The Trumpet Is Blasting--Wake Up!

Will the Trump candidacy finally cross one bridge too far and go down in shame? Will the Republican Party split out another candidate, under another party label, and perhaps restructure our two-party system after 150 years? Will Hillary--or Bernie!--cruise to the White House below the turbulence that has the whole Republican establishment in crisis mode? Or will Trump trim his sails just enough to accommodate some more reluctant followers, along with a throng of Obama- and Hillary-haters on his joy ride to a newer, whiter, more callous America? It is of course too early to know the answers to any of these questions, but what we know already should make us pause and reflect.

First, we know that this charismatic love affair between Trump and millions of voters is for real. It has survived and thrived on a host of gaffes, insults, lies, and blunders--just like the most passionate of abusive relationships. But to put it that way is to personalize it--Trump's game. Yes, the man weirdly fascinates throngs of spectators (while disgusting plenty of others like me). His is a singularly polarizing personality, the ultimate bully--a fit subject for what they used to call deviant psychology.

But the more profound truth lies in the invisible subsoil that has nourished this invasive plant. I mean the failed economy, the social and economic desperation that is the real crux of the Trump movement. This desperation has been building for 30 years or more of profit-hoarding by the rich, as many economists have now realized (a convenient summary can be found in this recent column by Thomas Edsall in the Times). A globalized, financialized, debt-driven, hi-tech, information-based, race-to-the-bottom economy--these are among the various ways to describe the profound changes that have left many working people struggling to maintain their standard of living and their self-respect. These people are angry. They are desperate. They are looking for scapegoats. And they love Trump because he incites the anger they feel. This is a stark reality, gestating here and there for decades on the margins of the conservative movement. It has now burst full-blown on the scene of our common political life. Whatever happens with Trump, it will still be there, festering.

Will it help if amid all the fuss Hillary Clinton triangulates her way into the presidency? A little, maybe: at least a centrist Supreme Court may act as a bulwark against certain excesses. Even if President Clinton II finds a way to work with the Congress, though, what would she do to redirect the economy to serve the marginalized legions of Trump? She is herself a pure product of the existing system. She proposes band-aid solutions, palliatives, adjustments, but hardly the sort of restructuring that could relaunch the American adventure and bring actual hope, not in a mythical past but in a reinvented future. Could the Sanders 'revolution' achieve this? Possibly, but I suspect that every victory would by pyrrhic, every triumph the occasion for more bitter resistance.

The problem is not just ours in America. Stagnating economies in all the older democracies have produced Trump-like figures named LePen or Wilders or Farage, demonizing immigrants and Muslims, calling for ethnic purity and 'telling it like it is'--i.e. demanding the right to racist defamation. In short, all of us constituents of this world-system have reached a common impasse, where our global economy will support only a fraction of its wealthier citizens in the fashion they have come to insist on. The rest are suffering, and in one political system after another they are showing they are mad as hell. Brexit, 'the Wall,' deportation, refusal of asylum--it's a global tidal wave of hostility and mean-spiritedness. And it's cresting, this movement, at the very moment when accelerating global climate change requires concerted, generous, far-sighted collective response.

Given the limited set of choices that confront us and all those other electorates, it may seem fatuous to call for radical reform, 'revolution,' a new kind of world-system, but frankly, dear readers, nothing less will do. We need to somehow engage ourselves, and our fellow citizens around the world, in that brilliant adventure to rebuild our energy systems, our agriculture, our cultures, our ways of living and our measures for happiness, success, well-being--a complete reversion from our defunct consumer and finance-driven economy into something sustainable, clean, cooperative, shared. No app will do it--this is the stuff of total revolution. The powerful (as Luke's Mary says, channeling Isaiah) must be thrown down from their high places, and the rich sent empty away. The time is now. Trump's poisonous blast is our warning cry, our call to action. For all its surreality, it's real, it's here, and it's happening. Don't wait to see who wins.