RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) Donald Trump has finally disappeared from center stage and Joe Biden has been inaugurated as the 46th president of the US, all against a backdrop of the January 6th invasion of the US Capitol by Trump followers.
With more fully armed American troops than are deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria combined guarding Washington against more domestic terrorist attacks, the impressive and optimistic Biden inauguration held out the promise of a new, less toxic era, reflecting his stirring call to “End the uncivil war.”
The weeks since the November election and the mob attack in an unsuccessful attempted Trump self-coup have been nothing short of surreal.
Forgive this gringo then, for believing that understanding what is going on in the US is not as difficult as it may seem: the lower classes (‘they’) are pushing back hard on the upper classes (‘us’). In the US, white non-college educated ‘patriots’ are fighting an existential battle to preserve what they see as their God-given superiority and privilege.
Republican Senator Joshua Hawley, poster boy for the far right, had been seen giving a ‘fist in the air’ support signal to the Capitol attackers. He has, according to the NY Times, “built his political career among people who believe that Shariah is just around the corner, even as they attempt to secure privileges for their preferred religious groups to discriminate against those of whom they disapprove.”
Today’s civic, political, and cultural upheaval is, essentially, a battle involving racism in all its myriad guises. It is also about disinformation and racial resentment which, history suggests, go hand in hand.
The Big Lie about the recent election that the ex-President called “the greatest fraud in the history of our country” was a direct appeal to fears that ‘they’ had gained too much voting power, notwithstanding the long history of active minority discrimination and voter suppression that had, mostly, kept “them” in their place. How else to understand the upset election of two Democrats to the US Senate from the deep southern state of Georgia – the first African American and the first Jew elected from that erstwhile white, Christian, Republican bastion?
Conspiracy theories endlessly spread by conservative ‘talk-radio’ and right-wing cable TV pundits abound. They make it easy to believe that the disenfranchisement of people “who don’t look like us and don’t speak like us” will restore some dignity and status to the stubborn cohort of the Republican ‘base’, marching in lockstep under the banner of Trump’s big lie. Anyone unwilling to sign on to this ‘stolen election’ fantasy, they believe, must be a ’socialist’ or ‘communist’ and must be rendered powerless.
Racism is not only between the white and the black and brown but also the affluent and the poor, the better-educated and the less-educated, the religious and the secular, the powerful and the weak, the ‘listened to’ and the ignored. (I realize that listing them thus, shows an unintentional knee-jerk bias: why not the poor before the affluent or the black before the white?)
A primary racist characteristic is to make a group of people feel inferior. Our society portrays and glorifies the rich and famous, not those living from hand to mouth in a trailer park. We are conditioned from childhood to look up to the ‘stars’ and to imagine we could be like them and enjoy their lofty status. That they are mostly white and educated is no co-incidence. Theirs is a ‘white picket fence’ existence, often with a smiling black “Aunt Jemima” making pancakes to be served for breakfast at the family’s overly plentiful table.
One big problem with the Obama presidency was that it scared the bejesus out of these folks. Some may have felt some temporary pride in having elected a black man as President, but not far below the surface, their whiteness was fired up with fear. “As surely as night follows day” wrote the ‘Daily Kos’; “any flex of political power by black and brown people in the United States will be followed by a reactionary white supremacist show of force… the white insurrectionist takeover of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th was as predictable as a pendulum’s swing.”
Imagine how they felt when an African American (or Kenyan, as Trump’s discredited ‘birther conspiracy’ theories had it) became the US president: what danger did that portend for their white superiority and their future?
There is not a lot of milage between the ‘birther’ conspiracy and the exploding ‘QAnon’ cult movement, central to supporting Trump’s election overthrow effort and his support, in or out of office. QAanon asserts, fantastically, that Trump is engaged in a top-secret war with a cabal of pedophile and cannibalistic criminals, financed by Jewish multi-billionaire philanthropist George Soros (an easy anti-Semitic target), run by politicians like Hillary Clinton (hated by Trumpians: “Lock her up!”), and the Hollywood and Silicon Valley elites (“liberals and commies”), intent on taking over the world (the obvious endgame).
If you can believe this, why not also believe that the institutions and rules which have been the foundation of society are all corrupt hoaxes, frauds, or fake news, waiting to be broken by QAnon followers, totally justifying any actions – however violent or unlawful? And if you reside in this alternative reality bubble, it is likely impossible to find any ‘middle ground’ to negotiate with a fact-based reality.
Michelle Goldberg has observed; “Central to Trump’s mystique is that he breaks rules and gets away with it. Trump kept the far right’s paranoia and sense of grievance at a constant boil and gave them permission to act. The people at the Capitol who said they were there because the president wanted them to be weren’t necessarily delusional.”
It is awesome that only hours after the insurrection and the storming of the Capitol, two-thirds of the House Republican caucus, extremists and Trump loyalists to a man, voted to reject the electors duly certified by the individual states. More than 74 million American voters, including numerous GOP congressmen and senators, endorsed this sedition.
That argues forcefully that the hell of this delusional mainstreaming of racism, xenophobia and science denialism doesn’t look temporary at all. We are plunged into a racist class war that isn’t going to end soon or well.
“When you are walking through hell…. walk faster” recommended Winston Churchill. I fear even ‘walking faster’ isn’t going to make it go away and it won’t end until there is a sea change in the hard-wired attitudes about race, extremely polarized attitudes about ‘them’ and ‘us’, built up over the ages and now rising up in a grand confrontation.
To view the events of past weeks as merely some kind of ‘surreality’ show, to not listen to and then act on these dangerous dystopian messages, is to invite even closer the cataclysm which now lies just around the corner.
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