Donald Trump and The Ku Klux Klan

Ever since Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the president of these United States, I have been researching the obvious question of why in the hell anyone would support him. And then this happened:

David Duke: Voting against Trump is 'treason to your heritage'

Regardless of the timeline of events, first he didn't then he did disavow the KKK and white supremacists. And the minor dust-up about credentialing a white nationalist radio show host for one of his mass rallies. And the fawning, gushing love for the Donald over at new-nazi website the daily stormer (I'm not linking to it but if you're brave, go have a look). We have the this blast from the past. As JAMES PONIEWOZIK put it in the New York Times, "until this week, the K.K.K.’s loathsomeness had seemed to be a settled issue." 

Hopefully it will be nothing else, but Trump's campaign has certainly proved that this supposed tyranny of political correctness is a toothless tiger. If, on election day Trump secures a paltry minority of votes and his Republican Party is utterly crushed in down-ticket races all over the country, the short-fingered vulgarian and his hate-filled mouth-breathing followers will have shown us all that racism is alive and well, and that the tyranny of political correctness has no idea how to adequately deal with it. And that we are really just one rigged election away from reinstating segregation, white supremacy, and possibly even a return to slavery. Political correctness, at least in the way social conservatives yap endlessly about it, really seems more and more to be a meaningless buzzword that signifies nothing more than "why can't we dominate those non-white people the way we used to?"

Just as the plutocracy and unregulated capitalism were marginalized for a time by the Great Depression, open racism and white supremacy were marginalized by herculean efforts of the Civil Rights Movement and the intervention of the Federal Government. But the will to power and domination represented by these forces are an idea, and just as many commentators pointed out during the "war on terror," you cannot destroy an idea. Thomas Frank discussed this concept in The Wrecking Crew, in regards to the methods and tactics that "conservatives" use to try and destroy liberalism once and for all. Just as plutocracy and "free market" (basically unregulated) capitalism clawed their way back into power by displacing the labor movement and New Deal institutions inch by inch, capitalizing on every crisis to expand and legitimize corporate power, racism and white supremacy has clawed its way back into the discussion by using every shock of modernity to discredit and delegitimize multiculturalism, diversity, equal rights, and tolerance of difference.

By playing footsie with very dangerous people, Trump legitimizes for his followers a belief structure that should have died out a long time ago. The only saving grace is that the majority of authoritarian followers still do not like the label of "racist" and do not want to be associated with words like "KKK" or "Neo-Nazi" however much they hold racial resentments. The next post will describe the KKK of the 1920s and explore similarities with Trump supporters.

Getting The House In Order

I am a big fan of The Bubble Genius Bob and Chez Show, and I follow their writing for The Daily Banter and elsewhere. This is a podcast about politics that Mr. Cesca and Mr. Pazienza host twice a week to bring their pragmatic liberal point of view to a grateful audience. I am using the honorific "Mr." out of respect and it is how gentlemen talk about their friends. Two and a half years ago I wrote an open letter to Chez so I could try and cheer him up and share some historical perspective with anyone who was open to reading it. I like to think it helped, Chez posted the link to his blog and The Daily Banter, where the letter received a decent response, and an expression of gratitude from the man himself. Recently the show has focused more and more energy on the fringiest of fringes, the so-called Bernie Bots. Chez's articles have also lately become borderline obsessed with the idea that there are an enormous number of these privileged snowflakes who cannot wait to stay home on election day if Bernie Sanders is not the Democratic nominee. I am worried that this tendency is negatively impacting his mental health and want to give it another try to help my friend and to start getting our Democratic house in order for this long march to election day.

I am the first to admit that correlation does not necessarily mean causation, my letter could have had no real impact on Chez's improved attitude and writing. But if there is even a chance that I can be of some help I want to share my perspective on the issue of Bernie Bots and the attempted sabotage of keeping a Democrat in the White House, then let's give it a shot. I want Kid Dynamite (someone called Chez that in a comment on my post, I'm pretty sure he was being sincere) back in form and blasting the snot out of Republican obstructionism.

I will preface this by saying that I will be turning the mirror around a bit and using some of Bob's and your words, observations, and ideas to make a case for snapping back to form. And yes, I'm being selfish because every time you, Chez, write a monster smack down of that Republican obstructionism I get a warm fuzzy. This obsession started with grumbling about college kids being college kids, so let's start there. The beautiful thing about being Eighteen, Nineteen, etc. is it only happens once, and this is (hopefully) "our" chance to be stupid and live to tell about it. Bob certainly noted after the low youth turn out in 2014 that what loud college kids want is often irrelevant to our larger political reality. I have also written about the stupid mistake I made in 2000 and tried to atone for it. You and Bob have repeatedly stated that crowd sizes, yard signs, and social media hits are a poor gauge for estimating electoral strength. So I want to state that I worry you are being had.

Or am I missing the point? Is this grumpy "get off my lawn" idiom just an act? A niche to fill for this election cycle and bathe in clicks? No, I don't think so. Unless everything about your writing has been an act since I started reading it. Though criticizing Bernie Sanders' supporters has certainly generated a lot of pageviews and comments. On the other hand, and this may be completely unsupported anecdotal evidence, it seems like so many of the commenters are repeat offenders and the discussion is between just a few passionate people with a lot to say. There have been about 26,000 shares of your latest article on Bernie supporters, how many of those are from real, engaged citizens and how many are from people just passing on a cool meme? With all the technology available to us these days, it is still awfully hard to tell.

At the risk of using a Doocy mark, how many so-called #feelthebern movement leader types could just be paid right wing trolls? Is is wrong to ask the question of whether much of this controversy is actually being led by agents provocateur? How many dedicated, professional, well-paid propagandists would it take to lead an army of disconnected volunteer trolls to pretend that they are actually leftist Liberal critics of Hillary Clinton? My answer: One. You guys have commented in the past that comment thread trolls are often led by by one operative or organization that produces the memes and talking points for issues of the day. The majority of "conservative" trolls are followers, right wing authoritarian followers to be precise. It really would only take one person to forward the idea on some obscure, reactionary message board that everybody should show up on liberal websites and social media to attack Clinton from the left, and the trolls would come running. After making exaggerated claims (conveniently echoing Republican propaganda) criticizing Clinton, and making the idealistic stand about "teaching the 'establishment' a lesson" and that politics as usual is not good enough, we come to the 'staying home or voting for Trump' portion of the ratfucking campaign.

Or it may be that the Bernie or bust movement is wholly part of the "far left", as it was in 2000 with Ralph Nader and the Green Party. I dislike speculating because there are no reliable documents to put forward as evidence. And the social media revolution has turned discourse into shifting desert sands anyway. Left or right, any number of people can create a number of sock puppet accounts to echo their message and agenda. Just as there are right wing authoritarian followers who obediently line up behind authority figures who tell them what they want to hear and will gladly attack anyone who disagrees with their self-righteous world view, there are left wing versions as well. In The Authoritarians Bob Altemeyer describes the left wing authoritarian follower as a permanent rebel who is never satisfied with the existing order. Sound familiar? You and Bob talk about them all the time without using that label. It could be any combination of these vandals manipulating people for a myriad of reasons

The right wing authoritarian followers who show up to troll liberals have their leaders in right wing media and politics, with Trump being the textbook definition of the "social dominator" that Altemeyer described. But left wing authoritarian followers have leaders as well, you and Bob know them well. These are the Glenn Greenwalds and H. A. Goodmans of the world, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. had them defined as "wailers" almost seventy years ago. In The Vital Center he described those two chuckle heads as "democratic men with totalitarian principles" almost as dogmatic and ideologically driven as their power-hungry counterparts on the right. I wrote about "wailers" and "doughface progressives" in several posts a few years ago (here, here, here, and here) because of the similarities between our self-appointed "purist" progressives who aggressively complained about being excluded and betrayed by the Obama Administration after working so hard to get him elected and those careerist "establishment" doughfaces in the administration who aggressively complained about the pajamas media and their foolish liberal agenda. Both sides had a point and the fact that we had to have that debate in public makes me despair of ever getting the house in order.

But seriously, in the large electoral coalition that is the Democratic Party, how many of these Bernie Bots that pledge to never vote for anyone but him are there? Chirping about it on those social media-driven websites that depend on Facebook traffic is one thing, but how many of these chuckle heads were going to vote before Bernie entered the race? Statistically insignificant is the term that springs to mind. Whether driven by authoritarians on the left or right, the numbers of Bots is pretty small. Most of the people I know and people I have observed do not have the nihilistic and apocalyptic view of pouting and staying home if they don't get what they want. No, most is not even the real descriptor, one is more like it and she never voted for a Democrat before. So the excessive energy spent trying to reason with people you, Chez, always admit will never see reason seems like a waste. We can't get everyone to agree, that's why we have elections. It is an imperfect method of resolving differences, but it's better than letting Trump make all the decisions.

I would love to see the young, disillusioned college types get out there in huge numbers and contribute their energy and passion to the process of democracy, but it hasn't happened. We can't win them all and moreover, we're not ready for a revolution. Even if that revolution is simply a return to dedicated New Deal policies and programs, which Bernie is basically advocating (for all the talk about Democratic Socialism, Senator Sanders is just a staunch New Dealer). Too many people have been effectively conditioned by the right wing media into petulant children. And not just on the right, the most interesting and largely unexplored facet of our descent into fascism has been how coarse we have all become in recent years. And goddamnit, wasn't The Daily Banter trying to "unfuck" the internet and raise discourse? I agree with most of what you, Chez, said in that piece, now that catharsis has been achieved it is time to take a break and stop policing the kids. The rest of non-authoritarian society needs you to get our house in order.