Last Call - to Stop a Tyrant, and a Fascist, American Style: Trump

Update, December 8th, 2024: I fire back to Heather Cox Richardson, and what Obama left us…

As I continue to work on a longer essay, the title of which is likely to be “After a half-century, I’m Leaving the Democratic Party. Here’s why,” I dashed off a reply, via Email to the famous Heather Cox Richardson (HCR), the upper class (really Bill?) American historian with a huge following on Substack, so in part, “How Dare I, with not so many subscribers, talk back to her?”

On her “background”: from Maine Public TV in print:

“ ‘I live on land that belonged to ancestors in the late 18th century," said Richardson. " It didn’t stay in the family [and I've only since] bought some of it back, but there’s a rock in the harbor that was named for my grandmother’s where she learned to swim in the late 19th century. I feel very privileged to live in a place where I can look around and see the marks of my ancestors. ' ‘”

And from Wikipedia, not much on the family history at all, but clearly an Ivy League pedigree, right down to the prep school.

“Born in Chicago in 1962 and raised in Maine, Richardson attended Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire.^[1][2] She received her BA, MA, and PhD from Harvard University, where she studied under David Herbert Donald and William Gienapp.^[3]”

Relevant, you ask? Well, yes given the Trump-elite Dems “out of touch.” Theme. And the take of Wendy Brown on the election. And I might add, in all honesty: I can’t imagine bombarding my readers with a daily essay, even if I were to rise to magical heights of authorship that I so far haven’t discovered. If you read my long essays, between 50-100 pages if translated into type, I’m looking for the deeper connections of American life to the life, intellectual and religious, from back in Western history, even some of its recesses, which is why I thought a revisit with the roots of the Frankfurt School was worth a couple of long stays in that “Grand Hotel Abyss,” the Jewish scholar’s witness to the collapse of the Enlightenment in Germany - the land of Goethe, Hegel and yes Marx. And many poets, writers, composers and painters - only to end of in the hands of the likes of Goebbels and Goring and company. Even if it was never said in quite this way, the cliche from the Nazis take about those old German achievements is not a bad summary of where official Nazi policy towards books and art went, to bonfires and banned modern paintings (and a lot of art looting from all the occupied museums of Europe, East and West): “Every time I hear the word ‘culture’ I want to reach for my gun.’” In my reconstruction of our moment, it’s Wendy Brown who captures the nihilistic spirit of some of the worst of the Alt-Right supporters of Trump. And produces public figures like Alex Jones.

And I also refer to writers who see the connections between the pace of economic and cultural change, and the failures of the Western democracies to cope in their legislatures, between the wars, what some have called Europe’s “Second Thirty Years War: 1914-1945.” That would be German historian Philipp Blom.

Well, I see HCR’s daily work as much more Centrist than her books, which are clearly left culturally if not economically. Her daily output is intellectually and physically amazing, a kind of daily dose of the old format of the weekly print edition of Time Magazine, centrist too, I recall, bi-partisan with a touch of academics to make it a bit deeper than the average American daily paper of the day - 1960ies. In our suburban high school history classes, we were urged to read it to keep up with events. Yet even on a weekly basis, it was a lot to read. She calls it “Letters from an American,” and it has an “New Testament” type of feel to it, those Letters and Epistles from the widely scattered Apostles facing persecution in various remote towns of the Roman Empire of 50-200 A.D.

Here’s what I dashed off to HCR in response to her lauding of former President Obama’s prescriptions for our ailing republic, if not the Democratic Party itself. Here’s her column link at Substack:

December 7, 2024

Dear President Obama and HCR:

You speak of “pluralism.” Can you name one institution which balances power against the dominance of capital wealth in our Democracy? I can't, Unions having been the primary pluralist opponent. The greatest democratic movement in the west - environmentalism - has failed to develop and answer, policy or political/policy wise, to win out over the anti-science climate stances of the carbon powers...Unless one is talking the weak America Corps, Mennonites and Amish - and the Amish increasingly vote for Trump, there is no national network of community groups - the Industrial Areas Foundation (movement?) having failed to ever develop a national movement...Black Lives Matter took on cultural racism in policing, not the blacks at the bottom of the economic heap who can't maintain their vehicles to reduce the stops. Women on abortion, against abortion, say nothing about the class and dynamics of who bears children alone on inadequate incomes. The Hispanic Dreamers are arguing for the American Dream, “to make it,” not for any new programs to prevent or cure vast economic inequality. And so on: a collection of "missionary movements" most of which have nothing to do with changing or challenging that $51 trillion transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top, 1975-20018.

this is much closer to the reality I see, from Wendy Brown:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-party-out-of-touch/ Wendy Browns succinct take on the election result and why.

I think the opening two paragraph of Brown’s brief essay there are worth quoting:

There is not one kind of Trump voter. Of course there are the Nazis, the alt-right, the hyper-misogynist and hyper-racist—all those who feast on Trump’s wild promises, noxious insults, and boorish ways. There are those animated by hatred for the “libs,” whose contempt or mere disregard they absorb daily. There are Christians, Zionists, and even (late-breaking) Muslims who expect Trump to serve their cause better than the Biden–Harris regime did. There are those who want the southern border of the country fortified and recent migrants deported. There are small business owners who want lower taxes and fewer restrictions, and former mining and industrial workers who want jobs that would pay what union-protected ones did.

But none of them fully account for Trump’s historic triumph—the first Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote since 2004. What does? Three things: Trump’s economic populism in a context in which the Democrats have become the party of the elite; the exhaustion of liberal democracy as a viable or trusted form; and the destruction of education, especially higher education, in the United States.

And I think for historical reasons the contrast in temperaments between Obama and Frederick Douglass is telling. Visit Jamelle Bouie's recollection of one of the last major speeches given by Douglass addressing the collapse of Reconstruction:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/23/opinion/election-frederick-douglass.html

Yes, it is unfair of me to compare the temperaments and times of Douglass vs Obama. Yet the difference (in manner, speaking style, and message) tells us a great deal about why the Democrats have failed: they have no fighting faith anymore, just a quiet equanimity about failing, fading equality, economic equality, and like Obama said, "in good time..." we might get to national health insurance, a million here, a million there, a decade at a time. My framing. So how long will it take to “filter back” a little of that $51 trillion that went from the bottom and middle to the top 10% between 1975-2018, which I just saw Bernie Sanders refer to on a YouTube video…

By the way, speaking of Frederick Douglass I recall a Douglas academic came sometime over the past 7 years or so to give a lecture at Frostburg State University, at a time when I lived right down the street. It was about, though, Douglas’ speaking tour in our area, late in his career, when he was accommodating to the post Civil War realities. I was a bit taken aback, since the fiery Douglas of his Abolitionist days, when he broke with the white pacifist William Lloyd Garrison and said blacks might have to fight for their freedom, as soldiers, just as he had wrestled a slave driver to a stand-off when still in bondage. None of that spirit or of the early lectures in what I heard. It was an elder, mellow Douglass on view. And very far from what NY Times columnist Bouie’s is giving us here, Douglass’ last great speech, which would have fallen closer to the academic’s time frame I heard. That was the last time, or close to it, where I attended any public forum put on by Frostburg State University.

William R. Neil

Update, December 2, 2024

I wanted to share with my readers, and perhaps new visitors, three articles written about our time of troubles - no other way to describe them. At the top of the list, just published today via the Atlantic Magazine, is a letter from staff writer George Packer, whom I am a fan of, sharing a certain left political experience that we are trying to place in a broader perspective. The title is “The End of Democratic Delusions - The Trump Reaction and What Comes Next.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/trump-reelection-voter-demographic-change/680752/

What I like most about the article, aside from its clear-eyed realism, still ending on a constructive note, is that Packer recognizes that it is the vast economic and cultural changes since the 1970’s which have “built” the Trump reaction, and he is clear that it is not going to be a constructive reaction to those vast changes. I made that point in my Nov. 30th update below, in referencing the handling of immigration in perspective in American history, how the reaction to immigrants was often a barometer of other deep troubles in the American economy and body politic. Comes under the heading of “scapegoating.” I’ll save a longer examination for my pending essay, queuing off what Packer wrote as well as what Fareed Zakaria said on his show Sunday, Dec. 1st about the Dems having “moved left” without really distinguishing culture policies from the economic ones, and I would say to both Packer and Zakaria that you can make a left economic case for what Biden accomplished, but it was like a ghost in the minds of the public who needed to hear of the programs/”achievements” the most…and just to be clear, the great advocate for unions, and the party itself, failed to pass labor law reform, a livable national minimum wage, health coverage for the entire population, Social Security increases for the bottom 50% of recipients due since Nixon’s days - not to mention no dental or eye care - surely a part of modern medical practice, or is it simple decency to have working teeth - one would think. There were some baby steps towards a new industrial policy which really did not help in the election.

Second article was by old line conservative David Brooks of NY Times columnist fame, and books as well, whom I usually find much to disagree with, as is the case here, the cover article in the print edition of the Atlantic Magazine December 2024 issue - the current one. It’s called “How the Ivy League Broke America” and you can read it here - I hope - if you’re not a subscriber: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritocracy-college-admissions-social-economic-segregation/680392/

It’s how a meritocracy built around education for the best and brightest has caused a lot of trouble and left a good part of the country without college degrees feeling betrayed and embittered. It’s worth your time, even though I think Mr. Brooks underestimates how much of this system for the educated elite comes out of the libertarian wing of Republicanism and Capitalism itself - I kept saying well to myself, tens of millions have read Ayn Rand’s famous works, a hell of lot more than read Michael Harrington, or Bill Greider, and if Rand’s philosophy stood for anything, it was was the creative destructive type of entrepreneurial “genius” let loose among the decaying old institutions, including the old corporate forms of capitalism which were wrecked with glee in the financial blizzards of the 1980’s and 1990’s - think of the Bill Simon type of business man who kept a Thompson Submachine gun handy in his office. You can place your own cast of the type around Trump’s advisors. David Brooks doesn’t convince me with some of his remedies that he can counter-balance the key “C” word that goes with capitalism theory and practice: it’s competition, much of it cut-throat and hidden from view even in the better financial journals, not “Co-operation” that strike the tune in our society. The need for co-operation and teamwork is something that gets managed later, with very much random results - in sports, families and the culture in general. And constant unrelenting change not in the hands of the average citizen, but in the hands of the most powerful investors that go with the system. Daniel Bell’s controversial classic “The Cultural Contradiction of Capitalism” (1976) was better, deeper and its logic that the well-off children of the 1950’s glory days wanted in some cases a softer version of capitalism while others, who won out in the crusades to remake the economy - wanted to be sixties style rebels in the boardroom, risk takers and disrupters, using many of the tactics of the Yippies from the 1960’s (read Thomas Franks peerless book from the turn of the millennium, “One Market Under God” (2001, and please note the subtitle: “Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the Economic Democracy.) to catch some of that mood. And one final note on Brooks’ analysis of the current system: he admits, with quite a bit of detail that the children of already well placed successful meritocrats, running our major institutions, have enormous financial leverage they can bring to bear to prep, expensively and extensively their offspring for the Ivy League credentials contests of tests and other promising markers of the rising “right sort of competitor.” How one therefore changes these advantages without a better distribution of wealth and income (not equality, but come on, it’s a new Gilded Age, brother) beats me by his own criteria. And is a real “pluralism” of institutions possible under our present economic biblical doctrines? After all, the Wall St. Journal attacked Biden’s Ex. Order for more Americorps Climate opportunities as being a breeder of anti-capitalist attitudes. “God” forbid a new Social Gospel movement arises (which I had to explain to a citizen, a Christian in Western MD - leave the politics out - who had never heard of the Social Gospel movement which ran parallel if not more deeply intertwined with the broader “Progressive Movement.”

It brings back memories from my freshman year at Lafayette College, a good school but just below the top tier of near-Ivies such as Amherst, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Trinity and Haverford - throw in Wesleyan as well. I’m sure the college would dispute my take. We were sitting around comparing what “Ivies” had rejected us - for me, it was Brown and Yale, a familiar refrain. The truth is, relevant to Brooks essay, that there was no way coming from the family I did, parents who only had high school degrees and were struggling mightily to make ends meet just as so many are today, could give me the advantages of special courses, wider travel, bigger home library - and thinking of my readings of two biographies of Joe Kennedy, the type of demanding but supportive family dinner table discussion which get the critical skills and perspectives rolling. Based on who I was in the fall of 1968, Yale and Brown were right - and Lafayette was a good school for me. What I’m trying to say is a part of me is still elitist based on merit, but a system with so much economic inequality has such a drastic imposition on the cultural side of learning that the structural unfairness is a “mug’s game” with those reforms - a baseline which does not solve all the problems of human societies. And I thought hard and often about this after reading Jamie Raskin’s semi-biography which came out in early 2022. “Unthinkable.” What caught my attention at the time was the incredible accomplishments, the extent of the broader Raskin family - not just Jamie, Sarah, his remarkable son and two daughters…but a whole array of lawyers, scholars, specialists, almost a Presidential campaign in the waiting, all in addition to the skills and achievements of Jamie and Sarah themselves. I asked myself: how the hell did I ever think I had a chance, comparing my family of the 1950’s with his of today, to get into an Ivy league school…I did have some good role models urging higher education, but it paled in comparison to the Raskin extensive “library of cultural achievements.” I don’t know of any cultural fixes that can take care of that scope of disparity. And I think of AOC by comparison as well; without her architect father who gave her a glimpse of a broader world outside her immediate family…well, I’ll leave it at that. And I don’t want to take anything away from the Raskin clan, nor should anyone else. It is a marvel of the potential resources of our society…but also a flashing beacon on inequality, some of it which may never be overcome.

And then one final article, also just read today, from a real academic, Prof. Mark Lilla of Columbia, whom author Corey Robin has fenced with over the years, wrote a piece, part of his coming book, on the “Surprising Allure of Ignorance” - the full book title will add “Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know.” I may be a left populist, but I’m not in favor of Know Nothingism although Lilla chides us all for having intellectual interests if not passions where we don’t want to be challenged - I would say like the American First and left-pacifists reaction to our lagging support for Ukraine. Here’s the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/02/opinion/ignorance-knowledge-critical-thinking.html

I’ll finish with two comments I posted today, staring with a response to Lilla’s piece:

William Neil

Maryland7h ago

One would think, Mark, based on your outline of the dynamics here, that modern Capitalism, based on constant change, invention, science, new products, with implications that can't be limited to just "economics": they affect everything you mentioned, especially a sense of place in the world, geography, "neighborhood," and the clash, especially in the West (is India now going through this?) between religious fundamentalism, which got it's defenses set in the last decades of the 19th century, when German biblical scholarship, the work of geologists and other scientists all threatened the Biblical order, time frames, who wrote what, what was divine and what was uttered by secular voices. Dare I say American business as a whole, what I now call, blasphemously, our "Lords of Creation," cannot themselves fact the scientific reality that we and their internal combustion engines of all sorts, are altering the weather, no further, the very climate itself. And the shocks are coming earlier than those scientists thought they would register. Of course, those suffering the most from the rapid changes, those without college degrees, are taking their rage out on those least able to defend themselves, immigrants, their necessity in our Capitalism suddenly obscured...oh yes, that rage is against the deep state coastal elites who raised China to superpower status as they improved the lives of tens of millions of Chinese peasants. Try running on that ticket, Dems...the old Clinton line.

3 RecommendShare

And the second comment was one in the Wall Street Journal about a private sector firm planning on building, after manufacturing the units itself, prefab, “Modular” units for big apartment projects. I thought the article, at least trying to shed some light on our deep and historical housing troubles, left a lot out. Here’s what I said:

William Neil Mon 02 Dec 2024 04:04:18 PM

“isn't it fascinating to ponder the silence of American business on the immigration confrontation, as if they were just bit players with no stakes, leaving it all to the good will of American politics. (!) Did it catch anyone else's attention that the construction labor force is shrinking...and the data I've seen from sites like the Immigration Project show substantial immigrant participation in the building industry, over 20 % in different categories. Clearly this is a factor - labor costs - in construction - and also no one talks about the "aristocracy" of labor, the building trades, they're just a decently paid "given" of American politics, so those immigrants are in the site construction crews mostly...but therefore, American business, lords of creation, fill us in if I'm wrong. A follow up question, and I apologize in advance for the "elitism" of the question: how much have competitive architectural designs, and or artist designs, (God forbid, all the buzz of a quarter century of "Green Design" - plus awards...no mention of that) so that we know a lot of creative work has gone into the projects here - factories, product and site design (oriented towards the solar year for heating cooling purposes...(oh Mr. Neil what an irrelevance you are..) Just a few thoughts from a non-Ivy league college grad.”

Here’s the article I was responding to: https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/americas-biggest-apartment-owner-takes-a-leap-into-modular-homes-abf62039?mod=hp_lead_pos11

Update: November 30, 2024

Dear Subscribers:

I’ve been debating whether to post what I wrote in a white heat mood just after the election, but I thought it best to hold off and look it over slowly, allowing for events, and my mood to shift. Part of that consideration has been the slow and late counting of the popular vote for the Presidency, which Trump won by 1.6%: 50% to 48.4% and by raw votes, 76, 917,038 to 74, 441, 439, or just about 2,500,000. Hardly a mandate, even with winning the Senate and House, by narrow margins. Would what he trumpets as a great, sweeping victory change his behavior as seen in appointments, comments and the whole Trump persona? A more magnanimous Trump emerge? Hardly; that hope of mine, slim glimmer that it was, is gone. What Thomas Frank once called the Republican Right - a “wrecking crew” will be swinging an enormous ball at the end of the demolition crane. Is that what 50% of those voting want? Seems to be. Own those libs.

Editor’s Note: This morning, Sunday, Dec. 1st, an Email with a link to Prof. Timothy Snyder’s revised essay at Substack arrived in my Inbox, and I’m inserting it here, right after my reference to Thomas Frank’s “wrecking ball” analogy from many years ago:

Decapitation Strike (December)

Because everyone has been deluged with the analysis of why the outcome, and what to do next, I’m still inclined to hold off, wanting to add some additional sections to my already medium length essay, waiting in draft form. Since the 5th, I’ve come across some excellent articles from the higher elevations of the Right, and now a good article by an unknown writer at the American Prospect magazine, and I want to work them into my broader overview.

In part, also, I’ve been in no rush, feeling, rightly or wrongly, that I did my best to figure out why it was happening, that “inevitable” Weimar feeling I’ve had for several years now. And explaining what that was, and what has “caused” Trump’s rise, in two major essays this year, and an earlier published one (book and magazine) entitled “Major Miscalculations: Globalization, Economic Pain and Social Disruption, and the Rise of Trump.” (2017). Here if you’ve missed it: https://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue79/Neil79.pdf

And I’ve seen a slow motion train wreck coming for the Biden led Democratic Party since my very last posting as the Daily Kos, October, 27, 2021, entitled “Joe Biden is Destroying the Democratic Party.” A bit of a rhetorical excess on my part - true - but not by much. And since my two long essays here at Substack, in July and September of this year, and my close reading of events in the Weimar Republic in Germany, 1919-1932, and my two “vacations” with the Frankfurt School writers at the Grand Hotel Abyss - well, I hope my readers got the drift clear, and early. I felt no compulsion to add to what I had already spelled out.

By now, you’ve heard all the theories of what went wrong, and figured out that I wasn’t much of a Kamala Harris fan. I voted for her, and two Democrats in key Maryland Congressional races, but gave no money. Amazing as it may seem, Trump had the more gracious $$$ seeking which followed me at YouTube, stating “not to worry” if you were pressed for money, give only what you were comfortable with. Harris’ early ads were hectoring and arrogant to say the least: “Not tomorrow, or next week, today!” in a none too gentle voice, maybe the state AG telling you to take the plea deal or else. I thought she was supposed to be the emotionally tactful one.

I felt she was playing against the strongest emotional component of today’s Right - an upper middle class (or higher by marriage and income) Dem from San Francisco no less - “say, wasn’t that “Pelosi’s San Francisco?” - and did you see her confident strides across the stage, so dramatically in contrast to Joe Biden’s limping…that stride didn’t bother me, but I’m sure it did men in the Trump fold, or thinking about joining it. However, Harris couldn’t back up that authoritative stride with policy depth - she did have a good overall emotional resonance though, money begging excepted…but then, her great chance to break with Biden’s “Titanic” bow nearly under water - and she couldn’t name a single major policy difference between them. For the few undecideds, given Biden’s awful numbers for the entire four years, that was the sealant.

To me, you can nuance the loss, rationalize it to death, but it came down to your understanding and reaction to two of the two major stated polling issues/reasons as expressed by voters: immigration and the economy. We’re still stuck on those two, and I will go into them in greater detail in the coming essay, but the swing of all the key contested states to Trump and the poor Democratic turnout lead me to side with those stated reasons, rightly or wrongly held. And inflamed and distorted or not by the Big Lies of the Trump campaign. Weimar Germany was full of lies from the Right as well, especially the “stab in the back” one from “enemies” on the domestic front - which caused the glorious, valorous German army to lose - unbeaten in war (!) It was a major way the authoritarian, militaristic, imperialistic Germany society of the Victorian age disguised its true colors from a good part of the public. But huge lies or not, a Germany which lost a great civilizational war, experienced a catastrophic runaway inflation in 1923, and then the Great Depression starting in 1929, didn’t need any lies to go through a major upheaval - scratch that: major trauma. The Kaiser was gone and emotionally, the bland and now forgotten Weimar Republic leaders, social democrats and mainstream conservatives, couldn’t fill the void. You know who did.

If you believe these two contemporary issues were wrongly held, that the economy was very good, and immigration not a big problem, then you have to disbelieve the pain I’ve written about - that you may have had a job - or two in the family - but for the bottom 60% life is an increasing struggle, for structural reasons of cost versus limited income gains, above and beyond the “inflation debate” over higher grocery prices. Now granted that the Right, and I should stop writing the Republican Right, because the new Right has purged most of the traditional Republicans from previous decades…that Trumpian Right has a more coherent message and better, more modern means to deliver it throughout the year than the Dems, and also a message that doesn’t have to be brokered like the Dems’ over six or seven competing liberal interest groups which don’t agree among themselves about which of their issues is salient.

And the dispute over causation in modern American alienation politics is never ending between cultural and economic reasons, but it seems pretty clear to me that the cultural complaints worked better for Trump and the Right as did their economic cries, better on both scores than the hopes of Democrats for Women’s Rights and a belief that the economy was working the best it had in 40 or so years.

And is there a better example of the tension in causation explanations than that over immigration itself? I haven’t stressed it in my writings because it hasn’t been “my issue” - personally or intellectually. This fall I’ve been reading - re-reading in parts -John Higham’s “classic,” Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism: 1860-1925.” I first read parts of it in 1978, during my young “socialist days” with Michael Harrington’s democratic left because it has sections on the great coal strikes in Pennsylvania, the hard coal regions that Joe Biden’s family was from. I never in my life heard - in school or my family talk - about the Eastern European immigrant revolt - Slavs, Hungarians, Italians, miners all, had had enough and fought some very bloody battles over hours, pay, conditions - their struggles and losses taking second fiddle in historical accounts to the earlier Irish Molly Maguires famous militant actions.

There was always an economic component to the cultural troubles of immigration and immigrants. White Protestant America didn’t like the very Catholic Irish before the Civil War, and then didn’t like the Eastern Europeans in the 1890-1913 later waves, Jews included, because they brought anarchists, socialists and worse to the already fraught struggle - to the great - “the social issue” - the struggle between capitalists and workers peaking throughout these years in the late Gilded Age. America always had a classic labor shortage, going back to colonial times, “land rich and people poor” and it intensified with the rise of mass manufacturing so that the business leaders themselves sponsored tours and tickets in Europe to recruit the necessary millions. And then, if the economy turned down, as it often did in the Gilded Age, and bombs went off in our cities as they did in the Haymarket Affair in Chicago, and the later violent labor fights in the hard coal fields of Northeastern PA, then the cries for stricter standards - literacy, the # of years it took to become a citizen, quotas on regions…and then, in the wake of the Wobblies and the big Red Scare, 1919-1921, actual deportations became a limited reality for those carrying the greatest stigmas.

Higham sees two broad and at times conflicting forces about immigration in American life. When the nation is doing well economically, or riding a wave of martial success (1898, WWI) it believes its “native” goodness of institutions can digest the many divergent cultures pouring in, and have our public schools turn out exemplary US citizens. When the nation faces grave crises, as in the 1850’s, the prolonged depressions from 1873 on…we search for others to blame for our basic structural problems…who better than those who stand out by their isolation in cities, ghettos and their strange cultural habits…and usually accompanied by lists of their criminal traits, like Italians and knife fighting. Or drinking. Or Catholic or Jewish religious habits.

Higham is subtle and insightful, and his social map of ups and downs towards immigrants reads like a Freudian case study: the way the nation’s leaders felt about the nation - the economy, the mood, the cultural troubles (language, manners, dress: think Hester Street, lower East Side, 1910…) often prefigured those campaigns against the immigrants… It’s like the gap between the complaints the patient brings to their “shrink” and what they eventually must face…that the trouble is caused by their own failure to come to grips with “uncivilized impulses” long repressed. And perhaps triggered by someone else, some family member’s lapse into “local” barbarism. Social symptoms…what’s the real cause of working class - non-college degreed unhappiness in the contemporary US? China stealing industrial jobs, immigrants doing the same and eating your pets? Or perhaps, just perhaps, the system’s own inability to control social and economic disruption due to the pace of change since the 1970…changes economic, technological, sociological, educational, in gender roles…in general, men without degrees doing much worse than the women…I’ve said it many times, if you are a cultural conservative and you also fully embrace Joseph Schumpeter’s waves of “creative destruction” that go hand in hand with capitalism’s constant turmoil (Trumps management style a reflection of all the knife fighting inside Silicon Valley or Wall Street…or retailing or fast food…or NY Real Estate…and on and on…) then maybe you have taken on a grand insoluble contradiction. In which case political survival and success depends on your ability to transfer the causes to others than the system itself. For Nixon, of the great mandate of 1972, which only lasted 2 years, was to put down the wave of wavering if not revolting citizens: it was “Acid, Amnesty and Abortion” or “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll” anti-war protestors, those ungrateful college students (ah, the beginnings of today’s degreed or not resentments?) not the war itself, or the profitability (or gold) draining out of the American economy…Keep 1972’s Republican landslide in mind as the Trump team works its magic.

Back to the subtitle of Higham’s book then, those “patterns of American Nativism.” Those patterns - nativism, nationalism, and the more dangerous form of racial nationalism was all there, in different decades with different groups bearing the arrows of scorn and danger they posed to the White Protestant Christian culture (dangers that the Welsh, Scots and English, and the Germans and Scandinavians didn’t present in the same way; the early Irish were a different matter, almost in the same category as blacks…)…and these waves of accusations and national hysteria are here again in the threat of open borders and failed states to our south. Criminals, mentally unstables, drug dealers, terrorists, Muslims…are the overblown bogey men of the day, the trouble they are causing - overblown, some to be sure but exaggerated, the real problems being housing and schools, troubles which we were having before the great migration crisis of the past 5 years. And that bitter feeling on the part of our “native” citizens who have been losing ground to the globalists, the machinations of the personnel of the deep state, that it’s in good part their fault in enabling the immigrants’ to pour through, unscreened.

Where, I ask, are all the major American business forums - The Roundtable, Chamber of Commerce and so on, the lobbies for the fast food industry, the whole broader service sector? How many workers do they need? Do they now suddenly have enough? They’re missing from the public debate unless I’m negligent in searching them out; I suspect business interests are bowing to the conflicting currents on the issue between the two parties, whereas they should be, as American leaders in a great capitalist country, speaking to clarify the issue from their important perspective. Instead, they’ve let it fuel a path for demagogues on the issue. Perhaps that’s ok as long as the demagogues continue with the tax cuts and the vast deregulation programs, and continuing on with that “nice man’s” mantra - Ronald Reagan’s - that the problem is the federal government, not the wild fluctuations caused by the good old - dare we say - sacred Capitalist system which no longer has any checks or balances equivalent to the New Deal’s.

Let me close, because this is turning into an essay itself, by noting the delicious if painful irony that the great hopes of certain Democratic strategists, to ride the rising demographic wave of Brown and Black and Asian and Hispanic to electoral majorities has been turned upside down by that stubborn persistence in opposition of the non-college degreed white working class who have felt most threatened by national developments since the urban riots of 1965 and 1968 and the great busing controversies in Boston. How is it that Trump did so well among Catholic, conservative, non-college educated Hispanic Americans even while he pounds their fellow countrymen and seekers of all types in the kind of shameless baiting of immigrants we haven’t seen since the Know-nothings in the 1850’s and the Klan of the 1920’s - part of that last great wave of anti-immigration sentiment which led to the draconian changes passed in 1924? The closing of the Golden Door.

Let me finish on a “constructive” note, to leave my readers with a tool that may prove useful in fighting what I, and many others, see as the coming flash point, the attempts at mass deportation of between 10 and 13 million immigrants here illegally. My source is the American Immigration Council, which has published a 51 page report entitled “Mass Deportation: Devastating Costs to America, its Budget and its Economy.” You don’t have to read the full 51 pages, 7-10 will do nicely to get you the core arguments and the structure of costs depending on the scale Trump intends, how many and at what pace. Here’s the link: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/sites/default/files/research/mass_deportation_report_2024.pdf

And a closing note from author John Higham (1920-2003), from his second chapter of “Strangers in the Land,” entitled “The Age of Confidence.” It concerns those American ideals, never uncontested but also never fully submerged in other, less worthy currents of economic change, politics, and human nature. It speaks of the sources of cultural confidence that always saw America through its bouts of self-doubt, and the corresponding self-destructive attitudes towards its tens of millions of immigrants. You don’t hear many conservative Christians on the Right speak this way about some of their own traditions…or what ought to be part of their worldview:

“The ancient Christian doctrine of the brotherhood of man proclaimed the ultimate similarities between all peoples and their capacity for dwelling together in unity. The democratic values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence postulated an equal opportunity for all to share in the fullness of American life. Both Christian universalism and democratic equalitarianism had withstood the nativist ferment of the ante-bellum period. Both had vitalized George W. Julian’s fiery condemnation: ‘Know Nothingism …tramples down the doctrine of human brotherhood. It judges men by the accidents of their condition, instead of striving to find a common lot for all, with a common access to the blessings of life.’”

Editor’s note: Who was this George Julian? Here’s Wikipedia’s assistance:

“George Washington Julian (May 5, 1817 – July 7, 1899) was a politician, lawyer, and writer from Indiana who served in the United States House of Representatives during the 19th century. A leading opponent of slavery, Julian was the Free Soil Party's candidate for vice president in the 1852 election and was a prominent Radical Republican during the American Civil War and the Reconstruction era.”

Update: November 1, 2024

Just when it seemed to me in sending out my “Last Call” posting below to a large Email audience, with the new additions of Republican County Central Committee Members in Maryland, that things were going smoothly, I got a “censoring” message from Comcast/Xfinity that it wasn’t sent to four Maryland Democratic delegates - even though quite a few before them apparently received it without a problem. I decided this morning to try again after reading Anne Applebaum’s Email/posting entitled “Trump is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini” or two infamous Fascists and one totalitarian dictor of the left. Here’s what I sent out:

“Dear Maryland Delegates:

A short while ago Comcast/Xfinity informed me, in a message I had never seen before in more than 20 years of sending out essays and columns to a large Email audience - including many legislators and other elected officials - that the Subject line  in the Email "Last Call - to stop a Tyrant, and a Fascist, American Style: Trump" was of "questionable content" and therefore blocked. 

Here's the language Comcast/Xfinity used in their explanation of stopping my communication as a citizen to legislators: 

"Your message was believed to contain questionable content, and therefore as not delivered to the intended recipients. The information above will help Xfinity with any questions you may have.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the issue, please reach out to our Customer Security Assurance Team at 833-501-0837

Thank you for being an Xfinity customer."

You should also know that when I called that number the first time it didn't work; the second had a message that the line was inoperable.  In previous trouble I had in getting my message out in the very heated political spring of 2024 in US politicas, I was told by a security specialist at Comcast that the company never monitors, much less censors or blocks political content.  

Well, the quote in this Email's subject line is from Anne Applebaum, the noted Washington Post columnist and book author about the Gulag, and here is the link to her full article, stating that Trump has used language never before used in American politics, much less by a former President, especially his "vermin" references which were crucial in my mind to reaching the conclusion that he was a "fascist," which General Milley, now retired, also concluded, and before him a Republican professor who taught at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.: Tom Nichols.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-authoritarian-rhetoric-hitler-mussolini/680296/

Therefore I am sending this Email out to indicate that well known writers and scholars have reached the same conclusions I had and are using language that while it should not be used carelessly, is fully part of the recent and all too awful 20th Century's return to barbarism, 1914-1945 and serves as a reminder that even democratic and economically advanced countries are not immune to the pathways that lead to "Fascism."  

Sincerely yours,

William R. Neil 

https://williamrneil.substack.com/p/last-call-to-stop-a-tyrant-and-a 

Best to all my readers. Please be advised that I have an active consumer complaint filed at the Maryland AG’s office against Comcast, unresolved, based on the troubles I had in reaching my audience via their Email system back in the spring of this year, and then again, in October.

Bill Neil

Dear Citizens and Elected Officials, County Republican Committee Members in Maryland:

I’ll keep this short, because the hour is fast approaching. Like so many, I do fear the worst on November 5, 2024, given the temperature of the body politic, and the precedent set on January 6, 2021, and the Trumpian reaction to the prosecutions and jail terms which followed.

I asked myself what I could do besides my two long essays published on July 3rd and September 13 of this year. My conclusion after reading the many suggestions which pour in and onto communications this year, was to make a direct plea to Republican leaders in Maryland, some of whom I know personally as my elected representatives in Annapolis. From my first attempt a week or so ago, I received not a single reply.

Therefore I thought I’d publish today’s appeal, as well as the older one.

I’ll never claim that this is my best writing, or terribly profound, just a last late plea not to plunge the Republic, such as it is, into a Civil War, a hot one or a cold one.

Should Trump win, I don’t know how I will react, but I’ve been thinking about it. America has a long history of civil and political dissent, ranging from the debtors revolt put down by General Washington himself, the abolitionists from the pacifist William Lloyd Garrison, to John Brown who tried to lead a slave uprising launched from Maryland’s own soil, close to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) on October 16-18th, 1859…and on and on. Then we have the more contemporary Republican Right tactics bestowed upon our first Black President, the one with upper-middle class white academic credentials - and manners- the “no drama Obama” - such as they are: President Obama, who got no support for any of his major legislation, nada, by design, to make sure there would be no legacy of FDR type popular programs to build on. Despite that, we, some of the citizens, obtained better medical insurance coverage, but still far short of what a “Judeo-Christian” nation, the richest in human history, ought to be obligated to deliver. And J.D. Vance’s secular translation of that Judeo-Christian nation’s morals means the poorest of the poor are irredeemable, right inside his family. No point, I guess, in this “theological tradition,” in tending to the bodies when the soul is lost. For me, that’s one place I don’t care “to go back to.”

Well, this could turn into an endless essay. I’ve voted already, weeks ago, to save our Democracy and wasn’t really tempted to vote for any third parties despite my heartfelt criticisms of the Democrats. Therefore, I’ll just leave you with a few books I’ve been reading while waiting and writing appeals to Republicans:

A warning surely to those who wish for an American Civil War, Round Two: Antony Beevor’s Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921. Knowing a bit about its “temper” even before reading the bluntness of Beevor’s work, I cringed when the current leader of the UAW sported a T-Shirt “Eat the Rich.” He didn’t mean it literally but if he read this book he wouldn’t have said it at all. I’d be happy if they read FDR’s State of the Union address from 1944 and its “Second Bill of Rights.”

In the same spirit, and to deepen my knowledge about Russia, since I write about the war upon Ukraine, I finally caught up with Catherine Merridale’s “Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945.” There is nothing in American history to match the hardships and bloodletting described here, perhaps just a glimpse of it in the guerilla warfare in a couple of locations in the American Revolution and then in our Civil War, Bloody Kansas being a mild preview.

And then, fully into contemporary times, our times, Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. It started slow, a read at breakfast, but soon I couldn’t put it down. Psychological, social, philosophical, a detailed journey into the online world of the worst of the Right, a re-visiting with the work of Philip Roth which was riveting - on Israel, and the dangers for the left in becoming the mirror image of the Right’s worst features. I can’t imagine Senator Cardin is a much of a fan of the Roth volumes Klein splendidly explains to us. Nor Senator Schumer. Thus, add in literature and the War in the Middle East as well. Ecologically and in matters of political economy, I’ve always admired her work, although I am more pessimistic about human nature than she has been, even in this work she finds ground for hope in self-examination and self-reform. I expect less now than she does but haven’t turned my back on the ideals I’ve expressed in many essays.

And then long overdue, my visit with Yanis Varoufakis’ “Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism.” I’ve read almost all his previous works, quite a few, to say the least, and this one has me agreeing with the “feudal” aspects of today’s electronic, online and now AI world, and the power that rent racking feudalism implies, but it’s still capitalism as I live it: a debtor hoping that the Democratic Party would call for lowering credit card interest rates from the 21-26% range (and higher, even, into the ‘thirties) to the 10-14% range, noting that even Trump very, very briefly called for 10% but then seemingly dropped the issue. Gee, I wonder why?

And my current breakfast reading: Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.” All I’ll say just 29 pages in is that just when you thought you knew an era - the 1930’s in America - you find that you don’t.

And one final word about historical comparisons, this one on the politics of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Hitler, and “our” nine years with Trump. Hitler was one man on the stump in a raging fury in his early Beer Hall days and his attempted coup in 1923, which put him in prison to write Mein Kampf, and another during the long campaign trail which led to 1933. Mostly he played by democratic rules, leaving the brutality of action to the Brown Shirts in the streets, who ought to have supplied everyone with clues as to what was coming, and did, but so many Germans hated the left, the institutional social democrats (mild socialists by 1920) and the beyond the pale Communists, that there were actually two levels of political action going on at the same time. The first volume of Ian Kershaw’s “Hitler: 1889-1936, Hubris” does an excellent job of the full landscape: beer hall firebrand, and more restrained public speaker, still too hot for Western democracies, British style, although when he spoke to the business community of Hamburg, the curtain was pulled back: Reds and Jews, often blended together in the portrait, had to go to restore unity to Germany. And my own addition: that Russian Civil War, 1917-1921 and its horrors, was not a secret to the German Right, all the factions. The recognition of events in Russia fed the German civil (and legal) tolerance for the brutality of the Brown Shirts, as well as the illusions of the communists that this German society would ever follow their recommendations.

But a fuller coverage of these books, and issues can wait. On to the pleas to Republicans:

---

October 27, 2024

Dear MD. Republican County Committee Members:

Here is a copy of an earlier Email I sent this month to elected Republicans serving in Annapolis, our colonial era state capital.  The hour is late, so I will not add much to what's below, only that a Republican teacher, who taught at our Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, convinced me back in late 2023 to cross the Fascist label "Rubicon," which he was long wary of.  It was the Trump speech on Veterans Day in New Hampshire, November, 2023 which did it for him,  as it did for me.  The writer's name is Tom Nichols, who long considered himself as a Republican. Here are links to his most recent pieces at the Atlantic Magazine, a "centrist" publication if there ever was one. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/10/the-generals-warning/680279/ ; https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/10/trumps-depravity-will-not-cost-him-this-election/680352/ 

The key thoughts are right in the links: "The General's Warning" and  "Trump's depravity will not cost him this election," a pessimistic take on the virtual tie.  

I won't belabor the point: you have a chance to take a risk for democracy for which your contempories won't thank you - at the least.  My nerve, you say, in even suggesting this?  Well, I published a long essay on July 3rd, this year, calling on the Democratic Party to jettison Joe Biden.  And hold an open primary. 

https://williamrneil.substack.com/p/world-on-fire-part-iii-us-domestic 

Three years earlier, I wrote a piece at the Daily Kos entitled "Joe Biden is wrecking the Democratic Party."  It got me banned from that publication.  https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/10/27/2060619/-Joe-Biden-is-destroying-the-Democratic-Party

The point is:  I'm not asking you to do anything I haven't already done - to make me an outcast with the Democratic Party.

"Long live The Republic" - such as it is, needing many repairs, but not overthrow by a faux "populist" tyrant. 

Sincerely,

William R. Neil

Frostburg, MD  

---------- Original Message ----------

From: WILLIAM NEIL <wrn1935@comcast.net>

To: mike.mckay@senate.state.md.us, jim.hinebaugh@house.state.md.us, jason.Buckel@house.state.md.us

Date: 10/18/2024 12:52 PM EDT

Subject: When will you, Republican office holders, speak out against the demagogue who is Trump?

Dear Republican Elected Officials:

I wanted to share with you a brief opinion piece from the NY Times today, here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/opinion/trump-woodward-milley-mass-deportation.html

It highlights former Joint Chief of Staffs' head General Milley's views on Trump: that he is a fascist and direct threat to the Republic.  

Let me add my view of the video and text of Trump's November 2023 speech in New Hamsphire on Veterans Day.  He told the nation how he would treat the enemy within, as vermin, and shared with us who was on the list.  I would say I qualify. 

And finally these passages from writer Adam Gopnik from his article "As Bad  as All That" which appeared in the print edition of the New Yorker, October 21, 2024: 

"Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power. One outrage succeeds another until we become exhausted and have to work hard even to remember the outrages of a few weeks past: the helicopter ride that never happened (but whose storytelling purpose was to demean Kamala Harris as a woman), or the cemetery visit that ended in a grotesque thumbs-up by a graveside (and whose symbolic purpose was to cynically enlist grieving parents on behalf of his contempt). No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune.

Villainy inheres in individuals. There is certainly a far-right political space alive in the developed world, but none of its inhabitants—not Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or even Viktor Orbán—are remotely as reckless or as crazy as Trump. Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives, just as comically deranged as he seems and still more dangerous than we know."

And here is the link to the article online:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/how-alarmed-should-we-be-if-trump-wins-again 

Let me add what I have been sharing with citizens since 2015: Trump, persona, character and comportment, and now threats, goes against everything I was ever taught in American civics and history classes in Jr and Sr. High.  I have to wonder what history teachers in rural red state America are saying today. 

I look forward to seeing how many of you, for the good of the country and American democracy, flawed as it is, denounce this budding tyrant.

Sincerely,

William R. Neil

Frostburg, MD