What began as a mere supposition at the start of Trumps campaign last year has now been confirmed beyond doubt. Trump’s campaign is bringing racist and fascist groups out of the shadows into mainstream respectability with his extremist agenda. White nationalism, once a fringe political current, is now poised to become a part of the regular political discourse in America as the declining middle class becomes more and more frustrated with their intractably dismal condition and they cast about looking for scapegoats. That most Trump supporters are racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic is beyond question. But Trump has now articulated (and fed) the fears and animosities of the embattled white middle class with scapegoating and hateful rhetoric.
The result is clear. Fascist, racist and other extremist hate groups, which the Southern Poverty Law Center now numbers at 892, peaked at well over a thousand around 2012 during Obama’s reelection campaign but since then dropped to “only” 784 in 2014 as the economy began to recover in earnest with record average post recession job growth in that year. But since that time, with the Trump campaign under way, the number of total hate groups in the US increased again to the current figure of 892, a 14% increase in only two years. There seems to be a clear connection between Trump’s hateful rhetoric, which has alienated the mainstream of the GOP, and the mainstreaming of hate that has brought fascist and racist groups out into the open.
There is more going on here than just a simple backlash against the civic and economic gains made by non-whites, the LGBT community and women by angry white males. This reflects a society and its political system that is entering a deep and irreversible crisis. The Trump campaign encouraged neo-Nazi leader and former Klansman David Duke to enter the race for the US Senate from the State of Louisiana. Says Duke of Trump; "As a United States senator, nobody will be more supportive of his legislative agenda, his Supreme Court agenda, than I will..." In a very recent interview with Steve Inskeep of NPR, Duke said that “Trumps voters are my voters” estimating that 75 to 80% of those voting for Trump in the State of Louisiana will also support his candidacy for US Senate. He is clearly riding the racist political wave created by Trump’s campaign.
What’s so disturbing is that Trump’s appeal is not as a traditional conservative politician, most of whom have utterly denounced him as a “thug” a “bully” and a “lunatic” over the course of his highly shrill campaign. Trump’s extremist brand of extremist right wing populism has had a wide a appeal with the white working class as the GOP nominee eschews traditional Republican support for free trade in favor of economic nationalism (tariffs and get tough trade agreements) which he deftly combines with ultra-conservative social agenda which scapegoats immigrants, minorities and the poor which get blamed for all the nation’s ills. Both add up to a tremendous dose of xenophobia which get the white middle class blaming foreigners, minorities and anyone different than themselves for their declasse fate. It is no accident that this appeal succeeds after over three decades of failed supply side, free market economics; Trump’s nationalist rantings seem like a breath of fresh air to middle America.
Trump’s fascist credentials have been well documented and bear no repeating here. His appalling statement that we’d have to do things that were always “unthinkable” in this country like register Muslims and force them to carry special IDs like the Jews did in Nazi Germany are horrific enough. His declared attempt to deport upwards of eleven million people, many of whom know only life in the US, and separate them from their families is a portent of civil war level violence. I’m sure that Trump’s fascist supporters welcome both measures; the first as a test program for further unconstitutional persecution and roundups and the second as a way of initiating the long treasured and sick white nationalist fantasy of a national race war to “purify” America and restore it to an unchallenged white majority.
The problem for Trump and his supporters is that most of the US ruling elite aren’t yet ready to throw in their lot with fascism to resolve the current crisis which is why so many refuse to support him. The left is too weak and divided, as shown by the collapse of the Sanders campaign, to be a threat to capitalism’s profitability. In fact, it is well known that corporate profits and the stock market are the only things to really recover over the past eight years. Economic growth has been anemic; quarter to quarter GDP growth has averaged just below two percent since the final quarter of 2014. Some sources have put average annual GDP growth rates since 2001 at below one percent (mostly due to the deep recession from 2007 to 2009). This rate of growth is too low to sustain a stable economy. Pressures for better living standards by workers, the fight for a $15/hour minimum wage, access to quality health care and education and job creation place pressures on corporate profit rates which have been declining somewhat as the economy has slowed over the last two years. It is no wonder that fascist hate is being used to distract workers from their just struggles for economic justice.
The trouble is once the fascist genie is out of the bottle, it becomes too hard to contain. This may explain much of the reluctance of the corporate ruling elite to support Trump. As class conflict intensifies such reluctance may give way to greater acceptance of extremism as a new normal. Only progressive unity and struggle can prevent the destruction of US democracy and society by attempts to save the corporate rich at any cost.