Donald Trump has begun his second presidential term. Son of racist real estate developer Fred Trump, and protegee of Roy Cohn (the man who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair), Donald Trump has swerved from one bankruptcy to another. Now, he’s been rewarded with the presidency.
Trump is often presented as an anomaly, a sign of decay. And it is true that he represents a new low in American politics. However, there is a thread running to him from the origins of the American republic.
Before he became a right-wing crank, American author John Dos Passos wrote in the 1930s:
“...they have built the electric chair and hired the executioner to throw the switch all right we are two nations America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch.”
John Dos Passos, "The Big Money," USA
The US has always had two opposing traditions: one, the radical egalitarian democratic ideals originating with the likes of Thomas Paine; and the other, a hateful, anti-human nativism of the Federalists and the Know-Nothing Party. The history of the USA has been a history of the battle between these two forces. On one side, John Brown, the IWW, Lucy Parsons and Martin Luther King; on the other, the Ku Klux Klan, Father Couglin, the John Birch Society and Roy Cohn.
The threats from egalitarian America have been strong but never really reached the levels of power that nativist America has. FDR was able to usher in a welfare state but this was at a time when American capitalists faced a robust challenge from organised labour on the one hand, and European fascism on the other. The social movements of the 1960s presented a different challenge, one that nativist America has worked hard to unravel ever since.
In the 1970s, financier David Rockefeller funded the Trilateral Commission to study the rise and threat of these social movements. Why had these movements happened and what could be done about them? Samuel Huntington (of the inane “Clash of Civilisations” thesis) gave his diagnosis and prescription: America was experiencing an “excess of democracy” and “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups”. Action on the part of those in power was required, and they took up the call.
The powerful in America have worked diligently to undo FDR’s welfare state and roll back the gains of civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and the labour movement, among others. The thread of nativism runs through Nixon, Reagan and now Trump. Trump’s innovation is to bring a kind of cruel nihilism into American politics at a time of economic crisis. The stagnation of wages which American workers have seen since the 70s, the rising costs of food and healthcare, all of this is due to an “emergency” on the USA’s Southern Border. The people who maintain America’s economy by servicing its restaurants, farms and construction are apparently the same people behind the collapse of living standards.
Trump’s nihilism isn’t interested in facts. He will veer from one contradictory statement or policy to another, always following Steve Bannon’s advice to “flood the zone with shit” (i.e., confuse the narrative). Trump’s opponents can rail against his excesses while his supporters can trust that they are in on the joke. In the end, the joke may be on them but at the moment they are drunk on brutality.
But there is another great American tradition and that is the hangover. Trump can be seen as a “hair of the dog” – we’ve tried cruelty and super patriotism before, and we can try it again. But at a certain point, reality will intervene and many of the people hoping Trump will sort out their issues will come to realise they were conned – like the investors in the US Football League and Atlantic City and Trump Baja.
The hope and the challenge is that the egalitarian tradition in America is ready and organised to pick up the pieces to, in the words of Langston Hughes, “let America be America again.”
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