THE TRUMP DEBACLE

Jerry Harkins

Regardless of how things turn out in the 2016 election season, America seems headed for a political upheaval that is likely to yield unintended and frightening consequences.

Donald Trump is the greatest con man ever.  He makes Bernie Madoff look like a dabbler, a smalltime gonif.  Trump has duped the uneducated, the unemployed, the disaffected and even the religious right in a way reminiscent of the entertainments staged in the Roman Coliseum.  He has bamboozled the media into covering his political circus in the same breathless way it treats the Kardashians.  He is a narcissist, a liar, a hypocrite, an ignoramus, a yahoo, a racist, a misogynist, a vulgarian and a failure as a business person, husband and human being.  He reminds me of no one so much as Benito Mussolini except for the fantastic hair.  Otherwise he displays the same bombast, the same scowl, the same gestures.  Like Il Duce, he is a nightmare to be sure but a comic figure nonetheless.  I freely confess that to me the most amusing thing about him is the agita he provokes among conservative intellectuals.  David Brooks, one of the New York Times house Conservatives, issued this cri de coeur on March 18, 2016:

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president.  He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn.  His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress.  He doesn't know what he doesn't know and he's uninterested in finding out…Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes.  All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.

I am trying not to enjoy the discomfort of the Republicans.  At this writing, The Donald is almost certain to be the Republican nominee for President and, as such, is likely to receive the votes of tens of millions of our fellow Americans which is depressing.  Of course he can't actually win the election or, at least, that's the way to bet.  Serious Republicans know this and are saying so in public.  Only newspaper pundits, desperate as always for something to write about, entertain fantasies about how he could wind up inhabiting Trump 1600.  But Mitt Romney is right:  Even in defeat he has the potential to destroy the Republican brand and bring about the end of the two-party system.  We have been here before.  Barry Goldwater nearly killed Republicanism in 1964 and Eugene McCarthy did the same for the Democrats four years later.  George McGovern might have done in the Democrats in 1972 except that was the year of CREEP, the re-election campaign of Dick Nixon and Spiro Agnew.  Trump could actually pull it off this year but he himself is not the major problem.

The problem is, and for decades has been, the Republican platform which presumably reflects the views of a large majority of the party's core constituents.  The 2012 version is, as would be expected, a radically conservative document:  cut taxes, especially taxes on business and the wealthy, cut spending on everything except the military, enact a national Right to Work Law, repeal virtually all gun control regulation, oppose gay marriage, outlaw abortion and contraception and so forth on and on.  In some ways, it was less strident than the 2008 version, more the product of Madison Avenue wordsmiths who peddle the same nonsense using oleagineous logic.  Ever since the Nixon era, the platform has been a wink-wink document designed to placate the base without discommoding practical politicians whose primary goal was to get elected.  In the interest of full disclosure, the same thing has always been true of all platforms. 

If Bernie Sanders wakes up in the White House on January 21, 2017, he will waste little time trying to fulfill his promise of offering free college tuition to everyone by instituting a cockamamie tax on Wall Street "speculators."  Admittedly it's a decent, humane idea addressed to several serious social problems.  But it's a non-starter for many reasons not the least of which is the problem of defining who the speculators are.  Bernie is a socialist and may not know this but he does know the long futile history of American Socialism.  Radicalism, left or right, simply does not sell.  Serious Republicans know this too.  Every once in a while, though, they feel compelled to toss a bone to their proletariat base.  Thus, for example, they have supported Right to Work laws since 1947.  These have the advantage of being attractive to their big business constituents even if they are also an immoral  abrogation of the fundamental human right to bargain collectively, a return to laissez faire and David Ricardo's Iron Law of Wages.  But they are an easy sell.  Right-to-work has become the lynchpin of Republican labor policy and has actually been enacted in 25 American states.

Like Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump has no intention of delivering on his own most characteristic promises such as a border fence paid for by Mexico.  At a minimum, he knows from personal experience the joys of hiring immigrants by gaming the immigration system.  To his supporters though foreigners constitute a dire threat to motherhood and apple pie.  They feel besieged not only by immigrants but by scientists who teach evolution and climate change, by gay people who want to get married, by teachers who want their children to read dirty books like "Romeo and Juliet," by politicians who insist they buy health insurance and by doctors who force them to have their children vaccinated.  For more than forty years these people have been losing ground economically and are sick and tired of candidates making empty promises to cure their ills.  They'll give their votes to The Donald because they think he's different.  It's hard to blame them;  in so many ways he is different from the politicians we have come to know so well.  God help us when they discover that he's more corrupt and malicious than any they have experienced before.

It's easy to poke fun at the Republican base which, however, is a failure of both sympathy and understanding.  It's like laughing at clowns and overlooking their sad faces.  What we count as stupidity is more often a symptom of psychic and economic distress.  These are the direct descendants of Eugene O'Neill's Hairy Ape and we do not hear their anguished cry, “Christ, where do I get off at?  Where do I fit in?”  They are caught in the middle of a great digital and global upheaval.  It is not that the rest of us don't feel their pain.  It is fear that we ourselves are not far behind them in being left out in the cold.  We know they are right to be disgusted by the professional politicians who have long perpetrated fraud on the voters.  Promise them anything.  They have limited intelligence and short memories.  They are, in short, sitting ducks.

Those ducks are now coming home to roost.  They're mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore.  They're getting violent, becoming what one of their gurus, Pat Buchanan, once called "peasants with pitchforks."  In one sense, history is repeating itself.  In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War there was Daniel Shays and his ragtag band of farmers rebelling against taxes imposed on them to pay the debts of the state and its wealthy merchants.  Before the Civil War, John Brown led an armed insurrection in Bloody Kansas in an effort to abolish slavery.  Five years of warfare spread to violence even on the floor of the United States Senate.  In 1968, a left wing mob led by liberal intellectuals conducted a bloody protest during the Democratic convention in Chicago.  In  the scheme of things, all these were tempests in teapots compared to the Labor Wars that raged in the United States between the 1890's and the 1930's or, of course, to the bloodiest war ever fought by Americans between 1860 and 1865.

Southern politicians are still fighting the Civil War and secession is still on their agenda.  A Republic of Texas movement is said to have 250,000 members and has been encouraged by former Governor Rick Perry and current Governor Greg Abbott.  And Texas is not unique.  Political fragmentation has become an important characteristic of the global village.  There are separatist movements in at least 110 nations and multiple movements in a majority of them.  In recent years there have been successful divorces in India, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and near misses in Spain, Great Britain and Canada.  It could happen in the United States where there are currently eight serious, dozens of fringe and several tongue-in-cheek separatist movements underway.  In the age of social media, revolution is on a hair trigger.

And that – a break-up or a serious attempt at one in the United States – is the end game made possible by the incivility of Republican politicians in general and Donald Trump in particular.  It will not be a peaceful process.  Only violence can spark it and, once afoot, violence is a contagious disease.  Exposure to violence increases a person's probability of becoming a perpetrator, a victim or both.  Incitement to violence need not be physical and the tipping point between verbal and physical confrontation can be very subtle.  One has only to study the so-called "Arab Spring" to show how even a minor incident can trigger outrage and rebellion.  Or, closer to home, the race riots of the 1960's.  It is true that the earliest (and least bloody) of these were spontaneous localized responses to racist provocations.  But the Long Hot Summer of 1967 and those following the King assassination the following year were triggered by the black power rhetoric of the Black Panthers and other revolutionary groups.  More recently, we have witnessed how rapidly protest – legitimate and otherwise – can deteriorate to blood in the streets.  Think of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street.

Several factors make the Trump Uprising different and more volatile.  Most obviously, it has captured the loyalties of tens of millions of Americans – far more than the black power movement or its antithesis, the racism of George Wallace and the other Southern governors of the civil rights era.  Wallace got ten million votes (and 46 electoral votes) in 1968.  Trump will do much better.  More importantly, the mainstream media thought of Wallace as a démodé embarrassment and largely ignored him.  Trump by contrast, a creature of reality television, is allowed to dominate the headlines and the television coverage simply by virtue of his extremism.  It may be that he can't win the presidency but, win or lose, Donald Trump is a menace.  He sows the grapes of wrath.  He ignites the flames of class, race and ethnic resentments. He toys with violence.

It is not given to humans to see the future.  Will Trump self-destruct? Will the Republican establishment stage a coup at the convention?  Will a third party emerge on the extreme right as is happening all over Europe right now?  Will Donald's evangelical followers come down with a case of buyer's remorse in time?  And, of course, who might replace Trump?  Senator Cruz who seems to be despised by everyone who has ever worked with or near him?  John Kasich?  Paul Ryan?  Mitt Romney?  Not that it makes much difference.  It is to be fervently hoped that the Republicans have already lost the election and I, for one, am delighted.  But beyond my happiness there is a more important consideration. We Americans have an investment in the two-party system.  It's not perfect and, in recent years, it has barely functioned.  But it works better than any one-party or multi-party system I'm aware of and I sure as hell hope we don't replace it with a system determined by the current cast of Republican clowns.