“In the party of Lincoln, there is no room for intolerance and not even a small corner for anti-Semitism or bigotry of any kind. Many people are welcome in our house, but not the bigots.”
Ronald Reagan
”Oh, look at my African American over here! Look at him!”
Donald Trump at a 2016 Campaign Rally
The metrics historians will use to describe American decline during the Trump era will be many. Surely, they will measure markets lost to random tariff regimes. The amount of ground ceded in the fight against climate change will get much scrutiny, as will the effects of the open season Trump et al declared on US skies and waters, not to mention wildlife. And, of course, the setbacks inherent in an America First foreign policy, represented abroad by the boundless insults and inanity of America’s worst civic failure, will require its own school of assessment. But perhaps the greatest damage Trumpism will do is to the fabric of American society; and measuring that is a far dicier task.
Who we are and what our country means to us is no longer a bipartisan proposition as millions entertain their darkest foibles and bring, not just naked selfishness and xenophobia to the table of our national discussion, but raw bigotry as well.
Patriotism embodies aspirations for one’s nation as much as it encompasses a reverence for past achievements. Melding our history and potential for future acheivement creates our national self esteem. This can’t occur in a vacuum; it has to be informed by events on the ground, whether those happenings enhance or insult the narrative of our patriotism goes far in determining how we digest them and evaluate those responsible. Today, right now, a substantial minority, reflected by the champion they put in the White House, are reflexively rebuking a century’s worth of assumptions that have created the reflection we see in the mirror of our collective identity.
Trumpism is the complete disparagement of virtually everything we have celebrated about America since the turn of the last century. Like Dr. Jekyll’s Mr. Hyde, it’s a gruesome element of our personality given voice and a license to cause rancor and turmoil. If not checked and dissolved it could destroy us. The idea that societal progress, much of it forged through the lessons taught by seismic conflicts created by past mistakes, is now seen by so many as responsible for making them feel aggrieved clarifies a grotesque misunderstanding of the civic obligations democracies require to survive.
Systemic racism in this country was always the result of white America’s worst inclinations… entitlement, fear and insecurity. These are the very components MAGA is based on. It’s our country. Progress has encroached on that; the empowerment the civil rights evolution has bestowed to minorities is zero-sum, their gain is our loss. That’s the gist of it. The concept of America as first and foremost obligated to the prosperity of white Christians. MAGA rallies are increasingly characterized by a lack of effort to adorn this proposition with lip service to any other group.
Trump is becoming ever less concerned with the approval of anybody other than those who butter his bread. Code words and dog whistles are becoming more frequent and straightforward. This is a bloc desperately desiring to bring their visceral feelings fully out of the closet, equating the “fight against political correctness” with Lee Greenwood patriotism. The GOP has been consumed by Trump’s wretched core, it’s leadership in both chambers now in lock step with MAGA exclusivity. The “big tent” is now “only nationalists need apply.”
Last week’s mid-terms highlighted the party’s contracting national support, as Democrats received more votes than any nationwide election since Watergate. Trump and the GOP appear unreceptive to any lesson from this development other than a need to roll out more effective voter suppression strategies. Make no mistake, Mitch McConnell’s comical demands for “bipartisanship” aside, it’s all “us versus them.”
You’re either for cops or against them. Circling the wagons after yet another recorded police shooting of an unarmed black man is the patriot’s response to a mob of militants bent on anarchy. Immigrants are invaders. ICE are heroes stemming the hordes. Even the tropes about being all for legal immigration are now giving way to a fearful broad brush painting brown skinned outsiders as threats to personal safety, to law and order. The proliferation of 911 calls from caricatures of irrational fear and entitlement feels very much like a cry for liberation; Trump is President, let us act accordingly. We are pushing back the clock and showing who is boss. Uppitiness is over, get back in your place or I’ll get my law involved.
I suppose the rest of us were in denial about the extent of this ugliness. Perhaps we were beguiled by the tone of local and national newscasts that pronounced diversity a good and noble pursuit in American life. Clearly, many stewed about such assumptions and became enamored with Fox/AM’s efforts to validate resentment 24/7, building it to the crest of nastiness we experience today.
It’s clear, nearly two years in Trumpism is succeeding in more than just fraying the unity of purpose and direction that has steadily evolved during America’s modern age; we are now two countries. One simply continuing down the road we have travelled together, for better or worse, over the last century or more. The other taking a jackhammer to that thoroughfare and rushing headlong into the wilderness with little idea where to go or how to get there, united only by a certainty they hated where they were… and many of those they were with. Such a situation seems unsustainable, and the answers to the predicament are elusive because nihilists are illogical and self-defeating. Yet and still, one thing is certain… cut them off, fight them, tell them to go straight to hell, whatever else you want to do, but refusing to see them for what they are and the peril they portend is not an option. BC