Donald Doughface

This year has seen the return of open racism and misogyny to American politics. It has come about because of one man, a vulgar talking yam who rode the vicious populist wave, voter suppression, and Russian intervention all the way to the highest office in the republic. While this has huge contemporary repercussions, it has also opened a clear view of the fact that for many people the Civil War never ended. Prior to that conflict there was a term for a Northern man with Southern sympathies, doughface, and it is time to reintroduce that name to a man who fits the definition so well, Donald J. Trump. The true battle line of the Civil War that preceded and succeeded the military campaigns of 1861-65 was between the democratic vision of America and the aristocratic one. Doughface donny lied his way into the presidency by appealing to the worst aspects of aristocratic America, not by promising the republican working class voters a better life but by promising to stomp on nonwhite and liberal America and all that it stands for without any restraint.

Two days before election day a little article was posted on the History News Network by the Presidential Distinguished Professor and Chair of the History Department at Weber State University, Susan J. Matt that flew under the radar during that chaotic time. Titled This is What Liberals are missing about Trump's appeal Professor Matt presents a very detailed and in depth look at the pre-industrial concept of personal honor and shame that dominated Southern life even after the Civil War. Now that the industrial way of life has receded in so much of the United States this primitive lifestyle has experienced a revival unnoticed by all of us "elitists" in the city. What this looks like is described as:

Southern white men worried incessantly about how others perceived them. Any insult to their reputations needed to be quickly parried lest they lose face. Historian Keith Thomas noted that among English elites, the concern with honor “generated extreme touchiness, and hypersensitivity to any form of slight. As a result, honour was invoked as justification for almost any kind of self-aggrandizement.”

Some of that aggrandizement could be based on sexual prowess. Men could boast of their sexual exploits, for lust signaled virility and strength. Reputation also depended on outward carriage, for Brown writes, “honor was a state of grace linking mind, body, blood, hand, voice, head, eyes, and even genitalia.” Consequently, southerners were concerned with their own bodies as well as their ancestors’, for bloodlines and racial purity affected the ability to embody honor.

Those who believed in honor engaged in physical, sometimes violent displays of power to defend it. Historian Elliott Gorn found that to display honor, poor men had vicious brawls, gouging out each others’ eyes, as well as biting off ears and windpipes, while elites relied on duels as a more genteel way to defend reputation. To be honorable required men to take risks, display bravery.

Men were also supposed to risk their pocketbooks, for gambling too was a display of nerve. If men ran up debts, they must repay them, for those they gambled with were presumably honorable gentlemen; however, they need not pay back people below them on the social scale. William Grayson of South Carolina noted, “A gambling debt is a debt of honour, but a debt due a tradesman is not.”

Southern whites who subscribed to this cult of honor lived publicly, and when possible grandly, boasted about their sexual prowess and bravery, focused on outward appearances and reputation, and took forceful, even violent action when that reputation was assailed.

- See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/164299#sthash.t9Y7fcRD.dpuf

This barbaric way of life persists in nearly any American community that is unencumbered by Enlightenment principles or even the industrial installation of bureaucracy or professionalism. The brutes may not be "biting off ears and windpipes" anymore but scratch the surface in any military base or impoverished small town and you will discover hypersensitive man-children endlessly bragging about their sexual conquests, the many slights suffered and punishments or humiliations dealt out, and the intricate web of hierarchy and domination forever being challenged and enforced. This system of honor has jumped the regional boundaries of the old Confederacy in much the same way that the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan after WWI found strength in states such as Indiana and Oklahoma. It has even jumped color lines as African-American gang members on the South Side of Chicago worry endlessly about their "rep" and answer slights from others posted online with physical confrontation and often bullets. The link between this system of honor and white supremacy, however, is the focus of discussing Donald Doughface.

Thus far I have only found one other blog linking trump with the term "doughface" and although poignant it does not go deep enough to understand the causal factors, the driving force that gives so much energy to the republicans who voted against every democratic impulse to make this doughface president. The right wing in America is driven by a primitive honor system, while it may have started in the South before the republic was even founded, today this plague has spread to all points on the American map. Anywhere ruin has been visited on the American proletariat, anywhere average people have been stripped of a decent living by plutocrats in corporate America and Wall Street, the vengeful honor system has flooded in to encourage vulgarity, racism, misogyny, and hypersensitive aggression.

Donald Trump, who will never be normalized on this page nor accorded with the title he and his confederates have stolen for him, is the epitome of of this (dis)honor system. A Northern man with Southern principles, ever ready to strike down anyone who opposes or slights him, ever ready to take anything he wants and react with self-righteous fury anyone or anything that resists, Trump is the violation of everything we Americans are taught in school about what we supposedly value. And yet, his awful values are long-standing, everything that is wrong with America from racism and white supremacy, to misogyny and sexual conquest of women, this is the Civil War that eternally haunts our nation. It is a war that can only end in the complete destruction of those primitive honor-related values. Democratic America has had several chances to deal a death blow to aristocratic America, the military Civil War and the Civil Rights era to name two opportunities, but we can never bring ourselves to strike fully to excise the cancer.

And now that cancer has consumed us. The third strike has finally dealt us a permanent ascendancy of aristocracy. We, the democratic nation of America, are an occupied people. To be continued...

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.

Ur-Fascism in the USA

When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross - Attributed to Sinclair Lewis

While the author of It Can't Happen Here may not have actually said this, the spirit of the quotation is more poignant today than it was even in the 1930s when fascism really was on the rise. While everyone should read the cautionary tale of how fragile democracy can be, how the masses can be manipulated by would be dictators, and how difficult it can be to distinguish a real dyed-in-the-wool fascist from a dangerous but ineffectual bully, praising this story is not the primary goal of this essay.

So many words have been written about the bad ideologies; authoritarianism and its offshoots, fascism, Nazism, totalitarianism, communism, and so many images placed in popular memory about them that so many people are guarding the wrong gates. The first misconception to address is that fascism does not equal Nazism. Being on the lookout for fascism in America, you can more or less safely ignore the occasional skinhead. While they may be dangerous in person, in close proximity, someone in a Neo-Nazi uniform is not likely to attract a mass following. A real fascist in America is likely to be the one denouncing the skinhead louder than anyone else, and public racism, government spying, censorship, etc. because words and actions in fascism are inherently out of joint. This is a chameleonic philosophy that can say or do anything because the end is what is important. Fascism is intolerant of everything except its own contradictions and that is why Orwellian doublethink functions so well in fascism and its enablers.

Before the mass rallies, before the book burnings, before the violence, fascism creeps in among the disaffected as an underlying second layer behind the words. Like a virus slips in undetected to take control of a cell, fascism waits under conscious thoughts until the time is right for it to ignite. This is the eternal fascism as analyzed by Umberto Eco. Ur-fascism is very difficult to spot because it mutates so readily within a culture, but any one of the fourteen features Eco identified is enough to allow undiagnosed fascism to fester until it strikes. The reason guarding against Nazism, as so many on the American Right do to the point of absurdity, is practically useless is that ur-fascism is exactly that, eternal. Eco noted that ur-fascism is not grounded in any historical expression but is obsessed with a primordial truth that was revealed and then lost. There are no empirical examples that ur-fascism needs for expression, it is both new and ancient at the same time and thus tolerates contradictions because any document or myth can only reveal a sliver of that truth.

For the common American fascist, that truth is revealed in his understanding of our foundational documents. The Constitution is a part of that primordial truth, it exists outside of history alongside that other ahistorical document, the Holy Bible, and they both contain the elementary essence of humanity. No thinking or understanding needed. As these documents are interpretations of truth larger than any mortal author can grasp, the "mistakes" that do not say what he wants to hear can be explained away by his superiors who possess the gift of divining the secret truth. That the secrets just happen to line up exactly with what he wants to believe simply confirms the universality of his beliefs.

The leader who can convincingly preach the truth will earn a following of true believers who will defend his every horrible action and attack the unbelievers who dare question his motives. Adorno and his colleagues may have been criticized for many of their findings and conclusions in The Authoritarian Personality but it is undeniable that fascists exist, both leaders and followers. It is also undeniable that their ranks swell during periods of upheaval and/or shock. The great irony is that American fascists scream the loudest about freedom and liberty but are the most willing to submit and obediently surrender their freedom.

The freedom most dear to the American fascist is the freedom to conform. Second is the freedom from worry that comes with thinking. Perhaps not unique to American fascism but vitally important is the freedom from responsibility towards your fellow citizens; in other words the freedom to be selfish. Eco characterizes many features of ur-fascism as cults, the cult of tradition, the cult of action, the cult of technology, the cult of heroism, and of permanent war. These contradictory ideals are never settled but as Bob Altemeyer discovered during decades of research on the authoritarian personality is that fascists are okay with that. The secret to accepting so many contradictions is in compartmentalized thinking, and this is a feature the American system excels in. We are taught from kindergarten that there is a time for everything, play time, learning time, nap time. Later this is expanded in school and bells chime when it is time to drop everything and switch subjects. It is a short leap for the mind to start putting conflicting concepts in separate mental boxes and only draw on one at a time. Thus can the fascist hold racist views and react with violent anger when witnessing racism, because another box tells him that racism is bad.

There is no way around the another very important point of applying Eco to American fascism, contempt for the weak. Fascism is both popular as a mass political movement and elitist as a hierarchical system. This is what differentiates fascism from simple authoritarianism, it must originate in a democratic or parliamentary system where voters can choose their government. Similarly, that government must be perceived as rotten. It does not matter that the system was broken by the fascist leaders themselves. The government is so broken that we need a strong leader who will unite us and purge the degenerates and filth from the land. It is simply amazing how strongly the myth persists that government taxes the productive, sober, white men and gives to "them." How often does the bumper sticker slogan "work harder, millions on welfare are depending on you" appear? American fascists are so angry at the poor while claiming to be good Christians. In recent years this hatred and contempt has expanded to government workers, especially teachers. Why?

It would be best to simply end this essay with Eco's words verbatim.

The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake.
Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering's fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play ("When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," and "universities are nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.
4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.
In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity.
Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

Everything that has come out of the American Right in recent years has been witnessed by history before. We simply need to understand it for what it is and stop reinforcing their frames by pretending the radical reaction coming from national GOP leaders, traitorous industrialists like the Koch brothers, all the way down to your angry uncle who screams about welfare cheats and illegal immigrants is "conservatism" because it is not.

The Hamburger Revolution: Crossroads

From the Department of the Painfully Obvious: Cliven Bundy is a racist, along with being a deadbeat millionaire, and lately a domestic terrorist.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

 

The only part of this passage that was remotely surprising was about abortion. Perhaps the rural bigots out West are a little different from the Midwestern variety, but having spent an inordinate and painful amount of time around the latter at various jobs I can say it is the lack of abortions and contraception that most sticks in their craw. Perhaps it has to do with population density?

"Freedom" Mr. Bundy keeps using that word, but one gets the feeling it means something very different to him than the way Merriam-Webster defines it. The idea of "having something to do" as freedom is about the only possible connection Bundy's rant on race could even tangentially have with his "war" on the Federal Government. You know, the one he refuses to recognize and whines is illegitimate.

It is truly delicious, reading the authoritarian right walk back their support for this "patriot" and Chez at Banter has been cataloguing all the ways these rats are abandoning their paunchy hero now that he touched the third rail. Left unsaid, of course, is why openly expressing the ignorant belief that all African-Americans should be lumped in with the problems that some individuals face is a bad thing, beyond common decency and all that silliness about "liberty and justice for all." Generalizations about an entire group of people are very tricky to make, educated professionals can sometimes draw conclusions about tendencies by running statistical analyses. But even in those cases the data can only find evidence of those tendencies. Why liberals and other rational, humane people shrink from generalizing about race, or sexual orientation, etc. is that the constant in the equation is inherent, people are born with dark skin or light skin, blue eyes or brown; they do not choose to do so. It is easier to generalize about beliefs and ideas, therefore you can get stronger correlations with ideology. Unfortunately, even with ideology you can get crossed wires. Take what Rachel Maddow presented last night:


We must first examine what Fox News is; at its core Fox is the propaganda arm of the Republican party. It's job is to elect republican candidates, defend them once in office, and undermine the Democratic party and liberalism by character assassination or guilt by association. Fox will therefore grab at any shiny object that fulfills this function, or appears to. Dr. Maddow exposed the lie that all right-wingers are in absolute lockstep, that there are people out there more disgusting than Sean Hannity. I was worried I would have to go all the way back to Bacon's Rebellion and the foundation of slavery in America to get where Dr. Maddow brought us. Phew!

So why is open racism, as espoused by Cliven Bundy, bad for Fox and the Republicans? Simple economics. The vestige of middle class America, safe from the world in their tucked away suburbistans and hanging on by their fingernails, forms at least a plurality of conservative voters. They like to believe they are above vulgar racism and shy away from open declarations such as Bundy's. Suburban conservatives and their even more remote cousins in exurban McMansions are the beloved demographic of advertisers, the Americans who have slightly more income than required for subsistence. I'll admit it looked like this bulwark of polite society seemed to have been overrun with the emergence of the tea party and its myriad racist appeals, but Fox did manage to gloss that over and pretend did not happen to reassure the skittish suburbanites who do not want to support an openly racist party. However, it keeps popping up.

Therefore, despite what Sean Hannity et al. may or may not believe personally they must take pains not to offend this group. Because billionaires and white trash do not an electoral coalition make. Also, it is hard to sell gold, cars, or "erectile dysfunction" pills to Walmart shoppers.

Let the hate flow through you



Is it even a surprise? An extremely divisive case begets an extremely divisive reaction to the verdict. A case that provides an horrific instance that not only is extreme polarization causing the United States to be ungovernable, but lawless as well. When anyone can pick up a gun, shoot anyone who "threatens" them, real or imagined, and get away with it; that is the state of nature imagined by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. A war of all against all.

The FB post where I took this meme from was decidedly anti-Martin, but this one is decidedly double-edged. Take this comment by "B. Oblamer" on a Politico story:

The jury did a fine responsible job and found for the defense based on the overwhelming evidence. A very fair trial. 

And this was a very, very tame one.

Later, a decidedly liberal philosophy professor I know posted the exact meme, somehow I do not think he would suffer the fools, now "instant lawyers" and experts on legal defense all over the interwebs, very gladly. Lawyers deal with the law, however poorly the laws are constructed or for whose benefit they are enforced. Even the above comment from "Oblamer" who probably put as much intellectual punch into that derp which his hamster brain could muster, manipulates anyone who reads it. "Responsible... fair... overwhelming evidence," this has got to be the racists' finest hour. Not only did they vicariously murder a proxy Barack Obama, but they got away with it. Cue the victory lap of gloating.

Just survey the comment section of any news story on the subject, this one from Daily Banter is representative. His/her name is Michale, this individual has deemed it their mission to respond to absolutely every comment even slightly critical of the jury's decision. If there is a single person fitting the "instant lawyer" description implied by the above meme, this is it. All I can say is in a million years I could not hope to have the kind of free time to waste that this individual has spent in the past few days locking down any chance of honest and rational debate. What kind of passionate hatred could drive this commitment? How much is he/she being paid by some authoritarian outfit to spend this much time here? Just a small sample.

cfdman  said:                                                                                                 

Let’s examine the undisputed evidence:

1. The man thought the teen looked suspicious.

2. The man called the police to report his suspicions about the teen.

3. The man was told by the police not to chase and pursue the teen.

4. The man decided to chase and pursue the teen anyway.

5 . The man was carrying a loaded gun.

6. The teen was not carrying a gun.

7. The teen was not carrying any weapon.

8. The teen was carrying candy.

9. The teen was not committing any crime.

10. The teen was not trespassing, as he was walking toward his father’s
condo....

17. But for the man chasing and pursuing the teen, there would have
been no physical confrontation.

18. But for the physical confrontation, there would have been no fight.

19. But for the fight, the man would not have shot the teen.

20. But for the shot, the teen would be alive.

Michale replied: "Your list of "undisputed evidence" is very much in dispute..
3. The man was told by the police not to chase and pursue the teen.
The man was ADVISED by a police operator not to follow the SUBJECT. A police operator has absolutely NO authority to tell on sight security personnel ANYTHING..
4. The man decided to chase and pursue the teen anyway.
Inaccurate. The man, at that point, turned around and started to return to his vehicle. In other words, he followed the advice of the police operator, even though he was under absolutely NO legal obligation to do so.
11. The man and the teen met in a physical confrontation.
Inaccurate. The teen initiated aggravated assault (with Hate Crime special circumstance) against the man while the man was returning to his vehicle.
12. The man and the teen fought, wrestled to the ground, and punches
were exchanged.
Inaccurate. No punches were exchanged. Martin was the only one throwing punches.
14. The man shot the teen while both were on the ground.
Inaccurate. The man shot the teen while the man was on the ground and the teen was on top of the man. 
17. But for the man chasing and pursuing the teen, there would have
been no physical confrontation.
Accurate as far as it goes. It is equally accurate to say that there would have been no confrontation if the teen hadn't doubled back and attacked the man. It's also equally accurate that there would not have been any confrontation if the teen hadn't been kicked out of school for drugs and violence.
20. But for the shot, the teen would be alive.
And if the teen hadn't attacked the man, the teen would ALSO be alive.."
He/she continued:

"One problem with your scenario.
Martin attacked Zimmerman.
That tiny little, but oohh so important detail completely decimates your argument.."

The comment thread goes on and on with this individual injecting these kinds of faux legal sounding shout-downs everywhere. I scanned through page after page of this crap. How many of these idiots are out there? They have just been waiting and waiting for the chance to frame their racism through a legal case like this. "No, I'm not a racist, I am supporting the 'justice' system." For authoritarians, this is a dream come true, wonderful cover to aggress against the enemy, the ability to openly and honestly express their prejudice couched in legalese, and prostrate themselves to authority when they like the result. So, in response I say: "Are there any circumstances under which you can support the verdict, actively, not just passively accepting the outcome, and not be a racist?" I ask because I honestly cannot think of any. and flipping the circumstances of the crime around... Would he/she be asserting the opposite as vehemently, or would he/she suddenly notice that GZ is not white enough?

And how stupid does all that gloating look in light of the fact that GZ was acquitted, not exonerated. There was enough reasonable doubt not to convict, this was not a vindication. Thank goodness for all the racists that tomorrow will bring a new outrage and everyone will move on (sarcasm font) and not notice how completely full of shit people like Michale are in their whacked out assertions.