Donald Trump’s crime family, the Russian money laundering operation, the GOP accomplices and its soulless zombie base pose the most terrifying threat to our liberal democracy since the Civil War. So, let’s strip away the facade that we’ve been hiding behind. Yes, we’ve been hiding. How often do I read diaries prayerfully asking when will Trump’s base turn against him. There may be a few remaining functional minds that will separate from Trump’s core of supporters, but as for the rest of them, the wait will be centuries-long. Why? One hundred fifty plus years after the Civil War, these white Evangelical genetic survivors of the Confederacy, ( and that is who they are in the main), still fight to wave their Confederate flags and pride themselves in having fought and died in a war to protect slavery. This is so even though most of them were too poor to own any.
These people didn’t just appear out of nowhere when Trump ran for president. Our political leaders have been using this authoritarian, anti-liberal-democracy demographic, hiding them when convenient, bringing them out, when their vote were needed probably since the founding of our nation. What we should be asking ourselves is what if anything do we intend to do about it? What if anything can we do about it? Yes, we have good reason to castigate the GOP for using these political zombies as a base. But hey, the Democrats were using them 60+ years ago. In those days we called them Dixiecrats, and they were the solid, loyal core of Democratic victories. But that is when Southern segregationists controlled the Democratic party in the South. I’m not trying to embarrass us. I’m proud of where we Democrats have come as a party. But what I am saying is that we have to stop pretending, and look at what we’re confronting with steel-eyed clarity. The so-called Trump core, these thoughtless, intolerant , mean-spirited bigots, misogynists, etc... are and always have been a functioning part of our two party system. I’m no political scientist. This is why I’m posing the question. What if anything can or will or should we do about them? But what frustrates me is the pretense that this influential voting bloc suddenly came out of nowhere to wreak havoc for the first time ever. We do ourselves and our precious democracy even greater harm than it already faces when we live in a pretend, ahistorical world. How can we solve a problem that we refuse even to see?