Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Why the
Rise of Trump, Cruz and Sanders Is the Logical Result of the 1% Not Paying
Taxes
March 14, 2016
You reap
what you sow. The Republican Party – pushed along by large segments of the
“Third Way” Democrats – crafted policies that allowed the American rich to go
on tax strike, that allowed them to deindustrialize the United States and that
allowed their banks to control the destiny of people from the redwood forest to
the gulf stream waters.
This land
is their land. Democracy is the mask of the 1 percent.
The
detritus of those policies created under-employment and endemic social crises.
Between the prison industrial complex and the opioid crisis lies the fault line
of race: otherwise these are identical. Wages plummeted, but debt-fueled
consumption allowed the American Dream to remain alive. The Great Recession of
2007 awoke sections of the country from its credit card somnolence. For the
first time in decades, the American Dream seemed unrealistic. The lives of
American children would most certainly be economically more fragile than those
of their parents.
Race stayed
the hand of unity. The Tea Party movement covered itself in the old rags of
racism to blame migrants and minorities for the degradation of their country.
Egged on by the Republican elites, this movement took the hatred of government
and of outsiders to the limit. Out of it came Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, with
fire against Washington as their ammunition. It is fitting that the old Gadsden
flag was taken up by the Tea Party – with its rattlesnake above the sign,
“Don’t Tread on Me.”
To
associate oneself with the rattlesnake is a curious gesture. This is venom
incarnate.
The Great
Recession hit black and Latino families hardest, but there was no room for them
in the Tea Party consensus. It was Obama’s presidential campaign that became their
ark. That Obama did little to constrain the banks and force the rich to pay tax
was disappointing, but not sufficient for disillusionment. What choice has
there been? It was organizations such as Stand Up United, Black Lives Matter,
Dream Defenders, Defend the Dream, Stand Up/Don’t Shoot and Black Youth
Project that drew in the more critical segments – spurred on by Ferguson. They are
the antithesis of the Tea Party, although survivors of a similar dynamic set in
motion by the American rich’s tax strike.
Many of
these young people have now taken refuge in the Sanders’ campaign. Hillary
Clinton was part of the “Third Way” Democrats that allowed Wall Street its
excesses. She does not have the compass to bring in this segment. It is fitting
that the wife of Eric Garner (killed by the New York police department)
supports Clinton, while their daughter – Erica Garner – who is an activist in
these movements supports Sanders.
Donald
Trump and Ted Cruz are the end-points of Republican policy. They are what
emerge when the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes and the
working poor cannot any longer dream of a better life. But they are
particularly the salvation of the white working poor. Theirs is a populism
narrowed by racism and misogyny.
Stop Trump,
goes the slogan. But replace him with what? Ted Cruz, who is not only as
bellicose as Trump (bomb the desert to “make it glow”), but is also a zealot?
These men are mirror reflections of each other. They are Crump.
Both Trump
and Sanders attract the white workers who had been battered by the trade
agreements of the 1 percent. Trump’s rhetoric is familiar to the American
right, which heard it from Pat Buchanan in an earlier era. Sanders comes from a
long line of Democratic barnstormers who opposed these recent trade deals –
whether Tom Harkin or Sherrod Brown and most recently the Sanders’ supporter
Keith Ellison. These are Mid-western politicians who know how the trade deals
eviscerated the working class of their heartland.
In this
skepticism of the 1 percent’s trade deals there is the potential of great
unity, but again race is the obstacle. Buchanan’s fulminations on the “end of
White America” are far from Harkin’s 1992 objections to NAFTA on the grounds
that the U.S. protects “everything that deals with capital and property but we
cannot deal with protecting basic human rights.”
Exit from
this current nightmare is not evident. Until the American Rich give up their
tax strike, there is little hope for necessary social investments. Unity is
impossible as long as the toxicity of racism diminishes social life. Trump and
Cruz offer bluster, empty slogans that reduce the potential of people. Clinton
and Rubio have little to offer beyond the prattle of the Beltway, which is
continued adherence to Wall Street’s failed dogmas and belief in the Security
establishment’s failed imagination for the world.
The
Republican elite wants to sow fear of Trump in order to sneak in Cruz. Under
both shells sit rotten peas.
It is
better to pick neither.
Vijay
Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford,
Connecticut. He is the author of 18 books, including Arab Spring,
Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), The Poorer Nations: A Possible
History of the Global South (Verso, 2013) and the forthcoming The
Death of a Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of
California Press, 2016). His columns appear at AlterNet every Wednesday.
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
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