The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
On the weekend of August 11-13, 2017, an alt-right, neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia suddenly changed the nature of the political climate of the United States of America. A group of white supremacists gathered to protest the proposed removal of a Confederate monument near the campus of the University of Virginia. Another group of anti-alt-right protesters formed to express opposition to the neo-Nazis. As the nation and world now know, violence broke out. A young white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of people who had come together to voice support for traditional American values. A young woman was killed by his copycat terrorist act, which was reminiscent of similar European incidents, and thirty others were injured.
Charlottesville alerted the nation to a factor it had little understood or recognized until August 11. The so-called “Alternative Right” is much more of a widespread anti-government mentality than most of us fully realized. We had read that Steve Bannon, the President’s close political advisor, was an alt-right supporter. Others in the White House were also associated with this ultra-conservative, extremely libertarian movement. But until Charlottesville, we did know how pervasive is this violent form of racist sentiment.
Up until Charlottesville, the primary concern of a growing number of Americans was the increasingly erratic behavior and bizarre actions of President Donald Trump. After Charlottesville, the political landscape has changed dramatically. As if the President were not enough to concern us daily, now we have a wave of nationalistic, white supremacist racism which has thrust itself into American consciousness.
Two New Contradictory Dangers
Before Charlottesville, the main hope of many Americans was how quickly courageous leaders of the Republican Party could convince the Republican President that he must resign. After Charlottesville, we realize that were that to happen anytime soon, Charlottesville made it apparent there might be an armed rebellion of unpredictable proportions and results. Alt-right terrorists will not stand by idly should the President be forced out of office.
Donald Trump represents the happiest prospects for white supremacists of any President since Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was a very quietly self-proclaimed white supremacist who occupied the White House a century ago. The most recent major American political figure with obvious white supremacist leanings was George Wallace. In the presidential election of 1968, the populist third party candidate ran on a platform which strongly appealed to the grievances of lower income white voters. Gov. Wallace garnered ten million votes out of seventy-three million votes cast. Richard Nixon had half a million more votes than Hubert Humphrey of the remaining sixty-three million ballots. Wallace won five states in that bitterly contested, oft-studied general election.
Since he took office, Donald Trump has increasingly pitched his political rhetoric to the most conservative side of his beloved “base.” He realizes that he is losing the mildly moderate voters who once admired his independent spirit. The only people still strongly loyal to him are congenital knee-jerk Republicans, angry whites, avowed racists, and anti-government libertarians.
The populist middle and lower class white anger represented by the 1968 Wallace groundswell had not again re-appeared in America with such force until Charlottesville. Suddenly, so it seemed, Donald Trump and the alt-right coalesced into an ugly and entirely new and frightening political entity. The seeds of Charlottesville had been there all along, long before Mr. Trump became President. But they sprouted in a Friday evening march featuring neo-Nazi slogans and anti-Jewish taunts and a Saturday terrorist car attack on a crowded Charlottesville city street.
Prior to these incidents in Thomas Jefferson’s hometown, a rapidly-engineered resignation of Donald Trump was a consummation devoutly to be wished by millions of Americans. Many still might soon hope to see that ominous eventuality occur. But now the President’s forced resignation could easily foment an all-out alt-right rebellion. And such a rebellion could have consequences that cannot adequately even be prepared for, let alone forecast.
Whatever else they are, the alt-right are extremely libertarian. They hate government, all government, but especially the federal government. Should the President be removed from office before he finishes out a full four-year term, the alt-right would fly into a raging frenzy. Charlottesville almost guarantees that.
The type of citizens who organized the march in Charlottesville would assume they personally were being attacked if the President was driven from office by resignation, impeachment, or Amendment XXV. They would perceive it as a governmental plot to remove the man who has cleverly sought to become their natural leader. And since they are armed and loaded, some and perhaps many of them would swarm the streets to register their violent opposition to what they have long considered to be the evil federal government.
Most Americans of all political stripes never come into personal contact with fanatical anti-government libertarians. All fanatics – religious, political, social, legal, or anarchistic – can be incited to engage in armed opposition against anyone they deem to be “the enemy.”
Leaders in the Republican Party are the only people capable of convincing the President to leave the White House. Were that to happen, however, extremists in the Trump political base might organize an armed insurrection against the federal government. They would assume a movement against the President was a movement against them. It would certainly not be so large a clash as to constitute a civil war, but it very likely would pose a serious threat to national political stability
Since August 13, the President has threatened to shut down the federal government unless his wall across the Mexican border is built. In the campaign, he told his base that the wall would be built, and that Mexico would pay for it, and he has never deviated from that impossible promise. The President has blatantly pardoned Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who was convicted of breaking several laws regarding immigrants and immigration. He did so the evening Hurricane Harvey was coming ashore in Texas so that the heavy news coverage would be focused on his announcement rather than on the hurricane. He later blatantly boasted of the cynical rationale behind the timing of the shocking, if also expected, presidential action. By pardoning Arpaio, the President has telegraphed the likelihood he might also pardon anyone indicted by the Mueller investigation, even before a trial would even be considered.
Knowing that Donald Trump shall never stop his outrageous autocratic actions, the Republican Party is faced with a terrible dilemma. If they do not convince the President he must resign, they shall lose several seats in the US Senate and House in the 2018 election. Under current circumstances, they know they shall lose the presidency in 2020 if Donald Trump is their candidate. If they do eject Trump, they risk an insurrection within their own party, but a far more dangerous insurrection by the alt-right.
Of course these calamitous prospects are not faced solely by the Republican Party. They also confront every concerned American citizen.
But what is the alternative? There is no alternative, other than to continue to allow an uncontrolled and uncontrollable President to wreak havoc on the nation and the world, and to contain him as much as possible. If he is driven from office, there almost certainly shall be blood in the streets. If he stays in office, there shall be exponentially more chaos in the next thirty nine months than we have already seen in the first nine months.
Is democracy a wonderful idea, or what? Talk about damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t! We have truly discovered with sudden ferocity how badly extremists have backed us into a fearful corner of democracy somehow gone quickly amuck.
Nevertheless, Congress should officially censure the President as soon as possible. If censure is not rapidly promulgated, it gives Mr. Trump both permission and encouragement to continue to do what he has been doing all along. Of course he will do it anyway, with or without censure. However, at least censure tells the President, the alt-right, the country, and the world that the President’s behavior is plainly unacceptable. We shall probably be forced to put up with it anyway, but we should not do so without politically castigating him for it.
A Sober Assessment of the Alt-Right
Who could have forecast this dilemma even in late July of 2017? We knew there were neo-Nazis, racists, and virulent white supremacists in the land, but we had not witnessed the extent of their rage. Charlottesville is only a hint of their dissatisfaction, which has been seething for many years.
Look at what they said and did in the few weeks after of August 13. Jason Kessler was the organizer of the Charlottesville alt-right march. He said of Donald Trump that he “appeals to white people because we feel like we can compete and have a good shot at the American Dream when we don’t have things like affirmative action or illegal immigrants holding us back and stacking the game against us.” David Duke was the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He said, “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. That’s what we gotta do.”
Who wants to “take the country back”? The alt-right and white supremacists and neo-Nazis! Who wants to “Make America Great Again”? The hard-line Trump base! And what does that mean? It means returning to a society dominated by whites, while putting down blacks, Latinos, Jews. Muslims, and immigrants. Viscerally the Trump base feel that the white-dominated racist America they nostalgically long for from “the good old days” has been stolen from them by do-gooder liberals who promote what the racists derisively term “the mud people.”
Those are not idle words, casually spoken. They are utterances of hatred, spoken by men who feel threatened by the best traditions that America has always represented.
Whenever a significant percentage of lower-income, lower-middle-class white Americans feel neglected or forgotten by government, racist nationalism looms large. We are living in such a time.
In 1934, in the height of the Great Depression, twenty thousand Nazi sympathizers gathered in Madison Square Garden to show sympathy for Adolf Hitler. In 1968 George Wallace won ten million votes in his independent run for the presidency. In August of 1992, there was the stand-off with federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. It resulted in the origin of the militia movement. In 1995, a bomb set off by two disaffected young Americans killed 168 people and injured hundreds of others in Oklahoma City.
Each of these incidents was a dangerous expression of a lethal, undercurrent of discontent, but none by itself managed to spark a major insurrection. How the President of the United States behaves in the next few months, or three years and three months, and how the nation responds to his behavior, shall determine what shall be the behavior of the new alt-right and the permanent underclass who have always felt left out of the American mainstream.
Lower income white people definitely have legitimate grievances. But Donald Trump is the last person in America effectively to address those grievances. All he does is to stoke their anger without seriously confronting the issues.
And Two Other Contradictory Dangers
After Charlottesville, it would likely be a very bad idea to try to force Donald Trump from the Presidency. Should that happen, however, it would bring Mike Pence into office under very difficult circumstances for him. His presidency would make the beginning of Gerald Ford’s presidency look like a gleeful walk in the park.
Mike Pence is an able man. He has far more useful experience for the presidency, particularly political experience, than Donald Trump ever had, because Mr. Trump had none.
But if Trump is soon driven from office, extremist rightists will hold it against Mr. Pence that he is not their anointed one. Donald Trump is, and they believe only he can be their chosen leader. Because the alt-right are so vocal and volatile, it would make it very difficult for Mike Pence to govern effectively.
The other danger is that Mike Pence might not become President nearly soon enough. As previously stated, if Trump leaves, it will cause great unrest. If he doesn’t leave, it will cause great unrest. Either way, Mike Pence faces an enormous uphill battle.
There are two corollaries to these two other contradictory dangers. The corollary to the first additional danger is that Mike Pence is an extremely conservative politician on social issues. The country at large is not where he is on most of those questions, and even many Republicans are not as socially conservative as the Vice President.
The corollary to the second additional danger is that Donald Trump is extremely unpredictable on every good political possibility, and he is extremely predictable on every bad possibility. That is, he will almost never do what is right, and he will almost always do what is wrong.
This would make it very challenging for the Vice President, should he succeed to the presidency before January of 2021. No doubt the nation would rally to him, but the obstacles placed in his path by his predecessor would be gargantuan.
There are no good alternatives here. Which of the two is the worse alternative? Is it worse to convince the President he must leave the presidency (which would be difficult in the nth degree to accomplish), and risk a bloody rightist rebellion? Or is it worse to allow the President to continue in office to the end of a wreckage-strewn four-year term? If that happens, what will American democracy look like after such a colossal presidential assault on the foundations and structures of our federal government?
Life before Charlottesville was dicey. After Charlottesville, it is increasingly dangerous. And the 45th President continues to create his characteristic chaos.
John Miller is a writer, author, lecturer, and preacher-for-over-fifty-years who is pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC.