Editorials & Actions
The Global Growth of Right Wing Extremism
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Editor’s note:
Thanks to Tikkun’s media ally TomDispatch.com for its analysis, below, of the European versions of Trumpism by John Feffer and the introduction by Tom Engelhardt. In that introduction, Engelhardt wisely notes that there is a method to Trump’s outrageous tweets–it plays to his most racist base. Feffer adds another dimension by pointing to the failure of liberalism as the source of decent people (not all of whom are racist, sexist, homophobic, antiSemitic, Islamophobic, etc) being willing to turn to the Right (I’d add–not because they think that the Right has a solution but because the Right gives them an opportunity to show how angry they are at the world that liberal politics has created–a giant “fuck you” to the Left that I explore in my article on the psychodynamics of the 2016 election https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/the-psychopathology-of-the-2016-election). But there is another element I also want to add to the method behind Trump’s outrageously racist tweets: they often serve an important function by distracting the media, and through them the American public, into sideshows at the very moment when major disastrous decisions are being implemented by the Republican Congress and parts of the Trump Administration. Now, at the very moment when the Congress is implementing a tax cut that will essentially destroy the possibility for funding much of what liberal and progressive forces have created in the way of an (admittedly inadequate) social support network for middle income working people and the poor, the tweets and outrageous statements by Trump distract attention from what will be a disaster for tens of millions of Americans (though a disaster that will not even begin to become clear till after the 2018 elections, and in their fullest level, when taxes on middle income people rise while the tax breaks for corporations remain in place –which wont be till after the 2020 election).