When a bomb maker targeted prominent Democrats, the response from Rush Limbaugh, the fraud squad at Fox News, and many Republican officeholders was to claim it was a Democratic hoax designed to tarnish Trump’s party prior to the midterm elections. Of course, it was actually a Trump acolyte out to attack physically the same people his hero has attacked verbally.
No sooner was this zealot arrested than another unleashed gunfire in a synagogue because he had been led to believe Jews were behind the Democratic Party, an invasion from Central America, and the degradation of American life for unappreciated people like him. Trump’s solution was the same as that proposed after Parkland. Then it was arm the teachers. Now it is arm the rabbis.
Such events are no longer weird aberrations but the daily news of life in Trump’s America. The bomber and the gunman are no longer lone wolves. They find like-minded alternative reality communities online and encouragement from a president of the United States who traffics in hate speech, discrimination, racism, misogyny, anti-semitic tropes and the stoking of grievance.
His followers are told America is in decline. white men like them are victims of the “others,” not of self-inflicted wounds, personal inadequacy, or the lack of needed skills in a changing economy. After having to endure the horror of people seeking Black Power, asserting Gay Pride, claiming Sisterhood powerful, Trump has emboldened some to express not just white pride but white supremacy.
What could go wrong? Well, according to the FBI, the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center, domestic terrorism is on the rise. Hate crimes have targeted LGBT people, Muslims, and Hispanics. Anti-semitic threats are up 57% in the last year. Over 900 extremist groups have been identified around the country since Trump began campaigning. Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, White Nationalists, and on and on.
This dark underbelly of American life has been there forever, but the embrace of Trumpism by the Republican Party has brought it out into the open. When Trump announces he’s a Nationalist, David Duke celebrates it as an endorsement of white supremacy. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Majority Leader of the House, seeks to scare Republican voters to the polls by invoking the conspiracy of three Jewish money lenders — Soros, Steyer and Bloomberg.
Republicans now unashamedly embrace their identity as the party of racial discrimination, voter suppression, guns and grievance. Successful, middle class, suburban voters who once voted for fiscally conservative Republicans now increasingly find it a party in thrall to far right attitudes that feel alien and un-American.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. These are not new strains in American life, but for a time they were driven underground. It was not politically correct to express such bigotry clearly. but it always lurked. It was behind the Southern strategy of Nixon, the launching of the Reagan campaign with a state’s rights dog whistle near the place where Civil Rights workers were murdered, and so on.
The election of the first black president produced an opposition party prepared to obstruct democratic processes and norms for years, and to pander to bigots more blatantly than at any time since the Civil Rights era with its Bull Connor, George Wallace, and Lester Maddox, its firehoses, attack dogs, massive resistance, confederate flags and obstructionism.
In fact, this country has discriminated de jure and de facto since before its founding. Native Americans were the first victims of white supremacy, followed shortly by the importation of slaves. The Constitution enshrined racial discrimination. There have always been “others” to denigrate and demonize. New England Puritans hung Quakers and ran Baptists out of town. Ben Franklin lamented the pollution of Pennsylvania by German immigrants. The Germans hated the next wave of immigrants — the Scotch-Irish.
Protestants thought it was un-American to admit Catholics to the country, and Jews and Muslims have been subjected to waves of hate. Congress authored a Chinese Exclusion Act and approved the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. Indians got consigned to reservations. There is a long history of closing the border and keeping the “other” in their place.
Ghettoes aren’t confined to the Old World. Nor are laws making anything other than heterosexual orientation a crime. And a man of my grandfather’s generation, born in the 1890s, had a vocabulary stocked with an ethnic slur for every neighbor on his street — Hungarians, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Jews, Catholics. He was an ecumenical bigot.
Trump and the Republican Party that is remaking itself in his image are in a long, bitter, shameful tradition. Will Trumpism make America great again or disgraceful again? Is confining the labor pool to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants likely to be a successful 21st century strategy, or the road to ruin? More to the point, is Trump any more likely than King Canute to stop the tide by commanding it to stop? Will all the mad shooters and bombers bring back the good, old days, or simply join their fellow white supremacists on the ultimate dead end — death row?
America is a global power because it has attracted immigrants from around the world. After four hundred years as a melting pot, it is far too late to separate out the ingredients and keep some and reject others. Racial purity is a fiction, as even the neanderthal part of Trump ought to understand. There was a time when Trump’s (Drumpf) Germans and Scots, Pence’s (originally Bentz) German and Irish ancestors would have been persona non grata in English colonies. Do they want to turn back the clock far enough to self-deport? Probably not. Everyone believes their ancestors were the good immigrants. That’s the American Way.