From its inception, America, by virtue of its structure and practices, has always been a fascist aristocracy with leanings toward a feudalistic economy. [Republican friends, don’t stop reading – hear me out.] The democratic processes we associate with America were always intended to be limited it to the interactions among the aristocracy. The aristocracy consists of white males of European ancestry. It set out to form a permanent underclass consisting primarily of African slaves along with all other people of color who found their way to its shores. It’s appeal to the European proletariat in its early beginnings was the lure of being able to come to a place where by virtue of their skin color, they became immediate members of the aristocracy with the ability to establish their own little private kingdoms, protected by law and on the backs of the permanent underclass.

       There has always been a tug of war between enlightened white Americans and those committed to the concept of the white aristocracy, so the structure has evolved over the years from slavery, to Jim Crowe and segregation, to active inclusion, to where we are today. The Trump-phenomena is the backlash to the election of a member of the underclass, in the form of Barack Obama to the Whitehouse. The results of the next election will once and for all determine America’s fate. If Trump loses, history will come to regard the entire MAGA movement as America’s last gasp of life for the deeply flawed and dying concept of entitled white supremacy. If he wins, it will be the beginning of the end of America, as it spirals down into oblivion in much the same way as Hitler’s Nazi Germany fell (though in our case, most of the violence will be from within in the form of civil war).

       Donald Trump and his minions have taped into the darkest beliefs of American white people. American culture and tradition has always had a deep undertone of promoting the idea that there is inherent value in being born white and to be white is to be closer to God and more in Gods image. Of course this has never be said directly but is deeply implied in its art and even to some degree in its science. It’s easy to understand this if you watch movies and listen to radio programs of the 1930s thru the early 1960s, where not only were the plots and heroes of their programing and productions indicative of absolute perfection of white men and women, but the idea was reinforced by the fact that people of color were virtually non existent, except in the roles as buffoons, fools, villains and servants. These kinds of subtle suggestions of the purity and perfection of whiteness have been laced in our culture for generations. This is why white Republicans fight and resist so vehemently any attempt to bring in literature or teach public school children any history that casts the African slave in a favorable light or reveal the institutionalized racism that has existed in America from its beginning. The “science” of eugenics was invented in the early 1900s to demonstrate “scientifically” that Africans were more closely related to monkeys and other apes than to white men.

       The fear that arose by the real life debunking of white America’s most deeply, subliminally held beliefs about themselves and particularly about black people by the election of the former President of the United States, Barack Obama, is the wellspring that grew into the MAGA Sea. A Donald Trump was inevitable because even the enlightened white people who are decidedly against racism and bigotry historically have always been willing to tolerate it from the minority of white people who do believe in the aristocracy. This has been the case because its difficult to resist the benefits of white privilege, which is often disguised in the form of better access to capital, better rates for loan payments, better access to certain jobs and positions. The Trumps and other conservative demigods of the world lead them to believe that the reason black people can’t get those benefits and others, like entrance into college, is because they simply don’t measure up to white people. It’s easy to convince them to believe this is true, even though on a certain level, I’m sure they know that without the law looking over their shoulders, many of the gatekeepers of American institutions would deny people entry just because he/she is black.

       At some point, white Americans will have to learn that when you attempt to ostracize one segment of the population of the country for the benefit of another, all the hardships you cause ostracized group will eventually effect the entire population. The best example of this is the opioid epidemic, which now primarily effects rural and suburban white Americans. By the early 1970s FBI director J. Edgar Hoover allowed the urban centers of the United States to be flooded with illegal drugs, knowing that few black inner city dwellers had the access to financial markets to own the property they lived in and could not get the mostly union jobs in large city factories at the time. The only commerce open to them was the illegal drug trade, which served the duel purpose of demoralizing most the citizens of those communities and provided the legal means to incarcerate young black men to stem the tide of the many young black intellectuals arising from those areas, who were at the forefront of the civil rights movement at the time. In so doing, it created a subculture of drug use that eventually was exploited by legitimate business interests that expanded the market into white neighborhoods. With the expansion of the market by the use of new and more addictive legal gateway drugs, the illegal drug market has boomed in the past decade and is the primary catalyst for all of the illegal immigration through the US southern border that continues to plague the United States.

       So who are the real villains responsible for having America on the verge its own self-inflicted Armageddon? The answer is the multinational American corporations, beginning with its financing of Ronald Reagan and the conservative Republican movement that has taken over and controlled this country for almost the past 50 years, since 1980. Ronald Reagan and his dog whistle politics succeeded in convincing white Americans that all their economic woes stemmed from the government’s investments in numerous social programs (almost all of which benefited white Americans far more than black Americans) which he claimed only benefitted black people at the expense of “hard working” white Americans. He convinced his constituents that if they allowed their white owned corporations a free hand in how they do business, they would create so much capital that it couldn’t help but “trickle down” to those hard working white Americans. So those corporations, with, the power that goes with having the White House and most of the Federal Government in their pockets, set out to change its culture from being that of creating the highest quality product, to create the most value for consumers and thereby be able to pay the highest and most competitive wages to its workers, to that of regarding workers as liabilities and consumers as revenue sources entitled to only the level of quality of product necessary for them to continue to buy the product. Under this new corporate ethic, the only people the corporation was obligated to serve were its stockholders and consumers and workers be damned!

      So you see, corporate America has very cleverly used race to manipulate white America to remove all the safeguards designed to prevent them from doing such things as forming monopolies (which are the real cause of inflation), regulate the standards of quality they must provide (which besides protecting the health and safety of consumers, creates the need for quality employees) and permit them to avoid taxes and production costs by moving their factories off shore where they can exploit third world labor forces. When I point this out my conservative friends, they are quick to remind me that Bill Clinton was mainly responsible for the NAFTA agreement that is most responsible American job loss (and which also may have forever caused the Democratic party to lose its base). But if you recall, Bill Clinton’s appeal to the electorate was that he was more Republican than the Republicans on economic issues while being ultra progressive on social issues and for a time was the conservative movement’s worse nightmare. Conservative politics in America has made it possible for corporations, banking institutions and insurance companies to legally steal almost 50% of Middle America’s wealth, which was especially devastating to most of the white people in America. Yet they continue to blame liberal politics for all their shortcomings.

       So inclosing, I would admonish MAGA America to wake up and understand that if you continue on your present course, you will create the very thing that they fear the most – the loss of your freedom of thought and ambition. Trump has already said he will use his power as president to jail all his perceived enemies. If you think that’s going to stop with people in the Democratic Party, you are really living in a fool’s paradise. The first rule of dictatorship is to never give up power. The second rule is to dispatch all your perceived enemies, not just the ones you vanquished to gain power. Once you sign up for dictatorship, you’ve got it forever. So you better get use to walking on eggshells from the day he is inaugurated. You better watch everything you say and everything you do. Because once he gets control over the military and the intelligence community, the path to American self-destruction will be fully paved and ready to go. I’ve given you one man’s interpretation of the history I’ve lived for over 70 years. I have actually witnessed everything I talked about in this essay and by sharing my conclusions I’m hoping you us that information to at least think about what you are about to do. It’s still not to late to do the right thing.