UnTrumping America By Every Means Necessary
Today marks day two of a series of reflections I’m writing in light of the likelihood of a new administration in the White house in the near future.
Yesterday: A Moment in Time to Celebrate Persistence
Wednesday: A Faux Center-Left Political Divide
Thursday: A Future for Activism
Friday: The Dear Leader’s Departure
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In 2016, three long standing political factors came together to give us our hopefully-soon-to-be-departed occupant of the White house.
The completion of a decades-long process to remake the Republican Party as an ideological war machine, fueled by the nation’s seemingly never ending supply of racism, the pipe dreams of theocrats, and billionaires' belief in individualism as the highest virtue.
The final unraveling of the social compact between labor and capital forged in the aftermath of the Great Depression and WWII. Economic success was increasingly defined in terms of financialization rather than production, leaving no meaningful role for much of the workforce.
The emergence of a sociopathic celebrity (in a culture where fame was equated with success) willing to be a vessel used for the dismantling of the federal government and ending a multilateral approach to the world in return for the trappings of glory and a small piece of the action.
Take away Donald John Trump from this mix and the underlying socioeconomic factors remain, along with the normalization of a disregard for the rule of law.
It’s been useful for reactionaries to have the aforementioned bundle, as the circus element in the White House distracts from the process of consolidating and advancing an agenda driven by the first two factors mentioned above.
The President has his own vested interests in keeping this deal with the devil going, namely protection from consequences of a lifetime of self-serving acts.
Hence, the binding of an oversized ego with a right-wing agenda is likely to continue for a while.
As Tim Alberta points out at Politico:
In November 2016, Republicans looked upon Trump’s victory and wondered if there was any going back. In November 2020, they looked upon Trump’s defeat and decided the answer was no.
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The process of rolling back the actions of the outgoing administration isn’t going to be simple, despite promises of a stack of executive orders waiting to be signed on the first day of a Biden administration.
The 87% of Trump’s cabinet who are millionaires may be lacking in knowledge about running government on a day-to-day basis, but they’ve made damn sure to stack the deck going forward. And I have no doubt paper shredders and hard drive wipers are going to be running overtime as inauguration day approaches.
Undoing the administrative acts of the last four years isn’t enough. The political basis for the administration needs to be changed. That won’t be as easy as deleting files.
We have a national mental health crisis and little useful knowledge about what actually will work to fix the problem, as David Atkins observed at Washington Monthly:
The core supporters of Trump have become members of a cult, in the clinical psychological-religious sense of the term. The Democratic Party and the American people have to realize this is a big part of what we are up against.
Being a Republican now requires believing in a jaw-dropping series of claims that, if true, would almost necessitate anti-democratic revanchism.
One has to believe that a cabal of evil scientists is making up climate science in exchange for grant money; that there is rampant, wide scale voter impersonation fraud carried out by thousands of elections officials nationwide; that the “Deep State” concocted a scheme to frame Trump for Russian collusion but chose not to use it before the 2016 election; that shadowy forces are driving migrant caravans and diseases across American borders in the service of destroying white Republican America; that the entire news media is engaged in a conspiracy against the Republican Party; that grieving victims of gun violence and their families all across America want to take away guns as a pretext for stomping the boot of “liberal fascism” on conservative faces; and so on.
That and much more is just the vanilla Republican belief system at this point (not even touching less explosive academic fictions like “tax cuts pay for themselves” or “the poor will work harder to better themselves if you cut the safety net.”)
[...]
It doesn’t stop there. Almost half of Fox News viewers—the core of the GOP—believe that Bill Gates is using the COVID-19 pandemic to microchip them. And Donald Trump has been promoting a series of conspiracy theories on twitter each more outlandish than the last, from old debunked accusations against cable news hosts he dislikes to concocted accusations against former president Barack Obama.
How do you change people’s minds whose concept of reality is so warped?
First up, most of the research about “deprogramming” cult members shows it’s a waste of time unless the individual is isolated from the entity holding their minds captive. I fail to see how we’re going to isolate the 71 million people who thought four more years of what we’ve been through was a good idea.
The underlying need of cult-susceptible persons for inclusion in something they consider meaningful isn’t that different from substance dependence. And this means changing behavior has to come from within, aided by the reality of the changing demographics of the electorate.
Argue all you want with Trumpers; facts and math don’t have any impact on their beliefs. No President since Herbert Hoover has bungled his way through four years like Donald Trump has, yet much of the country couldn’t see past the Man. Seventy one million Americans voted for more of the same on November 3, including a majority of white people.
All the bad facts emerging about this man over the past four years failed to significantly impact his support.
Maybe, once we’re rid of him, finding something else to do other than saying his name so often would be more productive. I’m not saying the Trump Crime family should get off scot free; let what’s left of the system do its job. His need for attention has all too often served as an excuse for delaying action in favor of reaction.
The way forward is by deeds, not words. And it’s not about hugging your crazy Facebook-conspiracy posting uncle. It’s about finding a purpose.
A starting point might be found by admitting something we all (in our bones) know to be true: the system isn’t working.
Full stop. The usual sentiment about the system not working is always tied to “because ____________.” The choice of words used after “because” is where we have differences.
No matter what your ideological orientation, there’s a laundry list of excuses you can fill in the blank with, many of which may have a component of truth.
The failings of our socio-economic systems have provided fertile ground for authoritarian thinking. Having a fall guy gives license for all sorts of schemes, none of which have the interests of our citizenry as a whole at heart.
There are no easy fixes here, but there can be a path toward finding solutions.
We need to think BIG. The Green New Deal is/was a BIG idea, and all of a sudden all of its component parts didn’t seem so unrealistic. While Donald Trump was ruminating about light bulbs, many domestic entities began to re-examine and reset their plans.
https://twitter.com/GreenLatinos/status/1326223839739703297?s=20
So, yeah, BIG; but bigger than that.
Instead of Make America Great Again, how about a “Rebirth of America?”
David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University
His essay in the New York Times this past weekend provides a glimpse of the kind of thinking that it will take to move on from Trumpism.
With the victory of Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris, they — and the rest of the citizenry — face a historic task of national rebirth. The challenge of repair from all the wreckage left by Trumpism may be the work of not merely a political season, but of a generation.
First, this task requires an awareness of how long the Trump disaster was in the making and how many people and forces enabled it. And second, it requires a forthright confrontation with the fact that to rebuild a society and a political system, we must admit that they are broken. Institutionally, America is broken.
Much like the United States of America was broken by the Civil War…
The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass had himself created many breathtaking rebirth metaphors by 1863 and 1864 to explain and justify the scale of the war. Around the same time that Lincoln delivered his annual message to Congress in late 1863, Douglass was traveling the country delivering his “Mission of the War” speech. Lincoln declared that “the policy of emancipation” “gave to the future a new aspect,” a signal change from his rhetoric of only a year earlier. The president envisioned a remade America: “the home of freedom disenthralled, regenerated, enlarged.”
In his address, Douglass said the American body politic had never been healthy while slavery lived. His language was shuddering but hopeful. He called the Confederacy “a solitary and ghastly horror, without parallel in the history of any nation.” Confederates had to be met and defeated, however “long and sanguinary” the struggle. Douglass’s rebirth story soared as a radical abolitionist version of the Gettysburg Address; but the argument was the same. The war had delivered the country a “broken Constitution,” requiring a legal and political refounding. He believed it was the “manifest destiny” of the war to “unify and reorganize the institutions of this country,” and such an aim gave the quest its “sacred significance.” The mission of the war, Douglass exclaimed, was “national regeneration.”
Setting a higher goal makes achieving other objectives seem easier. What’s been done to save the planet, create a more equitable society, and undo past damage done hasn’t worked very well, and if we’re faced with a divided government in years ahead, we’ll get bogged down in so many one-off struggles that the bigger picture will be obscured.
Like I said, let’s try thinking BIG for a change.
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Also, adios MFer:
https://twitter.com/KenStoneMedia/status/1326225786789982208?s=20
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Lead image via About Islam