As loath as I am to admit that either national political party has gotten anything right lately, the Democratic Party was right about Trump’s being a Fascist, wanna-be dictator. It’s harder and harder to deny that every day, which is one of the main reasons his supporters are ditching him faster than rats off the Titanic. What gives me hope is that the MAGA folks, even though they got conned, wanted something decent. For those of us paying attention (so much attention, maybe too much attention), the future looks bleak, but keep digging a little deeper, down inside the souls of the people, and the last ten years of American politics is even weirder, and far more ironic, and importantly, does contain a lot of hope.
For the last few decades at least, Americans have understandably soured on our federal government. It kept getting us into stupid wars we had no business being in, kept taxing the hell out of us, kept slowly eroding our rights and all but stopped listening to our concerns, unless we had a million dollars or so to throw their way. In other words, the basics of what was once a decent system had been thoroughly gamed by the rich guys (which is ALWAYS the problem with democracies). The people liked the actual system, or at least the hazy vision of the way the system was supposed to work, and maybe did work at some point in the past. There was a lot of righteous anger.
The ground was ripe for a populist leader to take the stage.
Instead we got the world’s best pretend populist, he of the orange hair, the blue suit, the red tie and the eternally-sagging diaper.
BUT, people turned on the Democrats because they had lost their once-strong thread of populism. The Democrats had turned corporate in the 1990’s, and the party of the people had stopped giving a shit about the people. They seemed to reflect only the will of rich, liberal Manhattanites and not the rest of us. People voted for Trump because he pretended to be a populist. People are turning against Trump (thank God) because he is, in fact, the opposite of a populist.
The biggest point of all is that America wants a populist. The ground is still ripe for a populist, hopefully a real populist next time.
It’s understandable that people were looking for populism from a rich guy. Look at our history and you’ll see that that’s where our populists have generally come from, the rich class. Kennedy, both Roosevelts, every single populist president we’ve ever had (except Jimmy Carter) was, on some level, rebelling against his parents, abandoning his birth class. Jimmy Carter is an exception to most rules. The noblesse oblige that fueled the past can still fuel the future, we just need to find a guilt-ridden rich guy who cares more about going to heaven than about helping already rich guys get richer.
I never said it was going to be easy, but it is still possible.