Donald Trump: Round Two

Donald Trump: Round Two—An Analysis (12 November 2024) by Lawrence Davidson

Part I — Surprise, Surprise?

Just how surprised should we be with Donald Trump’s distressing second election victory? Perhaps not too surprised. Prior to the election, there were lots of signs pointing to the return of Trumpism. Let’s leave aside economic grievances, which are always present for one group or region or another, and focus on deeper identity issues. If we had been honest and aware, we would have seen hints of what was coming in the persistent nature of who most of us really are.  Here are some of the things we ought to know about our collective selves, but really have avoided confronting:

—This is a deeply divided country on many levels and has always been so. It is divided by race and religion, by wealth and class status, by education and certainly by aptitude for critical reasoning. 

—A good part of the division is generated by long-standing (at least 200 years long!) racism and white resentment over any assertion that the U.S. is, in reality, a multicultural society.

Genetically, we are influenced in favor of group association (family to tribe, etc.) because there is survival value in this orientation. This is not the cause of racism. How we discern our group from others becomes an acquired aspect of one’s culture. It is a learned perception. When skin color, facial features or other aspects of race become markers with negative connotations, you get racism.

—Part of the division is generated by xenophobia and an ignorance of, or uncaring about, the country’s immigrant roots. This boils down to a renunciation of our own history and feeds into the racism mentioned above.

—This country harbors literally millions of medieval-minded Christian fundamentalists who have replaced history with bible myths and obscenely long for an apocalypse. Their faith appears to be the religious equivalent of the cult leader Jim Jones’ “kool aid.”

—And, as Donald Trump so aptly personifies, underneath our social norms lay a barely controlled sexism, sometimes reaching the level of misogyny. Sigmund Freud would certainly be impressed. 

One or more of these factors seem to have infected the emotions of a majority of America’s 2024 voting citizens. It all powers a confused mix of cultural fears and dreams which have nothing to do with the ideals of progress, humanitarianism, justice, fairness, and a worthwhile civilization. Yet it is the above listed feelings that, consciously or not, helped lead these voters to give Donald Trump (Pied Piper extraordinaire) a second term as president. “Videte quid optes.”

Part II — Spectacularly Bad Cultural Decline

In truth, the deterioration of American culture has been ongoing for some time. Confined in our local geographical and social environments, we tend to tut-tut and then forget about deleterious events beyond our near horizon and so don’t recognize that they are symptoms of just how rickety the cultural substructure has become. There are a number of such symptoms such as police brutality against minorities and protesters, rampant financial corruption among politicians on both the state and federal level (see below), most recently the abandonment of free speech and, perhaps the most shocking of them all, the all too frequent and growing number of gun-related mass murders. No society consistently presents such symptoms without accompanying social and moral decline. 

As regards to the ongoing problem of gun violence, here is a report on just how bad things have become: 

In late October 2024, The Commonwealth Fund released a report entitled “Comparing Deaths from Gun Violence in the United States with Other Countries.” The findings are spectacularly bad. “Globally, the U.S. ranks at the 93rd percentile for overall firearm mortality, 92nd percentile for children and teens, and 96th percentile for women.” This is awful enough that U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, M.D., officially declared firearm violence a public health crisis on June 25, 2024. 

The Fund’s research (here quoting the Washington Post’s summary on the findings) revealed that: 

—“the overall rate of firearms deaths in Mississippi was nearly twice that of Haiti, an impoverished Caribbean nation where violent gangs control large swaths of the country.”

—“Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama had higher firearms death rates than Mexico, where rival drug cartels are engaged in bloody conflict. 

—“Montana’s death rate from guns was higher than in Colombia, where drug trafficking is rife.”

— And lest you think the bad news is all in the south and west United States: “Suburban New Jersey had a higher gun death rate than Nicaragua, Mali and Djibouti.”

Want to know a place with higher rates of gun-related death than the U.S.? Try Greenland, and there it is mostly a function of the number of suicides using guns.

Part III — How Come?

The Fund’s report tells you how they conducted the study, their sources and the like. But if you are asking yourself, how come this situation exists, you won’t find any answers. For the source of this symptom of culture gone bad, you have to go to the National Rifle Association (NRA), and most of our politicians from whom the gun lobby bought the policies (the laws) that have allowed the U.S. to literally shoot itself into this position of deplorable leadership. For, you see, this situation could not have come into being without the financial corruption of politicians and elements of the judiciary.

What do I mean when I say the NRA literally bought the policies that have led to the situation described by the Commonwealth report? Here is the telling background: The financial corruption of our politics has grown apace over the last hundred years, culminating in the Supreme Court’s December 2019 “Citizen’s United” decision. How you spend your money is now seen as an exercise of free speech (while, simultaneously real free speech on college campuses is being curtailed) and as such, greases the electoral processes of our democracy with campaign-related financial offers sufficient to buy a politician’s votes.

But the corruption is deeper and more rooted in the nature of our political system. The financial payoffs most often work through a system of well-organized and very well-funded lobbies and such special interest groups have also been around for over a century. Not only are politicians bought by the lobbies, but it is now known that just about 80% of the “experts” advising Congress on policy are in the pay of lobbies representing both domestic and foreign interests. Among the former are the NRA and “defense” industries, among the latter are lobbies pushing the interests of Israel, and we know where that has gotten us. 

The results of the 2024 presidential election are a sure sign that neither party has answers to the divisions and corruption that beset the nation. Indeed, dominated by lobbies, just how aware of the problems that plague them are politicians and their advisers? Here is a hint to the answer: who are the Democratic politicians blaming for Harris’ defeat? Well, a lot of them are blaming groups who would normally vote Democratic, but this time abandoned the party. As yet there is no serious effort to look inward at the party’s overall structure and the policies it has generated, in order to explain these desertions.

Part IV—Conclusion

What we see today as corruption may be inherent in human nature. It may be an expression of the drive to satisfy self-interest and thus is instinctively felt to have survival value. The lobbies are a way of collectively pursuing such an end. Even so, as with other anachronistic activities that threaten the broader community, this sort of particularistic destructive behavior can be controlled through both efficiently enforced laws and consistently applied education emphasizing society’s shared interests and values.

A start was made in this direction in the 1960s—an effort to overcome 200 plus years of racial and regional division, laws that fought racism and xenophobic behavior in the public sphere and held at bay white Christian nationalism. Today, we witness the backlash to this effort. Using spurious definitions of “freedom” and twisted Constitutional arguments, well organized and very well-funded groups ranging from Christian fundamentalists to Zionists, from gun fanatics to white supremacists have successfully eroded these efforts. But that does not mean civil rights and other humanitarian reforms are hopeless. It just means we cannot achieve such ends through the present party system or the corruptive environment in which it operates.

Things may well be about to change, but over a long and bumpy road. It might be the case that things have to get worse before they get better. If Donald Trump is true to his word, he will soon act in an authoritarian fashion and probably do so in a sloppy and arbitrarily violent way. He will high-handedly throw millions of people (mostly government workers and rural farm hands) out of work, throw climate issues under the bus, put immigrants in prison camps while trying to deport them and otherwise trample on the rights of not only minorities, but of everyone who disagrees with him. Herein might actually lay the seeds of eventual positive change. At some point there will be yet another backlash and if it is not literally crushed by force, it may lead to reforms that actually improve on the present system. This is a long-term optimistic view, but hope burns eternal—that too might be inherent in human nature.