A Response to my Previous Commentary and my Reply to that Response.
Varna, Bulgaria, February 3rd, 2020
Salaroche

The following is the relevant part of the response my friend sent me:

“Hey Sal …read your article about the grip of fascism that has overtaken the three-legged stool of our Republic. It is a good time to be a psychologist I hear, as the lines are very long for citizens who need to vent from the stress of what is unfolding, and sales of antidepressants are through the roof!” 

The following is my reply to my friend’s response:

Hey -----------:

Your brief account of the decaying general psychological situation on US soil only comes to corroborate what some of us have already perceived from afar, that a 3.5% unemployment rate and ± 2% economic growth don’t contribute much to the pursuit of happiness. Obviously, those two factors cannot be the main reason Trump could hypothetically shoot someone in broad daylight in the middle of 5th Avenue and his followers would allow him to get away with it.

Been searching all over the place for a plausible explanation for the deep and strong hold the Trump virus has gotten on a good portion of the American population, from factory workers to senators. Seems hard to pinpoint the root causes for the rise of such injurious sociopolitical phenomenon.

Once we thresh the chaff from it all, however, it seems that racism may be a main cause lurking behind almost every move that has pushed the situation down to this point. Now more than ever, Make America Wasp Again seems to be the appropriate translation for the MAGA slogan.

It seems that the socioeconomic resentment plaguing an influential number of our fellow “whites” keeps coming ever more dangerously to the surface of the American psyche. That alongside religion. What happened to those “Christian” values so loudly championed in the past by those evangelicals whose influential voices now keep this fetid Trumpist wind blowing stronger all through the four corners of the country?

Loss of identity seems to be at the core of all of this and a bully that doesn’t hesitate to insult and demean anything and anyone who stands for the present status quo, including the American governmental institutions, represents, in the eyes of a good number of Americans, all the necessary characteristics of a messiah.

Donald Trump is a walking bundle of complaints about the “unfair” way the world treats him, particularly the American free press, and millions of Americans identify with that resentful stance. As a result, nothing Trump may do or say can turn those people away from him. He is the light at the end of the tunnel. For them, he is the only one who can redress all the wrongs that are being inflicted on the country, even as they don’t really understand what those wrongs may be.

For them, something is just not right, things are just not going in the right direction, it no longer feels like they are on top of everything, so there must be a solution in the ways things used to be in the past, even if the past they look up to is just a worn-out illusion lingering in their confused imagination.

Stop social progress, stop believing in the dangers of climate change, stop diversity of thought, stop immigration, stop looking for ways to improve International relations. Stop. Stop. Let’s go back in time to those moments in history where everything was, not like things really were, but as we would like them to have been…

…and so on… and so forth…

In a few words, generate a problem and then present yourself as the only solution to that problem, that is basically the foundation for Trump’s strong hold on his followers’ imagination. Identity politics at its most naked shape and form.

I’m not going to talk about the blatant undemocratic stupidity behind the electoral college system, but I certainly hope that by now the American electorate is even wiser than it was in 2016, when Trump lost the popular vote by close to three million votes. Hopefully, this year the people’s rejection of Trump will be much more decisive than then, so that even the highly unreliable electoral college will have to reflect such rejection.

Unfortunately, the way things are going, particularly after witnessing the shameful maneuvers the Republican Senate majority has resorted to during the Impeachment trial and the people’s impassive reaction to it as thus far detected in the media, trust in the wisdom of the American electorate is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

In the meantime… the beat goes on…

Salaroche