The Other Promised Land

     It's highly fallacious, ignorant, naïve or just flat-out stupid to think all these abominable nutcases running for public office two years after Trump is strictly coincidental. It's all of a piece. When you have a guy like Trump get "elected" president and he shares once marginalized views with these supposedly oppressed people, he makes their toxic views mainstream again. We've now come full circle since the Civil Rights era. We counted on the old civil rights leaders to eradicate these attitudes so we can continue moving toward all inclusion and multiculturalism. But that was wrong and too much to ask of them. You cannot win hearts and minds that had been poisoned by the older generation practically from birth.

     And when a guy like Trump makes these antebellum views mainstream again, when he wrenches Overton's Window to the hard right, he unwittingly reveals that our culture itself is still very much mired in racism. Jim Crow is back with a vengeance. And one of the most egregious mistakes we have made since the last election cycle is in underestimating how much of an impact a US president can have on American culture, such as it is.

    Obviously, Trump did not create racism. All he did was exploit it, make it mainstream and respectable again. And when we finally rid ourselves of this shambling nightmare that is Donald Trump, we will still be left with the 63,000,000 who voted for him. These people have gotten a long taste of their own "Promised Land."

     And they will not willingly cede it again.