Divided Future: “Were Trump either to quit in pique and frustration or, worse, be removed by either of the legal means available, the US would risk being plunged into civic unrest on an unknowable scale.” - NZ Listener.
“TRY TO
IMPEACH HIM, just try it. You will have a spasm of violence in this country, an
insurrection like you’ve never seen. The people will not stand for impeachment.
A politician that votes for it would be endangering their own life.” That is the
frightening prediction of the American right-wing activist, Roger Stone, one of
US President Donald Trump’s most outspoken supporters.
Stone,
himself, has many painful personal memories of the impeachment process. He was,
after all, an official in the administration of President Richard Nixon. But, a
lot has changed in 40 years. In 2017, Stone warns, impeaching a sitting
Republican president might not be so easy: “Both sides are heavily armed … This
is not 1974. The people will not stand for impeachment.” Asked if he was
predicting civil war, Stone replied unequivocally: “Yes, that’s what I think
will happen.”
Nonsense?
Not according to the editorial writers of New Zealand’s own Listener magazine:
“Were Trump
either to quit in pique and frustration or, worse, be removed by either of the
legal means available, the US would risk being plunged into civic unrest on an
unknowable scale.”
Drawing
their readers’ attention to the “considerable” support which Trump still
commands among “a socially disaffected rump”, the Listener argues that his diehard supporters “might not hesitate to
form militias and try to instigate civil war.”
How has it
come to this? How has the greatest republic the world has ever known been led
to the edge of such a profound political abyss? A more useful line of
questioning might begin with another, albeit related, question: “How has the
American republic avoided dissolution for so long? Because the most astonishing
historical fact about the United States of America is that it is still with us.
It very
nearly wasn’t. Had anyone but Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential
election, it is highly unlikely that the United States as we know it would have
survived. Either, the American South’s “peculiar institution” of slavery would
have obliged its anti-slavery Northern neighbours to undertake a long and painful retreat from
the “self-evident” truths of the American revolution. Or, the North American
continent would have been divided between the “United”, and the “Confederate”,
States of America.
Lincoln
forestalled both of these outcomes – but only at enormous cost. The casualties
inflicted during the American Civil War of 1861-1865 still outnumber all the
casualties sustained by the USA in all subsequent conflicts – including World
Wars One and Two. What’s more, the terrible political wounds opened up by the
Civil War: essentially a conflict about the economic and social role of Race in
American society; have never properly healed.
Lincoln’s
successors brave attempt to vindicate the sacrifices of the Civil War: the
so-called “Reconstruction Period”; lasted barely a decade. Equality between
Southern blacks and whites could only be enforced by the bayonets of the
occupying Union Army. Its withdrawal, in 1877, was followed by the brutal subjugation
and virtual re-enslavement of the black population by the white. The means
adopted: illegal terror by the Ku Klux Klan, reinforced by the institutional
repression of “Jim Crow” segregation laws, received no early constitutional
reproof from the Supreme Court. The federal government thereby signaled its
willingness to see established, across the South, racist political regimes that
can only be described as “proto-fascist”.
Accordingly,
when critics of the Alt-Right demonstrators in Charlottesville denounce their
“fascist” tactics as foreign to American democracy, they’re mistaken. The much
more unpalatable truth is that many of the political motifs we associate with
European fascism were actually borrowed from America. Torchlight parades, for
example, date all the way back to the 1832 campaign of America’s first populist
president, Andrew Jackson. Klansmen’s robes may, similarly, have inspired
Mussolini’s black-shirts and Hitler’s stormtroopers. And anyone who believes
that the Nazi Party invented the mass political rally should take a look at any
American party convention, or the news photographs of 50,000 robed Klansmen
marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1925.
American Fascism: Ku Klux Klan marches down Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, 1925.
Racism, and
the fascistic trappings that give it political momentum, are as American as
apple-pie. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the Kennedy/Johnson-led
Democratic Administrations’ successful efforts to abolish Jim Crow and end Klan
terror in the early-1960s have been the primary drivers of American politics
ever since. Be it Nixon’s 1968 “Southern Strategy”; Reagan’s upholding of
“State’s Rights” in 1980; or, Trump’s 2016 “Let’s make America GREAT again!”
(i.e. “WHITE” again) campaign slogan; the Republicans have been the party of
race-based politics for nearly fifty years. That President Obama was followed
by President Trump is no historical accident.
Tragically,
the Republican Party has made itself a willing hostage to the political terror
and unconstitutional objectives that have always marched in lock-step with the
advance of America’s white supremacist traditions. Defeating both may well
require a second civil war.
This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 29 August 2017.
