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.