Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 01:55 pm
Much virtual ink has been spilled over what Donald Trump’s success at the polls has meant, especially in the wake of his Super Tuesday performance. Far from unifying around Trump Republicans seek unity in a non-Trump – not Rubio, but Cruz.
In fact, things have gotten so dire, that economist Ben Stein is even thinking of voting for Clinton or Sanders.
Far less has been said about what Trump’s victorious march doesn’t mean.
Donald Trump’s success does not mean there is any essential difference between him and so-called “establishment” candidates like Marco Rubio, or Religious Right champions like Ted Cruz. This has been pointed out by People for the American Way and others. And no matter what the Republican Party wants you to believe, his victory is a victory, if not for the party establishment, then for the Republican ideology they have been peddling for decades.
The quasi-religious Republican narrative that delegitimizes all alternatives to itself, created Donald Trump, and Trump, while co-opting that narrative, has turned around and applied it to the establishment, and the propaganda organ largely responsible for creating that narrative in the first place, Fox News.
It turns out that it is Trump who is the only legitimate source of political power in the United States. Not the United States Constitution, which Trump has repeatedly proven he does not even begin to understand, and certainly not the Fox News empire, which had until the personality cult of Donald Trump, set the pace of political discourse in the United States.
It has been pointed out here that Trump stole the GOP’s thunder, and also the Religious Right’s thunder, showing that you not only do not need religion to justify hatred and intolerance of the constructed Other, but that you don’t need even a vague acquaintance with the issues. Greater propagandists and authoritarians than Donald Trump have understood this essential truth.
If we were a Greek city state, or even the republican city of Rome, isolated as they were from the forces of globalization, we would be in a great deal of trouble. As Roman aristocrats were to learn to their cost, the mob was Rome. And the mob – Donald Trump’s mob – would be America if our confines were a single city.
That is not to say that there is no danger. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin all showed the dangers of mobs to modern-day nation states and by extension to the world. Republicans are worried about their party, but they ought to be worried about the United States of America. They have made the mistake of confounding one with the other, when they are not the same.
The reaction to this is Bernie Sanders, Sanders has often been compared to Trump, but they are not different sides of the same coin. Sanders doesn’t represent a rebellion against Trump.
Sanders is not the anti-Trump or even the not-Trump, but would exist if Trump did not. Sanders’ rebellion is against the Republican narrative, which itself represents a conservative counter-revolution against the liberal successes of the American revolution and later, the New Deal and Johnson’s “Great Society” and last but hardly least, the Civil Rights Movement and even Occupy.
Everyone recognizes that America is at a cross-roads. Few recognize how frequent these cross-roads are. We look for “cusp” moments, dramatic scenery that ends in a cliff. We are told that Trump will make America great again, but Hillary Clinton reminds him America is already great and all Republicans forget the Obama-led economic recovery that means it is no longer 2008.
The past decade-and-a-half are full of cusp moments and the left has passed some hurdles and stumbled at others and there have been few actual cliffs, meaning if you fall you can get up and try again, which is what both parties have done. Both left and right suggest this may be a hurdle from which the Republican Party may not recover.
We have seen debate after debate where Republican candidates argue over talking points and lies and an America that does not, in fact, exist. The entire campaign from a conservative standpoint is political theater, a charade designed to both deligitimize liberal ideology and sanctify conservative.
As long as the GOP denies facts and separates itself from our shared reality, as it has done at least since George W. Bush took office, it is insulated against blows that might otherwise destroy it. This is Trump in microcosm, shrugging off gaffe after gaffe, and toxic incidents that would have killed any other campaign.
The election of Donald Trump to the highest office in the land might mean the end of the Republican Party as we know it, but it will be a triumph of Republican ideology, and its ability to have its own science based on a belief in how things should be, rather than are, and even their own math – a vindication at the very least of Karl Rove.
Naturally none of this means anything good for America, let alone a postponed greatness, and the media should be spending less time on what Trump’s continuing success means to the GOP and more on what he means to the USA.
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