I really haven’t chimed in on the Trump thing very much. I wanted to collect my thoughts (in a small, leaky bucket). But I finally got around to it, so…here goes. I wrote this for a small online political discussion/humor group, but I have also decided to post it in my long-neglected blog.
YOU SET THE FIRE, YOU REAP THE FLAMES…
I have yet to address the Donald Trump phenomenon in writing. I think that it’s time that I do so. I have seen much hand-wringing of late on the part of conservatives regarding this situation. A good portion of the issue seems to be based on the inability of the supposed cognoscenti to grasp either the cause or the consequences of a successful Trump candidacy. But I get it…I really do.
In the early stages of the republic leaders emerged as individuals and interest groups coalesced around people that they felt addressed or even embodied their ideals, desires and aspirations. As the culture has become more complex and leaders more removed from direct interaction with those who they purport to represent, this coalescence has dissipated, only to be replaced by some vague notion of “support.” People no longer feel like they are in the middle of something. Rather, they feel they are “behind” a candidate or an idea. That is a very different position, and a very different mindset. But I think that it helps to explain both the Trump and the Sanders phenomena. Both far ends of the political spectrum apparently have significant numbers of participants seeking to be (ironically) in the middle rather than behind. And it’s most often those on both the left and the right that have felt rejected, displaced, put-upon, ignored. My discussion of those on the left who have engorged what might otherwise have been an anemic, quixotic effort to elect a Socialist as president will have to wait for another day. I’m here to discuss Trump in the context of his troubling ability to garner support.
The Trump campaign is a well thought-out appeal to the very constituencies that no one else attends to. Someone somewhere in the campaign machinery quite correctly calculated that there are more potential voters in that group than there are outside of it. The Xenophobes, the Birthers, the Anti-Immigrationists, the Nativists, the Misogynists (many of them, ironically, women themselves), the Neo-Nazis (if we shared a border with Poland THEY’D be building a wall AND paying for it. They remember what happened the last time a Nazi rose to power), the Undifferentiated Racists, those who want an “outsider” (why is it that when people need surgery they are never looking for an outsider?) and the largest of the Trump constituencies, those that want some outsized, living, breathing caricature that they recognize from “The TV.” When you add them all up, what you get is what we’ve gotten. And who is the most concerned about all of this? It’s not the left, who smell a sure victory even with a corporatist candidate of spotty veracity or an otherwise unelectable Jewish Socialist. It’s the folks on the right, who by their obstructionism and their lack of affection for the nation and its people, who by their selling out to those who fund their sad little campaigns, who trade their moral compasses for twenty pieces of silver…it is the result of their misguided approach. They brought it upon themselves, and I’m glad. You set the fire, you reap the flames.
But there is some good in this. It has allowed us to meet and to understand so many of our neighbors. The old white folks that have had the promises made to them snatched away by the same maleficent greed that has created the very movement to which they now so fervently cleave, the Nazis, the Bigots, the dumb-as-a-post who reveled in the “fun” of watching “The Donald” on “Celebrity Apprentice” say “You’re Fired” to poor, brain damaged Gary Busey and now want to trust that bizarre, tonsorially eccentric, billionaire huckster with the nuclear launch codes. To me a Trump bumper sticker or yard sign is an indicator of someone with whom I have not the least in common. And someone with whom I do not wish to engage. I’m old and retired and happily married and I’ve got a little money saved up…so I don’t have to. Fuck ’em. But that having been said, they are, at the end of the day, among us, and in great numbers. They have always been among us, but now they truly believe that at long last they have found their champion. Or he has found them. The right deserves this. Sadly, they have clearly, as of this writing, learned nothing from the situation.
