Beware a Fanatical Minority

 “Where are we heading? How do we begin to dream ourselves out of this dark place of death and destruction?” Robin D.G. Kelley

Fire, flood, pestilence and Trump, the wrath of a vengeful god aimed at his wayward and unruly children or simply the consequences of human stupidity and fear? 

Footsteps echo in the blue-black night. Friend or foe? Is it a white kid not even old enough to cast a vote, armed with an assault rifle, on the hunt for people of a darker skin tone? Do the footsteps belong to men in blue uniforms, also armed and dangerous? Seven police bullets in the back of another African-American man, Jacob Blake. It’s still open season on black bodies, as if the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd never happened. In some American cities, the police refuse to pause and step back, afraid that giving an inch will be seen as surrender. 

In his excellent book, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War, historian Andrew Delbanco writes, “But if slavery was really a benign institution furnishing care for a simple people, why were the simpletons running away? It was a maddening question, and to read the attempts of antebellum southerners to answer it is to be reminded of the infinite human capacity for self-deception.”

In our own time a solid minority of Americans engage in self-deception. How else to explain the stubborn support for the Grifter-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump? Forty percent of the American electorate is simply too far gone, too far down the rabbit hole, unreachable by facts, logic, science, or common sense. Trump and his most loyal supporters live in a parallel universe unrecognizable to the rest of us; they see danger around every corner, in the form of marching, chanting black people, immigrants, angry women, liberals, and Democrats who, they believe, garnish their kale salads with the flesh of aborted babies. Trump’s hold on this forty percent is baffling. I can’t understand what they see in Trump after four years of lies, corruption, incoherence, and incompetence. How has Trump improved their lives? Has he delivered jobs, lower taxes, health care? 

But perhaps none of that matters to Trump supporters. Perhaps all they care about is airing their grievances against those they perceive as threats to their place on the social hierarchy. They back Trump because he says out loud what they think. Trump shares their victimhood, that’s the real bond between them. Trump paints himself as the white knight who single-handedly holds a deadly Deep State cabal at bay. Trump’s people lay their bag of woe at the doorstep of immigrants who take and take and take from hard-working real Americans, giving nothing in return; or black people advantaged by Affirmative Action; or gays, lesbians and transgender people; or snooty liberals from Hollywood and New York City, the elite. 

The Republican National Convention, which I refuse to torture my brain by watching, is a celebration of Donald J. Trump’s domination of the GOP. The party is so devoid of ideas that it offers no platform of its aims and objectives -- the platform is whatever Dear Leader says it is, whatever Dear Leader wants in the moment, whatever Dear Leader thinks his base wants to hear, no matter how batshit crazy or divorced from reality. If Dear Leader wins the election he will deem it free and fair; if Dear Leader loses he will declare it rigged, fraudulent, stolen by the radical Democrats. 

 

America gnaws at its own flesh, like a coyote with its leg caught in a steel trap. Look at what has become of the party of Abraham Lincoln. It’s devolving before our eyes, from Eisenhower to Reagan to the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus to QAnon. Lincoln, who danced on a political tightrope to hold the Union together, compromising when justified in the service of the greater good, wouldn’t recognize Trump’s GOP. Neither would Eisenhower. Even Barry Goldwater would say, “Where the fuck is my party?” 

In four years America has slipped from a nation most of the world admired to an object of derision and pity. The world watches aghast as Donald J. Trump stands before the country and rambles incoherently about light bulbs and dishwashers, while more than 100,000 (according to the Trump Death Clock) Americans have perished due to Trump’s bungling of the Coronavirus pandemic. That fact alone should doom Trump, but I fear we have become numb.

It comes down to the voters, and perhaps critically to eligible voters who have never before bothered to exercise their franchise. Americans who occupy the real world, not Trump’s Fantasy Island, have to turn out with the fervor of a long oppressed people who are about to vote for the very first time. 

I heard the author Mike Lofgren on Background Briefing. He said something that startled me: “A fanatical minority can take over a country.” 

If you’re eligible, you cannot sit this one out. Register, and vote.