It Can Happen Here

Credits: Jack Ruttan. all rights reserved.

As I reflect on this unusually disturbing and perilous moment in our nation’s history, I cannot help thinking of the philosophical polemic I wrote during the week that Donald Trump was formally inaugurated to the Office of the Presidency of the United States, approximately four years ago. I was struck at the time by the perplexing incongruity and irony of a week that began with the celebration of a national holiday created to honor Martin Luther King’s historic civil rights legacy and that would end with the inauguration of a man like Donald Trump.

In trying to get my head around this conundrum, I vented my spleen by writing a lengthy philosophical essay that examined the existential threat to the species Mr. Trump represented to me personally, as well as the counter-movement of mass civil disobedience called for in meeting this threat, a counter-movement I felt (and continue to feel) was both necessary to push back against anticipated totalitarian actions by this would-be corporate demagogue and that, to be true to the principles of Dr. King and his mentor and model for social change, Mahatma Gandhi, must remain morally-principled and non-violent whatever the cost.[i]

While my fears at the time of a Trump-induced nuclear war that would end the species have fortunately not (yet) born fruit, his consistently arrogant, deluded, vindictive, corrupt, and lawless actions while in office have manifested in ongoing and increasingly more harmful destruction of the nation in ways hardly anyone could have imagined. This has culminated today in a multi-tiered crisis—public health, economic, and civil rights—that, barring Mr. Trump’s sound defeat in the coming November election, is bound to get worse in the years ahead. The survival of our two-hundred-plus-year experiment with democracy hangs in the balance, and at this moment, appears to be tottering over the Abyss.

At this moment, we are beset by an economic crisis that—with tens of millions of our fellow Americans on the verge of homelessness as enhanced unemployment benefits and temporary landlord restrictions prohibiting tenant evictions recently expired—dwarfs any economic challenge we have faced as a nation since the Great Depression of the 1930s. I grew up in a household that had suffered through that Depression, and who lived for the remainder of their lives with the deep emotional trauma and scars that affected so many Americans during those difficult years. My grandparents were young newlyweds at the time, and never trusted banks again. They hid cash in sock drawers and Maxwell House coffee jars in the back yard. As they were fond of saying, they had to “skin the grease off the flat edge of a stone” for dinner.

Because my grandfather was a skilled hunter in a rural county in Michigan, where a man could still provide for a family in the traditional ways, it was a bit better than that. He put food on the family table shooting anything that could be eaten, trading extra squirrels, pheasants, partridge, deer, rabbits, fish, and even raccoons to the local gun-store owner in exchange for boxes of bullets, shot gun shells, and fishing tackle so he could continue to hunt for food. My grandmother grew a cornucopia of fruits and veggies in the back yard. That is how they ate, and literally how they survived those difficult years. Who among us post-modern urbanites are capable of the same? Few, I would say. In contemporary California, it does not require a lot of imagination to envision what might happen if the food trucks ever stop running; how would we actually survive an almost literal Zombie apocalypse without eating one another? Neither is it that difficult now to imagine the plights of tens of millions of our fellow Americans becoming homeless in the coming weeks and months, and consequently defenseless against a growing viral plague.

Although politically conservative, my grandparents—and the rest of my gun-toting family elders with them—became devoted FDR Democrats and practically worshipped the ground FDR walked on for the rest of their lives. To them, he was the savior of the nation, as great or perhaps greater than Washington and Lincoln. While we have fortunately thus far avoided this cataclysmic level of economic disruption, the current economic crisis is far from over, and has already revealed how fragile and unfair our economic system really is. For the billionaire-corporate class that wholly owns the Republican Party, and most of the Democratic Party as well, this represents a splendid opportunity to buy low and sell high. But, for the vast majority of Americans, including the middle-class and small business owners, the potential losses are beyond measure and at best may take us decades to recover.

This uncommon economic crisis—although already a major systemic deficiency—has, in 2020, been greatly amplified as a direct result of the worst public health crisis in a hundred years, a crisis that has been profoundly exacerbated by the least competent US President in the history of our nation, Donald Trump. Trump is, in the informed opinions of scores of our best psychologists, utterly unfit for office as described in the prescient book The Strange Case of Donald Trump and elsewhere. My friend and activist colleague Noam Chomsky, though not a psychologist, recently referred to Trump as a “sociopathic buffoon.” As true as that statement is, I consider this a relatively mild rebuke. Trump is, in fact, much worse than that.

Humanistic psychoanalyst Erich Fromm originally defined the term “malignant narcissist” in 1964 and explored this phenomenon—which he associated with the essence of evil—in a number of books, including To Have, or To Be, Escape from Freedom, and The Heart of Man, all authored in the wake of WWII and the plague of Nazism, in which he diagnosed Adolf Hitler as a “malignant narcissist.” Fromm’s description of these pathological character traits suits Donald Trump to a tee. No other US President that I am aware of remotely compares to Trump’s megalomania and narcissism; his words and actions are quite consistent in expressing his compulsive selfishness and obsessive self-interest at the center of all this public thoughts and actions—along with other narcissistic character traits including paranoia, grandiosity, lack of empathy and craving for attention.

Trump apparently only cares for himself, and by extension, for whatever profits his family, in the first instance, and his political and business cronies, in the second. Examples of his extreme egotism and greed (for money and power) are legion. This President does not give a wit about the vast majority of American citizens he swore an oath to defend and protect. He is, in the very core of his seemingly soulless character, incapable of empathy or feeling for others than himself and his immediate extensions through his children. And, if push came to shove, what thoughtful person could believe Trump would not throw his own children under the bus if it suited his purposes? Like a rat, he would eat his young.

The man is a profound threat to our society and to the future of our democratic Republic. He is utterly lawless and contemptuous of the order of law, setting up one system of justice for himself and his ilk—who protect him from impeachment and prosecution for both scores of obvious crimes and, I believe, vastly more heinous crimes yet to be disclosed. In this massive, ongoing abuse of justice, he is assisted by his lackey and attack dog—his own Roy Cohn—the most corrupt US AG in my lifetime–who, by comparison, makes me nostalgic for Ed Meese and John Mitchell. Today in America, there is one justice system for Trump, Barr, and their ilk, and quite another for the rest of us. And as Trump’s only niece, psychologist Mary Trump, has recently indicated—in her controversial and insightfully revealing new bestselling book about the exceptionally dysfunctional Trump family—“The Donald” is utterly incapable of leading this country out of the current crises he has created for us through his abysmal ignorance, greed, incompetence, madness, and guile.[ii]

At the forefront of Trump’s incapacity is the current deadly pandemic that has thus far taken nearly 200,000 lives in a few short months, almost four times the total battlefield death count of the Vietnam War. Trump is a master of psychological “projection,” fond of shirking all responsibility and casting the blame elsewhere, for instance, calling the COVID-19 pandemic the “China virus” or “Wuhan pandemic,” but which more accurately should be recast as the “Trump Pandemic.” His consistent, pathological lying and delusional denial of scientific, fact-based evidence and advice is wholly responsible for our nation becoming the worst victim in the world, so far, in terms of mass casualties and infection rates. And the end is nowhere in sight, despite Trump’s delusional claims to the contrary and absolute failure of leadership in times of national crisis.

Recent disclosures of his evil-mindedness chronicled in taped interviews with Trump made by legendary journalist Bob Woodward demonstrate the worst yet: Trump was fully aware of the deadly threat posed to Americans as early as January, and deliberately chose to lie publicly rather than disclose the deadly nature of the threat. In my opinion, that makes the unnecessary and therefore tragic deaths of the majority of those who have died from COVID-19 tantamount to mass murder. This would make Donald Trump the single most dangerous mass-murderer in the nation’s history—by a factor of tens of thousands over such notorious killers as Ted Bundy or any other American mass-serial killer.

As a cautious optimist, I try to see the good in things evil, and I have brought this perspective to the present public health crisis: the virus, when viewed as a hard teacher, has succeeded to some extent in raising the consciousness of the collective. However great the cost—which will continue for the foreseeable future on both economic and public health fronts —the pandemic has accomplished something of potentially great benefit to the future of the nation: increasing numbers of Americans, including Republicans, have seen Trump’s reckless and amoral incompetence on grand display these past few months, a fact that is clearly reflected in shifts in national polls.

As a result of Trump’s incompetence as a leader, Joe Biden (hardly inspiring as a Presidential candidate to me) has a stable and large electoral lead as the nation begins early voting. Even states like Texas and Arizona, not to mention the Midwest and other battleground states, are shifting blue. In short, the majority of Americans are gradually waking up to Trump’s extraordinary incompetence and evil-mindedness on multiple levels. This offers some cautious hope for a new beginning starting this coming November, now less than three months away.

Still, once again I must urge caution and vigilance. A third major social and political crisis has erupted in recent months that bears close watching. A new phase of the civil rights movement has recently sprung to life thanks to the catalyst of video recordings giving eyewitness to the brutal, sadistic murder of a black man, George Floyd, witnessed by hundreds of millions of Americans on the news and social media. Contemporary reactions, on both sides of the issue, have given rise to events in which—like the viral pandemic and the economic crisis resulting from Trump’s incompetent leadership in meeting that crisis as so many other countries have done successfully—the civil rights and human rights crisis now emerging on the streets of the nation’s cities has no certain outcome.

This catalyst for change (i.e., the murder of Mr. Floyd) has for the moment lifted the veil of camouflaged systemic racism in our country that persists six decades after Dr. King’s sacrifices brought a certain level of racial justice to the nation—coming a century after Lincoln freed the slaves in a savage Civil War, that in turn came after 300 years of previous racial oppression in this country dating back to the Revolution and before. Perhaps this time we, as a nation, can take yet another step in putting this sad and woefully ignorant perspective on race and diversity behind us. And yet, in the interim, these mostly peaceful mass protests have provided a convenient pretext for unleashing Trump’s most dangerous and violent inclinations.

Consequently, Trump has been recently characterized by increasing numbers of mainstream critics, including current and former Republicans, as a “fascist” or at least behaving like a fascist—or using a range of familiar terms, historically reserved for Third World dictators like Pinochet or Kim Jung Un or major geopolitical rivals from Hitler and Stalin to Mao Tze-Tung, and Trump’s “friend” and political mentor, Vladimir Putin. Roughly analogous terms like autocrat, dictator, tyrant, totalitarian, authoritarian, etc. are being applied consistently to Trump.  Among these critics are scores of top investigative journalists writing for the New York Times, Washington Post and The New Yorker among others, major TV news networks including CNN and MSNBC where news anchors have begun, reluctantly, to use the “F” word. Recently, no less a public figure than my former boss, former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, has joined the chorus.[iii] Also recently, MSNBC news anchor Rachel Maddow discussed Trump’s efforts to sabotage the November elections, by undermining the US Postal Service in the midst of a pandemic, as an expression of his authoritarian tendencies.[iv] The list goes on.

A recently released book views Trump’s increasingly authoritarian policies through the lens of his top aide and advisor, Stephen Miller, examining Miller’s white nationalist ties to neo-fascist allies. In her new book, Hate Monger, Emmy-winning journalist Jean Guerrero reveals the shadowy neo-Nazi white supremacist past of close Trump aide Stephen Miller. Miller,[v] reputedly a close friend of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is one of Trump’s most influential advisors and the chief architect of Trump’s most cruel and dangerous racist policies. The book maintains that Miller has survived a long succession of Trump advisors who are no longer with the administration by catering to Trump’s darkest motives, including his lust for power by fascist means. The contemporary, resurrected civil and human rights movement catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd (and many other murdered black citizens) has included elements of violent protest, whether from random looters or Trumpist right-wing extremist provocateurs, the latter representing a Trumpian version of Hitler’s “brown shirts,” who distract national attention from mostly non-violent civil rights protestors exercising their Constitutionally guaranteed right of assembly.

This has given Trump pretext and justification, at least in his mind, for sanctioned state violence against non-violent resistance in the streets across America, from Portland to Louisville, with increasing threats of federally sanctioned oppression and violence introduced into American domestic policy. This threat to democracy is embodied in the form of unidentified, publicly unaccountable secret police, using the well-honed tools of oppression used by dictators around the world. When unarmed protestors in Portland are abducted by unidentifiable, well-armed secret police and taken to an undisclosed location in the middle of the night in unmarked vehicles for no other reason than exercising their rights to protest, our nation is on a slippery slope to a hellish Kafkaesque nightmare.[vi] Under these tense confrontational circumstances, it seems only a matter of time until some terribly tragic event like Kent State happens again.

Upton Sinclair wrote a prophetic novel called It Can’t Happen Here in the 1930s about a fascist autocrat wrapping himself in the flag and Christian religion, occupying the White House and using this enormously powerful platform to recreate his version of Hitler’s Reich or the Soviet Union’s totalitarian state violence and oppression (as public intellectual and historian of fascism Timothy Snyder warns in his bestselling book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century).[vii]

Following the inauguration of Trump, as we are now witnessing his true colors and dark intent, it not only “can happen here,” but is in fact happening here. Chaos in the streets, induced by this insane megalomaniac and wannabe tyrant, give Trump the excuses and political cover required to test his most violent inclinations in a run-up to an election that he is almost inevitably going to lose, and for which he is actively preparing his violent, white nationalist base to support what is being signaled to the masses as a possible coup. Trump may, with the help of Barr and the Republican Party, attempt to illegally fight to maintain this authoritarian madman in office, whatever the results of the election. If that happens here, we might do well to heed the prophetic warnings of the poet W.B. Yeats who, in his famous poem “The Second Coming,” forecasted exactly 100 years ago that:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all convictions, while the worst

Are filled with passionate intensity.[viii]

My personal hope, as suggested in my essay nearly four years ago, is that the current Black Lives Matter movement, more popular with a diverse American citizenry than ever, will soon morph into something even greater—an All Lives Matter mass movement that, while not diluting the singular message of BLM in any way, addresses the importance of all human life, especially the collective life of the species embodied by my grandchildren and future generations of children yet unborn. Behind all the distracting scenery of these multi-leveled contemporary crises, we must not forget that the Atomic Clock is now fast approaching midnight as the looming, Hydra-headed ecological crisis personified by climate change stealthily engulfs our Mother Earth, arguably already past the point of no return.

The future of the entire species is threatened, as Trump and his greedy corporate cronies fight to overturn environmental regulations by the hundreds at the historical moment when we, as a species, must be doing exactly the opposite to avoid global ecocide. As Nobel-laureate and novelist Albert Camus wrote shortly after WWII, “an apocalyptic historical vista stretches before us.” Viewed through the lens of contemporary political events, driven by Trump and his following of white nationalists and Christian evangelicals who take his claims of being their long-awaited savior seriously, Camus’ warnings have never seemed more relevant. The unprecedented explosion of recent wildfires consuming the entire West coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington – as Trump fiddles while these “blue states” burn – is compelling evidence of our increasingly apocalyptic national future.

We are currently in a race, as my late mentor, the futurist Willis Harman, wrote in the early 1980s, “between education and catastrophe.” The collective value of these current multi-tiered crises, in my opinion, lies in the capacity of extreme crises to facilitate mass awareness—Harman’s “education”—to the severity of the situation we face, and thereby act as a catalyst for revisioning our collective future. We are starting to think outside the box. Unfortunately, it seems that our best-case scenario in the immediate future is electing a mainstream, relatively moderate Democrat to replace this absurd monstrosity currently occupying the White House. So be it, if we must choose between the “lesser of two weevils,” to borrow a snatch of dialogue from the movies.

But the promised “return to normalcy” is just a temporary patchwork to let the wounds heal somewhat while we catch our breath and prepare for yet larger and more lethal battles still to come. That is, if Trump and his mindless minions are willing to give up the White House without violent struggle if he loses, or as they are presently undertaking, radically undermine the US Postal Service to sabotage the general election. If he and they—the Republican Party that Chomsky has labeled the “most dangerous” political body in history—cannot cheat their way to an electoral victory, what will happen next? My guess is a full-blown Constitutional crisis, and an angry possibly murderous confrontation between the roughly 30% of Americans consisting of extremists like Miller and his neo-Nazi ilk and the other 70% of Americans who long for a return to some semblance of normality with respect to American lifestyles, and who Miller and other right-wing fascists are preparing to take up arms against.

However, even if we succeed in democratically removing Trump from office (our best case scenario in November), this leaves the festering problem of a divided nation, of two nations trying to abide as one—the approximately 30% of hard core Trump supporters, that is, Trump cultists, who remain, and the rest of us. What about these tens of millions of fellow Americans, perhaps more than 100 million, who have apparently drunk the Trumptown Kool-aid? A spate of recent articles defines “Trumpism” as a personality cult, including a recent article by journalist Virginia Heffernan in the Los Angeles Times,[ix] that is, individuals who support Trump (or someone like him) no matter what.

What must be done to counter these Trumpist Branch Dravidians who, if provoked, seem ready to launch their mass suicide and murder cult in the name of Trumpist anti-Christianity against their fellow citizens? How can we bring about unity with folks who aren’t smart enough, sane enough, or sufficiently self-aware to comprehend their own idiocy and hypocrisy? Who are too stupid to realize how stupid they really are? How can we protect ourselves from the pandemic when we are at the mercy of fellow citizens who are collective nominees for the Darwin Awards, determined to threaten their own lives and the lives of their friends and family members,  insisting on defying effective public health protections based on sound medical and scientific advice, for the sake of exercising their “liberty”? And similarly homicidal individuals who drive their cars into non-violent protesters who are exercising their own civil rights to protest guaranteed by the Constitution? The same fellow citizens who haven’t the education or experience of diversity, who believe they are not racist yet have no idea how deeply racist they are, who insist they have a friend who is “black” or brown or whatever, but hardly understand what it means to be truly “anti-racist”? What about them?

It seems to me this nation has been drifting right since JFK, MLK, RFK and other visionaries were decapitated in the 1960s. That is when the dream of authentic American idealism and virtue, when the dream of true justice, was knocked off track. We have been slowly, consistently drifting politically rightward ever since, until today’s “radical leftist”—like Bernie Sanders (who I deeply admire)—is what, in my youth, might have been labeled a moderate Republican. Republican President Dwight Eisenhauer was, on many policy fronts, more progressive than even Sanders.

It also seems to me that the nation underwent a collective psychotic break in the immediate wake of 9/ll. It was just this sort of outbreak of “psychic epidemics of mass hysteria” that the psychologist C.G. Jung predicted, in the wake of WWII, posed the greatest threat to the very survival of the human species in the coming decades, which have now arrived. And finally, it seems to me we are currently living through the further developmental implications of this mass hysteria. We are faced by multiple simultaneous epidemics now, one in the form of a biological threat such as the one faced by the French in Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague. But let us not forget that the biological plague depicted by Camus in his novel was a literary metaphor for the plague of fascism faced by his country at that moment under the Nazi occupation of France.

Americans are literally facing both forms of plague at this moment, and what shall we do? The biological plague will likely pass within a few years, no matter what. But we should beware, for example, of Trump’s efforts to normalize the consequences in the meantime. Almost 200,000 Americans have died in the still developing first wave of the pandemic; and we’ll probably have 300,000 or more deaths before the year is out, if expert predictions of the anticipated and likely more dangerous second wave that is expected this fall come to pass. And his recent proclamations of his strategy of “herd immunity” – if he is re-elected – are predicted to cost at least 2-3 million American lives before herd immunity starts to protect us. Two to three million innocent American lives, the vast majority of whom could be saved! So, where is the public outrage? Where are the torches and pitchforks?

But to me, the far greater problem—in terms of existential threat to the species, in terms of survival of future generations and the nation itself—is the collective psychotic break at the heart of the nation’s psyche. We are, in the body politic, deeply polarized and apparently going stark raving mad. At no point since the bloody and tragic Civil War has America been so divided. Whether or not Trump remains in office, he is but a single virulent cancer cell in the body politic, a symptom, yet not the disease itself. The cancer has metastasized, and now infects 30% or more of the body politic. How do we treat that before it consumes us all?

Here it gets messy. Very, very messy. While I am strongly inclined as a humanist to consider some holistic mass intervention—I am not sure what that exactly is in this situation—maybe it is time to consider a more drastic Civil War-type solution. When the leg is too injured and threatens the body with certain death from gangrene, the Civil War-era battlefield surgeons saved the life by cutting off the infected limb. Metaphorically speaking, one solution—as radical and messy as it seems, and less than perfect—is secession.

This scenario has actually been gamed out by Democratic leaders anticipating election and post-election results, according to New York Times columnist Ben Smith,[x] and I have it on good authority that this rather extreme and outside-the-box scenario is being taken seriously by some political leaders, at least in California. Personally, this begins to make sense to me. Rather than resurrect the actual violent Civil War II scenario currently brewing, ending in mass bloodshed, I believe it may be time to seriously consider a sort of Aikido approach, using the “enemies’” own power against them. I propose that we seriously consider that under conditions of “irreparable differences” (I submit that the majority of Americans are at loggers’ heads with those “minoritarians” who, like Trump, are living on the other side of a mass psychotic break, that is, in a very different “alternate reality”) that we approach our political divisions like a contemporary couple who can no longer agree that the sun comes up in the West, and subsequently part ways as amicably as possible under the circumstances.

I submit that the only political solution that now makes sense may possibly be secession from the Union that Lincoln fought to save. Trump, obviously, is less like Lincoln and more like Jeff Davis; he would single-handedly resurrect the Confederacy, a policy platform that is obviously at the current center of his racist, violence-prone campaign for re-election. I submit that, unless the Biden campaign—admittedly invigorated by the recent addition of Sen. Kamala Harris—wins, takes office, and succeeds like FDR in resurrecting the nation from the abyss into which Trump’s corruption has sunk us, it may be time for California, along with Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii—the entire West Coast—to consider formally seceding from the Union. And, importantly, take our tax dollars with us.

Why not bring an end to the nationalistic empire—supported by the war-machine at its heart, paradoxically created and justified in the name of peace—in favor of creating a smaller, politically and culturally progressive and evolved nation? Why not preserve the idealism and virtue intended by the Founders on a smaller scale? Instead of investing our treasure in arms-dealing, destroying the planet, catering to a few greedy trillionaires, and supporting the social safety net of tens of millions of “red state” white nationalists who actually hate us in exchange for our unconditional generosity towards their well-being as fellow citizens, let’s consider a better vision. Let’s use our tax dollars—those of the Pacific States of America—to invest in guaranteed income supporting every citizen’s basic economic security, in providing Medicare-for-All and guaranteed affordable housing for every citizen, while investing in the Green New Deal that can help save our planet while creating a vibrant new, future-directed economy, with good paying jobs for all Pacific coast citizens.

With some bold political vision and will, this dream that was America can be rebuilt, on a relatively smaller scale, by using our resources in a new and fundamentally better way, free from the encumbrances of fascist extremists and their perhaps unwitting enablers. There is advanced gangrene in the American body politic, and it seems time to at least consider emergency measures like severing the infected tissue to save the healthy tissue and set it free.

It is time to think outside the box. While this may seem a radical and far-fetched idea for some readers (I freely admit), this is my serious albeit radical proposal. Perhaps it is time, to mix metaphors, to amputate the body politic by mutual agreement in a friendly divorce. And take our federal tax dollars with us to build a new nation out of the ashes of what little sanity and political idealism remains. If America itself is no longer that beacon of hope for the world—and it surely is not when small European nations express “pity” for us—a somewhat smaller, more progressive, and relatively rich country devoted to peace and justice—economic justice, social justice, environmental justice—might take, in the spirit of its Founding Fathers, its errant, exclusively “white,” colonizing, and patriarchal “father’s” place. With sufficiently bold will and political vision—and much good fortune—this too “can happen here.”

R.L. Boyer, Sept. 11, 2020

Endnotes