It isn't tenable to view Donald Trump as an aberration, hallucination, outlier, comical interlude, or intermission in the noble history of a democracy. We are prone to think this because of how it reflects on us--that we aren't the people we thought we were. But we aren't. Some percentage of us were, more or less, and at some point. I'll explain.
We are the Balkans. We are the Middle East. We are Northern Ireland or any other political area deeply and incurably destabilized by irreducible factionalism. Trump's real forebears and antecedents are Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart and other irrationalist, reactionary, lying, self-serving, misanthropic, hypocritical, bullshit-peddling hucksters.
These preacher-boys are representative of a retrograde, racist element--our equivalent of the Taliban. They are believers in authoritarian government with claims to religious sanction and a divine mandate for permanent hegemony which, when threatened and challenged, warrants an all-out war and the annihilation of the (usually imaginary) enemy.
It is the devil's work and pernicious. I am several times over an alien inhabitant of the South: a Yankee, a social-justice Catholic, middle-class, progressive and even Irish--a Midwesterner by birth but politically appropriate for Massachusetts. It took me decades to begin to comprehend the depth of the racial animus, resentment, and reactivity in the South.
There's an individual corollary to systemic, structural racism--unconscious and imbedded and as toxic to personal moral development as institutional racism is to social progress. Before I arrived at this understanding I thought I had noticed similarities and creative parallels between Southern and Irish writing--between, maybe, Faulkner and Fitzgerald.
Their traditions are rooted in the psychology of defeated and humiliated peoples. Blarney, yarn-spinning and improvisational story-telling are ends in themselves and survival skills. Raconteurs are historians of traditions and identity, not facts and time-lines. The respective religious traditions--racism and Irish Catholicism--had been outlawed and went underground.
Irish priests were saying masses in the ditches and in the South there was segregation, the Klan, and honkeys hanging niggers with impunity (now they shoot them). Southerners and Irish Catholics (think of Fox News) share a sophistication for reactionary invention. Normally people call it lying but for them it's dimly revealed, reassuring and a matter of identity.
It's also compensatory because the boys--and it's a boy thing--had their balls handed to them in front of their women-folk back in the day. Those Southern politicians and preachers--there is no distinction--are the custodians of a tradition of identification, persecution, denial, fatalism, defensiveness, romanticized racism and delusional aggression.
In their delusion--the system of lies they live by--they recapture the flag from the infidels and restore righteousness. Now, deputy Donald has recaptured that flag for pathetic, loser, white-boy authoritarians everywhere and he's got Jeff Sessions and other neo-Confederates with survivalist instincts on his side. They lord it over the unbelievers. Oh, the triumphalism!
Reason isn't the idea. It's a performance intended to influence voters through emotionalism and fear. It's a sick, alternative world and it's reflected in the chasm between our political parties--revival culture in the land of TED talks. The creative impulse and tradition, good things, have been coopted, as have we, and are being used in the service of evil.
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