The crowning of Trump: The GOP’s politics of resentment out of the closet
Ever since the 1960s, when the Democratic Party followed the lead of the civil rights movement and the federal courts and broke the back of Jim Crow–U.S.-style apartheid– the Republican Party has been an ever-stronger magnet for white resentment.
Over time, the GOP’s politics of racial resentment metastasized into a generalized politics of the rear guard—anti-feminist, anti-Latino, anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-environment, pro-gun, pro-death penalty, pro-war.
After the collapse of a liberalism trying unsuccessfully (on both fronts) to simultaneously fight a war on poverty and a war on Vietnam, what FDR called the “economic royalists,” who had been the base of the GOP for decades, filled the vacuum left by liberalism.
Since Reagan, they made their ideology, with the espousal of the most savage and most selfish form of capitalism at its core, the ideology of the times.
Donald Trump is the culmination of this Frankenstein-like union of prejudice and plutocracy. Trump may not share in every single strand of this twisted weave, but he is more than comfortable with the sum of its parts. And, in any case, who knows and what does it matter when it comes to Trump. At one time or another he has taken almost every position possible, pro and against, on all the major issues.
With Trump, one also feels that the bottom line is not ideology but an opportunistic quest for victory and power. Paul Ryan is a true believer in ultra-savage capitalism. Jesse Helm was a racist to the marrow. Donald Trump, on the other hand, while hardly a fighter for racial and economic justice, cares more about other things than abstractions, mainly Trump.
The fight in the GOP around Trump is a battle between “free market” ideological fanatics like Paul Ryan and a no-holds-barred brawler who knows exactly how to rouse the rabble of xenophobes, racists, and their ilk who form the unacknowledged magnetic pole of the Republican Party. And he has shown that he is more than willing and adept at doing it.
As a column in the New York Times put it, the Trump campaign has created a “safe space” for the right. That is an understatement that to some degree distorts reality. The right has had safe space for a long time—in right-wing, corporate-funded “think tanks,” in the Scalia-Thomas Supreme Court, and in Congress, especially in the House of Representatives. What Trump’s campaign has done is to create a haven for that sector of the right that traffics in raw hatred. He has to an extent normalized actions, attitudes and utterances that until recently were beyond the pale, even among rightist Republicans.
Racist slander against Mexican immigrants. Fending off a fair question from a reporter from the right-wing Fox network by implying she must be having her period. Expelling the anchor of the major Latino network in the U.S. from a press conference. Not rejecting endorsements from ultra-ring wing or racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. Even dissing the Pope.
The list is almost endless. The Trump campaign has created a zone of comfort for those who once were stigmatized as part of the lunatic right-wing fringe. Feeling for the first time the warm embrace of a presidential candidate, Trump loyalists are ready to fight for their candidate on the convention floor or on the streets. As a columnist wrote in The Washington Post, “This is how fascism comes to America.”
But the mobilization of white resentment isn’t Trump’s only trump card. Ever the con man, Trump has managed, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to fool a fair slice of public and pundits into believing that he is some kind of populist: Bernie Sanders, ideological poles reversed, who stands with the people against an undefined establishment who has rigged the game against the common woman or man.
This is a lie writ big. Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, thought that if you are going to lie, tell a big lie. Trump is indiscriminate. He tells relatively small fibs that don’t affect the general public, like bragging that all 1,282 units in the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Las Vegas had been sold-out when 300 remained unsold. He tells colossal lies that have the potential to have bad consequences for millions of people. The notion that he stands with the people is one of the biggest of those lies.
Taxes are probably the best indicator of a candidate’s stand for the people or for the economic elite. Recently, The New York Times compared “populist” Donald Trump’s tax plan with that of House Speaker Paul Ryan, the kind of establishment Republican Trump disparages. The headline tells it all: “Trump’s Tax Plan, Like the GOP’s Favors the Rich; Whether consumption or income is taxed, biggest cuts go to the wealthy.”
Some populist.
It all amounts to a debate among fellow travelers about two paths toward the same objective: helping the rich, screwing everyone else, including the middle class. Ryan’s innovation, the kind of thing that draws accolades from lame-brained observes who consider Ryan “brilliant,” is to move from taxes based on income to taxes based on consumption.
This is more of the same with a different wrapping, since the poorer you are the greater the percentage of your income you must consume to stay alive, or to have a modestly decent life, or even a few luxuries consumption taxes, which are nothing new, are notoriously regressive: the richer you are the less you pay proportional to your income.
Trump, on the other hand, wants George W. Bush-type across-the-board income tax cuts. Reams of research show that those cuts greatly favored the rich and that the result was the highest level of inequality in more than a century.
The great Trump-Ryan disagreement about taxes, then, is much ado about nothing. Or, to allude to an English literary character as famous as Shakespeare, Trump and establishment Republicans are all Robin Hoods in reverse. They just wear different costumes.
The result of the GOP convention this week is a foregone conclusion. Trump will be crowned. Still, it will be interesting to see the verbal scuffles that will inevitably take place in the hall in Cleveland. Much more interesting—and ominous—is what will happen outside. Trump has raised the level of polarization in the nation, which had been high for a long time high and even higher after the election of Barack Obama, by orders of magnitude.
There will be a combustible mix of passionate Trump supporters and passionate Trump opponents on the streets of Cleveland. Trump has supplied plenty of fuel for this powder keg. All that is needed for a catastrophe is for someone to light the spark.
