What "Telling It Like It Is" Really Means

This explains something of the mystery of why there is little, if anything at all, Donald J. Trump could do or say, including the countless moral outrages that have already emanated from his Presidency in just its first year, that supporters would find reprehensible enough to reject. It also explains how it is that hate speakers and attackers and scofflaw political personalities such as Arizona's formerly discredited Joe Arpaio have been emboldened in the cultural climate of Trump's rule. This is a central irony of contemporary America: Having grown up in a nominally democratic country, many of our citizens now embrace an American fascism that agrees with Trump to such degree as to be totally impervious to arguments from the Constitution or reason or ethics or, for that matter, religion, for all such Americans lay claim to "Christian values."

American Fascism and the Disaffection That Feeds It

Among the underprivileged of all races and ethnicities, many poor and working class whites have also been left behind in the swamps and mudflats lining America's economic superhighway. Most of these whites are informed and heavily influenced by Right Wing radio shock jocks and the oxymoronically named genre of "reality TV" in shows from The Apprentice to Fox and Friends. They are Americans who have been conditioned by the circumstances of their lives to a deeply ambivalent mix of fairy tale faith and rank cynicism about a so-called American Dream that seems always beyond their reach no matter how hard they work.

American fascism is based in a white supremacist ideology that does not understand white privilege and how it works. It's hard for struggling whites to see themselves as privileged characters while living barely above the poverty line, without access to decent health and dental care, in one of the states with a deficient education system and few job prospects that pay a livable wage. Asking such folks to understand how their own white power and privilege are disproportionately amplified in the current Congress and White House is a bridge too far.

When a Lie Is as Good as the Truth

Given the socio-political narrative his supporters tell themselves daily on awakening, it is nearly impossible for them to see themselves as sharing common cause with immigrants and refugees or people of color or people poorer than they or any group upon whom they can look down from their next-up rung on the social ladder. Ultimately, their rage will have to be addressed in a way that acknowledges and does something about what they're really pissed off about, which is their exclusion from the goods of a society that is too often indifferent to their legitimate human needs.

Neglecting to Vote Is a Vote

Fighting for equal access to society's goods for all Americans is a longer range strategy for loosening fascism's growing chokehold on the American psyche. The most immediate way to fight it is by outnumbering it at the polls in 2018 and 2020. The Electoral College works in favor of Trump and his political enablers and against the majority of Americans only because, whether through self-indulgent indifference or self-indulgent disillusionment, too many citizens with humane hearts and reasonably informed minds - of both major parties and neither - fail in their responsibility to get out and vote. That failure has the effect, if not the intent, of "agreeing with him."

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