Undercurrents

Making up the blues
Holding back schools
Lot of greed, lot of temptation
Proof of one thing, we're a hell of a nation

Willie Wright, "Right on For The Darkness"

Time feels slightly disorienting, even though I’m doing my best to slow down and enjoy it like I should. Perhaps it’s because I perceive the sense of looming cataclysm, political, financial, geopolitical, or all three simultaneously. Who can say with any certainty that Putin won’t go nuclear in Ukraine? That’s one of those more distant worries, sort of like the fate of the ancient and decrepit nuclear reactors in Hanford, Washington, where material for the first atomic bomb we dropped on the civilian population of Japan was produced. Evidence of poor maintenance, leaks, and shoddy oversight by the US Department of Energy, all covered in a new book by Joshua Frank called Atomic Days. That’s closer to home, but closer still is the 23% decline in the value of our IRA. The US federal reserve seems to only have one single blunt tool at hand, raising interest rates to suffocate inflation. Many unseen hands in this one, bankers, hedge fund managers, huge pension funds like Cal-PERS (my pension fund), all beyond my control. Climate change, the availability of water, is a constant undercurrent to our lives, though often easy to ignore. 

In many ways it seems a cataclysm of Stupidity and Greed and Cruelty, dating back to the 2000 election, an election that was actually stolen, thanks to GOP judicial operatives like John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, and culminating today, with the former president acting everything but disgraced by two impeachments and the incitement of an armed attack on the seat of the legislative branch, an attempt at government by thuggery, as he continues to push his election lies, grift his gullible supporters, feed his durable base a torrent of lies and nonsense fables, and shop the state secrets he stole from the legitimate government to interested parties, possibly including Vladimir Putin. The possibilities are boggling, but again, far beyond my tiny sphere of influence. Purity tests took hold in the GOP under Newt Gingrich in the 1990’s, when Gingrich figured out how to weaponize obstinance and unyielding partisan opposition to actual governing. Party over country, raw power the sole objective. Rigid party discipline was built over the decades, and with the advent of the social disease that is social media (yes, I’m aware of the irony of a blogger who uses social media criticizing that very medium), but it has changed the game of politics, and not in a good way, putting performance over sense-making, the more batshit and outrageous and insulting the better. Get it trending and on FOX News. Repetition, like water on stone, will eventually make the truth give way. What’s true today? What’s a fact? 

The ire and outrage and sense of entitlement represented by extremists on the political right ring with echoes of the 1850’s, when this country was squaring off for separation and divorce, bitterness and hatred flowing fast, reason taking an elbow from emotion, fear on the rise, violence in the rhetoric of politicians and talking heads. Trump was the ultimate loyalty test, and he bluffed and bullied the GOP into submission. His Word had to be echoed without criticism, defended with personal attacks, invective and counter-accusations. Trump is a master of this authoritarian technique, he does it like judo, by muscle memory. I despise the man, but credit where it is warranted. 

Among the books on my tables these days is American Midnight by the historian Adam Hochschild. His canvas is World War I, with a primary focus on what America’s entry into the war meant on the domestic front at a time of widespread labor strife and violence, agitation from unions, socialists and anarchists for more fairness in a highly unequal economic arrangement. This is the authoritarian era the modern GOP wishes to return to, with everything it values -- racial animosity, vigilante groups, citizens spying on each other, cruelty against immigrants, women fighting for full citizenship, and intolerance of dissent -- in play.  This was the era that birthed the Espionage Act (still in force today) and the Volstead Act, which ushered in the nutty idea of Prohibition. Dumb ideas have the unfortunate habit of also being cruel, and they tend to proliferate. Ban books, forbid the teaching of history, demand that public schools emphasis “patriotic” education, outlaw abortion, slam the border shut. Another similarity -- it was an age with a global pandemic, then, the misleadingly named Spanish Flu, and today, Covid. Deliberate misinformation about both was disseminated widely to the public. 

Speaking of dumb ideas, look at what’s happening in the UK, post-Brexit. The people of Britain were sold a phony bill of goods that harkened back to the glory years of the empire, when Britain was a major global power. The Conservative party in the UK is as devoid of ideas as the GOP in this country. 

BACKLASH

“Not just in the South but across the country the Klan enjoyed a remarkable resurgence, reaching its all-time peak of an estimated four million members by 1924.” Adam Hochschild, “All-American Vigilantes” The New York Review

It used to be that nations mounted space explorations, now a few Robber Baron billionaires have so much wealth at their disposal that they can foot the bill to shoot themselves into space. Bully for you, Richard Branson. Who will the next contestant in the Billionaire Space Race be? 

I’m reading “The Cruelty Is The Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America” by Adam Serwer. One thing I’ve come to realize is that many of my fellow Americans are happy to enter the tent of Nationalism-Nativism-Racism. The rhetoric of America First, of America-for-Americans, and the superiority of the white race appeals to millions, as evidenced by the 74 million votes cast for Donald Trump in November 2020. That Trump was incompetent, immoral, ignorant, and an imbecile didn’t matter. As Adam Serwer points out in his essays, Trump’s followers adore him because he says out loud, and often, what they think; he hates and demonizes the same people they do, and gives voice to their grievances. A core tenet of Trumpism is that undeserving people are taking from “real” Americans, reaping benefits at the expense of flag-waving, gun-toting, salt-of-the-earth Americans. The takers are black and brown, foreign and devious, the victims are white. Democrats side with the black and brown folks, the queer, women, animals, fish and fowl at the expense of true Americans. Trump’s gift is that he absolves his followers of any shame or guilt. He makes them feel good, justified in their beliefs and opinions. He assures them that they are good people, “tremendous” people, as he called the mob who sacked the US Capitol on January 6. Trump tapped into an old, recurring, and reliable strain of American bigotry. 

I didn’t fully appreciate the backlash against Barack Obama until Trump was in office and actively trying to efface everything Obama had accomplished. Obama’s ethnicity never bothered me. What bothered me were his centrist policies, his caution, his expansion of our unwinnable wars, and his harsh treatment of illegal immigrants. In hindsight, I better understand what Obama was up against: it wasn’t just Mitch McConnell and the entire GOP that tried to thwart him, it was a sizable chunk of the white electorate who despised him because he was a black man who embodied the great fear of white people. The response to Barack Obama was tribal, and had far less to do with jobs and wages and material well-being, and more to do with bigotry -- and the fear of losing control, status, and privilege that white skin has always bestowed. As Adam Serwer writes, tribe and race over country is the core of white nationalism. 

What happens next? I have no idea, but the portends are dark. The energy of resurgent white nationalism has to go somewhere. We’ve witnessed what Trump’s followers are capable of and it would be a mistake to believe they will fade quietly away. At this point it’s obvious that Trump’s core supporters will not desert him no matter what. Donald J. Trump satisfies the darkest impulses in the American soul.