Where Hath Thou Gone, O Bama

Nostalgia for better times.

America began declining in my mind somewhere around 2007-2008 when I saw the vitriol that the ancestors of MAGA and the Tea Party hurled at Barack Obama, the first african-american to be elected president of the US. I couldn't understand where all of this racism was coming from.

At the time, I believed that the US was by and large a civilized society - both on the left and the right of the political spectrum - and the right-wing racist supremacists were confined to backwoods survivalists and moronic militia members of the NRA. They were marginal and cast to the fringes of normal society. Even Reagan and George W Bush were still civilized despite their right-wing affiliation.

But everything changed when Obama became president. Average middle class whites suddenly turned verbally and physically violent, abusive, and aggressive. I remember drawings of Barack Obama as an African tribesman with a bone through his nose or portraits of Michelle Obama as a monkey. Trump back then questioned Obama's American identity and demanded for months that the president shows his birth certificate, which he eventually did. 

Mainstream republican politicians, senators and congressmen vowed from day one of Obama's term to make sure his presidency fails. They refused to cooperate with him and his two terms - yes he was re-elected in 2012, luckily there was still a majority of Americans who believed in the dream - and he made great strides despite constant obstruction by the republicans. 

During the ensuing decade, the white supremacist racist republicans polished their art of the hatred and the division, and they have led us to this moment of anguish. They could have destituted and impeached Trump for all his crimes, but they kept covering for him out of both fear and also out of collusion with his ideology. I am thinking mostly of the senile Mitch McConnell, the former Senate Republican leader, who knew how dangerous Trump could be and yet did not take action against him. Now that he has announced he will retire in early 2027, McConnell has unleashed a barrage of critiques against the monster he has helped create.

You see, republicans know deep down that Trump is a danger to the republic. But they rally around him for:

1 -political opportunism: If they challenge him, they risk losing their seats in the next elections or other forms of retribution, and 

2- associative ideology: They are generally what I call "mild" or "casual" racists who would not turn extremists on their own. Trump works on them as a catalyst and, when the time comes, serves them as a pretext for deniability ("he made us do this. We really did not want to go there".) They basically do not mind seeing poor Americans, the elderly, immigrants, African-Americans (none has been appointed to government by Trump) and other marginal segments of US society get beaten up like Trump is doing. They would not have done it themselves, though, they just follow him reluctantly and fearfully.

Finally, the times we live in takes us back to the 1960s-1970s when US society was deeply divided. Revolutions were in the air and the reactionary white republicans like Nixon were abusing the system. The Vietnam war had its share as well. But in the end, a saner America re-emerged with Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Will we exit the currrent nightmare at some point? It's hard to tell. No more dangerous man than Trump has ever infected the American body politic, and the outcome could still go either way: Either a return to normal when he's out, assuming the republic is still standing, or a permanent collapse and civil strife from which the republic may not recover.