“It need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt. It may even wear a dress shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retains its power of exploitation and special privilege. – Tommy Douglas
Who doesn’t like to kick back and watch the US primary election campaign? I just scan the highlights, but John Feffer is big picture prognosticating with his recent article on Tom’s Dispatch titled Donald Trump and America B. The article examines the disaffected people who make up America B and who have bought into his faux-populist message. I encourage you to follow the above link and read the entire article as it is well written and laden with trenchant political observations that stretch into the near future.
In the 1990s, the United States changed its political economy. It was not quite as dramatic a shift as the regime changes that took place across Eurasia, but it had profound consequences for the realignment of voting patterns in America.
During that decade, the U.S. economy accelerated its shift from manufacturing — along with the well-paying blue-collar jobs that sector had once generated — to an ever more dominant service economy. In terms of employment, manufacturing jobs dropped from 18 million in 1990 to 12 million in 2014, while wages for such jobs tumbled as well. Over that same period, the health-care and social assistance sector alone grew from 9.1 million to more than 18 million jobs. At one end of that service economy were the 1% in financial services making stratospheric sums, particularly as compensation packages soared from the mid-1990s on. On the other end were the people who had to add shifts at McDonald’s or Walmart to their full-time jobs or monetize their spare time by driving for Uber just to make what they or their parents once earned with one job at the local factory.
America was not alone in undergoing this shift. Thanks to technological innovations like computers and robotics, greater access to cheap labor in places like Mexico and China, the rise of the Internet, and the deregulation of the financial world, the global economy was being similarly transformed. Blue-collar workers no longer played as vital a role in any advanced economy.
In the U.S., put bluntly, the imagination of America A no longer needed the muscle of America B.
[…]
“Falling behind economically and feeling betrayed by politicians on both sides of the aisle, America B might have moved to the left if the United States had a strong socialist tradition. In the 2016 primary campaign, many of the economically anxious did, in fact, support Bernie Sanders, particularly the younger offspring of America A fearful of being deported to America B. Unlike Europe B, however, America B has always been more about rugged individualism than class solidarity. Its denizens would rather buy a lottery ticket and pray for a big payout than rely on a handout from Washington (Medicare and Social Security aside). Donald Trump, politically speaking, is their Powerball ticket.
Above all, the inhabitants of America B are angry. They’re disgusted with politics as usual in Washington and the hypocritical, sanctimonious political elite that goes with it. They’re incensed by how the wealthy have effectively seceded from American society with their gated estates and offshore accounts. And they’ve focused their resentment on those they see as having taken their jobs: immigrants, people of color, women. They’re so desperate for someone who “tells it like it is” that they’ll look the other way when it comes to Donald Trump’s inextricable links to the very elite who did so much to widen the gap between the two Americas in the first place.”
[…]
“America B has a fondness for Donald Trump and his almost childlike audacity. (Gosh, kids say the darndest things!) Right now, his fans are attached to an individual, rather than a platform or a party. Many of his supporters don’t even care whether Trump means what he says or not. If he loses, he will fade away and leave nothing behind, politically speaking.
The real change will come when a more sophisticated politician, with an authentic political machine, sets out to woo America B. Perhaps the Democratic Party will decide to return to its more populist, mid-century roots. Perhaps the Republican Party will abandon its commitment to entitlement programs for the 1%.
More likely, a much more ominous political force will emerge from the shadows. If and when that new, neo-fascist party fields its charismatic presidential candidate, that will be the most important election of our lives.
As long as America B is left in the lurch by what passes for modernity, it will inevitably try to pull the entire country back to some imagined golden age of the past before all those “others” hijacked the red, white, and blue. Donald Trump has hitched his presidential wagon to America B. The real nightmare, however, is likely to emerge in 2020 or thereafter, if a far more capable politician who embraces similar retrograde positions rides America B into Washington.
Then it will matter little how much both liberals and conservatives rail against “stupid” and “crazy” voters. Nor will they have Donald Trump to kick around any more. In the end, they will have no one to blame but themselves.”
End game summary here is this – actual politicians are watching to see how successful DT is. The pull of false populism is strong and in the right(wrong) hands could be forged into a general election winning platform that will take America into a new darker age. So if we see in 2020 the new charming face of proto-fascism rise in the US, remember Tom Dispatch and DWR called it first in 2016.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
9 comments
July 4, 2016 at 6:14 am
Emma
Good piece.
But, sorry, goodmarriagecentral called it first: https://goodmarriagecentral.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/the-wages-of-discontent/
;)
Canada’s looking better and better with every passing day.
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July 4, 2016 at 8:03 am
The Arbourist
@Emma
Ninja’d! :) Although I wish article such as these were not necessary.
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July 4, 2016 at 8:04 am
Bernie Orbust
“In the U.S., put bluntly, the imagination of America A no longer needed the muscle of America B.”
To put it bluntly, this is a primitive view of the economy that only someone completely ignorant of economics and its recent history could come up with.
First it’s predicated on social Darwinism. That everyone must sing for their supper. That would only produce a society where people would end up paying others for the privilege of NOT having to hear them sing.
I.e., people are entitled to a basic income. The innovators and performers who make extraordinary contributions to society are entitled to extraordinary financial rewards. As the economy grows, ALL segments of society are entitled to rising real incomes and wealth (whether held publicly, privately or both,) as GDP per capita rises. Otherwise, inequality will grow. (A meritocracy requires inequality; a democratic society determines this level of inequality at the ballot box; but it must remain constant over time unless people vote to change it.)
Second, the Friedmanian era was polluted with economic bubbles that turned to economic crises: disaster capitalism at its finest. Now just consider the 2000s Bust Out which is only one of many crises. It was a complex web of fraud among risk-offloading predatory-lending commercial banks, trust-liquidating bond rating agencies, Ponzi-scheming investment bankers, paper-stretching shadow bankers, really-big-shorting hedge fund managers, and Masters of the Universe playing musical chairs with the global financial system. (When the music stops: a signal that the pump-and-dump scheme has run its course and it’s time to unload and short the hyped-up worthless investment.)
Now is someone going to tell me all this disgusting fraudulent behavior is a meritocracy? That the imaginations of America A were hard at work contributing to the betterment of society?! PLEASE!
No one has to worry about America going fascist. When the next financial crisis hits, fascist revolutions will break out in historically-fascist EUROPE which will trigger WW3 and the Anthropocene. All thanks to a perceived pecking-order entitlement among untalented patriarchal hierarchists looting the wealth of others triggering yet another economic collapse.
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July 4, 2016 at 9:29 am
Emma
I do to. But that would require us, human beings, to fundamentally change our way of life and our nature.
What we are watching is the inevitable consequence of our greed, selfishness, violence, and dehumanization of others. This is how empires fall — and they always do, through largely the same mechanisms.
We are not learning, so we must repeat these mistakes, time and again — until we either “get it” or self-destruct, whichever comes first.
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July 4, 2016 at 10:30 am
Bernie Orbust
Fundamentally change our ways or implement simple democracy free from establishment capture and corruption.
The people are the best captains of our own destiny. We are invested in the future of humanity through our children and grandchildren. We are not going to loot ourselves. That would be robbing Peter to pay Paul. (Not that the people would ever think of pulling the kind of stunts entitled barbarians pull on a regular basis. This is because the people are adults who are typically very responsible. They can never have enough wealth or power individually to be absolutely corrupted by it.)
“Civilization” is not a 10,000 year war that culminates in the implosion of 7-billion population world because the people were in charge. It’s because they weren’t. But it’s not too late for the people to step up and cease responsibility for our world and make a civilization out of it.
We have the blueprint (FDR’s New Deal.) We have the tried-and-true economic system (the Keynesian mixed-market system that created modern living standards in the post-war era: 1945 – 1980; before the disastrous neoliberal/neoclassical Friedmanian era: 1981 – present [should’ve been 1981 – 2008.])
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July 4, 2016 at 3:36 pm
bleatmop
Reminds me of the old Sinclair Lewis quote, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Trump is not the first one to be on the presidential ticket doing this, the most recent other example would be Sarah Palin, whom was one McCain heart attack and a few electoral votes away from being president.
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July 4, 2016 at 5:09 pm
Bernie Orbust
The American establishment has bought up the politicians, the government, the courts and the news media. Fascism has already come to America. These bribe-taking “super predators” are also exceedingly racist. Just look at the kind of racist global economy they’ve created. People of color were servants of rich white nations 200 years ago; people of color are servants of rich white nations today. But the establishment IS politically correct. That’s the important thing. It’s perfectly acceptable to wage a bunch of wars as “business opportunities” just as long as they don’t use the term “Muslim extremist” on suspected ‘enemy combatants’ they murder with cowardly drone strikes. (Just as long as they lie about torturing and disappearing people which they’ve been doing for over 40 years beginning with Pinochet’s Chile where the CIA perfected the practice.)
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July 5, 2016 at 7:20 am
The Arbourist
@Bernie OrBust
Well said. :)
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July 5, 2016 at 7:22 am
The Arbourist
@bleatmop
It looks like a race though now, whether it is to be religious or xenophobia that gets to be the standard bearer for fascism.
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