The Weekly Screed (#789)

Deplorable
by David Benjamin

“… Under these circumstances, an ambitious policy agenda to combat climate change or battle income inequality and persistent poverty seems like a pipe dream. Repairing decaying infrastructure and improving public education will most likely also remain out of reach… ”
                                          — Eduardo Porter

MADISON, Wis. — There is no analysis that can adequately explain the elevation of a degenerate demagogue to the pinnacle of the free world. One truth has been clear throughout the travesty. This election was not — as much as he might wish it so — about Donald Trump. It’s about the people who’ve giddily enrolled in his bizarre cult of personality.

The question that has followed these rowdy throngs as they’ve gathered in arena after arena to cheer Trump, curse the press and demand (well, they’ll stop now) that Hillary Clinton be summarily imprisoned, is: “What’s wrong with these people?”

They believe every word they hear from the most blatant con man (with all due respect to Huey Long) in U.S. political history. They shrug off sexual predation. They advocate exclusion and violence against religious minorities. They make common cause with the Ku Klux Klan. They have forsaken not only the values of the Enlightenment upon which America was founded, but the very Christianity that they profess to be the nation’s real foundation. They embody nihilism while not knowing what the word means.

How could this happen here?

By coincidence, on Election Day, I was reading a book by sociologist Kenneth Clark, published in 1964. His study was a watershed in understanding a social class whose sense of injustice provides a parallel to the angry and aggrieved who yesterday chose Trump to toss around the nuclear football. Clark examined in clinical detail a left-out, forgotten mass of citizens, economically trapped and isolated from the prosperity visible all around them.

Clark’s subjects are ill-educated kids in underfunded schools where the teachers are demoralized and the students, who see no way out or up, disdain the value of learning, focusing on physical prowess rather than academic progress. Few aspire to higher education. The dropout rate is high and the teen pregnancy rate is higher. Those who leave school are chronically unemployed or underemployed, relegated to menial jobs in areas where high-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree have migrated elsewhere. Where these people live (in crumbling homes), there are few programs — and fewer incentives — to train for jobs in the new economy. They can’t afford to move somewhere and they would be unwelcome and disadvantaged if they did. They both depend on public assistance in greater measure than the general population, and resent it.

Clark’s subjects suffer from countless ills, including poor nutrition and obesity, early heart disease, diabetes, TB, myriad mental illnesses, addictions to drugs, alcohol and gambling. They die earlier than the national norm. They are likelier than more affluent people to commit crime and be its victims, and more likely to land in jail, repeatedly. They’re angry and ashamed. They feel a sense of nagging and undeserved inferiority to those who hire and fire, demean and dismiss them. They are alienated from the life and promise of the broader society that exploits them without rewarding or respecting them. They seethe with frustration at an American dream visible on television but beyond their reach.

Clark’s book, Dark Ghetto, laid bare the ordeal of being black in the urban ghetto of midcentury America. Today, promoted by Donald Trump, the pathology of the ghetto has become the pose and the plaint — and to a significant degree — the reality of those ill-educated white folks stuck in dying small towns, stripped of their jobs and dignity and left behind by the global information society.

By promising not only to miraculously lift white guys (and their women) from their self-styled mini-ghettos but also to wreak vengeance upon all their perceived oppressors and dusky rivals, Donald Trump is exalted as their savior. Trump has discovered, embraced and bewitched the bleached niggers of America.

As Kenneth Clark relates, the ghetto-dwellers of Harlem in the ‘60s had an equally charismatic and similarly mendacious champion, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell.  He was a darktown peacock, a dealmaking grifter whose life story eerily foreshadowed that of lily-white Donald Trump. Powell, as Clark notes, was a dandy who flaunted his wealth and humbled the high and mighty (while greasing them on the sly). “In his flamboyant personal behavior,” wrote Clark, “Powell has been to the Negroes a symbol of all that life has denied them. The Negro can in fantasy journey with Adam to the Riviera, enjoy a home in Puerto Rico, have beautiful girls at his beck and call, change wives ‘like rich white folks.’…”

Let’s keep quoting Clark, but update a few words (in  brackets): “What [the elites] regard as [Trump’s] violation of elemental ethics, [white guys] view as effective and amusing defiance. Whatever is the personal ethical moral standard of the individualized [white guy], it tends to be suspended in judgment of [Trump]. He is important precisely because he is a caricature, a burlesque, of the personal exploitation of power…”

Clark wonders if Powell genuinely cares about his believers. Here’s another altered passage: “He has nothing in common with the workingclass [white guy] who provides the bulk of his support. He does not live in the community; he has never shared its problems but, since infancy, has lived a life of privilege and indulgence. Yet he has an almost instinctive ability to exploit the deep and elemental emotional needs of the average [white guy]. Like every successful charismatic political leader who attracts a mass following, he… can use their words, their idiom, their fashionable jargon, to communicate to their emotions…”

Clark in 1964, like everyone in 2016 who’s bewildered by the moral and intellectual vacuum of Trumpism, wonders if the savior really cares about the losers he professes to be saving. One last slightly twisted quotation: “Does anything really matter to [Trump]? He behaves with that freedom and flexibility usually available only to a person unencumbered by illusion, delusion, principle or loyalty. For [Trump], any idea and any person seems to be an instrument for use. This leaves the further question — use for what?”

How does Donald plan to use us? We’re about to find out.