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This is the third piece I've written about Trump for Dagblog. Consider it a trilogy - one in which I said first that he is for real, that his candidacy is not a joke (at least not from the sense that it will fade out), that he is tapping in to working class populism just like Sanders and, last, that he is a fascist.

The Republican Party does not like Trump. Strategists for the GOP are saying he will not be the nominee. The conservative friends I have have called him a "carnival barker" and an "embarassment." Yet that embarrassing carnival barker is drawing the poll numbers and the crowds while they, with all their good intent, have candidates who are in the doldrums as far as numbers. The basis of what conservatism is is apparent and it's not pretty. As I said in my first piece, Trump taps in to voters' hearts and minds while the rest of the party and its propaganda outlets are left flabbergasted and disoriented. He has been channeled very roughly by Bill O'Reilly, Megyn Kelly and Rand Paul only to keep standing, nodding his duck face and his toupee (or whatever that rodent on his head is) in smug arrogance.

Guys like Rand Paul really want to think their party is an intellectual force. Paul spent many years since becoming a senator triangulating himself - trying to present his vision of leadership that surrounded his interpretation (which, for libertarians, is the interpretation) of the Bill Of Rights. He wanted to sell the idea that free market economics and conservative ideology was something for everybody - something Trump is pissing all over.

Paul said some weeks ago that the rise of Trump was insanity. Now he is saying that Trump is propelled by "empty anger." I wonder how far Trump would get before men like Paul, who aren't stupid but are just naive and in denial about how this world and this country especially really function, will look in the mirror and wonder if their ideology is even real or if it was just a way of intellectualizing and putting economic and political jargon on to empty anger and insanity.

I was a pretty committed conservative for a good amount of time and it took a good amount of time, years in fact, to fully detox myself from that worldview and take on a worldview that correlated with the actual real world around me. I wanted to believe in many of its intellectual works, like Robert Nisbet's Quest for Community or the lengthy works of Russell Kirk. Their world view was more tidy and made the goals for life - a nuclear family, a flourishing economy - more simple and immediately answering to my desires and needs than the left wing world view, which too often requires a surrender to others and an acceptance of agendas that diverge from my own.

I didn't see it like that, of course, and neither do most conservatives. They think free market politics is about individual freedom - and not about protecting large corporations from regulation so that small competitors can't come in. Guys like Paul are sort of sad figures - they really think the things they say mean something different than they do and run around frantic at a world that just continually doesn't fit with their theories at all.

Conservatism, deep down, is all about keeping people out and keeping them from taking what the powerful already have. That is all it ever has been and all that it ever will be. Fertility clinics exist in abundance in white neighborhoods - it's not reproductive health that conservatives loathe but the subsidized access to it in poor neighborhoods. The average conservative wants Social Security - they just don't want those blacks and Hispanics they see in the SS office getting any of it.

And so we have Trump, talking about a wall that will keep everyone south of San Diego, the developing world, to keep everyone from crawling in and usurping what is here. We have him wearing hats that say "Make America Great Again" i.e. make it what it was before blacks, Jews and women were running for president all the time. We have his supporters attack Mexican men and shouting "white power" or "shoot niggers!" at his rallies. (Yes, that happened.) It's all a bit like something out of Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here.

As he talks about rounding up families (something I am sure his brilliant possible opponent Bernie Sanders, whose grandfather's family died in the Holocaust, could just do wonders with in the general election), it's very clear what he's getting it. Hard right politicians always talk like this, no matter what background they have - it's part of the human psychology of fear more than it is animosity toward any particular group. This isn't left wing crank talk - Jeffrey Tucker at Newsweek said aloud what I am hinting at.

It can happen here, however, because fascism is just a part of the human psyche, the brutal selfish part of it allied next to the more caring and generous, democratic socialist side. Both Trump and Sanders are tapping in to the human psyche, just different parts of it.

Additional: So apparently over at Liberal America, it's noted that the white skinheads at Stormfront see Trump as their new leader and think it could lead to some kind of "white awakening:"

“Imagine Trump tries to close the border and deport. Then the courts block him. Then he orders law enforcement to act anyway under presidential protection. This is an entirely possible scenario.

“It’s also possible that just as Blacks saw Obama as a blanket mandate to riot and burn, marginalized White people might get funny ideas too under a Trump presidency. I think you will find White law enforcement and military highly disinclined to do anything as pro White street actions begin re-modelling large sections of our country.

“But first he has to win.”

Adolf Hitler likewise is amongst his favorite reading. Scary stuff.