In a chain of correspondence, a friend wondered, “What is the ultimate fantasy at work in this Texas appeal…?” It’s a good question that took some reflection before writing back, which led to this column. The ultimate fantasy, I think, is to overturn the election and establish Trump as a Putin like strongman pretending to defend democracy. If Trump was as smart, wily, and experienced as Putin, we could be in real trouble, but he’s not. He’s basically a flimflam artist with the instincts of a street fighter, and not much else, which raises another question. How did we get to this place?
I think we have to go back to the America First movement of the late 1930s and early 1940s. On one hand, it was a single issue isolationist antiwar movement. On the other, it braided strands of cherished American individualism with elements of anti-Jewish white supremacy, fear of socialism, and economic anxiety. It was a fascist oriented populist movement that endorsed much of Germany’s Nazism as the aryan antidote to FDR’s New Deal, cheered on by the usual oligarchical suspects.
It ceased to exist shortly after December 7, 1941, but it established the modern setting from which arose McCarthyism, the John Birch Society and Goldwater. In a nutshell, they favored radical libertarianism in which government would be prohibited from regulating business and industry, taxes would be minimal, and government’s main job would be aggressive defense of American interests. It opposed to any form of civil rights legislation, and saw every social welfare program as a slippery slide toward communism. It was far too radical for the mainstream of American society, even for the Republican Party, until affable Ronald Reagan normalized it as just good old patriotic Americanism. For all the loudly proclaimed patriotism and love of the Constitution, the move put the GOP on an un-democratic path toward surrender of the libertarian individualism it cherished to the authoritarian control of political leaders and a relative handful of oligarchs. It sounds like a second rate script for a failed tv series, but it’s not far off the influential guidance of the Nobel prize wining economist, James M. Buchanan.
We’ve seen it played out at the local level through appeals, very effective appeals, to the economic and social anxieties of vulnerable folk. They’re often characterized in the press as working class, or non-college educated whites, which may be true but is often said in a smugly condescending way. It’s enough to enrage hard working, well educated (but maybe not college educated) folks only a few paychecks from dropping into the lower classes. They believe in the individualist credo. They’re truly patriotic. They’ve been sold on the welfare queen story. They understand politics, economics, and the Constitution in vague yet concrete ways. Thanks to Reagan, they’ve been convinced that conservative is good and liberal is bad. So they’re conservative, even if everything they want and need is part of the liberal agenda. In the end, it makes them vulnerable to skillful manipulation from the fascist wing of the GOP. Did I say fascist? Yes I did.
So what about the Attorneys General who jumped on Texas Attorney General Paxton’s snake oil wagon? Without ceremony, the Supreme Court took the wheels off of it. The AGs aren’t stupid, they knew it would happen that way. And what about the 100 plus Members of Congress who say they support the case? They’re all well educated. They know the Constitution is more than Article II and the Second Amendment. What’s going on? Reports indicate Paxton, who is in serious legal difficulty, might be trolling for a pardon, but his move has gotten out of hand and taken on a life of its own. It’s become a lynchpin holding together the diminishing hopes of Trump’s core. I’m guessing the AGs and MCs are pandering to them as a means to secure their reelections. Some may be true believers, but more, I suspect, are simply finding it difficult to give up the Reagan myth on which they were raised.