Whiny old fascists of America rejoice!

A day in the capital of a sick democracy

“Trump is a fascist, Trump and Pence are illegitimate” — that’s the chant the Revcom group led as about 250 people just swarmed the entrance of the “Deploraball” — a posh reception for Trump supporters about half a mile from the White House.

The American police seem incapable of anticipating, judging or proportionately responding to social unrest. They pepper sprayed into the air and then launched one of those pushovers you see in rugby where a maul collapses, injuring mainly themselves. The protesters labelled them fascist too.

In truth, neither Trump nor the cops are fascists. But the kleptocrats who, by this afternoon, will rule America do not need fascism. Fascism was a tool to smash the organised working class in Europe when it was strong.

What the new oligarchy of Trumpsylvania needs is simply to seize control of the institutions of democracy and use them for illiberal purposes. For these purposes these institutions have been pre-eviscerated during the Bush and Obama years.

And for a role model Trump has not only Vladimir Putin but Tayyip Erdogan, President Sisi of Egypt, Binyamin Netanyahu and — presuming he’s even heard of him — Hungary’s Victor Orban.

Trump’s appointees spent the day dodging questions and logic on Capitol Hill, while the transition team briefed that the incoming president is to privatise giant tracts of land, the public broadcasting authority, scrap the National Endowment for the Arts and cut a ton of welfare, legal aid and education programmes.

Demo outside Trump inauguration ball

All these assets, or the spaces newly created by abolition, will be shovelled into the hands of Trump’s friends and associates. That’s the nature of kleptocracy.

But my biggest worry after spending a day on the streets of DC is not the kleptocratic intent of Trump. There is something vaguely reassuring about kleptocrats: they are rarely at the same time genocidal maniacs, or war starters — because all they actually want is money and, in the argot of Trump Life, “pussy”.

What worries me is the actual fascism engorging the veins, and whitening the eyes of the Great American Whiny Old Victim.

I’ve met him everywhere today: empowered, emboldened, with permission to unleash what he wants to unleash most. Hatred.

The guy selling Trump memorabilia from a stall. Doesn’t want to be filmed or photographed despite he is in a public place. “I got things I can do to you,” he says, red faced. He is about 60, and wearing — like all Whiny Old Victims — military camouflage.

The guy from Tennessee. Seventy-plus, here to visit his family. His face stiffens as he brands all welfare seekers “sick”. He is an expert in the exact costs of the clothing black people wear: baseball caps that cost $50, sport shoes that cost $120. He resents that his family will pay 35c per dollar on the land he owns if he dies. He resents that he has to pay a tax when he raises a cow because of global warming. He believes there is a tropical forest with camels buried beneath the Antarctic, and that this is proof that climate change is simply “what goes around comes around”.

And the guy who stood amid a crowd of loud black communists just now, wearing his Trump scarf, egging them on to hit him, throwing a couple of sneaky slaps at a woman remonstrating with him. He looked like a guy whom the gun advertising breaks in TV shows about guns constitute the week’s viewing highlights.

The real fascists are everywhere in America — but like I say they don’t need to, or want to (except in their dark fantasies) enact actual fascism.

But here’s the problem. Trump will fail. I’ve sat in investment conferences where people calmly try and compute the stock market risks/benefits attendant on inflation, Federal Reserve rate hikes and fiscal stimulus. What people are missing is the likelihood that letting a paint-by-numbers guy loose on the Mona Lisa likely results in a mess.

All the men I’ve just described, and their look-alikes across the United States, really are victims. Victims, if they but wanted to understand, of climate change, finance capitalism, media lies and corporate kleptocracy.

Once Trump’s billionaire backers and Goldman Sachs alumni walk off with the loot, what will the Great American Whiny Old Victims do then?

Anti-Trump demonstrators in Washington 19 January 2017

The one thing Hillary Clinton got right was the “deplorables” tag: the bikers with Confederate flags, the devout Christian women yelling “cunt” at her, because the word asshole does not convey enough hatred.

However centrist politics has no idea what to do about the deplorables. But the anarchists and communists who confronted a few Trump supporters by the light of the cameraflash tonight did: they actually argued with them. Loudly but nonviolently they called out their hypocrisy.

I wrote in 2010, when the worst potential leader of the alt-right I could imagine was Glenn Beck, that this situation has horrible overtones of the 1850s, in which America disintegrated socially into “two nations”.

Benjamin Wade, the Ohio Senator, wrote then that:

“No two nations on earth entertain more bitter feelings of rancour toward each other than these two nations of the Republic.”

The outcome then was civil war. Since 2010 I’ve felt that, under extreme circumstances, something akin to that is possible in the USA if the political class does not find ways to de-escalate the tensions.

Imagine this then: the Democrats gets their act together enough to stand a plausible, progressive liberal candidate with broad appeal in 2020 and Trump messes things up so badly that, what should have happened in 2016 happens in four years time. The Democrats win — and the racial fantasies and hate-orgasms of the Whiny Old Victims come to nothing.

In their moment of victory then, the Democrats must not only show magnanimity but cement for a generation a new progressive consensus, around the values of what pollster Stan Greenberg has called the “new American majority”.

Demographically, people of colour combined with secular voters, millennials, lesbians and gays and single women account for 63% of the electorate now, up from 51% four years ago, according to Greenberg. By 2020, unless Trump makes good on his threat of mass explusions, the percentage will be even higher.

They have to find ways of speaking across the divide to the anger, frustration and genuine victimhood of the enraged plebeian conservatives. It has to be done with facts and arguments, but also demonstrative actions — and some geniune sympathy.

If it can’t be done, there is no way back. Economics is a cycle — history moves in a particular direction.

A young African-American man came up to me today, at the fringes of one of the protest stages this afternoon. “Is this where the KKK is meeting?” he asked. “My employer sent the entire workforce home three hours early because they saw a picture of the KKK parading in Washington.”

It told him it was probably just a rumour but consider this. A business closed three hours early. Because the boss thought the KKK might do something bad to his workforce. In Washington.