Even as, demonstrably, the worst president in living memory, if not in history, Trump is a short term disaster. What is a far longer term problem for any hopes for a restoration of such democracy as we once held are the durable stalwarts of Trump's cult, the roughly third to two-fifths of the population who have been acculturated to accepting fascist rule by a gangster king, who are prepared to pretend to believe any lie that is told, any contradiction of previously believed lies that Trump told that serve later ends of Trump, denying even the video recordings of Trump telling lies at his rallies. That level of willful gulling is a pathology that, if the topic weren't politics, would probably be considered grounds for declaring an individual incompetent. But we're talking about a dangerously large percentage of the American People, many of them who are affluent people with professions and educational credentials, some of them up to and exceeding the doctoral level, many of them in positions of influence and power.
This is no ordinary movie, fiction rallying of an ignorant, regionally despised rabble of "white trash" this is far more serious because it's not fiction, it's real. And it's a very real product of the corporate media that invented the Donald Trump that they believe in, the tabloid papers, the tabloid TV shows, the talk shows, the "reality shows" that he was on, most of all.
Mark Twain once said that if Sir Walter Scott's pulp fiction hadn't been so universally popular in the antebellum South it is quite likely the Civil War would not have been fought, if The Apprentice had not been produced, if he had not been the entertainingly outrageous buffoon invited on talk TV and hate-talk radio, it is very unlikely that Donald Trump would be governing an ever worsening fascist-gangster regime that is destroying democracy.
I was curious to compare that one-third to two-fifths figure that the polls give as Donald Trump's stalwart supporters to some previous depraved percentage of the population and the obvious one was the figures of those who supported slavery at the start of the previous Constitutionally guaranteed disaster of our history, the Civil War. I haven't been able to find anything that looks like a reliable figure on the support of slavery in the non-slave states for that era. If I don't really trust modern opinion polling, opinion polling then was not even done. I did find this passage from a Slate article debunking myths of American slavery, based on the census of 1860, done immediately before the Confederate treason and the Civil War.
According to the 1860 census, taken just before the Civil War, more than 32 percent of white families in the soon-to-be Confederate states owned slaves. Of course, this is an average, and different states had different levels of slaveholding. In Arkansas, just 20 percent of families owned slaves; in South Carolina, it was 46 percent; in Mississippi, it was 49 percent.
By most measures, this isn’t “small”—it’s roughly the same percentage of Americans who, today, hold a college degree. The large majority of slaveholding families were small farmers and not the major planters who dominate our image of “slavery.”
Those figures are certainly in the same range as the percentage who support Donald Trump and I have absolutely no doubt, whatsoever, that his racism is a huge part of why they have continued to support him. I don't know but am inclined to disbelieve that that percentage of the population whose thinking and whose overt expression of their thinking has stood as a constant. I think that the comfort of Americans, both in 1860 and 2019 in both harboring racist thinking and expressing it overtly and in political terms has risen as the informational environment that people live in has encouraged that. I doubt that in 1976, when Americans voted for Jimmy Carter that the percentage inclined towards today's overt racism was nearly as large. I suspect the very brief period when TV producers and others in the media to suppress overtly racist content that ended in the later 1970s had a very real effect in producing the presidency of Jimmy Carter but which, by 1980 was encouraged by Ronald Reagan beginning his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi using some of the crudest of racist tropes and images such as "strapping bucks" on welfare. That got worse as the likes of Andrew Dice Clay made overt racism and sexism cool and the academic and "civil rights" industry campainged against "political correctness".
But even at the height of the cultural, political and legal discouragement of racism, there was a significant percentage of the population which had no intention or inclination to give it up. When we're talking about the change that made the election of a Trump or a Reagan possible, we're talking about percentages of the population which supplement that constant hard-core of racism. The media is and has been the largest component of both the temporary suppression of that margin of victory for racism-fascism and the oligarchic gangsters who harness it, and in nourishing the weakness of those who can be so-swayed.
That constant part of the population who are predisposed to hard-core racism and the gangster-fascism that is inseparable from it, are part of a culture of racism, not at all unlike the one described in the Slate article.
Typically, this fact is used to suggest that the Civil War was not about slavery. If so few Southerners owned slaves, goes the argument, then the war had to be about something else (namely, the sanctity of states’ rights). But, as historian Ira Berlin writes, the slave South was a slave society, not just a society with slaves. Slavery was at the foundation of economic and social relations, and slave-ownership was aspirational—a symbol of wealth and prosperity. Whites who couldn’t afford slaves wanted them in the same way that, today, most Americans want to own a home.
Bottom line: Slavery was the basis of white supremacy, which united all whites in a racist hierarchy. “[T]he existing relation between the two races in the South,” argued South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun in 1837, “forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions.” Many whites couldn’t imagine Southern society without slavery. And when it was threatened, those whites—whether they owned slaves or not—took up arms to defend their “way of life.”
The work of defeating that permanent danger to American democracy is in changing the opinions of those who might give them a winning majority, and in the putrid Electoral College, undemocratically constituted Senate saddled United States, that sometimes means us convincing a large enough percentage of such people in many different states, to abandon that culture. The American media, bent on getting the most viewers and listeners and owned by such oligarchs will always be inclined to work against that. Democrats, and by that I mean anyone who favors democracy over gangster government have to abandon our own cultural predilections that have enabled that situation to happen.
* "Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," I really do believe that is the only safe basis on which to have any government, unfortunately the Founders, slave-owners and gangsters, didn't really believe it though it was how they got poor people to fight their revolution.
No one should honor the illegitimate regimes of Bush II and Trump, gained through crooked legal gimmicks, the help of foreign despots, the corrupt influence of billionaire oligarchs, lies told by the corporate media, the Brooks-brothers-Supreme Court putsch of 2000, with the name "administration". No election stolen by illegitimate means, including by the Electoral College, should be considered legitimate or called as such.
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