You must publicly appear to be
against racism if you want to continue implementing racist policies and laws.
We’ve have entered the time of
mock outrage. The press was shocked that armed neo-Nazis were marching through
the streets of Charlottesville shouting “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not
replace us!” Republicans were aghast that many of these thugs were wearing
Trump’s red “Make America Great Again” caps. Democrats were indignant that
Republicans didn’t call for Trump’s head on a platter. Everyone felt very good
about how bad they felt.
In this national psychodrama,
Trump plays the role of the Great Revealer. Trump has pulled back the curtains
on the cesspool of American politics for the inspection of all but the most
timid. Trump speaks the forbidden words that many other Americans secretly
think. Trump utters these heresies self-righteously and without shame.
Therefore he must be punished for putting the system at risk. He must be lashed
for his shamelessness. He must be castigated for exposing the sickness at the
heart of the American project.
Trump is Melville’s Confidence
Man: he offers his minions the chance to indulge in political taboos. But
unlike Bill Clinton or Barack Obama he is not a trickster or a quick-change
artist. All of his lies and temptations are at the service of his own vanity
and most are so transparent that even his most ardent devotees don’t swallow
them whole. Yet he rarely lies about how he feels. Not for long anyway.
His skin is too thin. Trump can’t escape who he really is. In another
politician, Jimmy Carter perhaps, this might be an endearing quality. With
Trump it is deeply unnerving. Trump’s rapacity and bigotry strike too close to
home. He reminds us that we haven’t buried the worst of our past.
Trump is a familiar character
to most of the world. He is the unvarnished embodiment of the American bully,
who has stalked the planet for the last century taking what it wants and
leaving corpses and ruin in its wake. There is in Trump no pretense to the
humane, no guise of benevolence or cloak of empathy. He is the threatening
figure he appears to be, which is, of course, exactly how you want your
adversary to appear.
The poor recognize Trump for
what he is: he’s the guy who collects the rent, who turns the water and
electricity off, who spits at you when you ask for money for food, who sends
your kid off to war while his goes big game hunting, who snitches your mom out
to the cops for her Oxycontin habit. They don’t need any false words from Trump
to heal their shock about the evil rampage in Charlottesville. They aren’t
shocked by Charlottesville. They’ve lived that reality most of their lives. And
they aren’t startled that the perpetrators have sympathizers in the government.
That’s the way it’s always been on the mean streets of America.
Now middlebrow America is
getting a glimpse of itself through the mirror of its own bombastic, vindictive
and racist leader. He has fractured the rituals and conventions that
desensitized most Americans from what our system is really all about. The
elites fear Trump because he gives the game away. He personifies the reality
they’ve been working for decades to conceal. The role of most presidents has
been to comfort the nation when it recoils at a sudden view of its own
depravity, from the My Lai massacre to Abu Ghraib, assuring the citizenry that
the system isn’t as malign as it appears. Trump pours acid on the wounds, as
when he impertinently reminded the country that its two most revered founders
where big time slave-owners.
Trump’s initial response to
the Charlottesville Nazifest was one of the most honest statements of his
presidency. No false pieties, no hollow condolences to the dead and injured, no
fake denunciation of the racists whose support he craves and whose views he
shares. With a wink and nod, he swiftly condemned generic hate and violence,
leaving the country to wonder how these sentiments squared with his remarks
earlier in the week threatening to nuke North Korea and invade Venezuela. When
he returned to the cameras two days later to read the words that the political
and media elites put in his mouth, Trump looked like he was making a hostage
tape. He seethed as he spit out sentences against his will. You could almost
see the steam rising as he stormed out of the room. You just knew he was going
to blow.
It took less than 24 hours. On
Monday, Trump blew up Infrastructure Day 2 with an incandescent eruption of
white rage, where he impetuously advanced a moral equivalency between Nazis,
some of them armed with semi-automatic rifles, and the people amassed to
confront them. During his rancid rant, Trump crassly used a Tweet by Heather Heyer’s
mother, Susan Bro, as a prop to boost his own self-esteem and then a few hours
later Tweeted out a cartoon of a Trump train running over a CNN reporter. The
man has class. People were quick to say Trump’s presidency ended at that
moment, as even squeamish CEOs started jumping ship. I’d argue that it’s just
begun.
We are now confronted with the
most openly racist president since Woodrow Wilson and he isn’t going anywhere
for the next few years. How naïve did you have to be to think it was going to
work out much different? What was the AFL-CIO doing on the president’s
Manufacturing Council to begin with? If you hadn’t paid attention to his racist
tactics as a landlord or his call to have the railroaded and innocent young
black men known as the Central Park Five executed, there were hours of Trump
tape from the Howard Stern Show to document the moral character of the man. Did
anyone really think Trump was capable of denouncing white racists with any kind
of authenticity? For Trump to condemn Nazis is to condemn Daddy. He’s frozen in
a Freudian knot. It’s instructive to realize that 3 of the last 5 US presidents
had fathers or grandfathers who were Nazi sympathizers. (See Prescott Bush.)
And the sixth, Ronald
Reagan, laid flowers on the graves of the Waffen SS.
The GOP damage control
strategy has been obvious: you must publicly denounce KKK & Nazis if you
want to continue implementing racist policies and laws. And all but the most
loyal Trumpites have fallen into line. The problem is that Trump’s base isn’t
going with them. Indeed, there’s little indication that Republican voters are
bothered much by Trump’s fulminations. Trump remains the great white hope. They
want to see him fight and don’t much care if he’s throwing punches at Nancy
Pelosi, Wolf Blitzer or Mitch McConnell.
Trump has tried to rally his
forces by talking about the sanctity of American history and the cultural value
of statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. He even suggests that the
Alt-Left might soon be coming with a wrecking ball for the Washington Monument
and Jefferson Memorial. Let it be so!
But even Lee would have been a
dissenter to Trump’s cause. In a 1869 letter to a friend, Lee resisted movement
in the Southern states after the war to erect memorials to the Rebels. “I think
it wise not to keep open the sores of war,” Lee wrote, “but to follow the
examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil
strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”
Lee was lucky to have lived to
have a say in the matter. President Andrew Johnson wanted the general tried and
executed as a traitor. His neck was saved by Ulysses S. Grant. No good deed
goes unpunished. Now Grant is known mostly for his Tomb, which he ended up in
after drinking more than Nixon in the Final Days and Lee is mythologized as a
reluctant warrior and honorable loser. (He was neither.) Grant was a helluva
writer, by the way. His memoirs–written
while he was broke and dying of throat cancer–are the best of any president’s
(not saying all that much, admittedly.)
Lee’s request largely held
sway until the turn of the century. The vast majority of Confederate memorials
and statues went up after the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 and
the subsequent rise of Jim Crow Laws across the South. The confederate
monuments idolized by Trump and his retinue aren’t solemn idols to a lost
cause, but imposing symbols of the reassertion of white power.
Trump himself has been
somewhat less respectful of historical monuments when they’ve stood in his way.
In 1979, Trump stunned the New York art world when he demolished two highly
esteemed art
deco friezes on the façade of the Bonwit Teller building to clear the way
for the construction of Trump Tower. And even now he has ordered his Interior
Secretary Ryan Zinke to develop plans to gut
protections for as many as 27 national monuments, from the Siskiyous to the
Bear Ears.
For their part, the Democrats,
who almost universally backed the torch-bearing fascists in Ukraine, have been
grousing about Trump’s use of the term Alt-Left. But the president swiped it
from Democratic Party operatives such as Neera Tanden, Joan Walsh and Joy Reid,
who have been using the expression to smear Bernie Sanders and his rag-tag gang
of Sandernistas as left-wing zealots bent on taking over the Democratic Party.
These same liberal
functionaries are now demanding that Trump fire Steve Bannon to prove he’s
serious about confronting racists. By the same measure, shouldn’t the Democrats
expel all of their own members who voted for the racist Clinton Crime Bill,
which has arguably inflicted more damage on black America than any legislation
since the Fugitive Slave Act? (This would, of course, include Bernie Sanders,
who remains unrepentant about his vote.)
But if you had only one target
to set your sights why waste it on Bannon? On foreign policy and economics
Bannon tends to be the sanest voice in the padded cell known as the Oval
Office. Check out his fascinating interview with Robert Kuttner in the crusty
liberal rag American
Prospect, where Bannon inveighs against the hawks in the White House,
dismisses the “alt right” as losers and clowns who need to be crushed, and
rules out military action against North Korea, going so far as to say that he’d
support removing US troops from South Korea in exchange for a verifiable freeze
in the North’s nuclear weapons program. Surely, when it comes to racist
policies the greatest villain in the Trump ecosystem is the Living Confederate
Monument J. Beauregard Sessions. But the Democrats have flocked to defend
Sessions, first because they want him to stay on as AG to protect Mueller’s
Russia probe from getting pink slipped by Trump and second because he used the
magic word “terrorism” when describing the killing of Heather Heyer. That was
easy. Now watch how many blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans Sessions locks up
over the next 3.5 years.
With Bannon out, the
efficiency experts from the Pentagon and Goldman Sachs now running the Trump
White House may actually be able to put their plans into action. Duck and
cover…
Predictably, in the
post-Charlottesville fever there’s been a rush to find a legislative fix to
curtail future noxious gatherings of American Nazis. These knee-jerk maneuvers
will almost certainly pose more of a threat to the Constitution than the white
power movement.
If they criminalize “hate”
what will happen to those of us who hate war-makers, bankers, oil companies,
home foreclosers, killer cops & white supremacists? Any laws enacted in the
name of Charlottesville will restrict the political activities of the left more
than the far right, for the simple reason that the government has nothing to
fear from the far right. [See the aftermath of Clinton’s Counter-Terrorism and
Effective Death Penalty Act (passed after the Oklahoma City bombing) and the
Patriot Act.] Already the congress is moving to outlaw boycotts of Israel. How
easy will it now be to apply the same censorious template to quash protests
against clearcuts on national forests, nuclear plants, animal slaughterhouses,
ICE raids, drone operations or police violence?
It’s a dead certainty that the
biggest beneficiary of the horrors that took place in Master Jefferson’s city
will be the most lethally racist institution in the country: the police, who
will see their powers and budgets increase. In Charlottesville, it was hard to
tell the cops from the neo-Nazis. Swaddled in their black storm-trooper gear,
the police held back, watching passively as goons with shields and clubs
flailed away at protesters. It wasn’t difficult to detect where their
sympathies resided.
There are probably more white
supremacists in the NYPD than the neo-Nazi Vanguard America, which claims only
200 members. On one day alone this month (August 4th, 2017) 9 Americans in 7 different states were
killed by police. I didn’t read anything in the New York Times about that
atrocity. Perhaps this kind of state-sanctioned racist violence is now much too
familiar to even warrant a headline.
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