The phenomenon that I've been thinking about lately, the one "revealed" or "mainstreamed" here by the Trump campaign is much more visceral. I'm thinking of the Rick Tyler campaign in rural Tennessee, as Salon reported it, "a fringe independent candidate for Tennessee's 3rd Congressional District," who saw fit to erect a "giant 'Make America White Again' billboard this week that he claims was inspired by the signature tagline of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump." We could talk about the sorts of distorted nostalgia for a time when protestant whites were the dominant demographic in the US and things were good. That "time," however, was a very brief window extending from the end of the second world war through the 50s to the early 60s. One could argue, of course, that the blood bath of the second world war made the "happy days" possible. The moral sense of having conquered the greatest evil the world had ever seen, personified in axis powers led by Hitler and Mussolini and Tito, along with the promise "never again." Then too, there was the sense of unlimited economic possibility as the world began rebuilding on the ashes of Asia and Europe. For the "greatest generation" in the US, meaning the middle and working class whites returning from the war or coming of age shortly after, it was "happy days." Their prospects were better than their parents who had struggled through the great depression, and their children's prospects seemed even better yet, and all was good with the world until it all seemed to unravel.
We should have enough distance to see the forest of history without the distractions of single trees. It should be clear enough that the "happy days" of the 50s were indeed happy for the white middle and working class protestant men who ruled the roost, but the same promise of upward mobility and unlimited possibility was not extended to each and all. Clearly the happy days of the 50s were not so happy for our African-American populations. Burdened under the outright apartheid of Jim Crowe in the south, with limited prospects throughout, they did not share in the good fortune of the nation. The disparities simply weren't "fair." The civil rights movement, the rebellion against that "unfairness," the rebellion against a system rigged against a whole population based solely on race, brought the good people of Mayberry RFD face to face with the remnants of America's original sin. It unsettled the psyche of nation. Rick Tyler's sign tells us, if nothing more, that we haven't yet recovered. Let's not kid ourselves. Rick Tyler's sign is deeply American in its racism, and like most racists, he turns to a pseudo biology and religion to buttress is alarm that America is being over run with non-whites. There is, of course, a half-truth in his assertion that birds of a feather tend to stick together, that "we are talking about someone who demonstrates greater affinity for his own racial family (your race is the extension of your biological family)" -- that "ethnocentricity is completely healthy and normal and all races, except the white race, are encouraged to engage in and express it." He is, in effect, asserting the right of white American's to "identity politics," but he either willfully misses the point that one engaged in "identity politics," not to demonstrate one's ethnocentrism, but to demonstrate the systemic "unfairness," to undo the injustice of systemic ethnocentrism. It may well be "normal," but it is not "healthy," particularly not in a system that professes, but does not provide, "justice for all."
Again, we should have enough distance to see the forest of history without the distraction of individual trees. The sense of unlimited economic possibility was predicated on a false assumption, that the rapid growth following the war could be sustained indefinitely once the re-building after the calamities of the 20th century was complete. If the war against Facism had pulled us from the great depression, we needed a new "stimulus," a new project, and we found in the "cold war" against communism. It was Eisenhower, a war-hero, a republican, who warned of the "military industrial complex," but the military industrial complex continued to serve us well, an artificial boost to the American ego and the American economy. The ideological stand off between our own capitalism and an alien, un-American communism, a stand off that divided Europe once again into a "war zone" with the "iron curtain" serving as a front, required of us a continued massive government investment in the economy. Then too, there was the emergence of China, with its own version of communism, that extended the European cold war into a new world war, and the military build-up picked up steam and continued unabated. It was a war of "containment," at all costs, and as the third world emerged from the ashes of its own colonial past, the so-called super powers allowed themselves to become ideological pawns in their civil unrest, in Korea, and then disastrously in Vietnam. As the conflict coughed and sputtered along, with more and more American bloodshed, with no apparent end in sight, with little or no evidence of a "moral" purpose except the containment of a political and economic ideology, with less and less evidence that the bloodshed was "buying" anything that might resemble a continuation of the prosperity of the 50's, it led to the anti-war movements that further unsettled the psyche of the nation.
And yet, here we are again. There is nothing new in the fight against "terrorism." If you read the transcripts of the defunct fight against communism, and substitute "radical islamic terrorism" in the place of communism, you see the same arguments revisited. If there is anything in Trump's "America First" stance, or on the international stage in Britain's withdrawal from the EU, it's the inherent difficulty in answering the pre-eminent political question, "who benefits and how, from our continued involvement in conflict?" That is a question worth answering, but the real answers are likely to be abstruse and difficult, and not as immediately gratifying as a religious crusade against the un-American islamic terrorists or the treacherous Syrian refugees. The very notion that they could "impose" something on the order of Sharia law on the American populace is absurd on the face of it, but there it is nevertheless, and otherwise rational people seem to believe it, but why? As Neal Gabler, writing for BillMoyers.com, put it,
it’s a modern version of the medieval Crusades, and as the ancient Crusades did to Europe, it has inflicted untold damage on our country. Because it is deep in the bones of the Republicans, it won’t end with Trump, who is a non-believer himself when it comes to conservative orthodoxy. It can only end with the extinction of the party itself as presently constituted — Cruz, Ryan, Rubio, McConnell, et al. — and the rise of a new conservative party, not a cult.
And make no mistake, "Today’s GOP is closer to a religious cult than a political institution. It operates on dogma, sees compromise as a moral failing, views enemies as pagans who must be vanquished, and considers every policy skirmish another Götterdämmerung." One must give Sarah Palin some credit, because the "lame stream media" is indeed "lame." Few in the mainstream media point out that, taken at their word, given their way, they would impose an evangelical way of life as alien to a majority of the American people as Islam. Otherwise rational people believe the Muslims are conspiring to impose Sharia law on a apostate America, because that is precisely what they are doing, conspiring to impose Biblical law on an apostate America. It is a dogma that is deeply un-democratic, deeply antithetical to an inclusive secular state, deeply antithetical to our first amendment, and the list goes on. No one in the "lame stream media" questions the values of evangelical right that plays such a large role shaping not only the social platform, but the tone of the republican party.
As Gabler goes on to write, in the name of fairness, the "lame stream media" treats not only middle east conflicts like athletic contests. I have confessed to being a Cubs fan, and I am in some despair lately because they have lost four in a row for the first time this season, but at the end of the day, little is at stake in their quest for the pennant. At the end of the day, it is an entertainment, a distraction. I wouldn't want to suggest that the islamic terrorists don't pose some threat to us, but even 9/11, as horrific as it was, didn't strike me as a call for military intervention. It did strike me as a military action, but a criminal action subject to our law and international law. One understands, of course, why there would be a call for immediate retribution, and there was perhaps some suspicion that the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq harbored the jihadist terrorist group that perpetrated the attack, Al Queda, but even so we had (or should have had) sufficient leverage within the middle east to locate, extradite, and bring the perpetrators to trial, if not in the US, in the Hague. The Iraq war was justified by then President Bush on cold war grounds, the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, with international jihadist terrorism displacing communism as the new threat. The troops were sent, gratifying the need for an immediate response to 9/11, while ostensibly serving some broader geo-political purpose that turned out to be a fabrication. Not unlike the paid athletes that represent our favorite sports teams, the "troops," the "volunteer forces," who fight the wars are, in essence, little more than modestly paid mercenaries. Unlike the Vietnam war, there is no draft, no influx of citizen soldiers, no threat that I or my children will be called to "serve" in a cause that was dubious from the outset. Instead of a broad based call for accountability for the lives lost, as there was (finally) in Vietnam, we have instead the sanctimonious "thanking" of the "troops" for their "service." We wouldn't want to appear ungrateful, as we did during Vietnam, but beneath the sanctimony there is a sense of better them than me. They knew going in that their "jobs" were dangerous, that they might make "the ultimate sacrifice," but it was a job that they volunteered and are paid to do. We root for the home team and we vilify the "enemy," but I'm not sure the American people can really answer the question, "who benefits and how from our continued engagement in the internecine conflicts in the middle east?"
At the end of the day, the war on terror is entertainment, a distraction, bread and circuses, blood on the sand. The real war against the American people has been fought and won. The real war against the American people began with Reagan and the new conservatism that systematically began undoing the democratizing forces within American politics. It may well be that the greatest threat to democracy may not be communism, may not be jihadist terrorism, but just may be capitalism itself. Let me be clear from the outset that I do not believe for an instant that capitalism and democracy as economic and political systems are in any way mutually dependent. One can have a socialist state that is democratic and one can have a socialist state that is autocratic. Likewise we can have a capitalist state that is democratic and one can have a capitalist state that is autocratic, and we have been trending, over the past thirty years, more and more, toward the oligarchic structures that undermine democracy itself. The capitalist war on democracy has not been an "all out war," with clearly defined sides. It has been rather a drawn out war of attrition, death by a thousand cuts, and it has continued through the first Bush administration, the Clinton administration, the second Bush administration, and the Obama administration. Did it begin with Reagan's deliberate targeting of the Air Traffic Controllers union? Did it begin with NAFTA, a "free trade agreement" negotiated by the first Bush and signed into law by Clinton? Did it begin with Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall legislation and the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act? Did it begin with the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act passed under the Second Bush? Did it begin with Obama's bail out of banks too big to fail? Death by a thousand cuts, but the trend has been clear -- greater and greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, along with the political power that flows from the concentration of wealth.
The economic agenda of the republican party simply doesn't work for the people. It has been tried in Kansas, and it didn't produce anything like the economic growth or the influx of jobs promised. As the Kansas City Star reported, the falling revenue for the state is "more evidence that the Brownback tax-cut 'experiment' is not working." They go on to say, "in October, individual income tax receipts were almost $27 million below what the state had estimated it would take in, or a jarring 15 percent off expectations," and it matters "because this is the tax that Brownback and the Legislature cut in 2012. The promise then was that more jobs would flood Kansas, eventually pumping back up income tax collections. That’s not working — at all." In the end, "the tax cuts are bleeding the state of needed funds to pay for high-quality public services to the people of Kansas," and we shouldn't understand "high-quality public services" to mean "welfare." We should understand it to mean things like good education, good policing, good infrastructure. Nevertheless, the republican's double down, because, in the end, they are more like a religious cult than a political institution. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they cling to dogma, and they do so in part because the dogma benefits a select few. I couldn't improve on Thomas Picketty's detailed account, or add much to the observations of Richard Wolff, but it seems clear enough that "tax cuts," while popular at the instant, don't benefit the people. An extra four or five hundred dollars in the pocket of the average American is simply spent and gone, but an extra four or five hundred thousand dollars in the pocket of the rich certainly isn't invested in "good public services" and it isn't necessarily invested in new enterprises which create new jobs. In the absence of economic growth, that extra four or five hundred thousand is simply "saved." The not-so-rich scrabble along, with little in their pockets, while the rich accumulate more and more capital.
The rise in right wing political voices -- Brexit in the UK, Trumpism in the US -- builds on the anger of the losers. It is perhaps not surprising that Brexit and Trumpism find their support in the more rural hinterlands, like Kansas. I can't speak with any authority about the UK, but in the US the rural areas have been devastated -- not figuratively, but literally devastated -- by the economic trends of the last thirty five year. So too for the industrial midwest. Leon Weiseltier has written a beautiful and moving editorial about the fate of the working class "white" entitled "How Voter's Personal Suffering Overtook Reason." Meth in the rural areas and heroin in the industrial cities are both a plague, but are more symptomatic of an even deeper plague. Weiseltier writes,
the world of these people ... has been shattered and lost. The economic foundations of their way of life were destroyed by the unforgiving logic of globalization, and then by the recession and its scandalously uneven recovery. The blandishments of the digital economy passed them by. Their current rates of alcoholism, life expectancy and suicide are now notorious. But only a little while ago, those measures of human breakdown and social collapse were not widely known.
And both parties have been complicit, though for different reasons. Weiseltier also writes,
Republicans have been indifferent to them because Republicans revere winners and they are losers. Democrats have been indifferent to them because they are culturally embarrassing (and because many Democrats, too, have had little time for losers). Now they finally command the attention of the country — they have been discovered — which is itself a victory for fairness in America; but a large portion of them have gained this recognition by debasing American politics with a desperate preference for a strongman. It is one of the lowest ironies of this low time.
Again, we should have enough distance to see the forest of history without the distraction of individual trees. The sense of unlimited economic possibility was predicated on a false assumption, that the rapid growth following the war could be sustained indefinitely once the re-building after the calamities of the 20th century was complete. If the war against Facism had pulled us from the great depression, we needed a new "stimulus," a new project, and we found in the "cold war" against communism. It was Eisenhower, a war-hero, a republican, who warned of the "military industrial complex," but the military industrial complex continued to serve us well, an artificial boost to the American ego and the American economy. The ideological stand off between our own capitalism and an alien, un-American communism, a stand off that divided Europe once again into a "war zone" with the "iron curtain" serving as a front, required of us a continued massive government investment in the economy. Then too, there was the emergence of China, with its own version of communism, that extended the European cold war into a new world war, and the military build-up picked up steam and continued unabated. It was a war of "containment," at all costs, and as the third world emerged from the ashes of its own colonial past, the so-called super powers allowed themselves to become ideological pawns in their civil unrest, in Korea, and then disastrously in Vietnam. As the conflict coughed and sputtered along, with more and more American bloodshed, with no apparent end in sight, with little or no evidence of a "moral" purpose except the containment of a political and economic ideology, with less and less evidence that the bloodshed was "buying" anything that might resemble a continuation of the prosperity of the 50's, it led to the anti-war movements that further unsettled the psyche of the nation.
And yet, here we are again. There is nothing new in the fight against "terrorism." If you read the transcripts of the defunct fight against communism, and substitute "radical islamic terrorism" in the place of communism, you see the same arguments revisited. If there is anything in Trump's "America First" stance, or on the international stage in Britain's withdrawal from the EU, it's the inherent difficulty in answering the pre-eminent political question, "who benefits and how, from our continued involvement in conflict?" That is a question worth answering, but the real answers are likely to be abstruse and difficult, and not as immediately gratifying as a religious crusade against the un-American islamic terrorists or the treacherous Syrian refugees. The very notion that they could "impose" something on the order of Sharia law on the American populace is absurd on the face of it, but there it is nevertheless, and otherwise rational people seem to believe it, but why? As Neal Gabler, writing for BillMoyers.com, put it,
it’s a modern version of the medieval Crusades, and as the ancient Crusades did to Europe, it has inflicted untold damage on our country. Because it is deep in the bones of the Republicans, it won’t end with Trump, who is a non-believer himself when it comes to conservative orthodoxy. It can only end with the extinction of the party itself as presently constituted — Cruz, Ryan, Rubio, McConnell, et al. — and the rise of a new conservative party, not a cult.
And make no mistake, "Today’s GOP is closer to a religious cult than a political institution. It operates on dogma, sees compromise as a moral failing, views enemies as pagans who must be vanquished, and considers every policy skirmish another Götterdämmerung." One must give Sarah Palin some credit, because the "lame stream media" is indeed "lame." Few in the mainstream media point out that, taken at their word, given their way, they would impose an evangelical way of life as alien to a majority of the American people as Islam. Otherwise rational people believe the Muslims are conspiring to impose Sharia law on a apostate America, because that is precisely what they are doing, conspiring to impose Biblical law on an apostate America. It is a dogma that is deeply un-democratic, deeply antithetical to an inclusive secular state, deeply antithetical to our first amendment, and the list goes on. No one in the "lame stream media" questions the values of evangelical right that plays such a large role shaping not only the social platform, but the tone of the republican party.
As Gabler goes on to write, in the name of fairness, the "lame stream media" treats not only middle east conflicts like athletic contests. I have confessed to being a Cubs fan, and I am in some despair lately because they have lost four in a row for the first time this season, but at the end of the day, little is at stake in their quest for the pennant. At the end of the day, it is an entertainment, a distraction. I wouldn't want to suggest that the islamic terrorists don't pose some threat to us, but even 9/11, as horrific as it was, didn't strike me as a call for military intervention. It did strike me as a military action, but a criminal action subject to our law and international law. One understands, of course, why there would be a call for immediate retribution, and there was perhaps some suspicion that the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq harbored the jihadist terrorist group that perpetrated the attack, Al Queda, but even so we had (or should have had) sufficient leverage within the middle east to locate, extradite, and bring the perpetrators to trial, if not in the US, in the Hague. The Iraq war was justified by then President Bush on cold war grounds, the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, with international jihadist terrorism displacing communism as the new threat. The troops were sent, gratifying the need for an immediate response to 9/11, while ostensibly serving some broader geo-political purpose that turned out to be a fabrication. Not unlike the paid athletes that represent our favorite sports teams, the "troops," the "volunteer forces," who fight the wars are, in essence, little more than modestly paid mercenaries. Unlike the Vietnam war, there is no draft, no influx of citizen soldiers, no threat that I or my children will be called to "serve" in a cause that was dubious from the outset. Instead of a broad based call for accountability for the lives lost, as there was (finally) in Vietnam, we have instead the sanctimonious "thanking" of the "troops" for their "service." We wouldn't want to appear ungrateful, as we did during Vietnam, but beneath the sanctimony there is a sense of better them than me. They knew going in that their "jobs" were dangerous, that they might make "the ultimate sacrifice," but it was a job that they volunteered and are paid to do. We root for the home team and we vilify the "enemy," but I'm not sure the American people can really answer the question, "who benefits and how from our continued engagement in the internecine conflicts in the middle east?"
At the end of the day, the war on terror is entertainment, a distraction, bread and circuses, blood on the sand. The real war against the American people has been fought and won. The real war against the American people began with Reagan and the new conservatism that systematically began undoing the democratizing forces within American politics. It may well be that the greatest threat to democracy may not be communism, may not be jihadist terrorism, but just may be capitalism itself. Let me be clear from the outset that I do not believe for an instant that capitalism and democracy as economic and political systems are in any way mutually dependent. One can have a socialist state that is democratic and one can have a socialist state that is autocratic. Likewise we can have a capitalist state that is democratic and one can have a capitalist state that is autocratic, and we have been trending, over the past thirty years, more and more, toward the oligarchic structures that undermine democracy itself. The capitalist war on democracy has not been an "all out war," with clearly defined sides. It has been rather a drawn out war of attrition, death by a thousand cuts, and it has continued through the first Bush administration, the Clinton administration, the second Bush administration, and the Obama administration. Did it begin with Reagan's deliberate targeting of the Air Traffic Controllers union? Did it begin with NAFTA, a "free trade agreement" negotiated by the first Bush and signed into law by Clinton? Did it begin with Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall legislation and the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act? Did it begin with the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act passed under the Second Bush? Did it begin with Obama's bail out of banks too big to fail? Death by a thousand cuts, but the trend has been clear -- greater and greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, along with the political power that flows from the concentration of wealth.
The economic agenda of the republican party simply doesn't work for the people. It has been tried in Kansas, and it didn't produce anything like the economic growth or the influx of jobs promised. As the Kansas City Star reported, the falling revenue for the state is "more evidence that the Brownback tax-cut 'experiment' is not working." They go on to say, "in October, individual income tax receipts were almost $27 million below what the state had estimated it would take in, or a jarring 15 percent off expectations," and it matters "because this is the tax that Brownback and the Legislature cut in 2012. The promise then was that more jobs would flood Kansas, eventually pumping back up income tax collections. That’s not working — at all." In the end, "the tax cuts are bleeding the state of needed funds to pay for high-quality public services to the people of Kansas," and we shouldn't understand "high-quality public services" to mean "welfare." We should understand it to mean things like good education, good policing, good infrastructure. Nevertheless, the republican's double down, because, in the end, they are more like a religious cult than a political institution. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they cling to dogma, and they do so in part because the dogma benefits a select few. I couldn't improve on Thomas Picketty's detailed account, or add much to the observations of Richard Wolff, but it seems clear enough that "tax cuts," while popular at the instant, don't benefit the people. An extra four or five hundred dollars in the pocket of the average American is simply spent and gone, but an extra four or five hundred thousand dollars in the pocket of the rich certainly isn't invested in "good public services" and it isn't necessarily invested in new enterprises which create new jobs. In the absence of economic growth, that extra four or five hundred thousand is simply "saved." The not-so-rich scrabble along, with little in their pockets, while the rich accumulate more and more capital.
The rise in right wing political voices -- Brexit in the UK, Trumpism in the US -- builds on the anger of the losers. It is perhaps not surprising that Brexit and Trumpism find their support in the more rural hinterlands, like Kansas. I can't speak with any authority about the UK, but in the US the rural areas have been devastated -- not figuratively, but literally devastated -- by the economic trends of the last thirty five year. So too for the industrial midwest. Leon Weiseltier has written a beautiful and moving editorial about the fate of the working class "white" entitled "How Voter's Personal Suffering Overtook Reason." Meth in the rural areas and heroin in the industrial cities are both a plague, but are more symptomatic of an even deeper plague. Weiseltier writes,
the world of these people ... has been shattered and lost. The economic foundations of their way of life were destroyed by the unforgiving logic of globalization, and then by the recession and its scandalously uneven recovery. The blandishments of the digital economy passed them by. Their current rates of alcoholism, life expectancy and suicide are now notorious. But only a little while ago, those measures of human breakdown and social collapse were not widely known.
And both parties have been complicit, though for different reasons. Weiseltier also writes,
Republicans have been indifferent to them because Republicans revere winners and they are losers. Democrats have been indifferent to them because they are culturally embarrassing (and because many Democrats, too, have had little time for losers). Now they finally command the attention of the country — they have been discovered — which is itself a victory for fairness in America; but a large portion of them have gained this recognition by debasing American politics with a desperate preference for a strongman. It is one of the lowest ironies of this low time.
I am not the first, nor will I be the last to suggest that the working class white is a "loser," but they are losing in a game that has been rigged against them, not by the influx of immigrants, not by racial preferences, but by the rise of the global corporation and the triumph of capital. I am not the first, nor will I be that last to suggest that the "democratizing" institutions, particularly the unions, have all but disappeared. The republicans have never had much of an affinity with "democratizing" institutions, in part because they inevitably end up advocating the redistribution of capital away from the few toward the many. Economically it would make utter sense for the working class white to align with other disenfranchised group and advocate for such re-alignments, but in the end, identity trumps economy, pun intended. The democrats have lost their affinity with the working class "white" in part because they are, indeed, "culturally embarrassing." Weiseltier writes:
It was inevitable that we would not escape the political consequences of our economic dislocations, but those consequences now include the darkest forces of reaction. These downtrodden demand sympathy, and they deserve sympathy, but they do not give sympathy. They kindle, in the myopia of their pain, to racism and nativism and xenophobia and misogyny and homophobia and anti-Semitism.
As I have written elsewhere, Trump's campaign, and one suspects the campaigns for "leave" in Britain, are more about "identity politics" than "economics." Unlike a rational identity politics of the sort advocated by Stanley Fish, where racial and cultural identities are invoked to reveal systemic injustice -- the over-incarcertation of blacks, the under-payment of women -- Trump has tapped into a wholly irrational "identity politics." I will give Weiseltier the last word:
Liberals and socialists have been wondering for a hundred years why people in economic distress do not vote according to their economic interests. The answer should have been obvious long ago: People in adversity turn not to economics but to culture. They are fortified not by policy but by identity. They seek saviors, not programs. And as the direness of their circumstances appears to imperil their identity, they affirm it by asserting it ferociously against others. Hurt people hurt people. Against these hurt people, therefore, and against the profiteer of pain who shabbily champions them, it must be insisted that no amount of sympathy for their plight justifies the introduction of a version of fascism into American life. No grievance, however true, warrants the fouling of American politics by the bigotry and the brutishness peddled by Donald Trump. Either he wins or America does.
It was inevitable that we would not escape the political consequences of our economic dislocations, but those consequences now include the darkest forces of reaction. These downtrodden demand sympathy, and they deserve sympathy, but they do not give sympathy. They kindle, in the myopia of their pain, to racism and nativism and xenophobia and misogyny and homophobia and anti-Semitism.
As I have written elsewhere, Trump's campaign, and one suspects the campaigns for "leave" in Britain, are more about "identity politics" than "economics." Unlike a rational identity politics of the sort advocated by Stanley Fish, where racial and cultural identities are invoked to reveal systemic injustice -- the over-incarcertation of blacks, the under-payment of women -- Trump has tapped into a wholly irrational "identity politics." I will give Weiseltier the last word:
Liberals and socialists have been wondering for a hundred years why people in economic distress do not vote according to their economic interests. The answer should have been obvious long ago: People in adversity turn not to economics but to culture. They are fortified not by policy but by identity. They seek saviors, not programs. And as the direness of their circumstances appears to imperil their identity, they affirm it by asserting it ferociously against others. Hurt people hurt people. Against these hurt people, therefore, and against the profiteer of pain who shabbily champions them, it must be insisted that no amount of sympathy for their plight justifies the introduction of a version of fascism into American life. No grievance, however true, warrants the fouling of American politics by the bigotry and the brutishness peddled by Donald Trump. Either he wins or America does.
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