The Damned "R-Word"

Recently the Informed Comment website ran an article titled “Star-Struck & Party Fanatic: the Moral Paradox of Trump Support,” in which that site’s proprietor and those who wrote comments to that article put fingers on the forces that they considered to be most responsible for the Donald Trump candidacy nightmare, which now, to the tremendous joy of billions around the world, is finally closing in on its last moments, one way or the other.

Professor Cole pinned the blame on Trump’s celebrity status and on party loyalty in spite of all.   The commenters offered alternative explanations, which included the sharp decline of industries in the U.S., support of carpet bombing as a legitimate U.S. tool of war, the absence of attention that Americans pay to things political, right wing media outlets as sole sources of info on everything, phony perceptions of the U.S. being in general decline, and undying hatred of Hillary Clinton.  Noticeably, no one mentioned misogyny in general. 

But then, if not always of themselves, everyone at least always wants to think the best of their family members.

All these designations were interesting and possibly even convincing, but I thought that the ground under them was not nearly as firm as what underlay the candidate that I could name, even though I knew that my opinion would have no chance of being taken seriously, by the writers on that site or by the great majority of its readers.   I knew that what I had to drag forward would be seen as unforgivable old hat to members of the most dominant segment of the American population, who are sick of hearing the R-word offered up yet again as an explanation for anything at all.

Still, having been born with the “wrong” skin color in 1931 and by having come of age during the Civil Rights Era, I felt secure in pointing out that, unlike the great majority of those folks, I have been obliged to endure and also to observe all the various manifestations of racism against so-called “black” people for quite a long while, even if I could be easily dismissed because I would be seen as being naturally disposed to offer pure racism up as the best explanation for the power of the Trump pandemic.

I don’t see how it can be denied that racism and the insistence upon “white” superiority has been the chief bane of American existence since long before the U.S. was founded, and that continues even to the present day.   Just stringing together expressions like “slavery, ”KKK,”  “lynch law,” “Jim Crow,” and “roll-backs” is enough to show that.

Take a look at the numerous Trump rallies that this year witnessed.   They seem to me to operate in a spirit of entertainment that could only appeal to the most callous, unthinking, and hateful of people,  and those events created an air that was and is strongly akin to what I can easily imagine had prevailed at the lynching bees of yesteryear.  And continuing in that vein, I would ask why, today, has Trump spent time trying to dictate what  “black” communities should do, when he is speaking in places that are more than 90 percent “white,” and so is sounding a chord that hasn’t been heard since nooses were thrown over so many tree branches, and now he is using dreams of sending in squads of his supporters on Election Day, to discourage voting in those communities.

Without openly acknowledging it, Trump is using the same “Southern Strategy” that the Republican Party started setting into place successfully in the 1960’s, after they had happily welcomed into their ranks the Dixiecrats who had started leaving the Democratic Party.  The “Willy Horton” effect and the Ronald Reagan dog whistles that sought to make bigotry respectable were other instances, later in the day.   And nowadays why is the “Black Lives Matter” movement resented so bitterly, when it is the Latino increase as a percentage of the American populace that figures to be the biggest factor in the decrease of “white” power?  I guess the Repubs figure that the Latinos can be dealt with later.

In embracing poorly concealed racism against the people that he rudely calls “the blacks” and their role in taking part in what he already condemns as certain to be rigged elections, Trump has reached for the biggest and longest-lasting spear in the grab-bag of the group whose status as “the Party of Lincoln” did not last much past the onset of the 20th century.

Racism is only rivaled by overpopulation when one wants to name the root causes of almost all the ills plaguing the world.  And that is not at all limited just to the descendants of Europeans.  It has been true of humans in general from the very beginning, and I think that would go far in explaining why, of all the different varieties of bipedals who milled around the savannahs of Africa for a very long time before, one after the other, they finally decided to get their knees wet, to see what, if anything, lay beyond the Red Sea, only one of those groups, the Homo Sapiens, are left, and, now divided into only a few colors, there are serious efforts afoot to see if even those several hues can at length be reduced to just one.