MORE ABOUT TRUMP AND THE RADICAL RIGHT

More than once I have called Trump “crazy as a fox.” In trying to make sense of the “fox” part, I went back to Howard Zinn’s, The Peoples’ History of the United States. In chapter 3 he says that at the end of the 17^th century and into the 18th, the very rich were most afraid of an alliance between the poor white servant class, Black slaves and Indians. They drove a wedge through racism and through giving small concessions to small merchants and planters. They found a solution, he says in chapter 3, in racism.

 

“Racism was becoming more and more practical. Edmund Morgan, on the basis of his careful study of slavery in Virginia, sees racism not as ‘natural’ to black-white difference, but something coming out of class scorn, a realistic device for control. ‘If freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the results might be worse than anything Bacon had done. The answer to the problem, obvious if unspoken and only gradually recognized, was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous black slaves by a screen of racial contempt.

“There was still another control which became handy as the colonies grew, and which had crucial consequences for the continued rule of the elites throughout American history. Along with the very rich and the very poor, there developed a white middle class of small planters, independent farmers, city artisans, who, given small rewards for joining forces with merchants and planters, would be a solid buffer against black slaves, frontier Indians, and very poor whites.” 

Could it be that Trump is trying to play this card today: playing poor whites and small businessmen against Blacks and Indians in order to keep attention away from the controlling mechanisms of the super-rich?  If so, the only problem is that this isn’t the 18^th century! It may work in certain sectors, for a while. But, ultimately it is doomed. Doomed because the so-called radicalized right is nowhere near capable of carrying the day and the small businessmen, the Blacks and the “Indians” are not nearly as helpless as they were back then. Trump's attempt to divert attention from the super-rich by setting other sectors against each other cannot work for long. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool them all – for long.

FURTHER: The following references are of interest:
Nancy Isenburg, White Trash, 2017
Jean-Claude Revet, "Les leçons d'histoire de Charlottesville,"  Relations, 792 (Septembre-Octobre, 2017), p. 5.  Jean-Claude is chief editor of the revue.
Scott Kine, "My Reflection on a Culture in Crisis,: the Ecumenist, 54, no. 4 (Fall, 2017). This is a book review of J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, 2016.