Divisive Trump
I read an article in The Washington Post written by former Missouri Senator, John Danforth. He says Trump is not a Republican, because he does not stand for a united country. Senator Danforth speaks of the “Party of Lincoln” and how it has all its life stood for holding the nation together. He extols the integrationist work of various Republican Presidents, such as GHW Bush, who, Danforth says, passed the “most important civil rights legislation in more than a quarter century”. He fails to mention the civil rights legislation of Lyndon Johnson, passed by a Democratic President from Texas in 1964. That statute is particularly germane, because that is when the Republicans made their pact with the devil, led by Senator Barry Goldwater, still a secular saint in Arizona where I write this. Goldwater opposed the legislation, leading the Republicans to become the party of the white south, especially under Richard Nixon, dropping the black vote, in Nixon’s infamous “southern strategy”. Until then, white southerners were Democrats, “Dixiecrats”. After the Republicans overthrew 100 years of being the party of Lincoln, in a naked attempt to become a party of power in the south, it became the party of repression and division. How can Senator Danforth ignore this?
Trump has merely exploited the divisions in the Republican Party, inhabited as it is by nasty white trash ethno-nationalists, east coast Republican grandee CEOS, and a collection of no-hoper working class whites who think big companies can be muscled back to America to give them the well-paying jobs and status their fathers and grandfathers had with no education and less training. The latter think it is some conspiracy by politicians to take that work away, because their idiot hero, Trump, says that is what happened, and they are so ill-educated as to believe him when he says he can bring it all back. They are too ill-informed to understand it was the grandee Republican CEOs who saw cost advantages elsewhere and took manufacturing overseas, where social costs were lower: no pensions, no medical costs, lower wages. The AFL-CIO negotiated their members out of the low-cost economy these people lived in and the cost of all this has become apparent. Training is necessary. Working is necessary, but working at the value-added jobs that suit the cost of the goods America now manufactures. Instead, we see the moron in the White House being taken advantage by companies who hold the administration to ransom to bring factories to the US. Foxconn is just the latest company to agree to bring a factory to the US, or to “keep” jobs in the US, in return for substantial taxpayer-financed bribes. The hundreds of millions, the billions, being forked over, in return for benefits to come in decades, if ever, along with the favoured access to this huge market are an appalling, uneconomic bargain. All the while, the moron in the WH crows over these proofs of his brilliance, while the companies let him gloat as they take the money and get paid to build a factory in some state or other. The cost of each job Foxconn will supposedly bring to Wisconsin, if all goes best for Wisconsin, is $230,000, all paid by the taxpayer and all decades before any US citizen will see any benefit from this payout! What a triumph, for this self-proclaimed, supposedly brilliant deal-maker in the White House….!
When the US was truly powerful and confident, it wanted free trade, competition, deriding economies that could not keep up. Now, a frightened, smaller, stupider country, has elected a bully, a huckster, a liar to take it out of trade deals that do not place American interests first. As though trade agreements ever dictate winners and losers. Truly, what were Americans who voted for Trump’s obviously empty promises thinking??
And now, after an open Nazi rally in a college town near to Washington, DC, Trump has shown himself to be the nasty white supremacist he has always been. So why is Senator Danforth so surprised? The Republican Party has been moving toward hatred and division for over fifty years: segregation of blacks, suppressing their voting rights, promotion of white supremacy at every turn, which is merely the flip side of the segregation of blacks. The same now applies to Hispanics, as they have become a threat to the white hegemony. Republicans want to “send them back where they came from”, just as they have proposed doing with blacks over the last forty years. Nothing but division, and taking advantages away from others. So why the surprise Senator Danforth?
