Is Trump manipulating fears to mobilise the masses?

For thirty-five years, we’ve been waging a culture war started by cruel cynics who robbed us blind and scorched the Earth while we fought about abortion and marriage and which lives matter. Iraq War to ISIS. Fracking to polar ice-cap melt-offs. Subprime rip-offs to foreclosure. Trickle-down to regressive taxes. These are just some of the crimes that Corporate America has lined its pockets with while we lobbed lies at each other from the trenches of identity politics. Now the chickens are coming home to roost. We’re at a point where, as Yeats said, the centre can’t hold and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

The view looks something like this. Wages have been stagnant since the late ’70s while rents have gone up seventy per cent in major metropolitan areas. Buying a house in a city whose seasons aren’t marked by tornadoes, floods or locust swarms has become the singular province of millionaires. More than half of Americans have less than a $1,000 cushion to sit on. The wealthiest one per cent owns nearly forty per cent of all private wealth while the 400 wealthiest Americans have more money than the bottom 150 million combined.

In America now, you’re either rich or scared. Scared like the 1,400 workers who for decades built – and built damn well – Carrier furnaces and heating equipment at a factory in Indianapolis that was responsible for more than a third of parent company United Technologies’ $7.6 billion earnings last year. United Technologies does nearly $6 billion worth of business with the US government, according to a recent New York Times story on this factory closing.

So, in effect, our tax dollars are subsidising the company’s abandonment of Indianapolis for Mexico where it can pay workers five dollars less per hour. You see, nearly $8 billion dollars in profit isn’t enough for shareholders. And Trump has missed no opportunity to use a video showing Carrier workers being sacrificed for “competitiveness” to excite anti-Mexican fervour.

Scared like a generation of young people saddled with $1.2 trillion in debt from usurious student loans, more than 7 million of whom are in default, all of which is carefully calculated to churn out cowed workers who will accept almost no end to their exploitation because they’ve been told they are damn lucky to have a job in this economy – the one in which corporate profits are at all-time highs.

Scared like the fifty-year-old new father who, two summers ago, found himself living in a rat- plagued sublet in a neighbourhood chosen for its proximity to his wife’s temp job. She needed somewhere to easily commute back-and-forth so that she could nurse their six-week-old daughter. And her work was important because that man, a respected practitioner in his field, had been relentlessly downsized while the fewer and fewer jobs available in journalism migrated to the young, the cheap and the compliant.

Not long ago, he’d made enough to afford a mortgage on a modest house. He wasn’t rich, but he could pay his bills, take care of his family, get health insurance and even save a little. Now, in the sixth or seventh year of the recovery – or so we’re told – he’s an itinerant, stringing gigs together to come up with half the income he’d made before the Great Recession.

That guy is me, and I believe the fear that struck me two summers ago is now so commonplace that it’s driving us to the crazy extremes playing out during this insane election. Demagogues like Trump egg on the fear and whip it into hate – a divide-and-conquer tactic that’s as old as the Civil War. Meanwhile, the saner of us watch and worry that the great American dream of ordinary people living productive lives free from the tyranny of economic persecution is so far gone that we don’t have a clue how to bring it back.