“It cannot happen in America” is now an ironic statement that every third world citizen used to repeat in critiquing their countries particularly dictatorship. This is equivalent to the “American Dream” social mobility message within American society. Looking at the today’s scene, it should be rewritten as “It happened here, there and will happen in America too”. American exceptionalism was an effective public relations campaign to other nations to cover up its highly unstable and disjointed societal fabric. The belief was a successful self reinforcing myth until Donald Trump showed the true reality. The age of Demagogic Authoritarianism within vast socioeconomic disparities is here to stay in America.
Rich vs. poor, urban vs. rural, meritocracy vs. working class, black vs. white, racial diversity vs. whiteness, facts vs. conspiracy theories, plutocrats vs. 99.9%, representative democracy vs. authoritarianism, liberal vs. conservative, progressive vs. neoliberal, Liberal corporate media vs. conservative corporate media, Christian identity vs secularism, modernity vs. traditionalism, science vs. opinions, welfare state vs. unfettered feudal capitalism, patriarchy vs feminism, liberalist foreign policy vs realist foreign policy, globalization vs. protectionism and capital vs. labor.
Such aspirations has hit the wall of bewilderment, disgust and near obsolescence as the United States of America tapers off into a Shakespearean tragedy or worse, a foreboding dystopian glimpse of a civilization’s end mimicking the decaying Roman’s empire or personifying sun-burnt Icarus of Greek mythology. America has sold the world its societal purity of exceptionalism but time has unveiled an undeniable decaying foundation of a decadent feudal like uber- capitalistic class with air-filled meritocratic self aggrandizement and a growing economically deficient and uneducated populace in despair. This growing populace in despair are seduced by the allure of a revisionist past, conspiracy theories and apathy which sets the table for a demagogue to exploit.
Donald Trump, the orange and vulgar authoritarian, is not the source of American predilection for destructive discordance. He is the consequence and embodiment of a lurking societal virus with various tentacles through its history, a more “selected valorized history”. The societal virus is the construct of “whiteness” not European lineage but “whiteness”. This sets the inevitable path for a bleak hybridized corporatized-white nationalistic- overt totalitarian future. The name “neo-fascism” bears its ugly head.
America is under the auspice of immorality, hubris, megalomania, violent militancy, hypocrisy, legislative toxicity, antiscience, ill-informed conspiratorial psyche, uber-plutocracy, white Christian-ethnonationalism which is accelerating into the inevitable abyss of anarchical nihilism of future apartheid state or worse, civil war.
The nascent neo-fascism is built on the fear of losing the finite space of “power” from the grips of privileged whites ordained by exploitative history, privilege, media, culture, and socioeconomics to which present day most Republicans and some Democrats exploit to financially enrich the elites while excluding immigrants, gays, and minorities. Unsurprisingly this transaction adversely affects poor and middle-class whites through economics. But poor and middle-class whites’ blinded ignorance reinforces narrowed “visceral” feelings of basking in culturally being white” offered by rich white elites but marginal monetary gains. This entitlement also earns them the rights to absurd loop of victimhood to which immigrants, gays, and minorities are focus of their ire. They propagandizes the facetious adage of “Racial equality is white genocide”. Whites generally haven’t realized that African Americans are the vessels of which the constitution is expected to live up to. The founding fathers despite their choice to continue in the social economic exploitation of blacks through slavery left a hypocritical constitutional loophole of which African Americans based their existence on.
The lines
“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”
or
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America”
pushes for democracy, separation of church and state, equal citizenry and anti-white supremacy which is inspired by the enlightened philosophies of Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu. So inadvertently, African Americans’ plight is the true embodiment of what the “spirit of Americanism” should be. It took until 1968, for these ideals in those words to “start” bear fruit. But the days reactionary anti-democracy has begun.
Government of the people, by the people, for the people as Abraham Lincoln proclaimed in Gettysburg is unfortunately now reshaping to Government of the lobbyists, bought by the plutocrats, distorted and propagandized by the corporate media, protected for the oligarchy in the name of white Christian ethnonationalism with the consent of the governed.
The current state of affairs in American politics is a chaotic gumbo of political circus, governmental inefficiency, angry populace, political polarization, racial disharmony, surreal politicization of facts and media propaganda. The lines between lies and truths are becoming indiscernible. These affairs have been grown on a petri-dish of corporate greed, plutocratic lobbying, ultra Christian fundamentalism, government-sanctioned mass surveillance apparatus, expensive public healthcare, lack of public spending on infrastructure and education, expensive military-industrial complex, unscrupulous political campaign system leveraged by elite circles, unethical revolving door of private enterprise and governmental offices, outlandish wealth and income inequalities, corporate-friendly media, public ignorance and/or dissonance, selective memory on complex racial history and white driven nativism. Regardless of the aforementioned problems and the current appalling caricature, America’s hegemony with economic resources and influence still stands but its luster wrapped in American exceptionalism is drastically waning with the rise of multipolar world powers (especially China and Russia), far-right populism, trade protectionism and pessimistic views of globalization. These problems are compounded by the dysfunctional political parties with which Republicans have a major share of the blame. I will venture into five major historical episodes in the devolution of Republicanism namely:
- Civil war: Abraham Lincoln era
The continuation of African American slavery was the underlying root of the American south’s decision to secede from United states resulting in the Civil war (1861-1865). The prior financial shocks in America which affected property ownership, bank liquidity, and employment hardened the resolve of Southerners in continuing free labor of slaves. The cultural divide of the educated Northern elites who were tolerant of black freedom but skeptical of black economic empowerment and social integration relative to rural southerners driven by utmost white supremacy widened. The Confederate soldiers led by General Robert Lee of the South lost to the Union soldiers led by General Ulysses Grant of the North which in essence supported the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. It also cemented the Reconstruction amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th) to the Constitution that abolished slavery, established citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws for African Americans and prohibited discrimination in voting rights of citizens on the basis of race respectively. Much to the dismay of history, Lincoln was driven more by consolidating political power rather than a moral prerogative in abolishing slavery to maintain the Union of States. Despite such national progress, the viral strain of white supremacy enveloped in the flag of the confederate rebel flag never died instead became part of the socio-economic, political, and cultural discriminatory fabric primarily in the American South through the reconstructionist Jim Crow and Black codes laws of which the infamous Ku Klux Klan arose. The Republicans, therefore, abandoned the black suffrage and the pursuit of racial equality in the Reconstruction era to reach a mutually tolerable relationship with Southern Democrats.
Abraham Lincoln instituted the early economic foundation of Republicanism; mercantilism and free-market capitalism within its borders built on subsidized domestic production by manufacturing and industrialization, trade protectionism, nationalized banking system, income tax, and progressive tax system and common fiat paper currency. These were instituted to invest in the poor-middle class, created social mobility climate, invest in infrastructure, integrated national markets and supply chains for a nationalized economy and reduce the shocks of past financial crisis but it consequently created a monopolistic and corrupt power of the few selected by a centralized government of which Republicans and their associates benefited which exacerbated wealth and income inequalities in the ensuing Gilded Age era.
2. Progressivism: Teddy Roosevelt era.
The Progressive-era starting in the late 1890s to 1920 was a political, scientific, socio-economic and moral pushback on the excesses of the prior Glided age. The societal rampant corruption of politicians, inefficient industrialization, urbanization, corporate monopolies, poverty-stricken working-class, hazardous working conditions, child labor, immorality, gender, massive income to wealth inequalities and contaminated foods and drugs were elements of the Glided age. Course corrective anti-Social Darwinist philosophy through regulation, incentives, scientific engineering, education, constitutional amendments, anti-trust and labor laws, preservation of natural resources, direct democracy and injection of religiosity were under the progressive umbrella. These principles were the revised platform of the new Republican party at the helm of Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt envisioned a well regulated capitalistic society with the coexistence of strong unions and competitive corporations within the confines of a non-corruptible sovereign democratic government. Despite such reforms, the progressive era still ended with the emergence of the Roaring Twenties era with which wealth and income inequalities worsened.
Anti monopolistic laws (Sherman Act and the Clayton Act), Federal Trade Commission Act, lowered Tariffs, Pure Food and Drug Act, Meat Inspection Act, 16th Amendment instituted a graduated federal income tax, 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution banned the sale, production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverage, Environmental protection executive orders, 17th amendment to the US Constitution allowed direct election of U.S. Senators, 19th amendment to the US Constitution allowed women to vote, rise of muckraking journalism exposing political and corporate corruption, scientific management, or “Taylorism for industries, settlement house movement for poor urban areas, expansion of child and veteran welfare, the reformative Social Gospel for churches and child labor laws were some the major progressive infrastructure through the presidencies of Republican Theodore Roosevelt, Republican Howard Taft to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
Despite the great tenets of progressivism, there were ills that either not addressed or worsened. The social engineering concept of eugenics was promulgated by some progressives to produce a “more genetically superior society of white Anglo Saxons” in which racial minorities, poor people, immigrants and mentally-physically disabled were allowed to be legally sterilized, segregated, discriminated and barred from miscegenation. Immigration Act of 1917 and National Quota Law of 1921 limited immigration of Italians, Jews, Eastern Europeans, and Asians because of the xenophobic labor force attributing immigrants as the cause of the low wages and hazardous workplaces and maintaining a homogeneous Aryan-Scandinavian majority. The Progressive-era was particularly regressive to African Americans starting with the Plessy vs. Ferguson of Supreme Court decision of 1896 that called for racial segregation, the most expansive erection of confederate monuments in American history propelled by the inaccurate, glorified and revisionist “Lost Cause” propaganda, the mainstream resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan reaching 4.5 million at its peak, the “Great Migration” of some blacks from the South to the North for economic opportunities (faced workplace and housing discrimination, racial segregation on government offices, reinforced Jim Crow policies at voting booths through poll tax and literacy tests, and the progressive economic welfare package were limited to the black populace).
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