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.

Reagan: The Problem

I was hoping for more from the title: A Short Breakdown Of How Reagan Broke Our Economy, Killed Jobs, And Rewarded Greed A little more history perhaps, at least an explanation of how political polarization led to Reagan's election and subsequent policy ransacking. But no, all we get from Sarah Wood is an analysis of the symptoms and effects of monopoly on the American people.

Reagan’s abandonment of antitrust laws and the refusal of policy makers even today to start enforcing them again is what collapsed our economy and rewarded greed.

While this is true, there is much more to it and simply stating that the reaganites gave business the green light to make their greediest dreams come true ignores the context of the times. For example, there were republican presidents before Reagan, why did Nixon or Ford not take their hands off the wheel and allow big business to rip apart the social contract? Events outside the US? Or recent history of that time? History is rarely a simple "A alone causes B." Looking at the 1980s from the perspective of what followed is a fallacy. While you will get no argument from me that non-enforcement of antitrust laws played a great role in the economic polarization of the contemporary US; it is a major source of the vast inequality of wealth and income, the stagnation of the economy as a whole, and ever-growing poverty, one cannot argue that this phenomenon occurred in a vacuum.

What follow in Wood's essay is a fairly standard recitation of the collapse of civil society, the result of economic ruin for the middle class and ever-deepening chasm swallowing working people into poverty.

Here is the salient point of Wood's thesis:

consolidation of industry has stifled our growth. Jobs grow through small business, individual entrepreneurship, and actual competition. However we need laws to allow this to happen which keep markets and wages fair. This doesn’t make me a socialist, this makes me a person in favor of capitalism who appreciates competition, but also appreciates laws that protect the small from being devoured by the large. These laws also protect us from these giant monopolies dictating laws that may potentially harm us (food safety, etc.) so they can increase profits by cutting corners. (Emphasis mine)

 Ahhh, let's not even pretend to understand the difference between socialism and varying forms of capitalism. Make sure you don't think of any white elephants while reading her essay. Funny how inoculation only works one way, when the Children of Light try it they only end up activating the Children of Darkness' frames. However, somehow anytime a progressive CoL brings up Reagan or God help us George w. bush the wailing of trolls begins. "Oh, of course it is all dubya's fault." Those knee-jerk schmuck declarations that dare you to agree, but reflexively we know what is out-of-bounds. It is the same reflex that all but forces liberals to defend small businesses as bastions of goodness.

Indented and italicized for no apparent reason and with no supporting source is this gem:

Industry consolidation also cuts down on workers’ rights. This is why Republicans hate and demonize unions. Workers having a voice cuts down on the ability to be greedy. 

The trouble is, and obviously there are exceptions, but most big business prior to the Reagan "revolution" had made peace with organized labor. Consolidated industries, like steel, or energy, or manufacturing were too vulnerable to workers' resistance in the days before subsidized outsourcing. The treaty of Detroit, where management finally conceded labor's right to bargain, meant high wages but no say in how business was run and compared to the days before the treaty had brought relative labor peace.

It was small businessmen who irrationally feared and loathed anything that smacked of bargaining with "the help." It was the NFIB that freaked out so hard about the Clinton administration's healthcare reform proposals in 1993, over a portion that required providing bare bones insurance for all employees at a cost of about 10 cents an hour. Twenty years later the fight is still joined at that level. The so-called tea party, if it has any real existence beyond Astroturf, is a rogue's gallery of small business types so it does not matter how dead unions really are this merry band of idiots and racists are frightened beyond belief that their busboys and stockers are just waiting for their fellow minority in the White House to give the word to agitate for fair treatment. This of course will cause utter chaos, the ruin of tea partiers' cult of self-importance, and possibly the violation of our white women.

Sorry folks, but race is, was, and probably will ever be America's original sin. Reagan did not kick off his campaign by memorializing and standing by 'states' rights' in a southern town that murdered several civil rights' activists during the 1960s because he himself had Klansman hoods in his closet, but he knew how to play the game for those that did. Reagan did not let loose his many counterfactual descriptions of "welfare queens" without the certainty of what images these fairy tales would conjure up in the minds of his supporters.

There is so much more to the wrecking of the relatively stable, fair, and equal America built by the Greatest Generation and refined by well-meaning Americans for a half century. But that will have to wait... because dang, that is a big, big story. Historians and lots of very smart people are still in shock that America unraveled this quickly and how far we will continue to fall. I don't mean to knock Sarah Wood or Political Shake for printing her piece, monopoly is a huge problem, but to pretend that there is a silver bullet which can undo all the damage of the last three decades is just naïve.