With all this hoo-ha about Trump failing to disavow David Duke and the KKK, I find it amazing that there's been nary a word in the media noting that "déjà-vu feeling all over again." After all, it was big news back in the 1990's when candidate-soon-to-be-governor of Louisiana Mike Foster danced and pranced around his association with David Duke, whom he never disavowed. Doesn't anyone remember the infamous "list of voters"? The "Duke list," which was a "'a highly sought-after' list of conservative voters" in digital form, as then Governor Foster's press secretary told reporters after Foster was forced to admit that he had paid Duke $150,000 for it. According to the same articles, Foster's excuse was that "he was a novice candidate looking for a list of conservative voters." (Trump's excuse is a faulty earpiece, added to "Duke who?" I give him an "A" for creativity.) But perhaps that's why it keeps being conveniently forgotten: the obvious and undeniable association of Louisiana "conservative voters" with a rampant bigot, racist, neo-Nazi anti-Semite.
But why should any of this be surprising? Back when Foster was running for governor, as well as after he was elected, it was only mentioned in passing that his grandfather and namesake was a former governor of Louisiana, Murphy James Foster I ("Mike" Foster is Murphy III). If anything further was written about his forbear in the local media, it was that he was the governor who had ended the infamously corrupt Louisiana lottery - a real hero. Never mentioned was that Foster I (1892 - 1900) was also the governor who ushered in the racist Jim Crow laws, the fight against which - a Louisiana fight growing out of New Orleans - culminated in the infamous 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson which established the race-based "separate but equal" doctrine as the law of the land for the next 60 years. The Wikipedia listing for the first Governor Foster notes as his "legacy" that he "worked to maintain white supremacy in Louisiana," and that because "blacks were disfranchised under his administration, Democratic candidates in the state did not encounter serious challenges from Republicans until 1963." (His "accomplishments" were finally recognized when in 1997 he was posthumously inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame. Justice at last?)
Of course, it also seems to have been forgotten that back then blacks were Republicans and all the racist white supremacists were Democrats, until the latter were finally scooped up in the 1980's by the Republican party through the "Southern strategy" initiated by Richard Nixon. Which is why the second Governor Foster ran as a Republican, so he could get all those "conservative" votes.
And speaking of those switcheroos, it was just about after the Southern Democrats had almost wholesale moved to the Republican party that the Democratic Party became the Republican Party - an accomplishment of the Clinton presidency. Being amnesiacs, it's difficult for us to remember what happened in the 1990's, so here's a little refresher: Using his version of "bipartisanship," Bill Clinton effectively occupied the Republicans' main positions: "welfare reform," which cut off subsistence payments to a whole lot of people, single moms in particular, and required those same moms to hold jobs - without providing them with child care or wage supports; the touting of international "free trade" agreements, in particular NAFTA, which allowed major American enterprises to move American jobs across the border to Mexico while devastating major parts of the Mexican economy - a real "twofer." Especially devastated were Mexico's small farmers, who in turn began crossing into the U.S. illegally because they couldn't support their families any more, leading to more cries for stiffer border controls and deportations, etc. And then the same companies abandoned Mexico when they found even cheaper labor in Asia as we made trade with those countries "freer" - free, that is, of American labor laws, environmental regulations and pesky constitutional limitations, such as the prohibition against indentured servitude. This left the Mexican economy in such a shambles that illicit drugs became the principal source of income for a lot of average Mexican laborers as well as Mexican law enforcement and government officials. These and other measures, all cleverly gift wrapped in Bill Clinton's famous "I feel your pain" rhetoric, left the Republicans without a distinctive platform. And this in turn left the field open for ever more right wing-nuts to start taking over, as evidenced in the recent Republican debates.
The Democratic party today is not much different from the average Republican of the pre-1980's. Remember "liberal Republicans" like former presidential candidates Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York, and Mitt Romney's father, George Romney, Governor of Michigan? Of course not. That amnesia thing again. So, now we have Hillary Clinton as the chosen one of the democratic establishment, running as a "progressive." But if we can't remember what happened 20 or 30 years ago, we're certainly not going to remember that the first "progressive," over 100 years ago, was Republican President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) - the one who caused the first major rift in the Republican Party. That rift was significant enough that Theodore's distant cousin and virtual worshipper, Franklin (1933-1945), had to become a Democrat to carry on Theodore's progressive agenda. And the candidate who most carries forward the agenda of the two Roosevelt presidents is Bernie Sanders - running on the Democratic ticket, but registered as an Independent and a self-proclaimed "Democratic Socialist."
Confused yet? Well, perhaps that's part of the reason for the amnesia. It's very, very convenient for the comfortable elites - including those elites who control 90% of the mainstream media in the U.S.A. through the 6 corporations which own it - who wish the rest of us would just forget the past, so we can't judge the present, and just plain give up on the future. Like not being able to recognize a return of the first 20th century false populist, Benito Mussolini - "false" because he cared not a wit about the people whose lives he destroyed. Search the Net for some old films about him and there he is, strutting about, spouting forth, hands on hips, chin out, promising to restore Italy's "rightful place" in the world by "making it great again." The crowds loved him and put him and his brown shirts in power, and so did capitalist businesses, which have never had a problem thriving in very authoritarian regimes: Still with us, to name but a few, are Mitsubishi, which made the engines for the Japanese "Zero"; BMW, which made the engines for the Nazi Messerschmitt; Fiat, which made all kinds of things for the Italian fascists; and IBM, which supplied the Nazi's with the machines and punch-cards which kept track of Jews, Gypsies and other concentration camp victims (the reason for the numbers tattooed onto their arms). So Mussolini was the favorite of the people - until he wasn't; and then the once adoring crowds shot him and hung his body on a meat hook for betraying them despite his rhetoric. But he had initially succeeded because the power elites he replaced had utterly failed to carry out their obligations to the citizens. As the English dictator Oliver Cromwell said in the mid 1600's after he had ordered the execution of King Charles I following the English civil war won by him and his "Roundheads" - a war that helped inform the American revolution: "The king was not beheaded for being king but because he had betrayed his trust."
From Napoleon to Mussolini to Hitler to Franco, ad nauseam, the hero on the white horse has been here to save us, the price always being our obeisance, adoration and unquestioning loyalty; but they have existed only upon the failure of their predecessors to carry out their fundamental duties to the governed. Which is why they seemed so "inevitable," so heroic - and why the citizens were so ready to put aside what their senses otherwise told them, so desperate were they for a savior.
And yet the Republican party Pooh-Bahs have remained slack-jawed at the ongoing success of Donald Trump, just as the Democratic party inner-circle worthies have been blind-sided by the increasing success of Bernie Sanders. Neither power group seems to understand that their respective average Joe's and Jill's have woken up; no, been jarred awake, knocked out of bed and mighty pissed off at the elites of the allegedly opposing parties who betrayed their trust, especially now that they each have an alternative to vote for. And the reason for these elites' respective shock, horror and surprise is the same as for the rest of us: amnesia.
For the Republican elites, they can't remember that they got what they prayed for: the bigot, racist, xenophobic, just plain scared-and-pissed-off-at-everything vote. The same voters they never gave a wit for anyway, using them as cover for passing the loot on up the chain while handing crumbs back down, and then, to add insult to injury, handing these new members the ultimate slap in the face: sanctimoniously declaring that the Republican party was nothing at all like them. The Republican elites' fatal error? Contemptuously underestimating the basic intelligence of its non-empowered members. These are the folks who made their first push-back as the "Tea Party" and now either gather behind Trump, cheering with glee as this bull wrecks the Republican china closet; or, for the more monolithically religious-minded, behind the staunchly ideologic, unbending, from-God's-lips-to-my-ears Ted Cruz.
For the Democratic elites, an eerie inverse image: Being amnesiacs themselves, they couldn't remember what they had been about before they became the new Republicans, lulled into unconsciousness by Clinton charm and rhetoric. This was an illusion that was easy to maintain as the new new Republicans moved into fascist, to-the-right-of-Genghis-Kahn territory, allowing them to think of themselves as "left." Relatively speaking, perhaps, but not a "left" in any real sense, because what remains is the moderate right (the Clintonian "left"), the far right, and the out to lunch straight off the cliff right. Which is why Hillary still feels justified in calling herself a "progressive;" and why she has become ever more uncomfortable and defensive when a Bernie Sanders, the most Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt-esque progressive on the national scene, occupies the same stage next to her. She will invariably fall back on her poster issues - women's rights, gun control, gay-lesbian-transgender rights; not unworthy issues in themselves, but a nice side-step away from the things that might offend and alienate her big money supporters. Like, say, the excess of corporate and financial interest powers; her support for the hush-hush, privately negotiated for narrow private interests international trade agreements; her prevarications over her support of the oil and gas business destruction of our planet; and her hawkish support for American covert and military intervention anywhere and everywhere to "protect" alleged but never, ever defined, much less comprehensible, "American interests." After all, those private, narrow business interests are quite happy to take the money of gays, lesbians, women, single-moms and gun-control advocates, not to speak of supplying military armaments and support. And Hillary can conveniently use the issues of the first groups as shiny objects to divert attention away from her corporate friends who with rapacious greed continue to shift their obligations to society downwards, further hollowing out the ever shrinking middle class and liberally distributing poverty across the country.
So there we have it: On one side, the last, traditional Republican, Hillary Clinton, versus the last true progressive in the Roosevelt mold, Bernie Sanders. On the other, there's the nouveau Mussolini, the strutting, dictatorial Donald Trump, whose popularity grows apace with his entertaining willingness to slash and burn the establishment candidates, versus the reincarnated Savonarola ready to burn all of us on the bonfire of his vanities, Ted Cruz.
Welcome to the United States of Amnesia.