The yellow dogs of asymmetric war

The yellow dogs of asymmetric war
by David Benjamin

“I think most people in this country realize that Donald Trump comes from… New York City… a slam-bang, difficult world. It is amazing he is as good as he is. If anything, you have to give him plaudits for the way he has run the country.”
— Senator Orrin G. Hatch

MADISON, Wis. — This is war.

Well, sort of…

One side is fighting tooth and nail, clawing and slobbering, screaming battle cries, waving banners and carrying on as though they’re manning the last barricade against the Four Horsemen.

The other side seems to be just biding their time, crossing their legs and pouring out a tumbler of Chivas.

The combat-happy Joes in this war are, of course, the forces of Donald Trump, a self-molded prophet who can — in the hearts and minds of his faithful— do nothing to shake their pathological devotion. Take hundreds of children away from their parents and put them in cages? No big deal. Trash the FBI and rage against freedom of the press? Cool. Cheat on his wife, betray his friends? Fine. Cozy up to mass murderers and international felons? No problem. Use the White House as family profit center. Nothing to see here. Lie every time he opens his mouth? Hey, man, truth isn’t truth!

What you see, what you read — it ain’t happenin’. Dig?

On the other half of this asymmetric war, two typical non-belligerents were on TV the other night. Confronted by proof that Trump paid off two bimbos, just before the 2016 election, to cover up his serial adulteries, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance danced cautiously around the evidence that Trump had orchestrated a criminal conspiracy. She preferred, judiciously, to await action by Justice Department prosecutors.

Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, dodged the $420,000 question about hush money that Trump funneled to centerfold Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels. These illegal campaign payments and their cover-up are grounds for impeachment far more serious than any of the charges laid against Bill Clinton in 1998, but Murphy preferred not to go there.

Let’s wait, he said, and see.

Despite a drumbeat of impeachment talk on the left, both Vance and Murphy had reason to hold their fire. They are, after all, opposed by an army of Trumpian absolutists and a nearly unanimous reserve of Republican enablers in Congress. Rank-and-file Republicans have rallied to the Trump imposture more loyally than ever they did for real Republicans Ike and the Gipper.

Democrats, indeed, probably grasp this phenomenon — and its implications — better than the Trumpists now on the warpath. Fanaticism is in the Democratic Party’s DNA, dating to the murderous reign of Jim Crow in southern states. It was Democrats from Virginia to Texas who prolonged the Civil War, denied equal rights to — and lynched — black people, and exerted an iron grip on the Solid South. The exclusively white voters who slavishly re-elected slavery nostalgics like Theodore Bilbo and Strom Thurmond (each more vile and openly racist than Trump dares to be) were affectionately referred to as “yellow dog Democrats.”

Today, Trump rules the yellow pack. The worse he behaves, the less effective he is as a lawmaker, the more bombastic, selfish, juvenile and panicky he becomes, the closer his faithful cleave to his monstrous ego. He’s Huey Long without Huey’s subtle savoir faire.

While Democrats were, for a century, split between the northern forces of progressivism and the die-hard warriors of the Confederacy, Republicans stayed calmly out of the fight, thriving from New York to California, hovering near the political center and husbanding a reputation for conservative probity. They were, in word and deed, the party of Lincoln. And they were dull.

When the Democratic Party, under Lyndon Johnson, finally shed its racist past, they set the yellow dogs loose to find new masters. Led by Richard Nixon and oblivious to the menace of hydrophobia (not enough viewings of Old Yeller), Republicans opened the party to an entire menagerie of extremists. The full transition has taken fifty years, but the G.O.P. is now in thrall to a Pitbull-in-Chief whose fur is, appropriately, as yellow as a vaudeville banana peel.

There are leaders in Trump’s party — Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch — who maintain the staid demeanor once characteristic of classic Republicans. But their reserve bespeaks neither dignity nor forbearance. It is the mute residue of fear. They fear Trump’s vindictiveness. They fear the blind and brutish retribution of Trump’s fist-shaking sturmabteilungen. Just as northern Democrats, including FDR, were powerless against the united bigotry of the Solid South, conventional GOP conservatives today feel helpless to stand against a tide of cultists who see themselves as victims of a vast invisible conspiracy, their savior a silver-spoon carnival barker from Queens.

Weird, yeah. But what to do? Should Democrats engage in a war of attrition against a brainwashed mob of unreconstructed secesh, fighting them on their own turf?

That would be wrong. Their opponent in this pointless struggle — America’s worst internal enemy — is both intractable and timeless. Donald Trump, like a string of demagogues before him, has stirred the embers of grievance, intolerance and xenophobia that have always seethed deep beneath America’s vibrant melting pot. He is a threat to the values that have knit peoples of a hundred creeds and colors, origins and beliefs into a national community. But the threat he poses is not — must not be — mortal.

Only we, all of us, can fix it, peacefully. Against my innate pessimism, I believe we will. I don’t think we’re the suckers Trump cracks us up to be.

Eventually, enough of us will pay heed to the fact that Trump has accomplished precious little for the “forgotten man” — except for selling him an ugly, overpriced baseball cap. We’ll notice — soon, I hope — that Trump failed completely to improve the lot of anyone but his cronies, his parasitic kids and a handful of appallingly rich people who’d just as soon not associate with him. It will dawn even on some of his erstwhile voters that Trump has focused the purity of his essence on nothing beyond his own performance. He will be, in his final act, the embodiment of Shakespeare’s “walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more… a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”