But let’s not be ashamed. It is not yet clear whether Trump’s millions of die-hard believers are learning something by watching politician after politician biting the dust.
Even in the unlikely event that Democrats gain control of the Senate by defeating Perdue and Loeffler in the second round of the Georgia Senate on January 5, potential winners Jon Ossoff and / or Raphael Warnock will inherit, along with Joe Biden, an even more terrible mess. than the terrible one that George W. Bush’s Republicans bequeathed to Barack Obama and Biden in 2009.
And again, Democrats will have to survive a tsunami of unrepentant and endless poison and insatiable fury.
We can anticipate this because it happened so often in American history that we, no less than the Republicans in Congress, would be preparing for shock and despair if we did not take steps to counterattack.
Many Americans who voted for Trump and crave easy answers and scapegoats for their affliction are following New England Puritans who hunted witches; the masses of desperately poor people who collapsed at revival rallies and the Great Awakening throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, leading satirist HL Mencken to satirize preachers who dammed streams by baptizing the faithful; and the lynching mobs, Klans men and believers who followed demagogues like Louisiana Governor Huey Long and Senator Joe McCarthy.
The Democracy newspaper has just posted my essay saying it’s happening again. (Salon posted my similar notice in more detail four years ago, when Trump was devastating the Republican primaries and demolishing both party establishments). Many others have issued similar warnings: “The Money Cult” by Chris Lehmann he preaches more Protestant theologians and preachers than I like to recognize as “court poets” of vulture capitalism that has eluded Americans throughout our history.
Trump’s demagogy, I write in Democracy, “widened and explored a social and moral vacuum that was already engulfing faith in the republic and in a corporate capitalist economy that brought countless little stabs of disgust and doubts about our lives”:
These forces have been dissolving our freedoms for decades, not out of malevolence, but out of stupid, routine greed. Trump concentrated incipient and fluctuating anger against these material and cultural attacks in a syndrome that replaces democracy with authority by feigning populist outrage and scapegoats for women and people of color. The increasing violence of its true believers will not diminish or be reversed, even if it recedes. …
[S]something like Trumpism will outlast him because the fabric of civic liberal-democratic and republican norms and institutions was weakened long before his presidency: leaders who weakened citizens’ trust in public initiatives and assets were fundamentalist market economists, like Milton Friedman, James Buchanan (both died before Trump even ran for president), and Arthur Laffer, who advised Trump’s 2016 campaign; entrepreneurs who have long meddled in politics, such as brothers Charles and David Koch and private equity baron Stephen Schwarzman; and media magnates like Rupert Murdoch and demagogues Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson.
What differentiates Trumpism from the mass illusions I mentioned is that we no longer have the ghost of an establishment that, despite all its flaws, was credible enough for enough Americans – as, for example, Franklin D. Roosevelt was – to bribe , divert and sometimes educate enough witch hunters, creationists, racial rioters and angry anti-communists to give democracy another chance. Even conservative Republicans like John McCain sometimes did this. Where are they now?
This time, they – and liberal Democrats – have allowed torrents of casino-like financing and consumer deception, which seem harmless and nondescript, but are actually unusually powerful and intimately intrusive, turn millions of potentially thoughtful citizens into impulsive buyers. who demand to be lied because they are desperate for easy answers. And so we find Republicans in Congress today, trapped in a blind embrace and passed out of illusions about how wealth is created and how it escapes from the workers who actually create it.
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