All in the Family
Trumpism's Journey Into the Past
Whenever I look at Donald Trump I think of my dad.
Like Trump, my dad was outwardly intimidating, and inwardly insecure. He left behind four baby boomers desperate for love, lucky to find it. Long story short, we all have issues.
That may be why the first response to Trump’s intimidation is for us to come together and convince ourselves we’re strong, that we represent the majority.
But here’s the thing. We don’t. We lost in November.
Looking at America from 5,000 miles away it’s as though we’re stuck in the 1960s, when men like Donald Trump’s father (a Fred like my own dad) strode the world with their racism, sexism, and bigotry out in the open, unashamed. That’s the thing with daddy issues. You either run to daddy and try to hide behind him, or you run away and try to find your own people. Turns out most Americans prefer daddy.
Nothing Donald Trump has done so far is outside democratic norms, or American history. He is doing just what he said he would do during his campaign. He has Congress and the Supreme Court behind him.
The crisis will come when his supporters turn on him. It’s not New York City he should worry about, it’s Massapequa. Not San Francisco but Huntington Beach, not Austin but Beamont, not Miami but Homosassa.
Trump’s intimidation is meant to preempt that reaction, which will surely come when Meemaw’s Social Security check doesn’t arrive, when Uncle Spanky can’t get a rehab, when the shelves are empty and prices double. People on the coasts, we can get through that. Doublewide nation can’t.
Bunkering In
In my own Fred’s case, we had loans backed by the government, and when dad fell through a false roof in the 1970s, a Small Business Administration loan came that no banker in his right mind would give. Yet despite being propped up continuously by “big government,” by good schools and a social safety net, I am certain my dad would have loved him some Trump.
The late Norman Lear had an ear for his contemporaries, for men like my father, consumed in bluster by their own insecurities, dragging damaged families along for the ride. He wrote them so well. His era ended when he tried to take those characters into a different direction, when Archie Bunker saw through his own racism. Because most of us don’t want to do that.
You should know Trump isn’t doing this on his own. The Hoover Institution has been plotting revenge against FDR since 1932. Groups like the Heritage Foundation and Heartland Foundation are generations old. The Federalist Society has been promising to overturn liberal justice since the 1960s. The Religious Right started working to overturn Roe v. Wade the day it was promulgated. All these groups have big money, and they play the long game.
What’s happening today is their platform, backed by their research. The fact it won’t work, that the 20th century won’t be put back into a bottle, that the Amendments put in place after 1865 somehow aren’t part of the “real” Constitution, is yet to be proven by events.
The Road Ahead
What the groups around Trump don’t understand is that that 19th century world is dead and isn’t coming back. The British Empire is gone, and the UK is the sick man of Europe because it refuses to deal with it. Africa, Asia, and South America are all engaged in experiments on government and values that are proving FDR and the 60s protestors were right. People do want reform, they do want peace, they want pluralism, and they understand freedom comes with responsibilities to one another, not just their leaders of the moment.
But Pax Americana is dead. Trump killed it. The institutional safeguards that gave us our advantages in wealth and power have been torn down. Trump’s America now stands alone, against a world that is independent of us. We’re going to learn just how independent it is in the next few months. It will be a bumpy ride for them, but they will learn much along the way.
It’s at that point, when the chickens come home to roost, when the people in Massapequa and Beaumont, in Homasassa and Huntington Beach, see their own security threatened by Trump policies, that the war for democracy will really begin.
Are you referring to the cast of "All in the Family" or the picture of my family 47 years ago? Because mom and dad have passed. He died at 78, she died at 93.
Superb commentary, Dana, right on the money. There are various segments of the U.S. population that have not accepted the outcome of the Civil War, nor the various advances of the 60s and 70s, and they've fight to return to an imagined better past ever since.