For the original 12/26/2016 post, see: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16wkfCn1aD7iCw1VQaSaH48r8BzDW8Scs/view?usp=sharing
"Populism is a belief in the right of ordinary people, rather than political insiders, to rule." Trumpism, by contrast, operates on the presumption that ordinary white working class people are never going to get a chance to rule, no matter what, so they might as well disrupt the political process using the only tool left that is still available to them: the vote.
These are white, working class men and women who know that, by all intellectual and economic standards, they cannot win at the fixed "money game." So, egged on by wealthy bigots at Fox and Breitbart, they lash out at politicians, judges, Hispanics, scientists, teachers, Wall Street, universities, Blacks, the media, women, legislatures—even at elections. They are not interested in serious reform to the system. Under the enormous economic pressure of a rigged "free market" they are either too pessimistic or too damaged to believe that reform is possible. So the best they can do is adopt a position of total irreverence: to show they hate the players like Walker, Ryan, Hillary and Obama and the game.
The retaliatory, extremist right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism is about something far more consequential than Trump, something that has been brewing and building in the US and globally since Ronald Reagan damaged the white working class with "trickle down" economics and hid the harm he caused behind money worship and a façade of celebrity. The result: "uneducated white Americans are living sicker and dying earlier" due to 40 years of sustained economic turmoil, now combined with a massive influx of prescription and nonprescription opioids. (Most of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan, and if you’re looking for the chief kingpin in the Afghanistan heroin trade, it’s the United States.)
Unable to recognize that their lives have been made far worse by the very right wing policies they were fooled into supporting, white working class people oppose common sense solutions, like Obamacare. This serves to establish their susceptibility to further manipulation. Hiding the growing damage requires more extreme distractions, however, hence the "unpresidented" 2016 campaign and the "election" of a true demagogue.
This brings us back to Trumpism.
"Ours is a singularly dangerous time." What is "most dangerous about Trumpism is that it encourages the distrust of all authority—except for the authority of brute force."
This is why the treasonous* act of conspiring with a foreign government to modify the results of both Senate and Presidential elections is cheered (“A win is a win” according to Larry Kudlow, incoming Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Trump Administration) and the main perpetrator, a communist, is celebrated by the right wing in the US.
Under any conceivable scenario, the current situation is very bad, and I mean toxic, for democratic institutions in general and for people of color specifically.
Bottom line: our Fully Adjusted Return Forecast** indicates that, over time, things will get much, much worse.....
Modified from: "This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson."
* Oran's Dictionary of the Law (1983) defines treason as "...[a]...citizen's actions to help a foreign government overthrow, make war against, or seriously injure the [parent nation]." In a democratic system based on the vote, helping to falsify the results of an election counts as serious injury. In the United States, misprision of treason is a federal offense, committed where someone who has knowledge of the commission of any treason against the United States, conceals such knowledge and does not inform the President, a federal judge or State Governor or State judge (18 U.S.C. § 2382). It is punishable by a fine and up to seven years in federal prison. It is also a crime punishable under the criminal laws of many states (so, in theory, states could sue Trump and his associates for treason...)