Trump is not the problem (okay, he is not the whole problem). I don’t say this because I think Pence is just as dangerous (he may well be). Here’s the nub. Trump is such a dramatically repellent person and so manifestly unfit for his office that we tend to overlook three fundamental truths.
1) No demagogue takes power without the support of a major political movement.
2) No demagogue can take power or rule without the support of a significant section of the pre-existing power elite.
3) No radical right or fascist movement can find its way out of the political wilderness, much less take power, without the support of a good chunk of the very rich, some of whom may find its ideology congenial while others are just out to fatten their wallets.
Trump is the bright orange crust on a far larger pustule. This reality show star forced his way to the front of a movement that preceded his political career. We can call this radical right movement the Tea Party, from a name it gave itself in one of its manifestations, if we recognize that the movement came before the name, and will likely survive it.
What does the “Tea Party” want? On the one hand, this racist pseudo-populism is the US version of a worldwide rash of anti-globalization movements. But it has a specifically American component. America is evolving from a “white” nation with “minorities’ to a genuinely multi-racial society. Either it will cease to be “white” or it will cease to be democratic. The Tea Party (in the large sense) chooses whiteness over democracy. The battle we are engaged in, a cold civil war as one Kossack called it, or our third revolution (with the Civil War being the second) is a fight for the survival of democracy. And it will be one with or without Trump.
While I do not discount entirely the danger of a European or Third World style dictatorship, I fear something more quintessentially American. After Union troops were withdrawn from the defeated South following the Compromise of 1877, white Southerners regained control of their states through a process they call ‘Redemption.” Through Jim Crow and lynching they blocked AA voting and much poor white voting as well. Yet all this went on under the cover of democratic constitutions with bills of rights and checks and balances. The form was democratic but the reality was largely rule by self-perpetuating oligarchies backed up by terror; and it lasted for almost a century.
Southern society as a whole reluctantly accepted Civil Rights in the late 20th century because the migrations of the 1920’s and 30’s had reduced the local AA population to a manageable proportion. But if a black could become POTUS? If the country as a whole should cease to be white dominated?
To fight this nightmare the movement calling itself the Tea Party updated its arsenal of voter suppression techniques, combining them with traditional ones like gerrymandering. This process was in progress well before Trump, at the hands of politicians like Scott Walker in Wisconsin. This is the movement that has conquered state houses, the congress and finally the presidency.
We have to get rid of Trump (legally please). He is a clear and present danger. But after we get him out, it will be (to paraphrase Churchill) not the end, not the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning.
How do we proceed? Please stay tuned for Part 2.