I apologize at the outset for the us v. them tenor of these remarks. There is, however, no way to say these things without partisanship. None of this will be new, but it represents where I am today as a person who thinks about serious things. I am a progressive social democrat who has worked in political campaigns since I became a voter. I cut my teeth, politically, as a high-school debater who one year argued that the electoral college should (or should not) be abolished. The conventions of debate require that one become proficient in arguing both sides of an issue. My remarks here, however, will be ex parte.

For those of us who adhere to an orthodox Christian calendar it’s still Christmas, time to reflect and look forward to Epiphany. For others, since the western new year has already begun, it’s time to review the past twelve months and take stock. Numberless folk are presumably consuming stories about the top news stories of 2019 from whatever source of punditry they may favor. But the indifferent time we all acknowledge during the first several weeks of January brings its own sadness and its own terrors. Today I am saddened to learn of the death of another dear friend as I am greeted by news stories about the coming schism in the Methodist Church, the denomination in which I spent the first forty years of my life and for which I still have much affection. That, and the terrible news of Australian wildfires which threaten the survival of that country’s political system, and the assassination of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, which is already being perceived as a US escalation of Mideast tensions.

I’ll not name my friend but only say that he and I went to high school together. His obituary touts his experience as a football player on our West Texas ‘dream team’ that won three state championships in a row in the mid fifties. The bond among the men who played on those teams is profound to this day. I do not share it. Indeed, my friend and I only grew close as old men who discovered we had a bond as fellow progressives who had read widely. My friend had chosen to spend his life as a small-town dentist, in imitation of his grandfather who had been a country doctor in West Texas. He chose that life for himself, I always thought, because it gave him the opportunity to know his patients personally and to form lifelong bonds with some of them. I admired him greatly, though he never tired of telling me that I was his ‘hero.’ Where that came from I have no idea. I squirmed when he said those words, and I would often tell him that he was my hero. But he would have none of it. Perhaps, now that he is gone, I can say as a memorial to him that he was my hero without fear that he will contradict me. I knew him for a model of civic virtue.

Long before, I had been baptized in the Methodist Episcopal Church South, the southern Methodist church with its history of support for slavery and Jim Crow. In 1939, just a couple of years after my baptism, the Methodist Church reunified, but the tensions between evangelical and progressive Methodists remained. Merger with the United Brethren in the sixties created the present day United Methodist Church but did nothing to heal the Church’s historic divisions. If anything, the addition of United Brethren to the mix intensified those divisions. I remember a dispute over ecumenism in the late sixties with a fellow graduate student at Duke who had been brought up in the United Brethren. I was committed to ecumenism, he to a program of religious identity that emphasized difference and seemed sectarian to me. That argument seems quaint and old-fashioned to me now, in this age when religious identity politics is all around us. I became an Episcopalian in 1973 when I found myself in an Episcopal church as a musician. I encountered the Book of Common Prayer and realized that the things I had always valued about my Methodist church were more or less entirely derived from Anglican tradition. Since the seventies, with the ordination of women and adoption of the 1979 prayer book, the Episcopal church has been a better fit for me in my struggle with agnosticism than the United Methodist Church (UMC). This current split in the UMC is being touted as parallel to the split between The Episcopal Church (TEC) and the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). The comparison is just doctrinally, I suppose. But the Methodists are being far more civilized about their divorce than we Episcopalians were, the Methodists having worked out a settlement in advance of the split; whereas ACNA congregations walked out of TEC and tried to take their property with them, creating a series of lawsuits which TEC has mostly won, though some still remain in doubt.

When I was yet a Methodist, during the spring and summer of 1967, there were massive voter registration drives in the city of Durham, North Carolina in which I participated as a volunteer along with employees of Operation Breakthrough and others. I was fortunate enough to have a car (indeed, as a graduate student I was far more fortunate than many of my fellow citizens). My participation included driving folks without transportation to registration offices and later on, driving voters to the polls. Most of my passengers were grateful, but one passenger gave me pause and caused me to question the purity of my intentions, perhaps for the first time in my life. She was a woman who looked to be forty, and she glared at me when she got in my car, sat as far away from me as she could on the broad bench seat of my 1961 Chevrolet, and refused to speak to me or to answer any question I asked as I tried, I thought, to be polite. When I deposited her at her door a bit later, she glared at me again and slammed the car door as she got out. She knew I was a white liberal, and she had little use for me. She would ride in my car to register to vote—I didn’t see her later on election day—but she cared very little for what I have come to think of as my white privilege. Nowadays I doubt my more conventionally grateful passengers those days were any less suspicious of me than she was. The difference was she let her suspicion show, and those others masked theirs with a simulacrum of politeness.

The next year, in the spring of 1968, I remember being addressed by an African American labor organizer on the quad at Duke during what we called The Vigil. He advised us privileged white kids—I was 30 that spring but still a kid—not to try to be black. Some of us were doing that, I suppose. I led a Sunday School class whose subject was ‘race relations’ at Trinity Methodist Church in downtown Durham that year. I remember that many of our meetings turned into shouting matches, but we succeeded in opening our church to the few brave African Americans who came to our doors. Many of us were aware, however dimly, that we were part of the history of something bigger than we were, the ‘dawning of the age of Aquarius’, perhaps, in the words of a popular song of the times. We sensed the coming of the pluralist social moment that now stands among us as the potential that gave us Barack Obama for a harbinger and has now given us Donald Trump as the unlikely embodiment of privileged (and wannabe privileged) resistance. I have tried to understand Trumpism, particularly to understand the devolution of the Republican party into a cult of Trump, and I have come to a few more or less tentative conclusions.

I cannot remember a time when I was not aware of politics, at first dimly because of my father’s service in World War II. He participated in the fall of the Philippines where he arrived in early September, 1941. My last memory of him as we saw him off on a troop train from El Paso, was that he told me to take care of my mother. You can read a biography to which I have contributed here. But my first awareness of politics that is germane here likely came in 1948 as Strom Thurmond led a rump group of Democrats out of their party’s convention in protest to its growing acceptance of civil rights for African Americans. The Dixiecrats (as these rump Democrats came to be called by their enemies; they called themselves States Rights Democrats) failed of their immediate objective of denying Harry Truman an electoral majority, but they left their mark on retrograde politics in the South which eventually issued in a response to Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” that appealed in 1968 to the deep resentment that Southern segregationists felt about being marginalized by the growing pluralism of the Democratic party.

I now understand Trumpism as a political nihilism that ruthlessly suppresses and violates minorities, imprisons immigrants and their children in concentration camps and denies trhem flu shots, denies human rights and the climate crisis, attacks and overturns the norms and conventions of democratic political behavior, promotes conspiracy theories and discredited ideas; some of them, like the lost cause of southern aristocracy, being ages old: I now believe that nihilism is of a piece with the colonizing tactics of bygone times in America, with the states rights ideology of the Dixiecrats, with McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, and the Ku KLux Klan, with the perpetuation of slavery in the south through Jim Crow laws until 1964, with lynching (Under pressure from Southern senators, congress refused to outlaw Lynching until 2018), with white flight, redlining, and the Christian school movement which have resulted in the fact that inner city American schools are now more segregated than ever, with the moral majority and the Christian right (so called), with the Native American genocide. It is also all that is left in today’s Republican party, of the legacy of William Buckley and Ronald Reagan, of what passes for conservatism on today’s political stage, because, of course, it was always present under the dog whistles of conservative rhetoric.

The claim is often made that today’s rightist nihilism denies even the existence of truth. Though likely correct, that claim obfuscates another important point. It’s what the right thinks of as ‘liberal’ truth, with all of its positivist falsifiability and thick matrix of scientific theory and substance, that the right denies root and branch, especially as that substance impinges upon what rightist political classes think of as their inherited cultural territory: the ‘history’ they cherish and desire, the religion and politics they cherish and desire, the family life and sexuality they cherish and desire, together with a license to continue extractive exploitation of the planet, etc. Faced with demographic death, the Republican party have now embraced an anti-liberal ideology so extreme that they can countenance whoesale suppression of the constitutional rights of those citizens and potential citizens Republicans believe to be their enemies (also their social and moral inferiors). And today’s Republican party is no longer conservative. It is a rightist insurgency that resembles European fascism, that defends its antidemocratic ideology by constantly pretending to be victimized by the liberal establishment. A recent Amanda Marcotte essay in Salon put it as follows:

Whatever word you want to use for it — fascism, authoritarianism, pick your poison — the grim reality is that Republicans, both politicians and voters, appear to be all in on this project. It’s painful to admit this, but Republicans have flat-out rejected democracy. As a group, they are pushing towards replacing democracy with a system where a powerful minority holds disproportionate and borderline tyrannical control over government and blocks the majority of Americans from having meaningful say over the direction of the country.

This isn’t a new development. It’s been a good many years in the making, and both political parties have contributed to it, as Professor Tim Wu pointed out in a recent New York Times opinion piece. “In our era,” says Wu:

Entire categories of public policy options are effectively off-limits because of the combined influence of industry groups and donor interests. There is no principled defense of this state of affairs — and indeed, no one attempts to offer such a justification. Instead, legislative stagnation is cynically defended by those who benefit from it with an unconvincing invocation of the rigors of our system of checks and balances.

Moreover, what we liberals and ex-liberals have to face today, and what has been on full display in the recent impeachment hearings and since, is that in the age of Trump we again have government by Bull Connor, who set his police dogs to savage protestors not as a deterrent, but because he enjoyed it. In a recent tweetstorm, the President twice repeated the name of the Ukraine scandal whistleblower. Moreover, there is an element of sadism in the constant claim of persecution that Trump gleefully makes and that Republicans have settled upon as the chief defense of their leader. It has now been widely identified as a form of trolling. Republicans have perfected the rhetorical gesture of claiming persecution in order to deflect attention from the antisocial behavior of the worst among them (indluding Trump) and at the same time to ‘stick it to the libtards.’ Franklin Graham even went so far as to blame anti-Semitic attacks during Hanukkah on ‘hatred of Trump.’ And Trump’s role in the ongoing troll game was again (remember the ‘lock her up’ frenzy) on full display at a rally just lately when Trump directed his ire at MSNBC reporter, Katy Tur. The incident has all the elements of the sort of trolling I mean. First, Tur is female but strong and outspoken. She can be taken to represent both the feminism Republican trolls love to ridicule and the ‘liberal’ press Trump has identified as an enemy of the people.

“Little Katy, third-rate journalist,” Trump declared during a bitter peroration about the “absolute scum” who allegedly populate the news media and report “dishonestly” on his triumphal march to the White House.

What Trump counts on, and what his supporters feed their inflamatory rhetoric into, is the retrograde commitment of today’s embattled main stream media to bothsidesism. Which ensures that rightist trolling will be largely reported as a series of benign utterances from one side, or as example of equal partisanship. This last is displayed in clickbait headlines like this one: Partisan rancor are on full display at House hearing on Trump impeachment, to a story whose content hardly bears out the headline’s claim. Note the verb “are” in the headline, in a context that would normally require “is.”

As I’ve said, Republicans, as the party of angry white people, are now faced with demographic death. Don’t believe them when they tell you that they secretly deplore Trump. Trump is the perfect front man for the antidemocratic program Republicans require if their hegemony is to survive, especially immigration and voter suppression, election fraud, court packing, and the surveillance state. If Trump had not existed, Republicans would have invented him. What Republicans envision as the true American Republic is a continuation of the present oligarchic kleptocracy for as long as it can be sustained. We’ve had a taste of this, not just for the past almost three years but for all the years since Mitch McConnell announced his determination to make Barack Obama a one term president. Mcconnell was not able to make good on that intention, but in settling for obstruction—remember Merrick Garland—he achieved much of his objective, and in forcing Obama to overreach prepared the way for our present authoritarian regime. Trump and his Republican enablers have now openly announced their intention to vitiate Social Security and Medicare in a second Trump term, presumably to offset the effects on the deficit of their current program of taxation. Trump supporters seem not to have taken this up yet, but since many of them are in the age cohorts that depend on these programs, I wonder if they are uneasy.

Still, I have no hope that the Senate will do anything but acquit Trump. Republicans all know he is guilty as charged, but they don’t care. Some may convince themselves that his crimes don’t rise to the level of impeachment. Most agree with him that his attempt to extort Ukraine to help him smear Joe Biden was just fine. Faced with the certainty of Trump unleashed again in the 2020 election, and faced with the prospect of a series of neofascist campaign rallies with Trump claiming vindication (and perhaps even the prospect of war with Iran) I think it’s time for another massive voter registration and voter turnout effort. We need to engage Trump on the ground, and not primarily in the media. There are three questions for Democrats in 2020, I think. The first is whether to choose a centrist nominee. The Primary process may settle this issue, but I think Democrats should be wary of engaging in the sort of chicanery that was employed against Bernie Sanders in 2016. I am more and more inclined to a further alternative, the selection of a nominee who can perhaps transform our politics. The disruption wrought by the rightist insurgency may have created a moment Democrats could take advantage of by nominating Bernie Sanders, as Elizabeth Warren tacks to the center. Barack Obama campaigned as a transformative candidate. His success as a candidate (who remains very popular, by the way) might be instructive, though his centrist behavior in office disappointed me and others who supported him enthusiastically. On the other hand, a transformative candidate would not only have to run against Trump but also against entrenched financial interests. Note that I don’t take the Steyer and Bloomberg candidacies seriously.

The two other questions for 2020 are first, whether the country is ready for a massive uprising to defeat Trump. We will need to overwhelm the electoral college, reclaim the Senate and increase the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives if we have any hope of reclaiming American Democracy. The success of popular efforts such as last month’s organized protest in support of impeachment is a hopeful sign; but if the past is a guide, we may not be ready. The massive voter registration efforts of 1967/68 failed to prevent the election of Richard Nixon. Democrats were in disarray after the withdrawal of Lyndon Johnson, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and the first of many efforts by Eugene McCarthy to win the party’s nomination. The late entry of George McGovern, who would become the party’s nominee in 1972, was likely unhelpful. The sheer turbulence of those times likely contributed to Nixon’s election, albeit the southern strategy had to contend with a strong candidacy from George Wallace, who in spite of being “nuked” by his choice of a running mate, still managed to poll significant minorities in the general election and to win his own state of Alabama together with the four states of Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

The third question for 2020 is whether Trump and the Republicans will be willing to concede if they are defeated at the polls. We have faced this prospect only once before in the aftermath of the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln. It’s hard to envision another wave of secession like the run up to the Civil War, but it’s not hard to imagine that Trump might claim massive election fraud, declare a national emergency in the event of the country’s repudiation of him, and install himself as a banana republic like dictator. He already has the support of many rank and file Homeland Security agents and police. Do the military still support him? There are signs that that may be on the wane, but were the OK hand signals at the Army-Navy game benign as the services have claimed? With Trump as the lynchpin of civilian control, the military remain problematic. I note here, too, that the military have not challenged Trump’s current war mongering, in spite of its blatant and cynical intent to perpetuate his own power. Much will depend, I suspect, on the strength of the public repudiation, if it happens. But if this year’s anti-Trump backlash is tepid, or if it doesn’t happen at all, if Democrats don’t unite and many stay home from the polls, we’re likely headed for a catastrophe that is quite new. Will the combined chaos resulting from a continued rightist insurgency running the country coupled with the coming environmental catastrophe result in the breakdown of our political system? That’s the real import of my third question.

In Australia as I speak, wildfires are now generating their own weather in a massive climate induced crisis to which the Australian government’s response has so far been too little and too late; though The New York Times is now reporting that the Australian military have been called out to aid beleaguered firefighters. Australia may well be a test case for the entire complex of issues involved in today’s world politics—for the entrenched disputes that prevent us as an exploding world order from taking rational action to combat the dying effects of late capitalism and its wars, the real terror of our times, that gave rise to the occupy movement and is very much in play as Australia’s government continues to serve the interests of the continent’s coal industry. Will the perceived need to preserve profit at the expense of all else be overwhelmed by Australian wildfires and the thousands of Australian citizens displaced by them? What we Americans need to realize, in my view, is that our own house is on fire. Right now those thousands in Australia are looking to survive. They will have no time for politics for a while. We Americans, perhaps, still have time.