by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
So: now that Trump has exposed the darkness at the heart of America, what are we to do?
For a start, don't despair, folks. Lift your grieving eyes to the stars, and let me show you how an American phoenix will take flight from the ashes of triumphant Trumpism.
First, let us examine how this f-upped f-up of f-ups came to pass. How is it that a political neophyte, a rank outsider, a billionaire who lives a life of luxury totally unrelated to the experience of average Americans, a New Yorker far from the Rust Belt, a man many satellite-orbits above the station of blue-collar drones … how is it that this man read the mood of our working class better than anyone else in the world?
How did he know to tap into the innermost zeitgeist of the contemporary American soul? How did he come to forge a direct connection to the core beliefs of most American voters? How did he know who his peeps were? Who are his peeps? Who are the folks who voted for Trump?
They are Americans just like you and me. But they have not been as blessed or as blind as you and me. They are Americans mired in Nietschean ressentiment. A resentment that won Trump the presidency. A resentment he must have felt himself. A resentment that is totally justified. Which is why America deserves Trump.
1. The Eight Resentments Behind The Angst And Fury Of Trump Voters
1) I resent not getting my fair share of the American Dream. It used to be that my dad could do this job, make a decent wage, and retire at a decent age. We had a good quality of life. Our community thrived. Now I'm doing what he did, but my life is difficult. I'm doing what I was told I should do in order to be a good American and get ahead, but I'm not getting what I was told I would get. Trump fueled this resentment: You're right, the system is rigged, you're not getting your fair share, there are other groups of people who are getting more than their fair share. Immigrants. Muslims. Uppity women.
2) I resent the elite in Washington. I'm not getting my fair share because the government takes it from me. That's why the government has to be rolled back. The government is not on my side. Washington is my enemy. The status quo does not work for me. It's corrupt. I absolutely don't trust this woman: she's a liar and a crooked cheat, lock her up! Nasty woman. She sucks, but not like Monica. I agree with Trump: drain the swamp.
3) I resent not having any agency in my life, not being in charge of my life, not having any power. I resent that I'm not given the freedom to make the decisions that affect my life. I work really hard, for what? All the decisions are made in Washington and nobody listens to folks like me. Nobody pays any attention, nobody comes out here and asks us what we think. Decisions are made in the big cities by privileged city folk, and we have to abide by them. We are not free.
4) I resent goodies going to other people. I'm not getting my fair share of stuff, of public resources. Where are my taxes going? All that money is sucked away by Washington. They funnel it to others: black people, poor people who don't want to work, takers, moochers off my tax money.
5) I resent not getting any respect. I'm totally pissed off. I'm the victim of injustice here. People who run things don't understand people like me. They don't understand what our lives are like. How we struggle. They call us names. They think we're a bunch of redneck racists. They don't value folks like us. They wipe their asses with us. They insult us. They've forgotten us.
6) I resent being shamed. I'm being blamed for everything from slavery to the genocide of the Indians, as though being white is something I should feel guilty about. I'm totally misunderstood. I'm being made to feel shame for not making it in the new economy. And it's not my fault — there are plenty of others being more selfish than I'm supposed to be: African-Americans, feminists, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, liberals, progressives.
7) I resent that my religion is under attack. There is a spiritual crisis in our society that is denigrated by our intellectuals. The left ignores the right's inner pain and fear. The racism, sexism and xenophobia that Mr. Trump exploits, does not necessarily reflect an inherent malice in Americans. It sprouts from the injuries of class, and a spiritual crisis that the global competitive marketplace generates. The intuition of working people that the system is rigged, is correct. Their pain and rage is legitimate. The decline felt by many Americans isn't only about economics: it's about all facets of their lives — from family to life expectancy to the drugs that have invaded communities. These Americans deserve our empathy. We need to understand why they cling to their religion and guns.
8) I'm a man, and proud of it, and I resent women being equal and taking over everywhere. I'm white, and I resent the way we're supposed to keep pandering to minorities.
In short, Trump's working class voters want jobs, and the dignity a job confers. They want respect. They want power over their lives. They're furious about being downwardly mobile. They're uncomfortable with the growing majority of our minorities. They want their white privilege back. They want to feel great again. They want for their country and themselves what it says on Trump's hat: Make America Great Again.
2. A Perfect Candidate For The White House
And they want to be Trump. They love him because he's rich and because he flaunts his wealth in the world's face like a golden penis at perpetual fellatio-readiness. They would not only like to have a beer with Trump. They'd love to get cross-eyed-asshole-hammered with him.
What makes Donald Trump the perfect political candidate is that he is a blue-collar guy's dream of a rich guy: a fuck-the-world-and-its-granny dude with a supermodel wife, a private plane, and his name stamped in gold everywhere. A red-blooded macho man who runs beauty contests, who speaks his mind bluntly, who bestrides the world like he bought it, who doesn't give a clergyman's shit what he says to anybody, who could give two-farts-in-a-Chinese-umbrella for political correctness, who bows to no man, who sits his pampered ass on a golden toilet, who gives ten tons of crap back to anyone who dares pass him the timidest of turds, who doesn't mind offending everyone from Megyn Kelly to John McCain to Barack Obama to the effing Pope, who runs his mouth like the river Nile into the Mediterranean, who walks tall and talks big and readies a stiff middle finger at every authority preening in off-putting pompous pisspottery, and who has the brass to tell the whole wide world to go fuck itself all the way up the inside of the cramped confines of a mutant gnat's smelly posterior. That's me if I were rich. He's my dream of the great life. He's my role model. He's what every American should aspire to. He is my idea of the American Dream fulfilled.
3. The Brute Fact Of Human Nature
To fully understand what kind of weltanschaung we're dealing with here, we have to realize a bloody-minded truth of the not-so-wonderful world we're doomed to inhabit.
To wit: good government is not a natural state of affairs. Throughout history, few people have been fortunate enough to live under good government, the way we do in America and in Europe. We're sublimely entitled. Spoiled rotten. Most other nations live under authoritarianism, demagoguery, corruption, monopoly, state-sponsored aggression, murder, war. ISIS is not an exception to the natural order. ISIS is human nature at its basic level. Our America is not sinking into a new age of barbarism; we are simply regressing to a natural mean. Civilization is very rare thingummy. When asked what he thought about western civilization, Gandhi said it would be a good idea. Consider our first true civilization, the Greeks: it was built on slavery.
Humanity might appear to be quite human: kind to small children, nice to pets. But we're a tribal lot, suspicious of strangers, not given to reason, fond of war and slaughter, vulnerable to bizarre ideologies, quick to believe in fantastical conspiracy theories. The Germans of Goethe and Beethoven built Auschwitz. We Americans genocided Indians, practiced slavery, offed each other brutally in the world's most destructive Civil War, started thirty unnecessary wars after WW2, and quite recently thoughtlessly and cheerily committed the monstrous war crime of the Iraq War, killing innocent women and children by the millions. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice cannot travel overseas, for fear of being arrested and brought up before the Hague.
So what happened in America this week is no anomaly. It's just plain old human nature at work.
4. Trump Won't Be Able To Solve The Problems Of The Folks Who Worship Him
The one good promise made by Trump in his acceptance speech was that he would put people to work repairing and building our infrastructure. But will Congress allow Trump to spend that much public money — billions — when they favor only private enterprise? The GOP Congress will not let Trump borrow the money needed for building our infrastructure, even though low interest rates make it very practical. They will not stand for this expansion of government to actually serve our people. (Mind you, if Trump does get a trillion-dollar infrastructure rebuild program through Congress, the country may forgive him for all his sins.)
Besides, Trump and Paul Ryan's economic plans are bound to ruin our economy anyway, as those plans already have — for all to plainly see — in the states where Republican governors have followed the GOP thing of cutting taxes, as happened in floundering Kansas and Louisiana. Moreover, repealing Obamacare will cause major financial catastrophe in our households. Rolling back Dodd-Frank will inspire new Wall Street recklessness. Tax cuts for the rich will increase income inequality and explode the deficit.
Trump has raised expectations that he cannot fulfill. Inevitably, his voters will hemorrhage in disappointment. Trump is their Messiah, and when he cannot save them, they will crucify him. Our manufacturing jobs will not return, no matter what trade deals Trump negotiates. Today America manufactures more stuff than ever before, but we employ far fewer people doing it, because of the internet, technology, automation and robots.
5. Trump's First-Term Failure Will Be Our Salvation
Let's face some embarrassing facts about our nation. The American people have just chosen a disgusting human being as their leader. To my mind, it means the American people, half of them anyway, are disgusting human beings — what Hillary called a basket of deplorables: racist and sexist, consumed with a fear of the other.
But don't blame these deplorables. Blame our elites, especially our Democratic elite, who have long turned a blind eye towards the concerns of those who lost their jobs and their houses, who struggle, who harbor a justified rage towards our tone-deaf establishment, who are a working class filled with righteous and justified resentment. We've just witnessed the Rust Belt Rebellion. They're the proletariat Marx warned us about, and they voted for Trump, like good Germans voted for Herr Hitler.
The one shining light in the entire 2016 presidential campaign, the one sane advocate for the working class, was a fellow by the name of Bernie Sanders.
Never forget that 80% of our Democratic-leaning youth cheered him on. These are the kids who can't get good jobs despite fine college educations that saddle them with crippling debt, the kids who believe that socialism is a better system than capitalism (they may be clueless about what socialism is, but they have enough experience of capitalism — the Wall Street crash — to be deeply suspicious of it). Inside or outside the Democratic Party, these millennials are going to organize for change. They started Occupy Wall Street, they said black lives matter, they made income inequality part of the national conversation, they're dead serious about climate change. They are harbingers of an American renaissance.
So take a deep breath: the fight for the soul of our nation is about to start bigly.
6. The Apocalyptic Battle That Will Determine Our Future
On the one side of this fight stands Bernie, plus his youthful followers, plus the progressive Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party (let's finally say goodbye to the neoliberal, Wall Street-protecting, labor-union-ignoring, white-working-class-insulting global-elite Davos Clinton/Obama wing of the Democratic Party, who've handed our government to the GOP). On the other side lurks the army of resentful older white mater fornicators who voted for Trump.
The Trumpists will lose this fight, because our economy is about to be crippled by an unfettered GOP in charge of all three branches of government. The failure of the GOP's discredited economic remedies will fire up the resentment of their white working class base to the highest heavens (a base who already believes that Washington's Republicans have done sweet blow-all for them).
By the end of his first term, Trump will face a maddened, resentful electorate, burning to stick long pointy needles in his obese effigy.
Get ready for 2020, when Elizabeth Warren will step into the arena and run against Trump. She will generate even more excitement than Bernie did. Trump cannot give his followers the satisfaction they seek — nobody can — and Elizabeth will bury him. In the end, this macho bully will meet his match at a woman's hands. Maybe that damn Hillary bitch could not quite settle his hash, but this here Elizabeth witch will double-knot his jock strap.
If Trump is a white backlash against Obama, a total swing of the pendulum, Warren will be a progressive backlash against the Trump phenomenon, another total swing of the pendulum.
Just you wait: the Donald Trump presidency is making an Elizabeth Warren presidency inevitable.
Heed my prediction, and be consoled. In another four years, what I say here and now will come to pass. Weep not, divided land, crushed and broken country. Despair not of the hot mess in which Trump has cast us.
From the dark of today will come the light of a brighter tomorrow.