What is really behind the Trump phenomenon?

By Bob Boldt

As early as 1968 I witnessed the death of Liberalism when I saw the Democrats ignore the strong voices of dissent against the Vietnam War and proceed with a war agenda that was as foolish as it was doomed. The irony of the situation was that the nominee that year, Hubert Humphrey, could have successfully come out against the very war the Johnson administration had been so vigorously losing. More bizarre still, President Johnson knew that Nixon and Kissinger could have well been charged with treason for their private negotiations with the South Vietnam delegation to the Paris peace talks [see “George Will Confirms Nixon's Vietnam Treason,” August 12, 2014].
    But for Nixon’s treason, the war would have ended well before November 1968, Humphrey would have been elected, and Nixon would have been just another used car salesman. I leave it to wiser heads than mine to make sense of all this. After the police riot in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, I came to realize that most of the disillusioned young Liberals in the Democratic Party had given up the Liberal principles upon which the party had been founded. Most of the true Liberals deserted the party, joined radicalized groups like the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) or the Weather Underground, or simply dropped out altogether. The result of this massive disillusionment was reflected in what amounted to a two-party War Party. People were tired of “losing”’ and eager to grasp at traitor Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war. That “secret plan” was as big a fraud as the Gulf of Tonkin false flag incident that started the war in the first place. It is estimated that without Nixon’s successful sabotaging of the Paris peace talks, the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington would have fewer than half the present number of names on it. Think about that for a moment.

What does all this have to do with the rise of Donald Trump and the Hate Party?

In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this. But their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered to their people. Those dreams failed. And today, people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life. –Adam Curtis, BBC Featured Documentary series The Power of Nightmares, 2004

    My admiration for the work of this prolific BBC film documentarian is no secret. In his documentary series The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis details the decline of Liberal governments, the rise of the fantasy of international terrorism, and the security state tasked with counteracting this largely fictional entity.

But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand. And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism. A powerful and sinister network, with sleeper cells in countries across the world. A threat that needs to be fought by a war on terror. But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It’s a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media. –Ibid

Of course, in the process of “protecting us from these nightmares,” our leaders only ask that we give up our freedoms in the interest of safety and security. What could be fairer? Curtis lays the origin of the rise of authoritarian regimes, the tendency of democratic governments like those in the United States and Great Britain to begin the slow, inexorable drift into fascism, as being not so much the result of the success of the forces of repression as a result of the failure of the very Liberal principles that could have successfully counteracted this rising tide of negativity.
    Another prophetic voice who lays the woes of our modern world directly at the failure of Liberalism is Chris Hedges. In The Death of the Liberal Class (2010), he examines the failure of Liberals to live up to the ideals and goals of traditional Liberalism: supporting the disenfranchised, championing labor and minority rights, and opposing the dominance of corporate influences over the society and the political process. Hedges contends that the Liberal class has never been the source of real reform, innovation, or revolution but a moderating entity, one that mediates between the forces of change and the forces that would enforce a status quo. With the loss of true Liberalism, this important mechanism of change has been lost. The result is that there is no longer any venue through which the necessary changes can take place in our society. As a result we have seen a rise in corporate greed and power that rivals the Gilded Age, a running roughshod over the rights of citizens, a justice system that grants immunity to the worst corporate criminals in the history of the free enterprise system, and the impending death of the middle class.

The Trump demographic arises and is motivated by very real concerns. Trump represents a reaction to the exploitation of the politically, socially, and economically disenfranchised, disenfranchised not so much by the oligarchs but by the so-called Liberals who have turned their backs on the unheeded masses they once championed. The rise of fascism in Amerika is less the result of the campaigning of demagogues like Trump than of the failure of the Liberal ideals of a fair and equal society for all.

There is only one way left to blunt the yearning for fascism coalescing around Trump. It is to build, as fast as possible, movements or parties that declare war on corporate power, engage in sustained acts of civil disobedience, and seek to reintegrate the disenfranchised – the “losers” – back into the economy and political life of the country. This movement will never come out of the Democratic Party. If Clinton prevails in the general election Trump may disappear, but the fascist sentiments will expand. Another Trump, perhaps more vile, will be vomited up from the bowels of the decayed political system. We are fighting for our political life. Tremendous damage has been done by corporate power and the college-educated elites to our capitalist democracy. The longer the elites, who oversaw this disemboweling of the country on behalf of corporations – who believe, as does CBS Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves, that however bad Trump would be for America he would at least be good for corporate profit – remain in charge, the worse it is going to get.” –Chris Hedges, “The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism,” Truthdig, March 2, 2016

Copyright © 2016 by Bob Boldt