On saving America
During the last Art Walk a few weeks ago I noticed the big posters on the Republican party headquarters exhorting me to “Save America.” That encounter raised the obvious question: Save it from what? The Republican answer, as I understand it, is from government overreach and the loss of our freedoms under a socialist state imposed by godless far-left liberals busy indoctrinating our children with their pernicious anti-American (a.k.a. “woke”) ideology. This commentary will make two points. First, it is not the far left but the wealthy far right that has worked for 200 years to stamp out our democracy. And second, this long effort is now poised for success due to a colossal scam being orchestrated by the greatest conman of modern times.
To set the stage for what follows, let us contrast the way the country is now from the way it was a mere ten years ago in 2014. At that time, despite its imperfections, we had a reasonably well-functioning democracy where election results were simply accepted, and the peaceful transition of power was a given. Such things as election denialism, fake electors, capitol riots, near-daily mass shootings, banning of books and widespread rollbacks of voting and reproductive rights were unheard of, indeed, as we used to believe, “unthinkable.” Today, as J.D. Vance recently said, they are “a fact of life.”
To claim or imply that this horrific rapid decline is to be blamed on far-left liberals and “socialists” ignores history. The violent upending of our norms and institutions, rather, exactly coincides with the rise of Donald Trump and his right-wing allies. Its historical origins are traced in detail in Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America” (2017). As she puts it, “Those who are leading today’s push to upend the political system are heirs to a set of ideas that goes back almost two centuries,” authoritarian ideas that run in a straight line from John C. Calhoun in the 1820s to the robber barons of the Gilded Age to the Koch brothers and the Heritage Foundation today. MacLean’s terrifying book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand our current political situation.
After years of working to undermine FDR’s New Deal, these anti-democratic elites flexed their muscles in earnest beginning about 1980. As Robert Reich, Kurt Andersen and other historians have chronicled, it was the business community’s shift in emphasis from “stakeholders” to “shareholders” in response to Lewis Powell’s memo in 1972 that launched our precipitous decline. Their stepping away from any responsibility to their localities or their employees in favor of maximizing profit for the few led to decades of companies quietly gutting labor unions, eliminating pension plans and health insurance, freezing wages and outsourcing.
The culmination was the economic meltdown of 2008 driven by the big banks. The rage and shame felt by millions of ordinary people at their ruination was visible for a short time in the Occupy Wall Street movement. But Thomas Frank’s “Pity The Billionaire” (2012) shows how the wealthy elites responsible were able to deflect that rage onto “big government” and portray themselves both as innocent victims and as saviors of the working class their greed had decimated.
This cleared the way for the 2015 eruption of Donald Trump onto the political scene, a Trojan Horse wheeled in by the radical right to finally end its long siege and “bring everything crashing down” (to quote Steve Bannon). Indifferent to the Constitution and the rule of law, and drawing on his lifetime of expertise in fraudulent business practices, he is now finishing the job of bringing democracy to its knees by running an elaborate scam on the American public.
The first step is to paralyze our capacity for critical thinking. Like a spider injecting venom into its prey, he has corrupted our language (e.g., convicted criminals are now “hostages”) and polluted the information base necessary for clear thought with an ongoing deluge of lies, distortions and disinformation. Any evidence-based challenge to his narrative can consequently either be dismissed as the work of a “nut job” suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome or simply ignored, as Elise Stefanik has done in stonewalling Paula Collins.
The second is to manipulate our emotions. As Arlie Hochschild shows in her new book “Stolen Pride, Trump,” the consummate showman/conman, has adopted the elites’ role of “victim” (“Unfair!” “Witch hunt!”) as a powerful means of tapping into the widespread feelings of victimhood and shame mentioned above. His “victim” schtick has four steps — 1) say something outrageous; 2) get attacked for it; 3) thus become a victim (“If they come for me, they’ll come for you”) with whom others feeling victimized can identify; 4) emerge as a powerful “savior” of the victimized against the victimizers.
Since this dynamic runs only on feelings it creates the perfect conditions for the third and defining component of the scam. The current AARP Bulletin (October 2024) features an article on “How Scammers Target Your Emotions.” It lists some common tactics which include “exploit[ing] the human need for connection … through a fake friendship,” making victims believe that “the fabulous winnings are real,” and playing on anxiety to create “an overwhelming sense of dread.”
This describes Trump’s modus operandi to a T. As a wealthy oligarch only posing as a downtrodden “victim,” he is a fake friend to the country’s marginalized; his grandiose promises of millions of jobs, etc. are the scammer’s fictitious “fabulous winnings”; and he keeps the national pot of dread and anxiety boiling by demonizing immigrants (“vermin”), red-baiting (“Comrade Kamala”) and darkly threatening that if you don’t vote for him (and him alone) “you won’t have a country.”
But what Trump means by the word “country” is not what most Americans mean by it. As Project 2025 and his own statements make clear, he, like his fellow oligarchs on the radical right, means an authoritarian state resembling Putin’s Russia and Orban’s Hungary.
It’s this — not some vague far-left “socialism” — that we need to save America from on Election Day. Don’t fall for the scam.
(John Radigan lives in Saranac Lake.)