For the last six months or so, the geniuses at Fox News and on talk radio have been selling their followers the paranoid fantasy that President Barack Obama will impose martial law and become a dictator before his second term expires. No sober observer of Obama’s character sees him as any more likely to do this than any of the first 43 presidents were. What is richly ironic, however, is that the Republican Party is now on the verge of nominating Donald Trump, a man who shows all the actual inclinations of a third-world dictator.
The Republican establishment is suddenly appalled and horrified at this prospect, but the simple truth of the matter is, they created the Trump phenomenon themselves, by years and years of selling snake oil to the American public. A few examples will suffice
For openers, Fox News has been selling the narrative that rich people are rich because they are morally superior (harder working, smarter, etc.), while poor people are poor because they are morally inferior (drug addicted, lazy, stupid, etc.) In fact, this is a staple of conservative philosophy, though few were stupid enough to say it out loud until Fox came along.
The truth, as any serious examination of history will show, is that people are rich for a variety of reasons, and people are poor for a variety of reasons. Furthermore, there are wonderful rich people and odious rich people (Bernie Madoff and El Chapo Guzman, for example), just as there are wonderful poor people and odious poor people. In fact, inarguably, the best human being ever to walk the planet was a poor, itinerant carpenter’s son, raised in a small village in the backwater province of Gallilee. The second best, arguably, was a French peasant girl from a small village in Lorraine. Both were born poor, and neither became rich, but both are universally loved, admired, and respected by those who know their stories.
So along comes the billionaire Donald Trump, far richer than anybody else in the field of candidates, and what Republican candidate dares question Trump’s character? After all, in the moral calculus of Fox News, the Donald’s vast wealth makes him morally superior. And Trump uses this mercilessly against his rivals.
Secondly, Fox News has been deliberately and systematically trying to make white men angry. Lindsay Graham let the cat out of the bag when, in the heat of the 2012 elections, he said candidly, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys.” In a nation controlled by corporate commercial media, Fox has done quite well at generating angry white people, and doing so precisely for the purpose of exploiting that anger to win elections. They just didn’t think it would be Donald Trump who would cash in, or that Trump’s rhetoric would be so openly fascist.
Thirdly, the so-called Southern Strategy has been a staple of Republican politics since the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 forced the Dixiecrats out of the Democratic Party. They were nothing more than Republicans in Democrats’ clothing to begin with. And ever since, the South has mostly voted Republican in Presidential elections, following the dog-whistle politics of race, so carefully explained by Lee Atwater way back in 1981. They couldn’t use the n-word to good political effect, so they accomplished the same thing using abstract phrases, like “forced bussing”, “states rights”, “welfare queens”, and so on. Their base knows that they are talking about keeping Black people “in their place.”
So when Donald Trump makes explicitly racist comments about Latinos and Blacks, there is really nothing the Republican establishment can say about it, because they have been implicitly encouraging and practicing racism for nearly 50 years. Trump is just coming out and spewing it openly.
The Republican Party, which sees itself as the party of family values and superior morals, is about to nominate a racist and sexist bully, who trades on the anger and money-worship they themselves have deliberately ginned up. They deserve this disaster. In the words of the prophet Hosea, “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”
djones2032@austin.rr.com