Red Meat Schizophrenia

“Hitler issued an endless stream of slogans to win potential supporters over. He would make Germany great again. He would give Germans work once more. He would put Germany first. He would revive the nation’s rusting industries, laid to waste by the economic depression. He would crush the alien ideologies—­socialism, liberalism, communism—­that were undermining the nation’s will to survive and destroying its core values.” Richard J. Evans

At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, better known by its acronym CPAC, Donald Trump tossed chunks of raw meat to the mostly white audience. America first! Check. More money for our “beloved military.” Check. Winning. Check. Tax cuts for all! Check.

Listening to Trump’s scattershot remarks, one wonders if his people brief him beforehand or if Trump simply gets a feel for the crowd and the occasion and shoots from the hip.

One thing is certain: Donald Trump is lousy at basic math. His pledge to pour even more of our national treasure into the Pentagon is ridiculous on a number of levels, but first and foremost, the only way Trump can slash taxes and increase military spending is to gut other federal agencies, like the EPA and the State Department, and maybe make a backdoor run at Social Security and Medicare. Perhaps Trump doesn’t realize that big tax cuts and increased military spending have been tried before, and all they have produced is massive budget deficits that sooner or later are closed on the backs of the most vulnerable. It’s called austerity, and it’s cruel and stupid and a form of class warfare.

Trump proposes hiking the Pentagon budget by some $54 billion. I wonder if anyone has mentioned to Trump that the US now devotes about 54% of its budget to the military, a figure that dwarfs the military spending of any other nation. What the US spends on the military makes Russia and China look minor league by comparison.

And what, exactly, is the point of Trump’s military build-up? Prosecuting the never-ending War on Terror doesn’t require more fighter jets, aircraft carriers, ships or tanks, so who is Trump preparing to fight? China? Russia, if the generals and Neocons around Trump have their way? Iran? Mexico? And will all this increased spending bring our 16- year-old war in Afghanistan to an end?

The most hilarious moment, for me anyway, came when Trump announced that the GOP would from now on be the party of working Americans. Forget the fact that the GOP has for decades been the party of capital, not labor; ignore the fact that the GOP has been hostile to labor unions, in both the private and public sectors; forget that many of the GOP’s leading oligarchs made their fortunes by exporting jobs to low-wage countries, leaving American workers to fend for themselves; forget that the GOP is hostile to minimum wage increases and sneers at the idea of living wages.

This is America! Workers are not entitled to living wages!

I’m sorry to say that my pointy-headed west coast liberal bias is emerging, but honestly, how misinformed does one have to be to believe this nonsense? Donald Trump is never going to place the interests of working people ahead of the interests of capital. Never. Trump is many things, but he’s not a traitor to the ruling class -- his class. Trump has surrounded himself with wealthy people who don’t give a damn about working people.

Almost as chilling as the fascist overtones -- protect the borders, build the military, America first -- were the all-white overtones. When Steve Bannon speaks about the American “culture” his meaning is very clear. He’s talking about racial purity, some mythical Ozzie & Harriet, Doris Day time in America when Negroes knew their place, Mexicans mowed lawns and cleaned homes and picked vegetables and kept their mouths shut, and women were grateful for a self-cleaning oven and a new washing machine, and to bake cookies for little Johnny and Jane when they came home from their safe, orderly, all-white school.

People like Donald Trump and Steve Bannon don’t rise spontaneously, they are always present, lurking on the fringes, other times out in plain site. Our soil has been waiting for a seed. America has from the beginning had a racist strain, and we added nativism and nationalism along our path to empire.  At times we move away from these evils, other times we move toward them, as if doing so will solve our problems. They won’t. Our root problems are unregulated capitalism which enriches the few at the expense of the many and devalues anything that cannot be priced as a commodity, aligned with militarism and imperialism. Trump and his gang will only exacerbate our root problems.

Trump loyalists may find out how easy it can be to choke on a chunk of red meat.