Alright. Here's a perspective piece on Donald Trump that I've been wanting to write for a long time. If you one of many who express wonder on why his supporters support him, or how what he's doing fits into history, this will should be some good insight.
Coming to historical terms with Donald Trump
There is nothing new about what Donald Trump in American politics.
As a people, weâre just doing a bad job, as weâve always done, at looking for, finding and appreciating historical perspective in our day-to-day political discussions.
The word âunprecedentedâ is thrown around like it has an expiration date that goes back only 20â30 years.
Without perspective, the general sense of the 2016 election lends itself to that idea that weâre seeing something that has no precedent, and there are certainly some firsts to be seen, but when you start to look back, you begin to note that weâve seen the general act of The Donald Trump Show many times before.
But due the general blasĂŠ attitude toward the role of perspective, the lessons of history are often forgotten and ignored in times like these, and so, history repeats itself, over and over.
The rise of Trump is no different.
Heâs another Huey Long.
Heâs another Joseph McCarthy.
More than any man, heâs another George Wallace.
Heâs rising with Wallaceâs same base, same tactics, same rhetorical pressure points, same projection of strength through exclusion, same declarations of the most dire moment in our history, from threats that have never been seen before, that must be confronted now.
Like Trump, Wallace rose in a time of war, of major progressive civil rights legislation, of overwhelming taxes and big government oppressing poor and middle class Americans, under pressure from Russia and China, with disdain for the national press and the perception of a need for an outsider to fix it all.
The tactics of Wallaceâs campaigns for president are common in Trumpâs campaign for president:
⢠Noting a current lack of resolve to use military power to end the threat of an enemy, but heâll have it. â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFhHOKD8JwI
⢠Avoiding a question posed and go on a rant about the targeted bias of the national media â https://youtu.be/_zpJDLkNIpQ?t=2m8s
⢠More on the targeted bias of the national media coverage âhttps://youtu.be/w-ZD15oa_mU?t=9m50s
⢠Railing against police brutality allegations âhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGQvKiJi4Jw
⢠Declaring the need for an outsider to save supporters from actions and legislation by both parties in Washington, DC â https://youtu.be/w-ZD15oa_mU?t=17m1s
⢠Declaring that new civil rights legislation is attacking conservative principles â https://youtu.be/_uQIibaiSpM?t=4m12s
⢠Pushing back again party leadership saying he wonât get the nomination.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJrqsOh9Hno
⢠Addressing people fearing him, and calling him a racist, a demagogue and a fascist. https://youtu.be/00E-MoGAm5g?t=14m57s
As the black Alabama attorney J. L. Chestnut said in an âAmerican Experienceâ documentary, âI will not forget George Wallace, because we must deal with the reality of Wallace. How is it that a demagogue, insulting twenty million black people daily on the television, can rise to the heights that Wallace did? Forgive? Yes. Forget? Never.â
Similarly, how is it that Trump can insult millions of Muslims, and millions of Mexicans, and any group or person who draws his ire, and still rise to the height at which he has risen to now?
The answer lies in the presence of millions of people who remain on the far, far right, who never left the far, far right, but for a long time, have not had an acceptable leader at the national level willing to stand up and speak for them.
When men like Trump and Wallace come along, ever so often, and find a red-hot political climate, as it is now, they strike the anvil and sparks fly. Trump has done that for the far, far right.
For those under the illusion that discrimination, racism and prejudice were dying out in this country, the sparks that the Trump campaign have created make it clear that they were wrong.
Though the country has been progressing and becoming more accepting and open since its founding, such ideas espoused by Trump remain deeply engrained in his supporters, and it will take many, many more generations before they truly fade into obscurity, though, they will never fully go away: wherever there are people, there will be hate and ignorance and bigotry, and people will blame other people for their problems.
These factors give rise to men like Trump and they do not happen in vacuums. They are not sudden. They bubble and percolate and fester over time, and when a Trump figure steps on a presidential election stage, these people unleash their feelings and project them into support.
The only thing that is sudden is the suddenness of the slowly-filled, stretching bubble finally bursting.
A large portion of the US grew up when segregation was still legal and have been through all the civil rights movements in the last 50 to 100 years.
The anger and disillusionment and fear has long been festering â back 4 years ago, back before Barack Obama, back before the 2000s, the 1990s, the 1980s, before the Civil Rights movement, before the Jim Crow era, before any era of the 1900s, before Reconstruction, before the Civil War, before westward expansion, before the founding of the country.
The anger has always been there and it has never gone away. It has ebbed and it has flowed. It has been passed down and passed down, and taught, and bred, and celebrated, right into today.
In the 21st century, it has carried on in colleges, in high schools, in workplaces, in homes.
In de facto segregated bars.
In de facto segregated churches.
At birthdays. And weddings. And funerals.
And now, a wild new frontier for spreading ideologies, with no need for accuracy: social media âa great new armpit of political discourse.
For some of these people, if there could be a return to slavery, they would welcome it. If there could be a return to Jim Crow laws, they would welcome it. If people could still get away with lynching black people or gay people or Jews or Mexicans or any type of person they donât like, they would welcome it.
Many of these people believe that homosexuals and transgender people have mental conditions that developed during life and need to be corrected.
They believe same-sex marriage is a bastardization of marriage.
Many want to go back to a time when these people were marginalized and they had much greater room to live theirs lives without being forced to face such groups.
American history has seen continued attempts to regress to earlier times, before progressions of ideology and law, when America was more exclusionary.
That is the great conservative vs. liberal battle.
Weâve fought over slavery.
Weâve fought over segregation.
Weâve excluded this group of people and that group of people.
Weâve relocated this group of people and that group of people.
Weâve had internment camps.
We have been experts at making or changing laws to exclude.
Some stark examples include:
⢠The (Indian) Removal Act of 1830 https://history.state.gov/milestoâŚ/1830-1860/indian-treaties
⢠The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/immigration/exclusion.html
⢠The Immigration Act of 1924. https://history.state.gov/milestoâŚ/1921-1936/immigration-act
⢠Executive Order 9066. http://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/todays-doc/âŚ
Weâve withheld rights for certain groups to own property, to vote, to get married, to come to this country.
Since Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a paragraph like this appears with employment applications: âThis company expressly prohibits any form of workplace harassment based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.â
All of those categories are listed because theyâve all been discriminated against, and are still being discriminated against.
For many Trump supporters, stopping liberal progress, which often seeks to defend and open doors for such groups, is critical.
They see the country they want being changed and taken away.
Anti-Trump protesters look at Trump supporters the way that anti-Trump protesters look at Trump supporters. Both consider the other an existential threat that must be stopped.
For most Trump supporters, Trump can do basically anything he says he needs to do, because anything he does is better than allowing progressive change to pull the country away from conservative principles â and allowing Hillary Clinton to become president would be the greatest anathema.
When Trump says he can go out on 5th Ave. in Manhattan and shoot a human and maintain his support, heâs not exaggerating. He would only need to argue that the person was with ISIS and he would have sufficient justification in their eyes. He would be seen as a protector, a hero. The killing would be seen as necessary. It would not matter if the deceased were ISIS or not, only that Trump made the declaration of affiliation.
And if there needs to be more killings and violence to stop these threats to the ultra-conservative way of life, thatâs a cliff that many of them are very willing to walk over to prevent, as they see it, their country from being taken over by blacks and gays and Muslims and Mexicans and Jews et cetera.
If Trump doesnât change his level of torque on his rhetoric, and especially if he gets elected and it continues, such violence will grow, and those committing such violence will become more emboldened, and feel more justified, and weâll return to scenes similar to those seen in the Civil Rights and Vietnam eras.
To many of these people, âthe South will rise againâ is not just some lofty saying â itâs a passionate desire to overturn a perceived injustice that was dealt in the time of their not-so-distant relatives.
Speaking of civil war, some ask, âIs it possible for there to be a civil war again in the US, in the 21st century?â
Is it likely? Certainly not. But it is quite possible.
Weâre certainly not immune to the human paradigms that have arisen and created such conditions in this country before. The divisive instability we see now is in many ways similar to instability in the decades before the Civil War. But weâve seen similar climates in the country sense those times, and surely, people asked then about the possibility of another civil war, and obviously now, one did not come.
But the risk will always remain.
We were Gen. George McClellanâs 1864 win of the presidency away from the Confederate States of America likely still being on the United States of Americaâs southern border.
But, alas, Pres. Lincoln won, and managed to save the Union.
He understood and said long before he became president, âIf destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.â
We almost did it to ourselves once, and there should be no illusions that we couldnât and wouldnât put ourselves there again.
Fortunately, as the iron cools, in time, such questions like civil war, and such men like Trump wind up on the wrong side of history, but in their moment, they are nearly unstoppable.
Because performers like Trump are political magicians.
When he performs his act, some are thrilled, and some are bewildered.
When a magician performs a card trick, you watch intently and there is a sudden slight of hand that you see, but donât understand.
You spend a moment trying to figure out what just happened, you think back through it and try to figure it out, but after a while, you accept that you just donât know what just happened.
And if you do think youâve figure it out, and you declare the trick, the magician can just say, âNope. Thatâs not what happened.â
And then what ground do you have to stand on?
How do you ever find conviction in a constant he said-he said paradigm?
The more you try to prove him wrong, the more it looks to his supporters as though youâre just trying to silence him and make him look bad and prevent him from standing up for their beliefs.
Trump can say whatever he wants, and it can be fact-checked into the ground, but most of his supporters donât care, and if they do, theyâre likely not going to believe any person or any news outlet that takes the time to fact-check him.
In fact, theyâre usually not watching or reading any outlet that would present such rebuttals.
And heâs well-aware of that.
So, if polls are good for him, theyâre great polls. If theyâre bad for him, theyâre wrong and there is a conspiracy.
He supports the Iraq War and he doesnât support the Iraq War.
He thinks Hillary Clinton is a good person and Hillary Clinton is an evil person.
He is for gun control and he is against gun control.
He is for universal health care and he is totally against universal health care.
Heâs pro-life and heâs pro-choice.
Heâs establishment and heâs an outsider.
He yells fire but heâs not responsible for the panic that ensues.
Anything involving Trump that is good, it is his doing. Anything that is bad, it has nothing to do with him.
Heâs whatever he needs to be, whenever he needs to be it.
And the more you try to spotlight the flip-flopping, and the more you try to make him look bad, the more his core support grows, because it fits perfectly into a narrative that anyone presenting anything negative about him is out to get him.
His audience will hear what he says, true or not. And they usually wonât hear fact checks, and even if they do, theyâll ignore them as lies motivated by conspiracy.
He is very brilliant in understanding and exploiting the dynamic. He is very calculated in how he handles it.
He knows how to be mean, or nice, or vulgar, or very reserved, or unapologetic, or remorseful, whenever he needs to be.
Itâs all a game â politics is theatre â and he understands how easily humans are manipulated.
That certainly isnât something unique to Trump. Thatâs politics. But Trump is taking advantage of mass manipulation in an expert way.
His campaign is built on the stretching of truth, and often flat-out lying.
Why bother with the work it takes to tell the truth, why box yourself in with the truth when there is no consensus on what constitutes the truth? The only difference between what one person believes and what another person believes is a good argument.
The paradigm of effective accountability requires shame and remorse for being wrong. If you refuse to admit fault, and show no shame and remorse, the accountability paradigm loses itâs effect.
Thereâs no difference between Pres. Clinton going in front of a camera and lying directly to millions of people, and Donald Trump going in front of a camera a lying to millions of people, but there is a difference in Clinton ultimately giving in and admitting he lied when he got cornered, and Trump never giving in.
In our type of governing system, all of this allows a demagogue like Trump to rise.
And if a democratic republic is what we want, then itâs what we get.
In this system, the people can stop a candidate like Trump from becoming the leader of the nation, or if enough want to remain silent, they can make a silent admission that it was not worth it to mobilize to stop him.
As Edmund Burke wrote, âThe only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.â
Is Trump evil? Thatâs a decision that each voter has to decide for themselves.
And theyâll have to ultimately decide: do we want to go back, or do want to continue moving forward?
Trump and his supporters want to go back.
For those who feel Trump must be stopped in order for the country to continue to move forward, it appears at this point that it will take maneuvering within the election apparatus to do it.
A few political options exist to stop Trump:
- Enough voters simply see to it that if Trump manages to score the GOP nomination during the primaries, he doesnât win the general popular election or the Electoral College.
- Block Trump from getting enough delegates during the primaries to prevent a quorum for the nomination; then orchestrating a hostile takeover of the nomination by preventing enough delegates to push Trump over on the first vote; that will free all the delegates to begin voting for whichever candidate they want, without being beholden to the candidate they were sent as a delegate to vote for.
- Block Trump with an unprecedented renegade Electoral College revolt with âfaithless electorsâ refusing to cast their vote for Trump, which could mean for many, facing legal punishment in their home states.
If one of these options does not happen, Trump would become the next president in Jan. 2017.
And those who shout down that Trump does not represent America will have to come to terms with the reality that the majority of Americans declared that he does represent America.
But that should not come as a surprise, as it wouldnât be anywhere close to the first time America has declared its support for exclusion.
