds because of these revelations was a paltry 9%. And immediately afterwards, when Tuck made a 180 pivot to re-proclaim undying fealty to Trump, the Fox fans slalomed right around that tree with him.
It’s easier to con people than to get people to admit that they have been conned. – Folk wisdom
Fat city
In this juicy, fetid societal moment, opportunists have made out like bandits.
Among those in fat city are fossil fuel profiteers like the Kochs, their earnings still soaring, and media moguls like the Murdochs. Not to mention 
the military contractors, riding high on the war in Ukraine. (Unlike the Murdochs, the ruling families of Big Armaments remain discreetly under the radar, and are unlikely to have a hit TV series modeled after them.)
The GOP, no longer bothering to recruit bankers and golfers, has rebranded itself as the party of fear and anger.
Fox’s audience doesn’t want news, they want a news-shaped excuse to hate the people they already hate. — ShowerCap blog
We spawned him
Dictators arise “…after improbable success as loudmouth entertainers, not taken seriously by the political establishment, they attract a passionate minority and then suddenly, often by oddities of the electoral system or the management of parliaments, they’re in power. – Adam Gopnik
One full Pluto cycle ago, George III of England was losing his marbles and his colonies, and the USA was born. Two and a half centuries later, the planet the astrologer Frederick Woodruff calls “that little hell nugget” has returned to that same position in the sky (2008-24; peaking Feb ‘22 – Feb ’24).
Pluto governs dominance/ submission rituals, mafiosi and drug lords. Trump has managed to pump this energy into contemporary politics (Capricorn) and make it normal, resulting in a “theater of humiliation” (David Frum.)
But like all larger-than-life heroes and villains, this one is a personification of group consciousness. It is we who spawned him. Under Pluto (extremes) we have fashioned a public figure of both blind adoration and abject loathing, in whose name political differences have gone from “I disagree with you” to “I hate your guts.” In its most primitive form, Pluto is the impulse to kill or be killed.
The transit didn’t have to show up this way. It is true that the national psyche was destined to die in some way, in order to purge itself of dysfunction. But the unhinged culture wars were our idea.
Pluto can’t help it if we can’t handle transformation creatively. The USA, practically a newborn as countries go, has a spiritual immaturity problem. Like a child, it shouldn’t be allowed to play with guns.
Death of The Man
For 15 years the Establishment (Capricorn) has had a target on its back. That much was fated to happen. It wouldn’t have mattered what ideologies were in play. Pluto doesn’t care about right or wrong. It is not now, nor ever has been, a member of any political party.
In its crosshairs is the whole notion of vested authority.
The Donald Trump problem is the same as the Richard Nixon problem. When Nixon was forced to resign under the threat of impeachment, it wasn’t for his involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity, nor was it for his illegal use of the CIA and other federal agencies to spy upon, intimidate, harass and destroy radicals, dissidents and activists. Nixon was brought down because he targeted other members of the ruling political and economic establishment. – Chris Hedges
Years before Pluto entered Capricorn, astrologers expected it would bring a surge of antipathy towards federal government. We didn’t predict an actual insurrection at the capitol building (Jan 6th 2021) complete with nooses and fecal graffiti (Pluto), but the hive mind often outdoes itself, matching planetary symbolism with vaudevillian panache.
Thousands of malevolent idiots storm the Capitol because a reckless lowlife narcissist pays them a little attention, making them feel they’re still protagonists in the nation’s history. Is this what America is about? A reign of error countered by a reign of terror? —Arthur Krystal
Jupiter too
Remember the massive Capricorn conjunction of 2020? Saturn’s input — government systems falling apart – was the star of the show. But Jupiter, the planet of morality, was in there too. Jupiter + Pluto = moral bankruptcy.
Today’s first graders know nothing of [America’s] grand illusions …. Those myths of national nobility do not exist for them. – James Carroll
Pluto has discredited the idea of the moral grandeur of nations. As Woodruff points out, this has been particularly hard for Americans, because ours is a country with Jupiter conjunct the Sun. We expect
…life (the Sun) to have meaning (Jupiter) because some higher-order, enlightened type of reason, or divine protector, decrees it. But Pluto is subatomic, beyond – inside of — moral purpose.
Most of the public has been following their government’s lead, so far, in cheerleading Washington’s sponsorship of the war in Ukraine. But the new cycle augurs far less receptivity to the official stories.
The US won WW2 and then immediately plunged into the Cold War. The US won the Cold War and then immediately set to work destroying the Middle East. The US destroyed the Middle East and then immediately started another cold war in the preparation for another world war… A normal country wages war with the goal of getting back to peacetime. The US wages war with the goal of getting to the next war. – Caitlin Johnstone
Not your grandmother’s geopolitics
Whatever sign it’s in, Pluto makes us confront something we’d do almost anything to avoid: our feelings about death. It’s especially galling in Capricorn, which rules things that are supposed to last. Like banks, which bit the dust in 2008, the year the transit began.
We don’t like it when things with marble columns start to crumble. We don’t want to hear that our august Supreme Court justices accept bribes from sleazy billionaires. But that’s the transit’s job: to deconstruct things we hoped would never change.
Such as the whole idea of civilization.
… for liberals, the idea of civilization is a source of chagrin and loathing, a hangover from the era of imperialism. By vacating the field, they have left the rhetoric of civilization to the right, to be deployed in the service of nationalistic and anti-democratic ambitions.—London Review of Books
Radically new approaches are required. David Graeber offered some in “The Dawn of Everything,” written after Occupy Wall
Street. So does Alasdair Roberts, in “Superstates.” He says the empires of the 21st-Century are already “animating their actions with stories of anti-imperialism.” We can see this in the way NATO is spinning the war in Ukraine.
Hold onto your headsets
By the end of 2023, this transit will have just about run its course. Don’t you wonder what Pluto will do when it has disabused us of our Capricorn fantasies?
It will then re-enter Aquarius, where it will stay for twenty years (1) . Warming and cloning and bots, oh my!
Note
1 Pluto’s tenure in Aquarius has three phases: March 23 through June 11 ’23; January 20, 2024 through September 1, 2024; and November 19, 2024 through March 8, 2043.