We
live in a time when the unthinkable is becoming routine. The September 11th
attacks and America’s responding torture program were both inconceivable, until
they happened. No one seemed to predict the 2008 market crash or the #OWS
movement that followed, and climate change provides us with
hundred-year-record-breaking weather every month. Not all of it is terrifying--
a two-term black president, the internet in everyone’s palm, and legal cannabis
in Colorado are all things I would have said were impossible twenty years ago.
Unfortunately, the latest unthinkable
thing to happen strikes many of us as deeply sinister: Donald Trump has become
the presumptive Republican nominee for president.
It is clear that hardly anyone in the political
establishment thought this was possible. Trump’s campaign has broken all the
rules. It was supposed to implode after his earliest outrageous statements
about immigrants, Muslims, and women, but that did not happen. Later, Trump’s
ambivalent reaction to the support of David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan was
supposed to mark his downfall, but it did not. The Trump campaign has refused
to follow the program of flip-flopping and gaffe-dodging. Standing by statements
that would have destroyed more traditional candidates has given Trump a veneer
of straight-talkin’-from-the-hip invincibility, and led his followers to
declare “He tells it like it is”, a statement even less grounded in reality
than Trump’s own campaign promises.
To understand why this is, it is important to take a
closer look at just how The Donald has managed success in defiance of all
apparent logic and expectation. As nice as it would be to believe, Donald Trump
is not just an incredibly lucky idiot. He and his campaign managers have shown
that they are in fact brilliant cynics.
One truth that both sides ought to grasp is that
Americans outside the top 1% (which is rapidly becoming most of them) are
completely fed up with the status quo. The 9/11 attacks dealt the first serious
blow to American optimism, but true disillusionment did not strike until
massively expensive wars and a spectacular market crash destroyed the two
things necessary to keep Americans happy: buying power and upward mobility. For
the last eight years, stagnant wages and sluggish job growth have forced more
and more of us deeper and deeper into debt just trying to cover our expenses, and
the looming specters of climate change and international terrorism threaten to
destroy everything we have managed not to sell off. Meanwhile, we have watched
as our leaders failed to prosecute any of the ’08 corporate criminals, went
back on their promises to bring our troops home, and fought tooth-and-nail to
keep us from attaining reasonable health coverage.
We are left with huge percentages of working-class
and middle-class people who are broke, frustrated, frightened, and angry about
consistently being locked out of the system of governance and ignored by the
people ostensibly elected to represent them. For all his pomposity and
egomania, Trump understands this--far better, I think, than Hillary Clinton
does. This is demonstrated by the Clinton campaign’s inability to shake off
Bernie Sanders, for Sanders’ momentum is representative of the liberal side of
the same exasperation with the establishment. Americans no longer believe they
are being given a straight deal or a fair shot, and as a longtime Washington
insider, Clinton is going to have to work very hard to convince voters that her
presidency would be anything else but business-as-usual.
Trump, on the other hand, has already had most of
the hearts-and-minds work done for him by Fox News and the rest of the
conservative media empire. Ever since Bush Jr. left office, Fox has been running
twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five pumping American households full of the idea
that our work is worth less and our future is uncertain because minorities,
immigrants, Muslims, homosexuals, and socialist slacker welfare recipients have
come to take it all away. Of course, the message is not presented so
simplistically, they’re clever about it, but the underlying implication of
conservative programming is that traditional white Christian America is under
siege, beleaguered by soulless, Anti-American forces masquerading as Democrats
and women who want abortion access.
I suspect Republican officials allowed and even
assisted all this because it seemed to galvanize their voter base and keep the
muddled debate away from the money-grubbing cronyism that has become central to
our political process. Their mistake was thinking that they could harness the
Devil of Our Lowest Instincts without letting him out of the cage. For years
now, Republican politicians have been delicately toeing up to the line, trying
to tap racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic sentiments for their own ends
without actually endorsing the viewpoint. What they didn’t realize is that they
were blue-balling a huge amount of middle-Americans, whipping up their prejudicial
sentiments into a frenzy without ever offering a release. After a while, that
kind of pent-up frustration demands a way to be vented, and along came Donald
Trump just in time to crank open the valve. Angry people all across America
found themselves thinking, “Finally! A man who ain’t afraid to just come out
and say that what we really need is a border wall and a ban on Muslims!”
So I have no sympathy for the Republican leaders
currently shitting their pants over the thought of a Trump nomination. As far
as I can see, they did it to themselves. After a decade of shouting through
their mouthpiece that scientific research is a liberal farce, they shouldn’t be
surprised that facts and lies have no effect on Trump one way or another. After
spending two administrations obstructing and shutting down the government
instead of running it, they shouldn’t be surprised that their constituents no
longer trust them. And after eight years of shrilly declaring that the
Democrats are out to destroy America, that immigrants are taking over the country,
and that the only good Muslims are dead ones, they have absolutely no grounds
on which to claim that Trump and his campaign do not represent their party. They
made this bed and it is up to them to figure out how to avoid dying in it.
But as the political strategists continue scratching
their heads over this anomaly, down here among the rank-and-file of the
American people the mood is growing more and more tense every day. Many
liberals are bewildered by what they see: a crude, bullying billionaire
celebrity dominating debates with grade-school antics and riding waves of
popular support for repugnant ideas. After two decades of elections
characterized by mudslinging and skullduggery, liberals are well acquainted
with feelings of contempt and even occasionally disgust for the Republican
side, but Trump and his supporters inspire something liberals are unused to
dealing with: visceral fear.
Love for this country is something conservatives
seem fond of claiming as solely their own. Throaty evocations of patriotism
laden with star-spangled imagery come off as Republican as pickup trucks and
tax cuts, and right-wing pundits routinely reduce liberal criticisms to simple
America-hating. In my experience, though, most liberals feels just as strong an
affection for their homeland as all the rest. The difference is that liberals
love their country not for its Godliness, economic dominance, or military
might, but because America has been striving since its inception to live up to
its promise of acceptance, justice, and opportunity for all who come here,
regardless of ethnicity, class status, or gender identity. In short, liberals
love America because hate-baiting, fear-mongering, and fascist nationalism
ultimately don’t work here. Or at least they weren’t supposed to.
Thus, liberals are frightened of Trump for
essentially the same reason as establishment Republicans: He was not supposed
to succeed like this. An angry, xenophobic campaign in America is supposed to
collapse under the weight of its own nastiness, and it hasn’t. But while
politicians are worried about what Trump will do to the political system,
everyday liberal Americans are more frightened by the cultural implications of
Trump’s success; by what it means about the nature of our fellow citizens. Liberals
are left battling amorphous fears that sound much more conservative in tone:
Are there fascists amongst us? Could violent racists be living next door? What
has happened to our country?
So now liberals are doing what they always do when
something scares or angers them: they are protesting. Each and every Trump
event is now accompanied by some kind of sign-waving, slogan-shouting attempt
at disruption. Just today I saw where several people had chained themselves
together to block the main highway leading to a Trump rally in Washington
state, holding up traffic for over half an hour. Protests have become so
expected that Trump rally security is now preemptively ejecting or denying entrance
to just about anyone dark-skinned or Muslim. And though my personal sympathies
certainly lie with the protesters, I have to say that these protests are not
helping the situation. At all.
The reason for this is very simple: By protesting
Trump, you are playing right into his hand. Trump has built a successful
campaign by promoting an “Us versus Them” mentality, and each and every
protester who shows up confirms the narrative by providing a “Them”. Shouting
at Trumpeters that they are Nazis only serves them proof that they are being
persecuted for their patriotic ideals. Or-- to the worst factions of Trump’s
followers-- it could even be taken as a compliment. Sarah Palin, onstage at a
Trump rally, referred to the actions of protesters as “thuggery”, saying
“they’re here to deprive you of your right to peaceful assembly”. Of course,
Trump’s assemblies are far from peaceful these days, and Sarah Palin is an
attention-seeking moron who is likely to say anything if it will make the
crowds cheer for her. But cheer they did. They cheered wildly at her
marginalization of those who disagree with them.
The fact is, if a bunch of angry people gather at a
Trump event because they have all been secretly wishing they could beat up a
black guy, the worst thing you can do as a black guy is show up to get beaten.
Give a mob an enemy, and they’ll make themselves a movement. I understand that
something as disconcerting and vile as Trump’s message often provokes knee-jerk
reaction and seems to demand that something be done to counteract it, but
pissing people off is how Trump gathered his army, and blocking traffic on the
way to the rally is not going to change their minds, it is only going to piss
them off more. Protesters trying to douse the fire directly are only shoveling
more coal into the engine of the Trump train. To lift a line from Stargate SG-1, “When confronted with an
evil too strong to resist, the only way to win is to deny it battle.”
This is not to suggest that we should simply knuckle
under and allow ourselves to be steamrollered by Trump and the other cynics. By
all means, vote against Trump and encourage as many others as you can to do the
same. Despite the fact that, to me, Hillary Clinton does not represent the best
way forward for this country, I fully intend to vote for her if it means voting
against Trump. But I feel it is worth pointing out that a Trump presidency
itself is not nearly so dangerous as the sentiments he thinks he can tap into
to score a win. Both the border wall and the Muslim ban are ludicrous proposals,
thoroughly economically and logistically infeasible, but by proposing them Trump
has brought together hordes of White Persecutionists and allowed them to
discover power in ideas that were heretofore unacceptable to express. If Trump
fails to get elected (or if he fails to deliver on his promises once elected),
there is a dangerous possibility that these mobs will decide to cash in on
their newly discovered solidarity and take matters into their own hands.
If that happens, we might see yet another previously
unthinkable phenomenon: civil unrest and brutality on a scale Americans are
used to seeing on international news reports, not on their own Main Streets.
Then will come the time for direct action-- for blocking roadways so that ICE
cannot truck away half our labor force, for chaining ourselves together to
prevent the torching of neighborhood mosques, and for doing everything in our
power to see to it that innocent people do not end up suffering and dying for misplaced
frustration and misguided fear. But until then, we must remember that
attempting to fight Trump on his ground only makes him stronger.
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