Dear Old Whites,
It is happening in plain sight. This being America, the words blatant, in-your-face,crude, self-justified, self-absorbed, narcissistic and defiant come to mind. Not much subtlety or room for doubt. And when struggle turns to death throes, the obviousness of it all becomes even more clear. There are advantages to this.
The venerable democratic mechanism your forebears created is progressively ceasing to deliver the power you assume is your birthright to you and your ilk. There has been a leader who exemplifies the id of your tribe in power for four years, but who has proved himself incapable of bullying his way to victory in a second general election. He commands the unswerving loyalty of half his party, perhaps 20% of the electorate, and the rest of them are cowed into fearful support - or believe in better the devil you know. The stubborn core of his party has helped him survive two impeachments, the second in the face of clear guilt of incitement of a mob to commit crimes against democracy itself. Such escapes fuel his survival and the delusional ego that keeps the monster fed.
He - and you - have been defeated by demographics and an accompanying seachange of mood The young surely will inherit the earth, the people of colour less surely but are a rising tide in numbers at least. Hate- and anger-fueled violence still are often enough to keep the lid on, but there are other weapons that can be brought into play. Some are easy and built into your version of democracy, others are more questionable, but if you can promote blatant lies successfully, surely you can get away with them too.
So, first, you deny your defeat - it didn't happen and it is the other side that is lying. This works well with many, but not with enough of the people - your opponents, a knife-edge half of the electorate, hold out against that play and its implications .It becomes clear that this scenario doesn't play strongly enough. In any case, you'd expect to continue to employ a whole toolkit of levers of power and you are working at those too.
Keeping your supporters loyal and motivated to come out to vote requires you to keep pressing on with white conservative politics. There has already been one major achievement in DC, the packing of the Supreme Court. The results of this will emerge fully over time - everything to do with the Court is on an uncharacteristically long timescale, and is not always entirely predictable, but that 6-3 majority has satisfied many of your supporters, some of whom were -and are - prepared to turn a blind eye to much else and who wanted this above all else from their president and party of choice.
The other strategy and its battery of tactics: protect your brand of capitalism, and keep the wealth among your tribe. Block tax increases,keep howling that the other side are the spenders and the big governrnenters and your opponents will be unlikely to go too far down the tax-and-spend road.This is a permanent component of your modus operandi anyway. All this will keep the Trumpers happy and appeal to the even larger group who without admitting it have a perception that Congress passes on white money disproportionately to lazy undeserving coloured people .I am assured that this is the meat and potatoes of much golf-club talk on the links and in the clubhouse., with a whole range of supporting stories and often very shaky facts all the way to urban myth and beyond..The Repubican party in Congress, especially the Senate, remains an extraordinarily effective inert block to progressive spending and liberal government.
Nothing new about any of this, you may say. Nothing new either about the next level of holding onto power while the demographic figures grow against you. Gerrymandering districts is not unknown to the Democrats, but the Republicans are the masters. Skewing the Census figures on which districts are built and altered requires another set of actions over time. Working at local and State level takes a long game too, but some of you are masters of the long game..
The next level of action to keep a hold on power is voter suppression. Making it more difficult for poor, wage-earning, less mobile citizens disproportionately affects the very young, disadvantaged and coloured voters who turned out in sufficient numbers to vote Trump out of office. In a tight election a whole battery of minor measures can add up to the recipe for victory - cut the number of polling stations, tighten the rules for registration and voting by mail, demand more stringent ID, even make giving water to waiting queues illegal. In an almost balanced 50-50 country or a key state these measures can make the crucial difference. Go for all this at state level, and rely on the difficulty of doing anything to counter the trend at national federal level, and it is another way of tilting the odds in your favor.
But at this point it would be reasonable to question the idea of "Death Throes" in the title of this piece. Gerrymandering and voter suppression have been classic Jim Crow tactics for the past 150 years, and have been highly effective over time. You don't need to intimidate the uppity population by actually burning crosses, still less getting murderous, for most of the time. Almost every thing enumerated so far can be argued to be just rough politics in the realities of power and even the moderate can sleep reasonably soundly.
But here is where we need to look deeper. All the present shenanigans are still working to the advantage of Old White America, but the new political world is arriving.inexorably. Look at Georgia and Texas, two large and important states where the old order is beginning to unravel. Trump could not bully the officials in Arizona or Ohio to fix the results in his favor, but what if the margin were 10 or 2o per cent - impossible to skew ? Old White America is looking at changes over the next few years on this scale.
Fear and insecurity always push many Americans into deeper gun-toting tribalism, and fear and insecurity are the buttons to push harder to keep the red hats on.What is new is the degree to which the truths of politics, the economy, society in general, the international situation can be and are distorted. Millions of Americans are exposed to toxic lies and opinions on an increasing scale - bad currency driving out the good. This has become the key battleground, where Old White America is already making its last stand. January 6th. at the Capitol happened partly because public debate in general had been poisoned, a much bigger problem than just the delusional rantings of a man with a genius for self promotion. The system held - just, and my personal opinion is that it is still stronger than the pessimists will allow. God Bless Us and the US ! However, I believe that 2020 was the year when the seachange became visible and its effects began to spread more widely. For the canaries on Capitol Hill the weather of the times had already threatened the coming storm, and they were the antennae of the paranoid mass of the exploited.
So it is a long, slow death that has begun and on a deep level Old White America knows that it is taking place. Angry, confused, used to power and armed to the teeth, Despair gnaws at the soul Once the perception of ultimate defeat has taken root it darkens the vision for good. Do what you have always done, and if,that doesn't work, do it more intensely and take ever more extreme measures along the same lines. The lines of legality are pushed out and crossed ever more often, the lies ever more egregious. It can all end in a world of fantasy and retreat into the bunker, even in suicidal violence. This grim scenario is already being lived by the most rigid, the most indoctrinated, the vulnerable exploited by the shadowy opportunists and recruiters for the terrorists. This world is close, airless, the world of screens in the basement and guns accumulating in readiness for the day of judgment, of reckoning. As the death throes intensify, more will join the extremist groups or plot lone last days of cataclysm.
If these victims of history are not to go down into the whirlpool and take us with them, they need help - from the more enlightened old white men first, but the world of the Old White Men must be opened up, the air and light let in and equality of opportunity and power begin to operate across the whole of society. The good must drive out the bad. but not just bad people.Every tightening of the old bonds must be vigorously resisted , the bad old ways must not work or be seen to work. Harder still to achieve, the tsunami of lies must be held back, cleansed and calmed.
But this is in some ways just the beginning of what has to be achieved. If we think that we are looking in on the plight of many Old White American Men, we have to face the fact that seventy one million adults voted for Trump. We can't allow ourselves to typify them as ignorant uneducated immature violent rednecks, in spite of the fact that there are plenty of Trumpers who fit the stereotype to some degree. All nations have their share of those, they are a part of the human spectrum and what Freud called civilization is required to reduce their numbers. They are the gullible, the unfulfilled, the bitter, the angry, the damaged, the caged in and the vulnerable, and if we regard them as the enemy we are simply validating their toxic view of the world. We should think of ourselves as better because of our intentions for the greater good, but only in the short term and not by birthright. There by the Grace of God go I, and by the Grace of God I don't have to go there. We share this country with them, and in the end we have to share zip codes as well, or our word stays open to the liers, the dividers and exploiters. All this has to happen while the old ways die, and the death throes will be dangerous. As an old white man with these views, I am not a member of the old tribe and their ingrown wickednesses, but I have to recognise all the ways I am like them and I cannot allow myself the comfort of distance and distain.
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