Beyond Trump, it’a also the Republican party leadership and Republican voters. Why are they lining up behind this lawless thug? There are two main factors: racism and massive wealth inequality.
Aristotle explained a long time ago that in a city polarized between rich and poor, there is a constant struggle for power (Politics 4.12). The rich may have wealth on their side, but the people have numbers. Our trouble is that American oligarchs have long divided people against each other using race, breaking the people’s power of numbers. Ronald Reagan understood the dynamic and exploited old racist myths to target welfare queens and urban crime. He successfully divided the working-class vote and split the Roosevelt coalition.
Reagan then put in place the policies that led to the oligarchic domination of the electoral system we witness today. Huge tax cuts for the wealthy allowed them to gain more economic and political power. Huge deficits created demand for U.S. debt and raised the value of the dollar, making American exports more expensive and imports cheaper. The result was a collapse of American manufacturing, leading to the hollowing out of the middle class and its political power. In 1986, the Rehnquist Court allowed independent non-profit corporations to evade disclosure and spending limits in FEC v. Massachusetts Citizens for Life, paving the way for the even more egregious Citizens United Decision of 2010 that permitted corporations to make unlimited donations for independent campaign expenditures.
The combination of wealth inequality and unlimited access for wealthy individuals and corporations to influence elections means that most candidates of each party must rely on large donations from the wealthy. As a result, the electoral system has devolved into a battle between the oligarchs, with neither party particularly responsive to the needs of working-class voters. Voters recognize the last point even if they don’t realize the rest of the story. The result is a body of voters who feel that the elite have betrayed them and Trump is the only candidate who promises retribution on the political and media elite. Of course in his first term, retribution on the elite took the form of huge tax cuts for the wealthy, but the image is more important than the reality, and he has cultivated the image of a fighter standing up to the elite of both parties. And of course, Trump has not gone light on the old oligarchic trick of invoking race to divide workers against each other.
Even if Trump is defeated, the threat of the lawless oligarchy he promises to inflict on America will remain because the conditions that fueled Trumpism will remain, as will his disaffected voters . Aristotle warned that when wealth becomes concentrated in only a few hands, so does power, and a lawless, tyrannical oligarchy follows (Politics 4.6). Given the divided state of the electorate, it is unlikely that we can do anything substantial about massive wealth inequality anytime soon, but we can attack the other side of the oligarchs’ strategy: racism. We need to unmask race for what it has always been: an oligarchic tool for controlling workers. Black workers have been the most obvious victims, but white workers have also paid the price for the very racism so many of them embrace. They may have gotten some crumbs of white privilege from the oligarchs’ table, but they have paid many times over for it in the form of a depressed wage scale, weakened union solidarity, and the loss of political power. Every time a politician launches into a favorite cultural war meme, we need to point out that he is simply trying distract you while he picks your pocket. Call out the racial con early and often. It may take time for the message to sink in but if the Republicans can peddle their nonsense through constant repetition, the truth has at least as good a chance of sinking in through constant refrain. The people can never exert their power until they stop falling for the racist con and work together for a more just society. Stop the Con.