With the 2020 general election less than a year off, the prospect of a Trump win are very credible.
Of course, I hope I am wrong, but I will not be so quick to rejoice the election of a moderate, Wall Street Democrat in his place, even though such a win will give me a brief, heavy sigh of relief.
Trump is not only all the retrograde things said about him - slum lord, racist, tax cheat, sexual predator - but he is also a phenomenon to many white voters, and it is the phenomenon that has carried this debase human being and will carry him across the finish line next November 2020.
The phenomenon of Donald Trump comes out of the roots of settler-colonialism and its foundational white racism. It is this white racism that is connected to the virulence of anti-communism in the United States. These links are key to understanding not only his persistent success, even among so-called evangelicals, but also to understanding the visceral, anti-socialism.
Yes, I am dismissing the polite narrative that says Trump's base is not racist. They are. I reject that they are simply the white working class abandoned by capitalism and Wall Street machinations: they are that too, but they are firmly joined at the hip to the contours of settler-colonialism. What sustains their support of this man, and nourishes their abhorrence of policies that will help the whole working class, despite the lowering standard of the lives of working people. is their need for a white superhero to win the so-called culture war - which is a race war by just another name. And it is this delusion that strengthens their support for Trump, and strengthens it many times over every time they see him attacked.
II
Several things have led me to conclude Trump's second term in 2020 is inevitable, none of them pretty, but all say what needs to be said about this Great American project and, implicitly, indicate what radicals must do to engage, confront, and dismantle this.
In ascending order of importance, consider the following:
Voters: Anecdotally, among family, friends, and coworkers for whom non-voting is a lifestyle choice, I have seen zero movement among these people to join whatever mobilization is happening to defeat Trump. Nothing he has done, or the things he has not done, have not resonated to their level to spark any interest in another election.
Non-voting for these people, broadly speaking, remains a lifestyle choice like abstaining from pork.
Socialists: to the extent that social media is a measure of anything at all, what I have been reading since the Democratic campaign started is not only a rejection of the Democratic Party as a whole, which is perfectly reasonable but tactically questionable, but also a rejection anything Bernie Sanders says, a persistent refrain that he's not a socialist at all, and therefore could not earn their votes even if he secured the Democratic nomination.
III
The Ronald Reagan Effect: Trump's appeal reminds me in many ways to a president we've had before. Ronald Reagan. Though not as brutish and ill-mannered as Trump, Reagan was no less willing to play on the wave of fears of white people that what they saw as "their country" was being seized by people who did not belong here - particularly Black and Brown people, two groups who had made some not insignificant gains in the late 60's and 70's.
Trump, like Reagan, exploited to the hilt these white fears at key moments in this country's remedying white racist policies. Reagan's administration emerged out of the so-called civil rights era aftermath, where pedestrian measures like school busing and affirmative action alarmed a white working class populace their apartheid-light regime was at its sunset Their counterattacks did not exclude throwing rocks a school buses of Black children in liberal Boston. Other attacks of the time included the infamous US Supreme Court decision instigated by a medical student rejected from admission with the University of California because of the narrative that Black men were stealing white men's places.
Reagan emerged from this white anxiety, cloaked as the white superhero who would stop the Black women welfare recipients he himself evoked from living like millionairesses in Beverly Hills.
Trump is their new superhero.
Reagan's function as pioneer territorial US marshal sent to pacify the native uprisings trumped the public reaction to his policies. By Reagan's second term, polls indicated the masses of people - read: white workers - did not favor his actual policies. But they re-elected him nonetheless.
This is the main connection I make with Trump. He's the 21st century Reagan, and he will similarly defy the public's view of his policies and be re-elected.
Both men should signify loudly the persistence of white racism in the US and alarm us into anti-racist coalitions. Both men produce policies that the broad electorate do not like, which should make us examine the quality of our democratic institutions. But we are neither coalescing or questioning the structural dysfunctions in our system.
What these masses of white workers are supporting is white nationalism's gains in the culture/race war. These people's calls to "take back their country" is to take it back from the people who they see do not belong here, have never been considered real citizens, are taking their jobs, exploiting the government, etc. [which is why it has been relatively easy to purge us from the voting roles and gerrymander us out of power].
We will have to face the nature of this settler-colonial project if we are to come up with actual countermeasures to reverse and defeat this deep-seeded trend.
Interestingly, both men are creatures of the Cold War obsessions with the labor movement and communism. Although Reagan had been a contentious pick as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), this mediocre, B-list actor and FDR Democrat was already veering towards being an FBI informant. His contested election to SAG mirrors that of another anti-communist Cold War liberal, Walter Reuther of the UAW and CIO. Radicals and Communists knew what lurked behind the facade of these men's supposed liberal values, and they opposed their candidacies.
Trump's mentor, Ray Cohn, was Sen. Joseph McCarthy's chief legal counsel for the anti-communist witch hunts.
Incidentally, all that can be disparaged about identity politics can be traced to the unfortunate successes of these anti-labor, anti-communist liberals, like Reagan and Reuther, since the core of their liberalism was mere tokenism without any class analysis.
IV
Similarly, the incongruous push back against this universal health care has its roots in anti-communism and settler-colonial racism.
The cry that "my health care is being taken" is disingenuous. The anger from some sectors of union members that the health care they negotiated is in jeopardy is garbage too.
The rank and file should want quality health care. Recall the rank and file not too long ago agitated when employers started making them pay a portion of their premiums. Now the costs the worker bears toward these premiums continue to go up. This cost sharing has now become a norm, so its strange to hear complaints from some that they do not want this sacrificed to a national health care policy.
So where is this angst over having their health care taken away coming from?
I go back to that evil seed of white racism and the meaning of this settler-colonial project. I think back to a liberal health care measure in my native St. Louis from the 90's - nothing radical, just expanding coverage to more people in the region. I remember hearing hotheaded white people in the grocery stores and public places, deeply engaged in opposing this policy measure. They were against it because they said "those people from the East side - " or from "the North side" - would take advantage of this system.
Of course the areas they were referring to were predominantly Black areas. The measure failed.
White racism is a tool by elites to keep the working class divided, but workers are not innocent bystanders. White racism is supposed to afford the white worker a status over his Black sisters and brothers that he may be poor, but at least he's not Black. And many white workers thrive on this. So powerful is this delusion that even pedestrian, liberal fights for "equality" stir white racism because they risk ideologically putting the whole working class on an equal footing.
If white, Black, and Brown workers have equal access to universal health care, what does this suggest of the settler-colonial project but threaten its erasure like the so-called civil rights measures threatened a few generations ago? Is this the same country once apartheid has been thoroughly eradicated, roots and all?
This is at the crux of the resistance to these measures, and Donald Trump is their current, necessary mascot.
V
If anything I have argued has any currency whatsoever, the thing for anti-fascists, radicals, socialists and communists to do is design the appropriate tactics and counter measures. The surgeon doesn't prescribe an aspirin for a tumor. Securing his tax returns to prove he's a gangster or impeaching him will have no awakening effect on this base, but just the opposite. This shouldn't exclude making tactical decisions in next year's general election or holding him to account. But any tactic must include coming to terms with the wide and reactionary dimensions of this settler-colonial project has on our national discourse, rejecting the so-called "revolutionary" war had nothing to do with the working class, nor was it revolutionary by any standard, and accepting that the white workers invested so heavily in Trump are reflexively invested in this white-settler project.
While there are white workers who reject any talk of racism or racist institutions, there are other white workers who accept this narrative. And there are Black and Brown workers who are always perfectly prepared to work in complete solidarity, as equals, with these white workers on facing this racism and countering it. Many radical movements have traditionally brought these forces together. Those are our opportunities. Those are the foundations of any political Front movement to end the rule of neo-Confederates and stop fascism in its tracks.
