Red America raised me. Now I fear it will raze America

I grew up in red America. Good people, good people, as we are always dutifully required to say. But with a dark side.

They sulked after the Civil War and they sulked some more during the decades of Democratic dominance after the Great Depression. Then, they seethed over the implicit rebuke that came with the passage of major civil rights reforms in the 1950s and ’60s.

Seeing red: Donald Trump has opened the door to a new era of American politics.Credit: AP

In the wake of the realignment that came with the rise of Ronald Reagan, their power recovered, but everyone could see that the burghers of the Republican Party were just paying lip service to their id. They seemed to be afraid of something. They had suspicions and conspiracy theories. Communists (Dwight Eisenhower was one if you didn’t know) could be found under almost any rock.

There were resentments, too, though the particulars were difficult to pin down. We heard talk about the good ol’ days. Well, in the good ol’ days of, say, Eisenhower, America built the interstate highway system and did it by taxing rich people at breathtaking levels. Social security kept millions of old folks out of poverty. The GI Bill provided homes for hundreds of thousands of families. Those taxes saw untold millions of dollars taken from blue-state residents and poured into poor red states to build up infrastructure, dam rivers and electrify farms. We educated generations, essentially for free. It was a shocking redistribution of wealth, but you didn’t hear complaints about that back then, or now for that matter, from red America.

America created the world’s greatest educational system, increased standards of living by an order of magnitude, won the Cold War and built the internet – and yet, the Republican Party has thrived while consistently attacking the mechanisms that created these miracles.

After the civil rights era came whites marrying blacks (red America was against it), equal rights for women (it was against that, too) and even acceptance of gay people, which it fought with increasing hysteria for decades. (Did you know that, into the 21st century, you could get arrested in Texas for participating in the sex act that Donald Trump mimed over a mic stand the other day?)

Red America mostly seethed. But then the latent power of this atavistic force was energised and connected by the internet. They came together first to create the so-called Tea Party and then to become the front line of Donald Trump’s shock troops.

Once this potent admixture was assembled, we saw, unfolding in real time, how their anger and resentments, absurd as they were, could be harnessed. Trump, the most extraordinary political figure of our time, did it. With yipping sycophants, two-bit bullies, canny connivers and vacuous cynics surrounding him, Trump tested the waters of violating norms once, twice, three times and then, emboldened, seemingly every day. We saw an arrogance and cruelty that toyed with vulgarity and hurtful rhetoric and then became defined by it.

And now he has won, opening a door into a new and unthinkable era of American politics.

To students of the evolution of democracies, this is not unheard of. America’s founding fathers studied the Greeks and the Romans, who knew of the men who inflamed the populace with lies and extreme rhetoric. The founding fathers foresaw a potential problem of their novel construct – the demagogue who flatters the populace and says he’s their saviour. Here’s Alexander Hamilton, before he was a Broadway star, reflecting on that risk in the first Federalist Paper:

“A dangerous ambition … often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people … [Of] those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people – commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”

Barack Obama with Donald Trump at his inauguration as president in January 2017. Obama reportedly called his successor a “madman”.Credit: Bloomberg

America has accepted the idea of a second Trump presidency. I wish I could say the checks and balances the founders enshrined in the Constitution held. In fact, the cowards and sycophants in both houses of Congress too often enabled Trump during his first term and refused to put up guardrails. We saw the Supreme Court, which is supposed to provide a definitive final guardrail, too often remove it.

In the Barack Obama years, it was a mantra on the right that he was acting like a king. Now, the right is constantly carping about something called the “unitary executive” theory, in which the president gets to act very much like one.

That left us to depend on the people and the voting franchise. We have seen its baleful side for eight or nine years. We’ve been too kind in describing Red America. We’re supposed to defer to these red state and rural folk as good and true Americans frustrated by this or that. But they are the ones who have thrown off American values. They persecute those less fortunate than themselves and hide behind religion when they do it; they constantly carp about the Constitution but have repeatedly supported candidates who cheerfully violated its precepts; and from the anonymity of a Klan robe to the anonymity of a Twitter handle, they engage in all manner of cruel and vulgar – those words again – behaviours themselves. The latest target in a long line: trans people.

It seems Harris will end up with about 10 million fewer votes than Joe Biden received in 2020. For every 50 Americans who would allow a woman a right to an abortion, there are seemingly 51 satisfied to elect representatives who’d be content to watch as young women bleed to death on operating tables in front of doctors unable to save them. Similar percentages will scoff at the efficacy of life-saving vaccines or are willing to watch and stand by while a sturdy ally like Ukraine falls to a menace like Vladimir Putin, endangering the security of the West.

With Republican control of at least the Senate and the White House, the America we will see in the next few years will be, finally, an undistilled red-state version of the country – led by a demagogue. As the founding fathers knew, the one thing a democracy can’t protect against is the people themselves.

Bill Wyman is a former assistant managing editor at National Public Radio, in Washington. He lectures at the University of Sydney.