No matter how you slice it, one aim of the Right Wing Oligarchs who have funded the Conservative Movement and Republican Party in America for the last 50 years, was to destroy the power of Labor Unions thus re-exerting full control over America’s workers. Some astute observers like Thom Hartmann believe that this is an aim of the billionaire oligarchs intent on completely controlling our country. He writes: A 21st-Century Form of Indentured Servitude Has Already Penetrated Deep into the American Heartland, which is subtitled:
“Corporations want to make sure that laborers never again have the power to tell big business how to treat them.”
Before we get to Thom’s post let me provide some context by giving my own background of labor history in the United States.
Indentured Servitude in America was a system dating as far back as 1609, whereby employers would contract with young workers eager to improve their lives by coming to the 13 Colonies. A worker would be under contract for a specified period, fully under the employer’s control. They could be beaten as discipline, their contracts could be sold to third parties and were subject to further extension based on perceived violations. The only real difference between indenturedservitude and slavery was that the servitude was supposed end at future time, whereas slavery lasted for the slaves’ lifetime.
People living under the crushing aristocratic systems that existed in most countries of the 17th and 18th Centuries were relegated to a life of serving some aristocratic master. People worked dawn to dusk, eking out a subsistence life with no hope for the future. If you were a member of the Underclass, there was no pathway to a better life. This era, on the cusp of The Enlightenment, where the lives of most people were brutal, short and hopeless was an era of pillaging imperialism. In all the areas of the planet where people were unable to defend themselves from soldiers of the various empires, colonies of exploitation were established, peopled by those seeking their fortunes or their freedom. This was true of the 13 colonies of America. However, as in colonial outposts elsewhere, the relationship between colony and the colonizing nation we highly exploitative. The problem with establishing an ongoing colony in the Americas was that initially there weren’t enough people to produce enough of the products desired by the English overlords. Slavery was of course one answer, but before the Slave trade could produce enough human chattel to produce the necessities of trade. In 1609 the first indentured servants began to arrive in America and after that their numbers rapidly expanded. Those indentured servants who survived servitude were able to prosper to some extent and I suppose were happy with the bargain they made. They of course had White Skin and though thought of initially as “low class” many were able to thrive and prosper. Because of skin color this was never the case for the African Slaves, who despite the bloody Civil War, are to this day still fighting for an equal chance in life. This provides background for a dire trend being accelerated in the Age of Trump, our traitor President
No matter how you slice it, one aim of the Right Wing Oligarchs who have funded the Conservative Movement and Republican Party in America for the last 50 years, was to destroy the power of LaborUnions, thus re-exerting their full control over the lives of America‘s salaried people. Prior to the Civil War, the relationship between employer and employee in America was fairly stable with the employer maintaining the upper hand and aided in doing so by the authority of all levels of government. After that War had killed about 620,000 men, mostly youths, the burgeoning American industrial revolution found it needed millions of entry level workers. Also, despite the Emancipation Proclamation, the vast majority of Americans still considered people of color sub-human and didn’t want to employ them in anything but the most menial and least remunerative jobs. The solution to feed the industrial revolution was to open up immigration, most especially of White Europeans. Millions of immigrants flowed into the United States and were employed in our factories and our farms. In truth these immigrants were also considered to be a low-class lot, lacking intellectual capacity and socially inferior. Throughout the years though, each wave of White European immigrants more or less began to thrive, prosper and begin a slow rise to social status.
What also came with the immigrant hordes was the notion of a Labor Movement, with Labor Unions replacing the individual negotiations between employer and employee. The history of the labor movement in the United States was long and bloody, with an oligarch run government on the side of Wealth, using Law Enforcement Officers and Troops to suppress efforts to unionize and to negotiate better working conditions. The attitudes of the oligarch employers was that each employee should “negotiate” their own terms of employment and that banding together into the hated “Unions” represented an illegal usurpation of the employer’s rights. For the most part this view was empowered at all levels of American government. The employer’s paternalistic attitude was that they were the ones who could best care for their workers.
The Great Depression of 1929, dispelled any myths about the paternalism of employers and left many millions unemployed and desperate. FDR’s New Deal changed all of that by recognizing the legal status of labor unions and passing laws protecting worker’s rights, particularly their right to organize into unions. While in effect saving American Capitalism from its’ own excesses and probably saving the country from a revolution that likely would have turned Fascist, or Communist, Roosevelt and his New Deal gained the hatred of many of America’s industrial barons.
I’ve long been cognizant of the fact that starting more than 60 years ago American Oligarchs of the far right variety began to range a war against the programs of the New Deal and my thoughts can be accessed by typing those two words into the search function above. This is a war that continues today and with the Republican control of the 3 branches of government might actually be won by the oligarchs. I am far from original, or unique in this view and a recent article from Alternet articulates much of what I believe. Excerpts from: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan to Hijack American Democracy A Q&A with author Nancy MacLean about the elusive James McGill Buchanan by Kristin Miller / BillMoyers.com
“Author Nancy MacLean has unearthed a stealth ideologue of the American right. Her book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, tells the story of one James McGill Buchanan, a Southern political scientist and father of “public choice economics.” MacLean details how this little-known figure has had a massive impact on the ideology of the far right. None other than Charles Koch looked to Buchanan’s theories for inspiration. They are libertarian — but with a twist: bluntly, it “entails restrictions on the freedom of the great majority in order to protect property rights and the prerogatives of the most well off.” MacLean shows how this idea can be traced down through the last 60 years of right-wing politics, starting with Brown v. The Board of Education and continuing with the Koch brothers’ empire. And she demonstrates that those followers and those in thrall to the Koch billions are pumping up their fight under the new administration.”………………
“It’s kind of like the revolutionaries of the left, the Bolsheviks and all the groups they wrought. So there are various differentiations among them, but for the people who are the core ideologues of libertarianism and the core architects in building this movement, there are certain common views and what I’m describing is one of them, the notion that property rights are the crucial human right and that they are central to liberty and that liberty includes the ability of individuals to veto what a democracy comes up with.”………
The above gives you the drift of where the article is going. Please read the entire article to see its’ full implications and cast of characters, like the Koch Bros. and our illegitimate President. The point is that there is a movement to dis-empower the overwhelming majority of the American people and create an Aristocracy of Wealth.
Returning to the Thom Hartmann article linked at the beginning, a primary part of this plan to do away with any form of Democracy in our country has been to re-introduce an updated form of indentured servitude upon American workers. Thom Hartmann writes:
“Indentured servitude is back in a big way in the United States, and conservative corporatists want to make sure that labor never, ever again has the power to tell big business how to treat them.
Idaho, for example, recently passed a law that recognizes and rigorously enforces non-compete agreements in employment contracts, which means that if you want to move to a different, more highly paid, or better job, you can instead get wiped out financially by lawsuits and legal costs.
In a way, conservative/corporatists are just completing the circle back to the founding of this country.”……………………………
Thom talks about the history of indentured servitude:
“It was, at least philosophically, the logical extension of the feudal economic and political system that had ruled Europe for over 1,000 years. The rich have all the rights and own all the property; the serfs are purely exploitable free labor who could be disposed of (indentured servants, like slaves, were commonly whipped, hanged, imprisoned, or killed when they rebelled or were not sufficiently obedient).
This type of labor system has been the dream of conservative/corporatists, particularly since the “Reagan Revolution” kicked off a major federal war on the right of workers to organize for their own protection from corporate abuse.
Unions represented almost a third of American workers when Reagan came into office (and, since union jobs set local labor standards, for every union job there was typically an identically-compensated non-union job, meaning about two-thirds of America had the benefits and pay associated with union jobs pre-Reagan).
Thanks to Reagan’s war on labor, today unions represent about 6 percent of the non-government workforce.
But that wasn’t enough for the acolytes of Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman. They didn’t just want workers to lose their right to collectively bargain; they wanted employers to functionally own their employees.”
Hartmann goes into specifics illustrating how the use of non compete clauses, in contracts forced upon workers as a condition of employment, renders them unable to quit their jobs. After discussing the issues of how and why the improvements to workers wages and benefits upset the oligarchs, he looks at the current desires of those oligarchs who are bankrolling this movement to dis-empower the people:
“And now the conservatives/corporatists are going in for the kill, for their top goal: the final destruction of any remnant of labor rights in America.
Why would they do this? Two reasons: An impoverished citizenry is a politically impotent citizenry, and in the process of destroying the former middle class, the 1 percent make themselves trillions of dollars richer.”…..
“Historically, indentured servants had their food, health care, housing, and clothing provided to them by their “employers.” Today’s new serfs can hardly afford these basics of life, and when you add in modern necessities like transportation, education and child-care, the American labor landscape is looking more and more like old-fashioned servitude.
Nonetheless, conservatives/corporatists in Congress and state-houses across the nation are working hard to hold down minimum wages. Missouri’s Republican legislature just made it illegal for St. Louis to raise their minimum wage to $10/hour, throwing workers back down to $7.70. More preemption laws like this are on the books or on their way.
At the same time, these conservatives/corporatists are working to roll back health care protections for Americans, roll back environmental protections that keep us and our children from being poisoned, and even roll back simple workplace, food and toy safety standards.
The only way these predators will be stopped is by massive political action leading to the rollback of Reaganism/neoliberalism.
And the conservatives/corporatists who largely own the Republican Party know it, which is why they’re purging voting lists, fighting to keep in place easily hacked voting machines, and throwing billions of dollars into think tanks, right-wing radio, TV, and online media.
If they succeed, America will revert to a very old form of economy and politics: the one described so well in Charles Dickens’ books when Britain had “maximum wage laws” and “Poor Laws” to prevent a strong and politically active middle class from emerging.
Conservatives/corporatists know well that this type of neo-feudalism is actually a very stable political and economic system, and one that’s hard to challenge. China has put it into place in large part, and other countries from Turkey to the Philippines to Brazil and Venezuela are falling under the thrall of the merger of corporate and state power.
So many of our individual rights have been stripped from us, so much of America’s middle-class progress in the last century has been torn from us, while conservatives wage a brutal and oppressive war on dissenters and people of color under the rubrics of “security,” “tough on crime,” and the “war on drugs.””
Please follow the link above to read the entire article and see the full argument and proof for its conclusions. As we gather together to massively RESIST this corrupt human being and his oligarch administration, we must be cognizant of the history of that which we RESIST and the aims of the oligarchs that we must oppose. We are in a pitched battle for the soul of OUR, not their, country, as the financiers behind Trump are working to make our country resemble the oligarchies of Russia and China.
Two days ago Donald Trump, Jr., the dim bulb son of a feckless father, admitted that during the 2016 Campaign that he had gone to a meeting with a Russian National, who supposedly had damning information about Hillary Clinton, supplied by the Russian Government to aid the Trump campaign. He was accompanied by Paul Manafort, the Trump Campaign Chairman and Jared Kushner, the Trump Campaign’s Senior Advisor. Just two hours ago little Donnie tweeted:
“Media & Dems are extremely invested in the Russia story. If this nonsense meeting is all they have after a yr, I understand the desperation!”
That Junior is unable to understand why there are serious implications about this meeting that begin at impropriety and end at treasonous criminality, is a factor of his own clueless mentality, accompanied by a long Republican history of treasonous Presidential Campaign activity. Republican apologists have been quite active in these past few days pretending that this meeting is nothing out of the ordinary and that “Librul” partisans are merely taking out their frustrations because they lost the election.
Let’s be clear though, official Campaign staff meeting with an agent of a foreign (hostile) government intent upon influencing an American Presidential election is treasonous behavior. The entire edifice of America’s claim to be an “exceptional” nation due to its’ Constitution and Democratic election process, is undermined if foreign entities are given free reign to interfere with and influence our election process. While Trump supporters and Republican politicians act as if there is nothing wrong with that “foreign influence”, the simple fact is that electoral influence ALWAYS goes hand in hand with a quid pro quo. Only someone in a stupor, or in denial, would see the change demanded in the 2016 Republican Platform on the Ukraine as having nothing to do with paying off the Russians for their assistance. Republicans adopted pro-Russia stance on Ukraine as Trump officials met with Russian ambassador.
This of course wasn’t the only evidence of a quid pro quo with the Russians, as it seems our incompetent, yet malignant President has continually bent over backwards to heap praise upon the Russian Republic and the murderous Dictator who leads it. This servile pandering to a foreign Despot, intent on making his kleptocracy a World Power, is at its’ most positive interpretation dangerous to our nation, but in its’ most realistic interpretation, treasonous behavior by our President, by those who serve him and by the Congressional Republicans trying to provide him justification. What seems to go missing in almost all the media reports of this treasonous behavior is providing the context that this is not the first time this has occurred in the annals of Republicans working to attain the Presidency and on two momentous occasions they achieved their goal..
The Presidential Election of 1968 was among the most turbulent in American history, because of the widespread and militant opposition to the Vietnam War. Lyndon B. Johnson had won the Presidency in a landslide over ultra-Conservative Barry Goldwater and pushed through the 1964 Voting Rights Act, causing great displeasure in the still officially segregated Southern States. LBJ’s escalation in Vietnam added to his nationwide unpopularity, as the Anti-War Movement burgeoned in numbers and in activity. Ever the consummate politician Johnson recognized that his re-election was in peril and decided not to run, but to devote all his efforts to attaining Peace in Vietnam, thus burnishing his Presidential legacy. The mechanism for this Peace effort was the Paris Peace Talks which brought together all parties in the conflict in order to reach an accord. LBJ forced the South Vietnamese government to the table in Paris by dint of the fact that the U.S. had been propping up this corrupt and unpopular government for years. Substantial progress towards ending the conflict was being made and that caused Republican Presidential candidate Richard Nixon to fear electoral defeat. He and his campaign dispatched Henry Kissinger, who was already playing a semi-official diplomatic role, to meet with South Vietnamese Government officials. The message from Nixon was to hold out making any agreement until his election, at which time he would get them a much more favorable deal. The South Vietnamese agreed, the talks were stalemated and Nixon was elected and immediately violently escalated the war. The result was 6 more years of devastating warfare, the loss of hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian lives, the death of tens of thousands of American troops and the maiming of tens of thousands of their fellows. This devastating treason by Nixon and his cohorts became a mere footnote to the Watergate Scandal, which caused his resignation. The details of Watergate actually paled when compared to the deaths and destruction caused by interfering in the peace talks, which was outright treason.
Where ” Fifty-two American diplomats and citizens were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981 after a group of Iranian students belonging to the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line, who supported the Iranian Revolution, took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.[3] It stands as the longest hostage crisis in recorded history.”
Members of the team of Ronald Reagan, the Ultra Conservative Republican Candidate, including George H.W. Bush and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, met in secret with representatives of the Iranian rebels to promise them arms and a more favorable deal to conclude the standoff. Carter, the beleaguered incumbent, unsuccessful in ending the crisis, lost to Reagan and in a startling display of Non-Coincidence, the 51 hostages were released on the day of Reagan’s Inauguration. The seamy details of this treasonous behavior trickled years later in theIran-Contra Affair and while some went to jail, the lasting damage of electing a President through treason with a foreign entity was never healed.
It seems the history of treasonous behavior by Republican Partisans, represents a paradigm of their Party going back at least almost 50 years. That our illegitimate President was unaware of this treasonous activity on his behalf seems highly unlikely, given how he has spent so much time in the past year extolling the virtues of the Russian Republic and its’ Dictator Vladimir Putin. The most important question now is will the Republican Party in power, which glorifies in proffering its‘ patriotism, act against this treasonous behavior and the ongoing Presidential quid pro quo?
One dominant theme of American politics, often its’ most dominant theme is racism. This is particularly true as it applies to those Americans we call “Black“, an appellation which itself reflects a bigoted pseudo-science Eugenics. The history of our America, rising to its’ position of economic and military world dominance, owes much of its’ success to the cruel enslavement of African people and its’ genocidal destruction of Native Americans. This is a fact so obvious and true that I won’t reprise the arguments for its’ truth that I made in more than 100 posts I’ve written and made available at this Link. For the dominant White European culture in America, it has been hard for many to acknowledge the truth that theircountry was created through the work, upon the backs and with the genocideof those we viciously abused to sustain our White Privilege. The 2016 Election, that gave us a despicable con man as President was primarily due to the racism so few Americans are willing to openly acknowledge. While many pretend that Trump’s nomination and election were due to other less sensitive factors, like the economic insecurity of White Blue Collar workers, the election was won because of the candidates’ racism conflated with his religious bigotry.
Although the Trump candidacy was presented as an anomaly by much of the main stream media and Republican stalwarts, the truth was that Trump was the inevitable result of a conscious decision of the Republican Party to capture the Southern States from the electoral hold of the Democratic Party. The Republican Party, Party of the “Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln, far from being the “principled purveyor of Conservative philosophy” has become since Richard Nixon’s election, the party of racism and its’ doppelganger xenophobia. The emphasis must be put on racism though, because the Nixon “Southern Strategy” that won the South for the Republicans for five decades up to now, was covertly, yet overtly racist.
Now “Ronald Reagan, The Gipper believed that conservatism was a three-legged stool, consisting of religious conservatives, national security conservatives, and economic/libertarian conservatives. For Reagan, each one of these legs was integral.” Here.
What Reagan’s “conservative belief” was really, according to one of his speech-writer’s, “putting lipstick on a pig” (using a “Palin-ism”), to disguise the truth that the Republican Party is the party of racism. The base of the Republican Party are the inheritors of the old southern racist traditions, hidden under a plethora of code words used to dissimulate, a patina of conservative “respectability,” to add philosophical pseudo-gravitas and a deconstruction of Christian mythos presenting Jesus as a capitalist entrepreneur. Ronnie Reagan presented himself as a devout Christian, while never bothering to go to church and was idolized by evangelicals for seeming to speak their language. Reagan was devoutly militaristic, yet had spent World War II comfortably making military propaganda shorts, while fellow Hollywood stars served in harm’s way. Reagan was a one-time union President who sold out many of his members by becoming an FBI informant rooting out communists. Reagan, was an intellectually shallow man, whose core “philosophical” beliefs were expressed in “the speech” known as “A Time for Choosing”, which he probably crafted with the help of GE(General Electric)’s public relations department.
“On October 27, a week before the [1964] election, the Goldwater campaign ran a national telecast of an address called “A Time for Choosing” that Reagan made on Goldwater’s behalf. If the pundits had been blessed with a crystal ball, they would have ignored Goldwater’s defeat and studied every syllable of that speech, every camera angle, every facial expression. For The Speech is one of those uncanny cultural artifacts that contains within it not just words, gestures, and ideas, but a future.
Reagan had been delivering The Speech, in various versions, for years—for General Electric. The company had hired him to do an unusual double job: to host its weekly TV show, General Electric Theater, and to tour the country making motivational speeches to its 250,000 employees. GE was no ordinary company. It carefully cultivated its image as a bastion of free enterprise and as a loyal corporate community. It saw its mission as selling not only lightbulbs and appliances but an entire way of life—one for which Reagan himself became an advertisement. GE fitted out his Pacific Palisades home with the latest electric gadgets— and also fitted Reagan out as a spokesman for its free market, anti-union, anti-Communist, anti-welfare creed. Reagan spread GE’s conservative gospel to the company’s employees, and also to community groups, Rotary Clubs, and schools across the country.
It was a perfect job for Reagan. Although he had been a union leader in Hollywood, from 1947 heading the Screen Actors Guild through the most fraught years of the cold war, he was by temperament and belief a company man. His bitter fight with unionists who he was convinced were Communists, trying to take over Hollywood on orders from Moscow, had led him to fear for his life and to work as an FBI informer. So Reagan tirelessly crisscrossed the country for GE, polishing his speech, convincing workers that they were part of a big, happy family, honing anti-government punch lines that would appeal to business leaders.” See here.
Perhaps the most telling nuance about where the Reagan team was coming from was in the fact that directly after his nomination at the Republican Convention for the Presidency in 1980, his campaign’s opening speech was given inPhiladelphia, Mississippi where 16 years before “was the scene of the murders of activists James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from Meridian, Mississippi; Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old Jewishanthropology student from New York; and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old Jewish CORE organizer and former social worker, also from New York. Their deaths demonstrated the risks that activists took to secure the constitutional rights of African Americans, but many more blacks than whites had been killed in the struggle.
Ku Klux Klan members (including Cecil Ray Price, the deputy sheriff of Neshoba County) released the three young men from jail, took them to an isolated spot, and killed them. They buried them in an earthen dam. It was some time after they disappeared before the bodies were discovered, as a result of an FBI investigation and national media attention.[5] The national outrage over their deaths helped procure support for Congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The murders and related conspiracy gave rise to the “Mississippi Burning” trial, United States v. Price.
The opening lines of Reagan’s speech that day were: “I believe in states’ rights … I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment.” Given the history of Philadelphia, Mississippi, given that this town was a backwater except for its infamy in those three murders, could there be any clearer statement of the racism and bigotry behind Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party that now embraces him as their guiding Saint?
So returning to the present, Trump ran a campaign with no specifics other than the demonization of Latino’s, support for the police via the murders of Black people and the promise of reprisals against Muslims both in the U.S. and overseas. This was the key to Trump’s success and that key had little to do with his Conservative ideological fervor, nor with his embrace of religious principles. Trump even received more evangelical votes in Indiana then did Ted Cruz, demonstrating that religious bigotry and Christian bigotry are inter-related.
What of those doyens of Republicanism who are currently eschewing Trump, by labeling him with the “not conservative” tagline? Their angst seem to me to be “Crocodile Tears”. Surely they don’t hate Trump because of bigotry, because if that were true, how can they explain the bigotry of the party they’ve supported all these years since Nixon. What these conveyors of conservative civility are really upset about is that Trump blows the cover off of the covert racism that has held their party together all these years and is the source of their strength in their “Red” States.
While Bill Clinton was hated and anathematized by Republicans, their leaders in Congress nevertheless worked with him behind the scenes to pass legislation. That most of that legislation represented Clinton’s forsaking Democratic Party principles, I’ve dealt with elsewhere. However, Republicans in Congress did work with Bill Clinton, yet they steadfastly refused to do so with Barack Obama. Anyone who believed that Barack Obama is politically much different from Bill Clinton hasn’t been paying attention. Purportedly the opposition to Obama was because Obama was alternately a dictator, a Nazi, a Communist, Muslim, or a native born Kenyan. The truth, which is so obvious is that Barack Obama is a Black man and as such from the Republican perspective, unfit to be President. While the nonsense of the “Birther” movement raged, the leadership of the GOP was loath to come to the defense of our President. When the “Tea Party” took the reins from the “birthers”, there was also a strange, strained silence from the Republican Establishment, as that faction played out the same vitriol against our Black President.
Now as the man who wrested the leadership of the “Birther” movement away from its founders, has achieved the Presidency, the bigoted hatred of our country’s first Black President moved clearly out of the shadows. It gave lie to the racist, bigoted Republican code words of the last 50 years and places the Republican’s squarely in the overt racist camp. A spate of recent articles about how racism was the key factor in Trump’s election was touched off by political science Professor Thomas Wood at the Washington Post in writing this piece: Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism, who concluded that “Racial attitudes made a bigger difference in electing Trump than authoritarianism.”
“The election was lost because low income/rural white voters who voted for Obama decided to vote for Trump. Ironically, racism played a big role in the flip even though almost everyone expected the opposite to happen (that without a black candidate, the Democrats would do better with the racists).”
The battle to be faced by those of us who are determined to RESIST Donald Trump and his Republican Party, will not be about economics per se, but about the racismthat still permeates this country after so many struggles to eradicate it. Once again we are again fighting for the “soul of OUR nation”. I wish I was more optimistic about how it will all turn out, but nevertheless I am committed to the struggle. Let us be perfectly clear though, the keystone of this struggle is about the racism of Trump and of his Republican Party.
Almost daily there is someone expressing in the Media the lament that the political atmosphere in America has become too partisan, too poisonous They will go on to say words to the effect of: with so much shouting at each other, no one hears the others’ viewpoint and nothing gets done. To me this represents The Blissful Ignorance of Bi-Partisan Pundits whose goal in life appears to be tamping down the anger that is rampant on the political scene and pretending as if there is nothing really wrong with people’s lives that can’t be solved by honest discourse.
I must admit whenever I see a talking head on TV, or read a columnist of bi-partisan mediocrity in print media, it makes me angry. The fact that my ire rages listening to someone counseling comity between people, would be funny, were it not for the America I am living in today. The anger afoot in America and from what I can glean in many of the world’s nations, reflects the fact that modern civilization, with all the comforts and conveniences that people like myself enjoy, is but a thin veneer upon the murderous rapaciousness that seems embedded in the human psyche.
Here is the problem as I see it. We humans remain animals, who have developed massive brainpower and mastered the use of a multiplicity of tools, that have allowed us mastery over other species. The “lizard brain” within us all, still sends us messages alerting our predatory instincts to take, fight or flee. Because of our enormous human brainpower, we have evolved mentally and built civilizations based upon cooperative efforts to improve our lives collectively and individually. A big part of that “improvement” has been protection from the dangers of other collectives of humans, who in essence want what we have. Though it takes a wide variety of forms and formats, this collective means of protection is what we call government.
Government exists to keep us safe, to make our polity prosperous and to ensure a continuance of our particular type of civilization. Government binds us together and establishes common purposes. It allows us to have a culture and a common moral compass. Besides our common protection Government oversees our commerce, assists in inculcating in us in how we should interact and sets standards of behavior controlled by levels of punishments for improper behavior. While these statements of mine should be self-evident it seems to me that many today are ignorant of what government is supposed to do and/or define it in self-serving terms. From that ignorance and competing definitions comes the anger and the discord abroad in our country.
As to the ignorance I allude to, we in America have been bombarded for more than 60 years with the notion that Government, particularly our Federal Government is our enemy. This notion of “government as the enemy” is the basis of the “Modern Conservative” Movement. While political conservatism has been a force on the American scene since our founding and was an important strain in imagining our Constitution, its’ modern iteration began in the 1950’s. The two men who gave birth to “Modern Conservatism” were the privileged Ivy Leaguers William A. Rusher and William F. Buckley.
The magazine they founded in the 1950’s, the National Review became both the manifesto and the bible of conservative thought in America. The NR used the Cold War fear of Russian Communism to label Liberalism as subversion. Coming in as their ally by the end of the decade was a group of extremely wealthy, Right Wing racists and anti-semites The John Birch Society, among whose founding members was Fred Koch scion of the Koch Brothers. The National Review,desiring to embed Conservatism into the American Mainstream of acceptable politics, publicly denounced the bigotry of the JBS. In reality though, the NR was also racist and anti-semitic, but couched their prejudice in the more elegant language of Buckley. The common thread among this new American Conservatism was a loathing for the impact and success of FDR’s “New Deal” which had dominated American politics since the 1930’s.
From the perspective of these most Patrician Americans and from the nouveau riche wannabe Patricians like Fred Koch, the “New Deal”, with its focus upon the majority of the people, had displaced them from their rightful positions of power and had unjustly taken too large a portion of their wealth and given it to undeserving people. The “New Deal” and the liberals who supported it filled them with hatred and loathing. Their problem was and remains today, how does one get the support of enough people to work against their own interests, by empowering those whose aim is to spread national largess and unlimited privilege upon one percent of the population, paid for by the remaining 99%? The first great success of this Modern Conservative Movement derived from its’ most monumental defeat.
In 1964 the burgeoning conservative movement of the Republican Party forced through the nomination of their national darling, Sen. Barry Goldwater, by running roughshod over the centrist Republicans of the Nelson Rockefeller wing of the party. While LBJ defeated Goldwater in a stupendous landslide by characterizing him as somewhat crazy, these Republican modern conservatives, gloried in their triumph of Party control. It marked the beginning of a national propaganda and public relations movement, bankrolled by the wealthiest and most radically conservative of our “upper classes”. This initiative was a four pronged strategy:
Define Liberalism as Anti-American
Re-define Government as the enemy of the people.
Support oppression of People of Color but never admitting it
With the tumult of the Civil Rights Movement, dovetailing with the Vietnam War and the emergence of a youth counterculture, the victory of Richard Nixon in 1968, fueled by his Southern Strategy of capturing Southern bigotry for the Republican Party, began the ascendance of modern conservatism in the Republican Party. The ascendance though was seen as a mixed blessing among this wing of the Party because Nixon was too liberal in the modern sense of today’s conservatism. This movement found their hero in Ronald Reagan and his election in 1980 completed their capture of the Republican Party.
The four pronged attack above, as fostered by among the wealthiest of America’s Billionaire oligarchs is to my mind the poison in politics today. The specific aims of this Movement are directly inimical to the best interests of 99% of the American people and this is political poison. When it comes to government, there will always be arguments about methodology and these arguments are a positive things that can lead to innovations and new ideas. These methodological arguments are the stuff of a political spectrum and are healthy for any society, providing they are not nihilistic calls for oppression or destruction. We’ve seen though in the election of a President with devotion only to his own needs and little regard for the Rule of Law, that a poison can spread through our country and may spiral out of the control of the elements that cohere our nation. After all, Germany in 1932 was a democratic State, among the most civilized and cultured on the planet and yet devolved into among the most disgustingly barbaric nations in history. How similar to the four tactics above, were the poisonous policies of the NAZI Party?
A fair question to ask about me is “Who the Hell Am I for my views to be trusted by anyone when I state that Donald Trump is a ‘Hitler“ in the making?” While I could justify myself by presenting my curriculum vitae, such proffers have little meaning when you consider that George W. Bush was Governor of Texas and had degrees from Harvard and Yale. The only way for you to even give a little credence to my political judgment, is if you can see some indication that I’ve shown some insight over time. The following links will give you the many posts I’ve written on the subject of the similarities between Trump and HitlerHereand Also Here. Many though would dismiss my Trump=Hitler comparisons because of a popular meme that is known as:
“Godwin’s Law” which is: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches , that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitleror Nazism.
That spurious “Law” has had such a reach that its’ connotations have kept many a commentator, or pundit from invoking a Trump=Hitler comparison for fear of ridicule. We even have this Huffpost article by a Jason Crotty from February 2016 criticizing anyone who would make the Trump=Hitler comparison: Comparing Trump to Hitler Is Worst Kind of Hate Speech I wonder how proud Mr. Crotty is of his article now? I see this refusal to acknowledge what is actually happening as a problem since every day, to my mind at least, our country is moving towards Fascism and that movement is specifically because we have a Trump Presidency. More than a year ago, way before Trump even received the Republican nomination, I wrote this piece on the speciousness of “Godwin’s Law”and the dangers of Donald Trump. Perhaps it might add to my credibility in tandem with the fact that we have so many more examples of where the Trump Administration is heading.
There is a problem with the oft-quoted “Godwin’s Law” which is: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches , that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism.
The problem as I see it is that this meme has become merely another way of terming someone, or something, “politically correct”, thereby untrustworthy, or insincere. You will note that Donald Trump constantly uses the PC formulation as an explanation of his bombast and proudly asserts that he is not “politically correct”. Used in the wrong way the expression PC serves as a cover for all manner of bigotry and racial stereotyping. It serves as a rhetorical “get out of jail free” card for those engaging in bigoted bloviation and in that respect is there a more famous bigoted bloviator at the moment than Donald Trump? Back to Mike Godwin though: “Godwin has stated that he introduced Godwin’s law in 1990 as an experiment in memetics. Godwin’s law does not claim to articulate a fallacy; it is instead framed as a memetic tool to reduce the incidence of inappropriate hyperbolic comparisons. “Although deliberately framed as if it were a law of nature or of mathematics, its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about the Holocaust“, Godwin has written. In December 2015, Godwin cited several articles on Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump for their Nazi and Fascist comparisons.”
Notice the last sentence though where Mr. Godwin asserts that comparisons of Trump to NAZI’s, or Fascists are hyperbole. For those who weren’t aware, Godwin is an important cog in the wheel of the “R Street Institute”,which “is an American conservative and libertarianthink tank headquartered Washington, D.C..” Godwin’s Law is but another version of clever usage by Republican/Conservatives of PC, as a way to deflect the fact that since the inception of Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968, the GOP has been the “Grand Old Party of Racism and Bigotry”. Well I am about to cross the line of Mr. Godwin’s phony law and show that Donald Trump is indeed aptly compared to the rise of Nazism in Germany and let me begin with the first New York Times article on that young, rising German politician Adolph Hitler.
If you follow this link you will come upon this article from the NY Times from November 21, 1922 titled: “New Popular Idol Rises in Bavaria” subtitled: “Hitler credited with extraordinary powers of swaying crowds to his will”. Since the article is in PDF format I can’t directly copy its words, but I can paraphrase them and you can go to the original to see if my paraphrasing is accurate. The meat of the article comes towards its climax, when while admitting that Hitler’s anti-semitism is virulent and violent, then goes on to say that ” several reliable, informed sources” tell the writer that Hitler’s anti-antisemitism was not as it seemed, but merely was being used as clever “bait” to catch masses of followers with a simplistic message, because the masses are simplistic people. It also quotes a “sophisticated politician” who credits Hitler with “political cleverness for laying emphasis and over emphasis on Anti-Semitism, because you can’t expect the masses to appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-semitism. It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you are really leading them”. The upshot is that Hitler was really a German Nationalist who sought to rebuild his country and make sure it regained its rightful place in the world.
Trump made headlines at the beginning of his campaign when he decried Latino immigration to the U.S. and characterized Mexican “illegals” as murderers, thieves and rapists of White woman. Trump then opined that we should not allow anyone of Islamic faith to visit the U.S. and further made the implication that we should look closely at any of our citizens who followed Islam. His rhetoric also was that of an American Nationalist, who was going to make our country great again and yes there were some who opined that Trump was merely using the anti-immigrant rhetoric as a means of rousing the base, when his real message was one of strengthening our country. Though Hitler and Trump came from far different backgrounds, their verbal crudity of speech, their use of stereotyping scapegoats and their messages of jingoistic nationalism seem frighteningly similar. Let’s look at some more examples, but first let’s understand how Trumps’ rise is directly attributable to our Mainstream Media making money on his controversial campaign.
Let’s look at the opinion of Leslie Moonvesthe Chairman and CEO of the CBS Television Network: “Leslie Moonves can appreciate a Donald Trump candidacy. Not that the CBS executive chairman and CEO might vote for the Republican presidential frontrunner, but he likes the ad money Trump and his competitors are bringing to the network.
“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” he said of the presidential race.
Moonves called the campaign for president a “circus” full of “bomb throwing,” and he hopes it continues.
“Most of the ads are not about issues. They’re sort of like the debates,” he said.
“Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? … The money’s rolling in and this is fun,” he said.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going,” said Moonves. “Donald’s place in this election is a good thing,” he said Monday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco. “There’s a lot of money in the marketplace,” the exec said of political advertising so far this presidential season.”
In the past, when it was a respected news outlet, CBS News was independent of the scrutiny of CBS Entertainment executives. It’s journalistic stars were of the likes of Edward R. Murrow, who had the courage to take on and bring down Senator Joseph McCarthy. During the Vietnam era, CBS’ Editor in Chief and Nightly News anchor, Walter Cronkite, had the courage to take on the President and present a true picture of the failure that was the Vietnam War. True Journalism no longer exists at the Major TV news sources, who all are making huge profits from the Trump Circus, because of greedy, cynical men like Les Moonves, who are overseeing network news. Moonves could care less about the fate of America, because he and his bosses are quite wealthy and feel they’re above the masses of Americans. In the end he is merely another “hollow man”, willing to make a buck without thought for the consequences of his actions. He and his cohort of top TV network executives, bear direct responsibility for the rise of American Fascist, Donald Trump. Am I violating the benighted Mr. Godwin’s “Law” yet?
At Salon.com chauncey DeVega writes:“Donald Trump is the preferred candidate of white supremacists. Online and in other spaces, they have anointed him their champion in the 2016 presidential race. When asked about this on CNN, Donald Trump deflected, bobbed, weaved and dissembled: “Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?” Trump said. Trump was pressed three times on whether he’d distance himself from the Ku Klux Klan — but never mentioned the group in his answers.“I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists,” he said. “So I don’t know. I don’t know — did he endorse me, or what’s going on? Because I know nothing about David Duke; I know nothing about white supremacists…” Despite what he said Sunday, Trump apparently did know Duke in 2000 — citing him, as well as Pat Buchanan and Lenora Fulani — in a statement that year explaining why he had decided to end his brief flirtation with a Reform Party presidential campaign. “The Reform Party now includes a Klansman, Mr. Duke, a neo-Nazi, Mr. Buchanan, and a communist, Ms. Fulani. This is not company I wish to keep,” Trump said in a statement reported then by The New York Times. …After his appearance on “State of the Union,” Trump highlighted that Friday comment in a tweet, saying he does disavow Duke.”
DeVega goes on: “The facts are not always kind. In reality, the relationship between the Republican Party and white supremacy–and yes, the Ku Klux Klan–is much deeper and more problematic than the comments by .. other Republicans would suggest.” DeVega goes on to explain his meaning and states: “The post-civil rights era Republican Party is the United States’ largest white identity organization, one in which conservatism and racism are now one and the same thing.”
“In the 2012 election, 89 percent of Republican voters were white. While the Republican Party routinely anoints a professional “best black friend” (Herman Cain in 2012; Ben Carson in 2016; Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele in 2009) who serves in the role as human chaff to deflect charges of racism, non-whites are a minuscule part of the GOP’s electoral coalition and base. This is reflected by how Republican voters are much more likely to be racially resentful toward black Americans and also manifest what is known as “modern” or “symbolic racism.”
Even more troubling, research by Brown University political scientist Michael Tesler demonstrates that “old-fashioned racism” has actually increased among Republican voters since the election of Barack Obama. Once thought to be a relative non-factor in contemporary politics, this, the more primitive and retrograde racism of Jim and Jane Crow America, is now such a potent force that it is directly correlated with party identification: individuals who are “old-fashioned racists” are more likely to support the Republican Party.
Since the end of the African-American civil rights movement, the electoral strategy of the Republican Party has relied on the use of racially coded appeals and “dog whistle” politics to win over white voters. This tactic — what would come to be known as the “Southern Strategy” — was outlined by Lee Atwater, mentor to Karl Rove, as:”
Lee Atwater’s Strategy:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.”
“Atwater’s approach for mobilizing white American voters has dominated Republican electoral strategy for at least four decades. It was the basis for Ronald Reagan’s “law and order” and black “welfare queen” narratives. George H.W. Bush summoned it with his Willie Horton, “black beast criminal rapist” campaign ad in 1988. The Southern Strategy was desperately deployed against the United States’ first black president, Barack Obama. From “birtherism” to claims that Obama is “traitor” who “hates Americans,” the rampant disrespect and obstructionism that Republicans have shown toward him, as well as the panoply of both overt and subtle racist attacks by conservatives against Obama’s person (and family) are all outgrowths of the Southern Strategy.
The Southern Strategy, with its mix of coded and overt anti-black and brown racism, is also a script that is closely adhered to by the broader right-wing news entertainment propaganda machine.
The Age of Obama also gave rise to the Tea Party movement. As an extreme wing within an already extremist and revanchist Republican Party, Tea Party members and their sympathizers were/are extremely hostile to Barack Obama and the symbolic power of a black man leading “their” White America. The Tea Party demand that “they want their country back” is both a direct claim of white privilege and constitutes a worldview where whiteness is taken to be synonymous with being a “real American.”
White supremacists quickly identified the Tea Party‘s agenda as congruous with their goals and values. To that end, they attempted to infiltrate and recruit members at Tea Party events.”
Researchers have also found that Tea Party membership and activity was a “racializing” experience for white people, which encouraged them to think in terms of white group interests. In all, the Tea Party and other right-wing organizations are ripe territory for converting white conservatives from being “modern racists” to a more “old-fashioned” type of racism and white supremacy.
Policies and outcomes are also an invaluable barometer for assessing the relationship between the Republican Party, racism and white supremacy. The modern Republican Party has consistently opposed civil rights protections for African-Americans and other people of color. The Republican Party in the Age of Obama has also undermined the won in blood and lives victories of the black freedom struggle and civil rights movement by gutting the Voting Rights Act and allowing states to put in place programs that deter civic participation by African-Americans, young people, the elderly and the poor. Many of the public policy goals advocated for (and advanced) by the contemporary Republican Party are racist and white supremacist both in terms of their disparate impact across the color line, as well as the malicious intent behind them.
One of the most fascinating stories in American political history is how the Republican Party, once the home of the “Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln, was able to “flip” the states of the former slaveholding Confederacy to their side. The Southern Strategy, hostility to African-Americans and the civil rights movement, a sophisticated right-wing media campaign, generational replacement, Christian Evangelicals and their investment in the Jim Crow order, abortion and “values voting” are all part of that story.
While little known, the relationship between the Ku Klux Klan and increasing support among white Southern voters for the Republican Party is also a critically important part of how the Republican Party won over the former Confederacy.”
Given this accurate history of the Republican Party dominating the South and becoming in fact the “White People’s Party”, I look in bemusement at all of the calls to “Stop Trump,” by his, primary opponents and by the Grandees of Republicanism. Why are they so upset with him and why do they view him as a danger, if in fact he is preaching to the same choir of White Christian America that they have preached to for the last forty years? The answer goes back to the Atwater strategy of subtly using a racist message, while doing it in coded terms, so that there was the patina of deniability of bigotry. At the same time of course, the coded message to the racists of White America came through loud and clear. Now it is also true that since the election of Barack Obama the racism of his opposition has become far more strident and far less subtle. That stridency and lack of subtlety, however, was fended off by charges of political correctness and its corollary Mike Godwin’s Law.
Trump has upset the apple-cart of the subtle racism that has provided the Republican Party with its’ power base since Richard Nixon’s election. He has in his wake energized the most disreputable elements of American Conservatism such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Supremacist Movement. Trump has brought into the open naked hatred for Muslims, Latino’s and even now is also looking to demonize all people of color. Jews are even leaking into Donald’s targets and Jews are definitely targets of many Trump supporters. He has become a quintessential Fascist in the making and his technique is directly akin to the same messaging technique that Adolph Hitler used in his rise to power. If you think, as someone like Mike Godwin might think, that I’m being hyperbolic, let’s look at some of the evidence below.
“Billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump often speaks as though he’d gladly punch a journalist if he could get away with it. And hell, maybe he could — in the eyes of his supporters, at least.
With much of Trump’s campaign revolving around his near-constant demonization of reporters, restrictions on the media and appeals to callous authoritarianism, perhaps this response shouldn’t be surprising. But it reflects an environment in which people feel comfortable saying it’s OK to use physical violence — and perhaps even violate someone’s rights — to put those who would challenge authority in their place.”
“Last week, voters across Vermont and Minnesota received robocalls from the white nationalist William Johnson, who has founded the American National Super PAC to support Donald Trump. “The white race is dying out in America and Europe because we are afraid to be called racist,” Johnson said on the calls. “This is our mindset … It’s OK to give away our country for immigration, but don’t call me a racist. It’s OK that few schools anymore have beautiful white children as a majority, but don’t call me racist.” Others fear the taint of racism, Johnson said, but Trump does not. “Don’t vote for a Cuban, vote for Donald Trump,” his message concluded. He gave a phone number that listeners could call for more information.
Johnson is the chairman of the white supremacist American Freedom Party; according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, it was founded by a group of racist California skinheads in 2009. He has called for the deportation of Americans with any “ascertainable trace of Negro blood” or more than one-eighth “Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay or other non-European or non-white blood.” When he is not working toward creating what he calls “separate white ethno-states,” Johnson farms and practices corporate law in Southern California.”
“Donald Trump’s campaign is denying having told the Secret Service to remove 30 black students from a Monday rally they were attempting to attend quietly and peacefully, but Secret Service agents say they kicked out the students at Trump’s request. Either way, it’s disgusting: The sight of the students, who were visibly upset, being led outside by law enforcement officials created a stir at a university that was a whites-only campus until 1963.“We didn’t plan to do anything,” said a tearful Tahjila Davis, a 19-year-old mass media major, who was among the Valdosta State University students who was removed. “They said, ‘This is Trump’s property; it’s a private event.’ But I paid my tuition to be here.” […] “I don’t understand why they would do something like that,” Davis said. “I have not experienced any racism on this campus until now.”How’s that for a preview of President Trump’s America? He can bring new racism to a place that was whites-only until 1963.”
Edwards talked to the real estate mogul’s eldest son and campaign surrogate, Donald Trump, Jr., last Saturday for his “pro-white” radio show, “The Political Cesspool.” Previous guests on the show have included Neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and Ku Klux Klan leaders.
Edwards heralded the 20-minute interview in a blog post flagged by Little Green Footballs, that boasted about his access inside a Trump rally in Memphis, Tennessee, last Saturday, where Edwards was broadcasting his show live. He said Trump’s campaign gave Edwards and his co-hosts full press credentials and “VIP” parking near the event.
Edwards said he and his co-hosts have attended three different Trump rallies in recent months: One in Illinois, one in Arkansas, and the rally in Memphis. With press credentials from Trump, the white supremacists feel “every bit as legit” as members of the traditional media, he added.”
Those who’ve followed my writings know that I’m concerned with what I see as the “Authoritarian Personality” which I first wrote about in
The author Professor Bob Altemeyer has spent his career studying the “Authoritarian Personality” and how this mindset affects the voting patterns in America. The post supplies a link where you can download the Professors detailed book and this is why Bob Altemeyer thinks you should read it:
“But why should you even bother reading this book? I would offer three reasons. First, if you are concerned about what has happened in America since a radical right-wing segment of the population began taking control of the government about a dozen years ago, I think you’ll find a lot in this book that says your fears are well founded. As many have pointed out, the Republic is once again passing through perilous times. The concept of a constitutional democracy has been under attack–and by the American government no less!
The second reason I can offer for reading what follows is that it is not chock full of opinions, but experimental evidence.
The last reason why you might be interested in the hereafter is that you might want more than just facts about authoritarians, but understanding and insight into why they act the way they do. Which is often mind-boggling. How can they revere those who gave their lives defending freedom and then support moves to take that freedom away? How can they go on believing things that have been disproved over and over again, and disbelieve things that are well established? How can they think they are the best people in the world, when so much of what they do ought to show them they are not? Why do their leaders so often turn out to be crooks and hypocrites? Why are both the followers and the leaders so aggressive that hostility is practically their trademark?”
The book “The Authoritarians” was written more than 8 years ago and yet it seems even more relevant today as an explanation of why Donald Trump seems poised to become the Republican Presidential Candidate. While the Professor’s book was the first I’d read in terms of the study of the “Authoritarian Personality”, the academic study of authoritarianism has been a fertile field. My last link of the day is from a VOX piece titled: “The Rise of American Authoritarianism”. “the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.
This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which “activated” authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.
These Americans with authoritarian views, they found, were sorting into the GOP, driving polarization. But they were also creating a divide within the party, at first latent, between traditional Republican voters and this group whose views were simultaneously less orthodox and, often, more extreme.”
An argument can be made that Germany was among the most stable, innovative and well educated Country’s over the 19th and early 20th Century. While it was a homogeneous nation ethnically, it was a cosmopolitan nation as well. The tradition in Germany though was an authoritarian one of follow the leader, who in the 19th and early 20th Centuries was a King called The Kaiser. He with the assistance of a wealthy Military elite, led the country and the good Germans followed these leaders into a disastrous World War I debacle, that left the country struggling. Germany became a country torn by strife between its Left Wing and its Right Wing. As pointed out in that NY Times article from 1922, into that maelstrom of political strife there arose a leader that appealed to the Authoritarian Personality. That leader, Adolph Hitler, used the scapegoating of Jews and Leftists, to arouse the German people, inculcate them with fear and distrust of a minority and eventually become Germany’s Supreme Leader. The authoritarian personalities following him ultimately followed him to their own ruin, but not before they followed him to perpetrate one of the great crimes of recent history.
I’ve provided evidence that Donald Trump is a “Hitlerian” copycat in methodology. He behaves as a Fascist, is Fascistic in his approach use violence against those he disagrees with and shows a Fascist’s disregard for any laws other than the use of naked aggression. Although Trump is to the “manor born” he presents a thuggish personality that seems to awe and appeal to those following him. Mr. Godwin can blow smoke out of his rear end as much as he’d like, but in his small way he is complicit in the rise of this NAZI-like figure. This is ironic because Godwin is himself Jewish. Also complicit is the Republican Party Establishment, which has played so long on the edge of racism and misogyny that it has finally teetered into the abyss. God Damn them all for what they have unleashed upon this country.
The one personality trait that I have that has kept me alive and functioning for more than 72 years, is that I maintain an optimistic outlook, even when my world seems to be collapsing around me. This outlook by no means makes me unique, because it is actually among the most human of human characteristics. It is why the majority of humanity has gone on with their lives throughout the tumultuous and violently bloody history of our species. Since I think and write about politics almost all the time, with of course my admitted ”‘Left Wing” bias, these almost 100 days of the Trump Presidency have proven difficult for me. It isn’t the fact that we have radical Republicans controlling all three branches of the Federal Government and the majority of States that upsets me specifically. In the end, it isn’t even that our President is incompetent, unstable and decidedly working against the interests of most Americans, that is so hard to accept and move on from. What I find to be almost unbearable, is that since the murder of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the country I love has been on a downward slide towards authoritarian dystopia and I am not confident that it can be reversed.
The greatest advantage of being an old man, providing one does not let the mental sclerosis of fearing change prevail, is that having a long history of experience provides context for understanding that life is change. It may be hard for those who are not as old as I am, or without my political leanings, to understand how the brief Presidency of JFK was such a meaningful occurrence in people’s political lives. Let me encapsulate.
Despite the Right Wing biased history being vended by Conservative revisionists, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his ‘New Deal‘ saved America from becoming a Fascist Country, With the political philosophy and the progressive programs that FDR put in place, America was able to spearhead the defeat of the Fascist AXIS powers and become the pre-eminent nation on this planet. For thirty years the ‘New Deal‘ philosophy dominated American political life and more importantly the mindset of most Americans. However, FDR was despised by many members of his own stratified social class, who saw him as a ‘traitor‘ and a danger to their economic dominance of American society. Even as they were made even more wealthy by the money they extracted as profiteers from World War II, they seethed with hatred for what they perceived as the loss of their rightful prerogatives. They found advantage in demonizing, the rightfully demonized Soviet Union, because it allowed them to start a national witch-hunt to root out “left wingers” as Un-American. This wealthy elite helped to create a “cold war” which supplied them enormous profits, use of U.S. power to destabilize governments that found their business practices colonialist and most importantly for them demonize liberals for being soft on communism.
Their Communist Witch-huntwas used to fight against social changes in the 1950’s and tamped down the efforts of any who would question the social order. The most prominent exception to this was the Supreme Court, led by a Republican liberal Chief Justice and its’ many landmark rulings for social justice and intellectual freedom. The 1950’s, for the most part, however, represented a time of a dull status-quo where liberals were fearful of being seen as “too far” Left and conformity was the desired social norm. I was 16 years old when JFK was elected and his relative youth, along with the youthfulness of his Administration, was the promise of a future of exciting changes for me and my contemporaries. It also was an all to brief symbol of resurgent liberalism.
All the hopes we had for this charismatic man and for the future of our country that he promised, came crashing down on November 22, 1963, when we heard of his murder. In the aftermath of a bungled murder investigation, allegations of conspiracy and the ascendance of the lugubrious Lyndon B. Johnson all pall was cast upon the nation. I was 19 at the time, a sophomore in college and an orphan. My mother had died 15 months before the assassination and my Father barely 3 months before. My mourning for JFK no doubt was exacerbated by my mourning for my parents. Then came the Civil Rights Movement and then came Vietnam and those two momentous struggles exposed the rot at the heart of the American system. This was embodied in the belief that despite all evidence, the United States was a democratic society, that ran by the will of the people and promised equality for all. This rot had been somewhat ameliorated by the lingering of the ‘New Deal‘ philosophy and programs. Fortified by JFK’s death, the profits from an anti-communist war and the incipient but denied racist nature of our country, the elite oligarchs set into motion their long range plan to eradicate the “New Deal” and replace it with a “Conservative” philosophy that would free them to rape the country, its’ workers and its’ people at will.
One of the most effective tools utilized by those privileged few wishing to extend their “privilege” was to co-opt organized religion morphing it into an instrument for supporting a corporate-centric state. Life for most of us is confusing and frightening. Many of us humans seek solace in our religious belief and practice. If through money and power, various leaders of religion can be convinced, or bribed, to reinvent the terms of religious belief, while retaining the threat of eternal damnation, then somehow Jesus could become a staunch Republican and the Torah become the scripture of a Capitalist God.
The first great victory of this sub-rosa aristocracy of wealth, was the election of Richard Nixon, via a Southern Strategy imbued with coded racism. However, Nixon was surprisingly too liberal in his economic policies to satisfy this group that was primarily made up of members of the bigoted ultra-Right Wing John Birch Society. Ronald Reagan’s election marked the most important milestone in their coming triumph. What Reagan’s years provided, besides disintegration of the labor movement; higher taxes for the workers; a bloated Defense Department and the institution of a radically right wing Supreme Court; was to turn the word liberal into an anathema. So much so that even liberal politicians began to refuse to admit they were in fact liberal. The shallow Reagan Presidency, re-formed the Republican voters into fans for their party, electing labels rather than programs. By selling the country an unqualified and shallow man, who could look Presidential, the way was paved for other vastly unqualified Republicans like George W. Bush and now Trump.
All of this past history weighs heavily on my aged mind and make no mistake it is a history that has provided few victories for my side of this American political equation since the death of JFK. The plans of this Administration and the Republican extremists in Congress, are nothing less than to completely eradicate all vestiges of the “New Deal” in government; destroy the separation of church and state; diminish the citizenship rights of women, people of color and LBGT Americans; control people via the intimidation of police power; limit voting rights to ensure continuing Republican power; lower taxes for the wealthiest Americans and their corporations; and finally removal of all restraints and restrictions upon banks and big businesses. As I write on my laptop, it seems to me that these forces, of what I see as evil, have a very good chance of succeeding in their awful aims.
How then can I and you perhaps, maintain optimism in the face of continued losses against these forces of dystopia? Let me be clear when I state that I am finding it hard to do so personally. Yet what I have to comfort me and to cajole me away from these bitter and frightening musings of my mind, is that I am someone who in all probability was about to die more than six and one half years ago as my heart was about to give out. In January of 2010 my cardiologist told me that I had little chance of living much longer, unless I got aheart transplant. He referred me to a Heart Transplant hospital, which first saw me in March. Unbelievably, as these things go, I received a new heart in record time and obviously I am still here. In one month my oldest grandson will be Bar Mitzvah’ed and so there is much I have to live for and to experience. So that is why I maintain my optimism from a personal perspective, although I see that dire things are possible for our country.
Obviously, my own personal affairs mean little in the grand scheme of things, especially when this planet has literally billions of people being downtrodden and destroyed via the mechanisms of totalitarianism and greed. I am an old, fragile human who can do little to change the direction of a country an the cusp of dystopia, which if it occurs will sweep me and mine away. Yet, banal as some might see it, I am hopeful because improbably a Movement has begun which may not only beat back the forces of dystopia, but actually change the political direction of the Nation. It is a Movement of resistance, but even more importantly it is a Movement of education and most importantly of all a Movement for human social justice.
The fuel of this Resistance, if you will, is the widespread anger of how the powerful in this country and on this planet, are cruelly exploiting us all and seeking to crush us by widening the already huge gap between them and us. Anger can be effectively used to create optimism, for in the energy it provides, comes the belief that the seeming impossible can be achieved. Stupidly, those with so much wealth and power, have pushed our collective backs up against a wall and activated humanity‘s more important defense mechanism…..the will to survive. I derive optimism from my sense that finally there are multitudes on my side who will sustain their anger against those who would exploit and oppress us. Perhaps my optimism is in vain, but right now it is all I have got. Resist!
ElephantTail 
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