Photograph Source: Forsaken Fotos – CC BY 2.0
Published on http://www.counterpunch.org
‘[W]ho ever is elected this November, a vast segment of the U.S. population will be deeply unhappy, in fact feel existentially threatened. That is the recipe for divisive clashes”.
Patrick Mazza, “How Civil Wars Start,” Counterpunch, July 29, 20
In the second season of the wildly inventive TV show The Umbrella Academy, a clandestine mass movement is afoot dedicated to an apocalyptic final curtain, The Cleanse.
Reason given? These folks are mobilized by recollections of having had better lives in other Time Lines. Thus, the blind fury of their intent to destroy the present unhappiness in hope of re-entering their nostalgia world, what the Greeks meant by “a return home.”
Interrupting my viewing of this plot, somehow “touching home” with me, there’s a doctored TV message from Reagan asking all Americans if they’re better off now than they were four years ago. It’s a Trump campaign message, clever for two reasons.
Firstly, it evokes the Reagan Time Line which the Republican Party has, up until Trump’s arrival, tried to keep from putrefying, like Egyptians with mummified King Tut. Trump has stepped all over that legacy but attaching himself to Reagan is a “why not?’ with him. If some Everyday Americans see a bit to Jesus in him, why not?
Why that Party so obligingly bent over for Trump in regard to sacred Reaganomics is easily answered if you discern why the Roman Republic crumbled when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. He had an army.
Trump doesn’t have Roman legions but he did get about 63 million Americans voting for him in 2016 and there are more Trump faithful in 2024 than in 2016. Another rabble-like army similar to the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capital might recruit themselves here and there across the land if Trump loses the election on the near horizon. Fair to say, without the organizing, mobilizing genius of Caesar behind them, their fires will be put out by our still standing Republic’s army. (Upon electoral and insurrection defeats Trump may pull an Aaron Burr and retreat West to MAGA strongholds inciting them to leave “the Union.” Feature film to follow.)
Secondly, the campaign ad is clever because it kindles and rekindles a nostalgia for better times in the past, especially when INFLATION now wracks the soul of your Everyday American. But “conditions on the ground” have not been good for this EA since, well, Reaganomics gave up “general welfare and prosperity” and tilted heavily toward plutocracy creation. It’s understandable if the tilt was in your direction, the present is a good place to be. Or, as Mel Brooks put it in History of the World Part I –“It’s good to be the King.”
In Adrienne LaFrance’s Atlantic piece, “American Fury,” she lists “ostentatious wealth disparity” as one of the social conditions that historically exacerbates violence. While there is a destructive fury blossoming in the country there is little sign of “private profiteering” being a fuel among the Trump legions as it was elsewhere historically on the left, as in the 1871 Paris Communards whose fury would be alien to the MAGAs.
Why the fury of the present drive to The Cleanse (see Donald J. Trump’s Project 2025) for a list of who and what needs to be cleansed) is not fueled by the obscenity whereby the richest 1% owning more than the bottom 90% is a mystery. This is a peculiarly American phenomenon, an “Exceptionalism.”
In a market rule society in which private profit accrues it is claimed by Natural Law while wealth redistribution is a deceiving wiliness mouthed by “Liberal/Progressives/Leftist/Socialists/Communists” (the collective of Evil) there is little or no incentive to point out the obscene wealth disparity this Market Rule has produced.
Sean Fain, president of the UAW, may wear an “Eat the Rich!” tee shirt but MAGAs wear the face of Trump in the garb of Jesus. It’s not the rich that need to be cleansed. It’s “the Deep State,” the “most far left,” and whatever obstructs Trump’s will to power, such as trial courts and judges, Congressional powers to impeach, the mass media of “fake news” (aka “freedom of the press”), unmanageable Generals, electoral democracy, and any prosecutions of Trump, always “politically weaponized.”
Nostalgia for another Time Line in which wealth was distributed in the middle and not on both ends is not a MAGA nostalgia. The economic issue that heats up now is not wealth disparity but inflation, and that buck stops at the Biden presidency, now shifted to Kamala. Everything cost less four years ago when Trump was president. It’s gotten hotter also. And the “Fringe” populace is more annoying now.
Whether or not the Federal Government has any direct control over the Greedocracy that sets prices, that is, the Owners, is not a point of consideration. Whether our wild west financializing form of Capitalism pulls the cart of our representative democracy or whether the reverse is true is not a point of consideration.
Dividend recipients are nostalgic in a transparent way while wage earners are so much more complicated. I mean they have their warm memories which remind them of how absent all of that is in the present. Amid this despair and nostalgia, the Stock Portfolio Invested Class respond only to the Market’s ups and downs of the day. Yesterdays are horse races already run. With this class everything is in play at the moment.
In contrast, the wage earner’s life has little to do with the volatility of the Market, though manipulated and exploited by the consequences of its wealth creation and distribution. The WE is powerless and frozen in a present where only money talks, and so the dual urge to cleanse the present and return to a “time before” when all was better develops. And the anger and fury arise and rise.
That Donald J. Trump has managed to inject himself into this scenario with a kind of salesman-at-the-door opportunistic finesse, or like an Elmer Gantry tent preacher pitching his tent among folks hungry for “The Word,” is sort of P.T. Barnum admirable. Fascinating and will probably remain fascinating, like the two headed boy in a bottle. There is a fury to cleanse, an Old Testament call for destruction that is not “The Rising” Springsteen sang but it is a Rising wave Trump is riding like Ahab on the White Whale.
What is the Time Line the MAGAs want to return to?
Democrats supply the answers.
If anything about this nostalgia were rationale the focus would be on Wall St et al. But it’s not. No, twice. Even the Occupy Wall Street movement occupiers weren’t making a Communard movement. They merely wanted in on the Wall Street high salary positions that were closed to them. Capitalism had solidified. They were too late to the party.
The fury now is also not over a failure of government and business to confront global warming. The fury is over Democrats hindering “Dig, baby, dig!” and thus keeping gas prices high. The fury is over Bernie and The Squad campaigning to turn the country into a bread line as they spend tax money in support of the “Underachievers,” the dark and swarthy “Illegals,” and foreign regimes who support liberal welfare programs for which the Everyday American pays.
But the fury is at heart a cultural one, as I reveal in my description of south of the Border immigrants.
There is a nostalgia for the good old days when no one spoke of White Supremacy and People of Color made the news only under arrest, indicted or imprisoned. “Back in the Day,” Southerners were nostalgic for the good ole Ante-Bellum South, as I witnessed in the mid-70s when a Tide Water Virginian told me how much better Blacks were treated on her ancestor’s plantation than they were now. Somehow slavery was a good way of life. Today’s racism is not a wish to bring back slavery but rather only a return to when Blacks shut up, stayed in their own neighborhoods, and just didn’t make a fuss.
DEI, “wokeness,” Critical Race Theory, reparations, Affirmative Action, LGBTQ rights, neutral genders and so on are irritants in our present Time Line to many of our fellow Americans for many reasons, or, more precisely, warped passions. If the U.S. was diverse in other Time Lines, it was urban, coastal and of a segregated kind. The equal rights and protection under the Fourteenth Amendment has not meant much if an economic system has led to a plutarchy in which equality is displaced. The call for equity is a call to adjust a lopsided economic system so that equality can be real.
This call for equity is at once attached to some form of socialist redistribution of the wealth. There has been no Time Line in U.S. history in which any hint of socialism has made all Americans joyfully expectant. It’s impossible to think that those furious with the present and desirous of a Cleansing of it are not nostalgic about our victory after a long Cold War over the Soviet Empire. Any political party tied to a Communist system that destroyed that Empire is in need of The Cleanse.
There is the passion of fury here and a deep conviction that in a past Time Line Leftism of any stripe was decried. It is to where we should return. We just need a Wagon Master and Trail Guide.
There have been so many hyper-speed changes in so many narratives coming from so many platforms sponsoring so many “alternative facts” that the most saving response seems to be “Enough!” Or a across the board rejection of all “Incoming.” The alternative reality of Cyberspace and its social media, its addictive devices, and its establishment as our default communication avenue creates a complexity that overwhelms our pre-frontal cortex. Things were so much simpler in a former Time Line.
Cyberspace has led to more confusion and division than to democratization. Perhaps the rise in an anti-democratic spirit begins here, with the failure of Cyberspace and its social media to nurture a democratic society. That media shows us the naivete of that wish. Musk is using his power to dispatch on X the venom of people who hate other people.
Paradoxically, the personal freedom to choose aura that a cell phone in hand gives also imparts the vicious circle of wandering in the confines of one’s own choices. Your Everyday American is now cockeyed within a web of choice. I suggest that what results is a subliminal yearning for authority outside the illusions of personal autonomy. Not only the authoritarian Trump emerges but others across Europe as a global antidote is sought to distorted notions of freedom, both personal and political.
The alternative free-roaming reality of Cyberspace, accessible to any child with a cell phone, does help parents keep track of their children. A digital safety net is offered parents, which may or may not improve socialization of the young. As a kid, I faced the dangers of roaming in the Old Brooklyn streets and lots. How I survived without a cell phone support group I can’t say.
There’s nostalgia here but like regret it cannot become whatever the past may have been. The pathological aspect of nostalgia now as fed to the MAGAs is one truly politically “weaponized.” It’s a sad and cruel card to play but it has nevertheless been played since Trump arrived on the political stage, like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, full of evil intent.
A less reassuring feature of Cyberspace in the view of parents is the fear that children are rearing themselves in social media, attracted to powerful influences that parents know nothing about. They could be tuned to Fox & Friends, or on a podcast with Bernie & Comrades. (I made that up). In short, home and family are easily replaced in terms of childrearing by the World Wide Web. And whoever and whatever content offered there.
Once again, nostalgia is generated for a time when reality was one, you could read one newspaper and follow it, and the biggest Influencers in your kids’ life wasn’t a gender-neutral 16 year old with cool tats but you, the parents. That none of this ever existed and your failure to go Christian and love “The Other,” has no place in nostalgia or in the anger felt when all this (which never existed) is gone.
Fair to say, that the Democratic Party has sponsored more changes in the privacy and personal nature of Everyday Life than even Cyberspace.
The issue of whether a marriage was between a male and a female was not up for debate in an earlier Time Line. The issue of what gender you might choose for yourself likewise not an earlier issue. The emergence of an LGBTQ community as equally constitutive of the American Family as a father, mother and child family is yet another something in the present Time Line in need of The Cleanse.
Spearheading these intrusions into moral and cultural norms, the Democratic Party becomes the party of amoral license. That Democrats are respecting the Constitution’s separation of Church and State is not what rings in the ear when they petition against any State’s attempt to establish religion in public domains, such as schools. The strong Evangelical and Pentecostal movements very much active in American politics are far more warner to Donald J. Trump as a Man of Faith than any Democrat. Pete Buttigieg got a shout out to expect his soul to burn in Hell. Trump can shoot a man on 5th Avenue or grab a pussy at a party and ascend to Heaven.
“And when Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”
Evangelist Joel Tenney, quoted in McKay Coppins, “Lord, Help Us Make America Great Again,” The Atlantic, September 2024
I believe that when fury reaches the “Good vs. Evil” stage it has kicked up the notch of violence and expanded The Cleansing from political and cultural realms to a religious delirium. Living in an evil Time Line is not like living under the New Deal or Reagan’s New Morning in America. When you make America great again you are redeeming a lost world, cleansing it of evil and evil doers. Trump is not a religious avenger, a Raphael warrior of God, but revenge suits his own particular brand of low humanity. He is as acquainted with any god as he is with Reagan Voodoo economics, the U.S. Constitution, or the capital of any “battleground” State.
Whether or not nostalgia for a far better Time Line continues after Trump departs and whether the need to cleanse the evildoers of the present remains, and thus cataclysmic violence follows we’ll wait to see. What’s more certain is that the past is not any less shitty a Time Line than the present (Viet-nam? WMD Iraq?/ Ukraine? Gaza?) and Donald J. Trump is not a Moses taking us anywhere but on a confidence man’s tour of his golden real estate Mar a Lago.
“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
Martin Luther King
