ALLAN NAIRN ON HOW TRUMP DRAGGED A RIGHTIST REVOLUTION TO POWER
Jeremy Scahill
May 28 2018, 11:05 a.m.
' .... Trump dragged a rightist revolution into power. It’s the Paul Ryan agenda which could never have gotten elected in its own right, because it’s anathema to most Americans — slashing Medicare, slashing social security, transferring trillions of dollars from the working people, and even the poor and the middle class to the very rich. Mitt Romney kind of tried to run on that and failed. Ryan, in his own right, could never get elected president. But Trump, with his genius for unleashing the beast in white America, touching these deep chords of racism that succeeded in turning a crucial number of previous white Obama voters into Trump voters, precisely, in large part, because of his racist appeals and his appeals to fear.
He succeeded in dragging the Republican Party into the White House with a minority of the votes. And this is a Republican Party that is one of the most radical mainstream political parties in all of American history, perhaps with the exception of the pro-secessionist Democrats at the time of the Civil War. And they’ve been in there, they’ve been implementing a rightist revolution, doing the massive transfer of wealth in part via the tax bill, but also an important part by systematically, agency by agency, trying to gut the constraints on large corporations and the oligarchs, regarding the environment, their treatment of labor, their ability to discriminate, their ability to commit fraud without fear of being sued by the public, increasing the rights of rich individuals to intervene in politics, decreasing the rights of collectives of working people to intervene in politics, like the Gorsuch-led Supreme Court decision just the other day, inhibiting the ability of workers to file class-action lawsuits against their employers.
It’s a systematic program that’s been in the works since 1980, really. In a sense, it dates back to the old Powell memorandum, where Powell, who later joined the Supreme Court, said we, the representatives of the rich, we’ve got to fight back against this new environmental movement, against this consumer movement, against the labor movement, and also implicitly against the Civil Rights movement. “These people have been making too many gains, we’ve got to organize ourselves.”
And they did! They created Heritage, and this whole other elaborate apparatus, and later the Koch Brothers came in, and they created ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. They sent people down to the state legislature. And they’ve been working on this program for decades.
And, now, as the Republican Party has evolved to the most radical extreme, Trump dragged them into power again. They happen to have control of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. And they’ve been going around rigging the system so that a diminishing minority of people can hold power and continue to govern. Just as Trump was elected with a minority of the votes, they’re trying to set it up through a long list of tactics, including purging of voter rolls, voter suppression shortly before Election Day, gerrymandering, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, smaller and smaller numbers of people can win elections and retain power.'
theintercept.com/2018/05/28/allan-nairn-trump-revolution/