In many ways this potential Trump catastrophe was decades in the making. Just go back to Ronald Reagan launching his first campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. No, he didn’t start his “Morning in America” campaign there to symbolize that he was supporting brotherly love in the South, like the city’s Northern namesake.
Reagan was there to signal that he supported the segregationist racist legacy of the South (using the coded words “State’s Rights”) because Philadelphia, Mississippi, was the site where three civil rights workers from the north were killed by the klan during the height of the civil rights movement in the South. Actually, that makes the origins of the salient Trump racism against immigrants, Blacks and Brown people harken back to the end of Reconstruction in the South when “States Rights” became synonymous with the suppression of Blacks, segregation and lynching. Trump may be a deranged, aberrant, vulgar racist and misogynist, but he represents two forces that have been brewing for some time.
1) The nation has increasingly become a multiracial and multicultural society. By 2050, whites are projected to be in the minority. The DNC convention, which I thought was handled pitch perfect, especially for fractious Democrats, appeared very Black to the white viewer who resents minorities (soon to become majorities) and thus Democrats are a threat to white privilege.
But this reality makes Trump out to be the savior of particularly working-class and r.