America’s Racism is Alive and Well
Ted Cruz is an incorrigible dork, an infallible nerd. He is prone, as many GOP lackeys are, to make assumptions and predictions about Democrats that never pan out. They look foolish, but life goes on in their world of delusion. Apparently the Texas senator was convinced that the Democrats’ rational human response to a pandemic, their adherence to the lines of defense available, was all just a smoke screen to make Trump look bad. In fact, the whole virus was a political cudgel and the seriousness with which the Democratic party responded to it would be abandoned after their candidate won. Guess what, Democrats are still fighting the virus in response to the Trump administration and many Republican governors’ exacerbation of it. And, as far as Trump and an ever shrinking number of Republican officials are concerned, Biden has not won. The reality of both the virus and the election are suspended in a conservative vortex, a GOP sinkhole created to give Democracy an out to die. Still we fight.
Certainly Eisenhower; Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Bush all remained within the bounds of civility. None of these Republicans were ever seen as a threat to basic civil liberties. None of them would have allowed something like the alt-right to gain any kind of momentum. None would have, after an incident like Charlottesville, said there were good people on both sides. None of Trump’s Republican predecessors so overtly and intentionally stoked the fires of racism. None of them ever created a platform for violence, at a time of extreme racial unrest, by using Federal troops to clear a path for a photo op. That said, Trump is the old-school Republican dream, the one that numbers Strom Thurmond and George Wallace among its alumni. Four years of kissing the ass of the most racist president since Andrew Johnson may have had an effect, but some of these Republicans, maybe generations of Dixiecrats, see this guy as the one. Donald Trump is the racist with his finger on the pulse of America. He is the first contemporary POTUS to give leverage to the fundamental ideas of racism and, better yet, white supremacy. He is cleanly cut from the white privileged cloth, raised on racist ideas, the son of a Klan sympathizer.
No one wants to let Trump go, least of all the cross section of America that quite disturbingly wants a virulent racist running the country. They want this man who would pull a baby from its mother to deter them from coming here, all because of their skin tone. They want a man who would hire Stephan Miller, a man so full of hate he loathes himself because of his Jewish heritage. Forty-seven percent of the country, enough to get 73, 768, 688 popular votes from a country known to be a “melting pot,” a melange of ethnicity and varying skin colors, obviously long for a government where the black American has few, if any civil liberties and white skin and “Christian” values are the order of the day in perpetuity. If not delusional, executed with the hypocrisy that has so long served it, finally challenging the hyperbolic nature of systemic racism that has always plagued American politics since LBJ signed the 1963 Civil Rights Act, Trump represents the first clearly radically right-wing ideology to prosper in the GOP since Reconstruction. Simply put, he has resurrected centuries old ghosts that once haunted America’s better consciousness. They are ghosts of the klan, reels of “The Birth of a Nation,” of vigilante lynch mobs, of Jim Crow that have been suppressed or repressed, sublimated and concentrated into a form a candidate could run on in the 21st century.
An astonishing fact is that 150 years ago it would have been the Democrats that were trying to hold on to a candidate like Donald Trump. In ideology he most emulates Andrew Johnson, who also served one term(1865 to 869). Johnson was also impeached, but acquitted by a single vote. He facilitated the US acquisition of Alaska, while Trump only joked about buying Greenland. He is a Messianic figure to some, his red-meat fed base, to senators, and to a decreasing number of evangelicals. Simply said, racism is a religious construct with roots to the 17th century. Biblically compounded over centuries, the idea that white is the superior race is a constant philosophy taught in quiet Sunday school rooms. This Messiah complex too shall pass.
