This rage-fueled monster is turning on Trump
In a recent podcast interview with The New York Times, political science Professor Robert Pape pointed out that acceptance of political violence is today higher than it’s been in generations. Tens of millions of Americans, his research shows, are now accepting of things as extreme as assassination as a way to change politics.
This follows the third attempt at Trump’s life, the murder of prominent Democratic politicians in Minnesota, the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the ICE assassinations of at least three US citizens in the past year.
We’re also seeing an increasing acceptance of violence toward minorities and women.
ICE brutalizes mostly Hispanics, including children, sending them to foreign torture camps, deporting them to Congo and other war-torn hellholes, and keeping over 70,000 — including thousands of children — in brutal, primitive conditions that in some cases would get an animal shelter closed down.
Violence against women is also increasingly accepted across the right wing of American society. Trump has been credibly accused of multiple rapes and assaults (and nailed for one by a jury of his peers), Hegseth’s own mother called out how he’s abused his previous wives, and accused rapists like the Tate brothers are tight with the Trump boys as an online “Rape Academy” got 62 million American visitors in a single month this year alone.
Republicans shrug it all off — or revel in it— while attacking and dismantling DEI and “woke” as anti-white-male, as if it’s all just fine with them. Bring up the topic and you’re accused of being a snowflake.
What the hell is going on? Why have American men — particularly white men — seemingly gone violently nuts over the past generation or two? Why do they revel in images and memes of violence and follow so-called “manosphere influencers”?
This is being driven by three factors: economics, racism, and misogyny that have been brought together in this moment as a perfect storm.
Republicans understand this well — after all, they are driving it — and if Democrats fail to figure the dynamic out and offer clear, specific, concrete fixes, they’ll continue to get beaten at the polls, and the problem of political violence will expand, no matter how badly Trump and the GOP screw things up.
First, there’s the economics.
When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 and declared war on the New Deal and unions while cutting income taxes on billionaires from 74% to virtually nothing, a massive $80 trillion transfer of wealth began. It wiped out worker protections, froze wages, ended most pensions, and — over the past 45 years — has taken the middle class from two-thirds of us down to around 43 percent of us.
To add insult to injury, men who once defined their masculinity by their ability to singularly provide for their families now have to rely on their wives working to keep a household together. And even that wasn’t enough for Republicans; today over half of working Americans are a few paychecks away from homelessness or bankruptcy as a result of these GOP policies and tax cuts.
Rush Limbaugh was the first to identify this back in the 1990s, calling women who worked and demanded equal rights and pay “Feminazis.” He legitimized that sort of rhetoric, blaming the emasculation of working class men at the hands of corporate bosses on their wives and other women in the workplace.
Republicans in Congress joined the chorus, publicly and proudly opposing the Equal Rights Amendment, which simply and entirely says, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” They continue to block it to this day.
Trump’s famous claim that he could sexually assault any woman he wanted because “when you’re a star, they let you do it” added to the Republican permission structure, giving modern rape culture a huge boost.
But Republicans didn’t just blame the collapse of the middle class on women in the workplace; they also claimed that Blacks and Hispanics were “stealing jobs” and “driving down wages” to deflect attention from the GOP-aligned fatcats whose singular agenda is to “control labor costs” to increase profits and add to billionaires’ money bins.
On this issue of race, there are two clear factors. The first of these reminds us of the last era of widespread white adoption of organized racism when President Woodrow Wilson sponsored a White House screening of the Klan recruiting film Birth of a Nation in 1915 and then embraced an eugenics movement that was explicitly grounded in ideas of a racial hierarchy of intellect and talent with whites on top.
The result of the President of the United States endorsing white supremacy that year was immediate and widespread: membership in the Klan, which had been moribund for a generation, exploded from an estimated 400,000 to over four million in fewer than two years. Klan marches coinciding with the Fourth of July and other patriotic holidays became commonplace events in American cities (30,000 Klansmen marched in Washington, DC in 1925, for example) until the fever was broken by World War II.
Donald Trump and the racist lickspittles he’s surrounded himself with have created a similar permission and endorsement atmosphere over the past 15 years, starting with the racist “birther” attacks on Barack Obama he rolled out in March of 2011.
Now Trump’s even more explicitly and publicly racist, routinely using the epithets “thug” and “low IQ” to smear any Black person he thinks opposes him. Most recently he applied both to Hakeem Jeffries — who graduated from NYU Law School Magna Cum Laude and holds a Masters degree from Georgetown — this past weekend. (Trump refuses to release his own college transcripts.)
Trump’s explicit beyond-dog-whistle racism now echoes through the ranks of his white supremacist regime. The last Black Republicans will leave the House of Representatives this year, and six “conservatives” on the Supreme Court just let former Confederate states destroy any vestige of Black representation in the South through extreme gerrymandering.
Whiskey Pete Hegseth is purging the senior ranks of our military of Black and female officers after Trump allegedly said he “didn’t want to be seen” with one, Stephen Miller is on a jeremiad to purge America of Black and Hispanic immigrants, Black history is being stripped from our national monuments and museums, and federal contracts are being denied to any organizations with a policy of encouraging diversity in the workplace.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that pasty-white South African immigrant Elon Musk has put up around 850 arguably racist tweets to his social media platform just in the past six months, many warning of the coming extinction of white people in America. They found:
“More than half of those posts have used the word ‘white.’ The billionaire has posted on X about race nearly daily — 166 out of 197 days — from last October to mid-April, The Post analysis found.”
The apparent reason for Musk’s panic and this recent explosion of virulent racism in America isn’t limited to Trump and the racists he’s surrounded himself with. America is browning, largely because of a 1965 change in our immigration laws that ended racial quotas, and white people are noticing.
Since that year, 59 million people have legally immigrated to America, shifting the white population from 85% white in 1965 to 58% white today. Within a decade, if current trends continue, we’ll be a majority-minority country, as Texas already is. This has caused a panic among those like Trump and his white billionaire buddies who think that race defines what they call “culture” and lament the loss of “Anglo-Saxon cultural values” (code for white people).
So, what are Democrats and people of good will to do? I have three suggestions to dial back white male America’s embrace of political and racial violence, and with a sufficiently large electoral majority all three can be pursued simultaneously.
First, bring back a healthy middle class. This isn’t rocket science: FDR did it in the 1930s and 1940s, and Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter all expanded his New Deal.
This would involve:
— Rolling back the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts for corporations and the morbidly rich, restoring tax rates as they were in 1980 when our national debt was less that one trillion dollars and we were on a steady path to paying that off.
— Joining every other developed country in the world in offering a free or low-cost national healthcare system and offer free or low-cost college to anybody who can qualify, while ending all student debt as Joe Biden tried to do.
— Enforce anti-trust laws, repeal the “right to work for less” Taft-Hartley Act, and outlaw the billion-dollar union busting industry while enforcing workers’ right to representation and democracy in the workplace.
Next, deal with the “race problem” in America by passing legislation outlawing gerrymandering and other ways Republicans politically disenfranchise non-whites. Strengthen anti-racism laws and have the FBI go after racist groups rather than persecuting the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Launch a national education program about America’s racial history to build understanding and empathy among white people and empower the newly emerging majority.
Finally, to deal with misogyny, as a society we must work to redefine masculinity around competence and contribution rather than control of women, a message President Obama once took on. Being a man isn’t about being the sole breadwinner; it’s about being reliable, emotionally literate, and capable, being someone who shows up for family, work, and community. And bring back DEI — which principally benefited white women — and put it back into law.
For half a century, Republicans have bled white working-class men dry, hoovered up their wealth and given it to the Bezos’ and Zuckerbergs, and fought to keep the middle class from re-emerging in a way that might slightly dent corporate and billionaire profits.
The acceptance of political violence, the rising racism, and the open misogyny we’re seeing across America aren’t a mystery but are the predictable result of 45 years of GOP policy that gutted the middle class and then sold white men the lie that women, Blacks, and immigrants were the ones to blame.
It’s time the Democratic Party started telling Americans the truth and setting out a clear vision to remedy these decades of Republican vandalism that have brought us to this perilous, violent moment in our nation’s history. Share this article widely so more Americans can see clearly who’s actually been robbing them, and join me in the fight for a Democratic Party willing to tell the truth and finally solve this growing crisis of political violence.
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