PHOTOS: Ted Quant, davidduke.com
The clown prince of real estate, Donald Trump, has traded his most famous catchphrase, “You’re Fired!” for one more fitting to a 2016 presidential campaign: “Make America Great Again.”
Trump — racist, misogynist, and American huckster extraordinaire — makes an appeal to people who feel America has been made ungreat. The threats to America’s greatness, according to Trump logic, are a broad-based coalition of women, Mexicans, Muslims, and African-Americans — all set to besiege the white-male breadwinner and disintegrate the family.
From his supporters beating black and brown protesters, and the Trump-inspired hate crimes against Latinos and Muslims, to telling Jorge Ramos to go back to Univision, knee-jerk misogyny against women, and outright fascist comments about deporting people regardless of birthplace, Trump has waged a successful campaign based on fear and hatred.
Though whatever groups he attacks may be interchangeable, they are not picked at random. Each group emerges from historically developed conditions. Each is vulnerable to attack because of its current position in society.
The question of the southern border, for instance, cannot be understood without understanding the history of the Mexican American War by which it was forged.
In 1829, the second president of Mexico, the Afro-Mexican Vincente Guerrero, legally abolished slavery. The U.S. was then a slavocracy under control of the Southern slave owners. Already tense from the liberation of Haiti in 1804, they saw this also as a threat to their way of life. So the question of Texas, where many slave owners had settled, became key to the U.S. slavocracy, which was already in conflict with the developing industrial North.
The war for Mexican territory began in Texas and was driven by slave interests. However, the broader war for greater territory united the interests of both the slave owner and the industrialist. The political and economic unity of the propertied classes on the question of the seizure of Mexican territory was expressed under the banner of Manifest Destiny (the belief that Americans were destined to own the entire area which is now the U.S.).
Leading military figures later on both sides of the American Civil War took part in the land grab against Mexico. For the slaveowners, new territory represented new land for cotton production. For the industrialists new territory represented a new frontier for railroads and industrial production. The notion of stretching “from sea to shining sea” also represented a means to reach the Asian market, then controlled by Western European imperialism.
The subsequent development of the American Southwest in the land that was once Mexico has been and remains dependent on the suppression of the wages and labor of the peoples of the southern border.
When Kelly Osbourne’s immediate response to Trump’s assertion about Mexico sending rapists to the U.S. is to ask, “If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilets,” everyone knows what is being said. From agricultural work to the service economy, the bulk of the so-called and so-felt undesirable labor of the American Southwest is carried out by Mexican and Central American hands.
This is not new and was developed by the 20th century U.S. government importing and exporting human labor. Mexican labor in the U.S., regardless of origin of birth, experienced two major forced migrations in the 20th century, the Mexican Repatriation Act and Operation Wetback. These are the very policies Trump says he plans to use against the peoples of the southern border.
Solely on the basis of race, Trump has convinced a huge section of the population that he and they have shared interests in making America “great” again.
But the actual conditions of all working people will not be solved by billionaires nor by a political establishment in the service of billionaires. The problems of the working people, whether or not they can find work these days, will be solved by the people themselves.
