The Donald Trump Constituency – a Unique American Tapestry

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The modern Republican Party – over the past forty-some-odd years – has created the phenomenon of the Donald Trump constituency – out of whole cloth.

Serial adulterer Donald J. Trump – unabashedly mugs under the banner of the cross to the adoring 'family values' crowd who view the thrice-married casino owner as vastly more preferable than the reviled Hillary Clinton. 

First dismissed by pundits and intellectuals alike – today the prospect of a Trump presidency has reared its ugly head – as an existential threat to our democracy. For that, it is essential to examine the components of his constituency for their singular and collective import:

1. White Southern Racists: old school secular self-identified racists, bigots, and segregationists who are partisan Republican descendants of former so-called Dixiecrats in the Southeast.

A right-of-passage for a lower class of rural white Southerns, the unfurling of the Confederate Battle Flag is widely regarded as a proud display of heritage. While most – if not all – fully realize it is act of politically-incorrect defiance – their vaunted Constitutional RIGHT TO OFFEND black Americans - and even more reviled 'lib'-rul' white Southerners – who see it as an brazen symbol of white supremacy. This cultural subset is anthropological evidence that – while it is not THEORETICALLY impossible to overcome one's upbringing – it is indeed PRACTICALLY impossible – for all intents and purposes.   

2. Christian Dominionists: fundamentalist nut jobs who have convinced themselves that God hates the same people that they do – and believe it is the role of government to enforce their denominational dogma through public law.

Perennial presidential hopeful – and self-proclaimed dominionist – Mike Huckabee and legions of acolytes – consider it their divine injunction to impose their pinched version of the gospel of Jesus Christ on all Americans. Here Huckabee aggrandizes the jailing and release – in a public media spectacle – of anti-gay bigot Kentucky county clerk-of-court Kim Davis – for defying the Supreme Court of the United States by refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The Republican Kentucky legislature subsequently attempted to nullify the selfsame SCOTUS ruling by legislating changes to Davis' job description – thereby relieving her of her public duty to serve gay Kentuckians. 

3. Sociopaths: selfish sociopathic assholes who self-identify with Trump because he is a fellow selfish sociopathic asshole.

Trump primary rallies were rife with bullying and naked pugilism – suborned by Trump himself – who – on more than one occasion – incited conveners to assault protesters – offering to bond them out of jail and pay their legal defense. Under the rubric of 'politically incorrect' – shorthand for totally lacking in empathy for other Americans – Trump has emboldened a subculture of sociopaths, passionate to get even with the effete 'politically correct' pussies who have long inhibited their limbic-brained impulses to level the political playing field by brute force.  

4. Paranoid schizophrenics: craven paranoids who will fall for any demagogue – who tells them whom to fear and whom to blame (AKA the ‘Chicken Little’ syndrome).

Oblivious to the fact that Republican George W. Bush – in invading and destabilizing Iraq – including disbanding Sadam Hussein's Sunni Army – created ISIS out of whole cloth – deeply aggrieved and paranoid partisans are convinced that the putative Muslim Obama has emboldened ISIS to strike the United States. To them – this existential threat can ONLY be countered by Trump's empty bloviation to 'declare war on ISIS' – an asymmetric military impossibility. 

5. Fascists: text book fascists who long for a dictatorial strongman to dispense with democracy and the constitution – and purge the country of the "other" people who don't look, think, act, and worship as they do.

While the institution of the Western Liberal Democracy has long been the bedrock of the American political commonweal, the seeds of text book fascism easily germinate in the incendiary climate of inflamed political rhetoric – demonizing the "other" for all ills. Donald Trump laid the groundwork for this as far back as 2008 – when he assumed the mantle of 'birther-in-chief' in a disgraceful media circus vowing to delegitimize the presidency of Barack Obama by unearthing his foreign-born and Muslim provenance. While his quixotic gambit yielded nothing but mockery among the main stream media, the diehard 'birther' community anointed him as a true patriot.        

6. Oligarchs: corporate royalists and oligarchs who view the acquisition of government as the ultimate two-fold license: (a) to neuter organized labor and (b) to plunder the public treasury through the tax code.

In 2010 when the five-member Republican Supreme Court plurality pulled the Citizens United ruling out of thin air – it laid the foundation of a Neo-Gilded Age – rendering obsolete the retail market of the corporate lobbyist – subsuming it with the wholesale market of purchasing public officials directly from multinational corporate treasuries. Multi-billionaires Charles and David Koch (above) are the self-identified poster children of American oligarchs – dispensing untold millions of dollars into the wholesale electoral process – instantly creating bought-and-paid-for toadies subservient to their every legislative  hand-out. This political larceny also includes governorships – such as Wisconsin's Scott Walker – and even local city councils.      

7. NRA Crowd: a particularly virulent paranoid American subculture – and its political enablers – which views the unfettered, unaccountable, and unregulated ownership and acquisition of firearms – in civilian hands – as the civic antidote to the existential threat of evil, particularly as manifested in government.

From its bosky sportsman roots in the 1960s – the National Rifle Association (NRA) has metastasized into a take-no-prisoners affinity group – hired and paid-for by the munitions industry – a particularly virulent civilian subset of the military industrial complex. This civilian outreach has succeeded in creating retail  political constituency – dedicated to the unbridled militarization of the civilian populace. Fueled by the neo-religious baseless fiction that the Second Amendment mandates fealty to armaments in civilian hands – as a backstop to an ever-present tyrannical government – this subculture has proved itself implacable to the very idea of any regulation whatsoever – even in the face of perfectly legal military assault weapons in the hands the sociopath who mutilated twenty first graders in Newtown, CT. Indeed, the Republican party has time-and-again chosen the NRA and its adherents over the mandate of the American people – in regard to common sense gun laws.        

8. Low Information White Voters: low information, poorly educated, anti-intellectual, and often defiantly ignorant working class white people who are readily propagandized to believe the Republican party has actually advocated for their interests – despite practically zero objective evidence over the past forty years.

Legions of white American voters – variously categorized as Reagan Democrats – have been propagandized to believe the Democratic Party wants to take away their freedom, confiscate their paycheck, give it to shiftless minorities, and institute the tyranny of an all-powerful  collectivist government. The objective evidence reveals quite the opposite – that Republican administrations have consistently expanded government, started unwinable wars, drowned us in public debt, and gridlocked our economy. Inexplicably – despite virtually zero record to run on – bought-and-paid-for Republican apparatchiks manage to resurrect the belief that THEY ALONE can save us from our selves. Donald Trump has proved himself uniquely qualified to shill to this constituency.

And there you have it. Indeed, America is in the crosshairs of political crisis. To deny the existential threat of a Trump presidency is an exercise in sheer sophistry. Whether or not our collective community can weather this test remains to be seen. 

Calhoun Georgia
07/31/2016