A Trump administration could be like the end of Reconstruction.
Donald Trump’s working class white supporters are always described as “angry.” They are certainly angry about economic decline, but there is more to it than that. They are also angry about racial self-abasement. The Obama administration has repeatedly humiliated whites for being white and ensured that there can be no defense against degradation. This humiliation far exceeds the garden-variety racial humiliation of having to deal with incompetent affirmative-action co-workers or conversation-killing PC speech codes.
Donald Trump is like the post-Civil War Southern political leaders who sought to restore the honor of whites after bayonet-backed Radical Republican carpetbaggers imposed rule by former slaves. The defenders of white honor were called “Redeemers” and, in a sense, Mr. Trump is a modern day Redeemer, even if he has not explicitly embraced this role.
Conquerors can treat the vanquished in many different ways: exterminate everyone, keep the women and kill the men and children, impose heavy tax burdens, or simply humiliate them. When Europeans ruled China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, humiliation took many forms. In Shanghai, Chinese were banned from public parks unless accompanied by a Westerner–who could even be an infant. Such petty degradations–and they occurred daily–stung deeply, and were seldom forgotten when the tables were turned.
A public humiliation is like the authorities proclaiming that 2+2=5, and punishing anyone who denies this “truth.” The final blow is to force the humiliated openly to affirm that 2+2=5. This resembles the Soviet show trials of the 1930s: innocent Old Bolsheviks publicly degrading themselves by confessing to bogus crimes, and signing confessions to save their families.
President Obama has imposed race-related humiliation in several forms.
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