Why? Because…

Blow-hards (several of whom write regularly for the New York Times) are often shy of actual facts. Here is one that precedes, or ought to precede, any analysis of the three recent elections in which now-President Donald Trump was a candidate.

To wit: in those three elections Trump lost, in total, slightly over 222 million popular votes; he won between 214 and 215 million. Only against Harris–that is, a black woman running at the last-minute in the wake of Covid–did Trump win; even against Harris he won by less than 2%. Biden won the Presidency in 2020 by 7%; Harris lost it in ’24 by less than 2%.

In raw numbers he won 2 million plus more votes than did Harris–a change that has enabled Trump to claim a “landslide” though it was in face a nail-biter determined by a handful of hotly contested states. But the fatal difference was enough to generate a demand for explanations, most of which do not hold up on closer analysis.

One of those, however, holds up all too well, and I want to go into it–with a lot of help from one political philosopher (see Note at end of this blog).

I’ve earlier argued is that Trump’s success is based on a deal that he has intuitively made with the white working class: Give him absolute power, and he will absolutely pardon your uses of your own power, however destructive those may turn out to be.

What does he offer? “The answer is a Retrotopia,”a term that I think explains itself. Things were great then and now they’re awful. But based on what–what is the material reality behind that judgment?

The answer that Pia Lara gives–and others have also–is the historic creation, and now a burgeoning reality, of “(White) Democracy” and “racialized capitalism.”

The first is again self-explanatory, but at its core is the expansion of the never-disappearing Confederacy that in collaboration with the interior states of the nation has come to power. The key element here is the Electoral College, and what gives it concrete force is the experience of demographic division:i

As almost all commentators put it, this is a rural/urban division; but it is also a white working class that is dominated in cultural representation
and economic power: in a common trope, one op-ed columnist refers to the “highly educated wealthy suburbanites.” Oh yes, the power of Rachel Maddow’s Northampton. The inverted snobbery of such descriptions is as worthless as such off-handed social constructs usually are.

So then, what we have, according to the plethora of op-ed columnists that dominate the editorial pages of the Times, is an inverted class structure: the successful versus the excluded. Trump has pushed this division mercilessly.

There is a serious problem with this division and its supposed outcome, however. Trump is an extremely successful performer; he is also a complete failure at effectuating what he performs. He cozies up to enemies and challenges. After months of ignoring disaster, he approved operation Warp Speed; nowhere else has he shown leadership qualities.

He lies about almost everything; proving he’s much better at mismanaging a crisis, economic or political, than managing it. He’s produced nothing of value for the MAGA base, except the following:

1. He’s elevated gun ownership to new heights;
2. He’s made the language of violence to opponents
and retribution for opposition a standard to follow.
3. He’s won the culture war that Pat Buchanan declared at the GOP convention in 1988, though only at the cost of worsening the social division.
4. And he did all of this under the guise of curing an economic crisis, which didn’t really exist, while making no material improvement for the “white working-class.”
5. Summing all this up, he planned an insurrection; and after its failure, doubled down on efforts to overthrow the legitimate government. And then, having assembled a winning coalition for the election of 2024, he harnessed the power of the would-be looters by pardoning them.
6. And since then, he has in that short period set out utterly to destroy the historically democratic institutions of the nation” all the while using the inherent and overwhelming powers of the executive, with help from the Supreme Court.

This has been the road to Fascism wherever it has appeared, and at least temporarily triumphed; but how does it work: the appeal to the unleashed forces of rage that are so prominent on the universal Internet?

As Cristina Beltrán remarks (see end Note), most Americans think that what they have “understood as public freedom and happiness — as collective practices of self-rule — cannot be detached from the political project of whiteness.” But how does this work in practice?

Whiteness is the norm; non-whiteness is to be rejected. But has been long understood by social scientists and historians that it is possible to “become white.” In fact it was possible in the teeth of the worst and deepest rejection, that Jews could become “white,” as we have done.

But the black men, Latinos, right-wing women: how have they all managed this? The answer is that Trump made it possible. The manosphere was his home, to do with as he wished. The non-white men who by their actions and attachments signed on to the manosphere became white–and voted that way in the ’24 Election. The testament they had to give, and have given, is to join the attack on immigrants, now or from the past. They were already men, and now became white.

To prove their position, their loyalty, they have only to join ICE (is that why they wear masks?). Carry guns, wave flags, rule over women who in significant numbers become a significant portion of the Fascistic Right thanks to their evangelical Christian roots, and the War of Abortion to which it leads; not to mention the unassailable position of Trump’s blondes, who govern in public spaces at his command (e.g.,Karolyn Leavitt, Pam Bondi) and so exercise the authority of white men.

All that being accomplished, what has been created is the Rule of White Democracy. This is his master stroke; it is the tie that binds. The impact of that conception is profound: it leads to the most : it leads directly to Trump’s Retrotopia. And in conclusion, it renders powerless the likes of Liz Cheney and other defectors from the GOP that is now a haven for his boot-lickers.

And our conclusion is one simple fact–one simple fact that the Radical Right, the proponents of rape and killing on the Net, believe that they have become the home of true democracy. They have the votes: or at least the only ones that will be counted. What else does “democracy” need to win?

Of course it needs the support necessary to keep that coalition going, and provide what is needed in the realm of policy, where real dollars have to be spent. Put together the votes and the big money; Nothing can now stop them. No one has the right to oppose them — the real people! In the suburbs and big cities: screw us all!

So democracy enters the realm of the super-wealthy–not suburban moms with academic degrees–but the billionaires who, as in the person of Elon Musk or Peter Thiele, have come to expect their due the abolition of the nascent welfare state, of child care, or available medical insurance, or life-savings expenditures in Africa–all that is turned into their total freedom from taxation and regulation that they require and have found their paymaster indeed. They are the masters of the Universe.

There we are: the coalition that only psychopaths of money and power could have created: The all-powerful wealthy and the working-class carriers of male domination. Each gets what they could not else attain so totally. What could be bad?

Well, one last suggestion, with which I shall go out on a limb. The one thing you learn in those wealthy suburban universities or colleges is how to read: to be literate. And to recognize ridiculous lies when you encounter them. And this is what the less-educated apparently cannot do. Every step of the way into the morass of Fascism, they think they are being recognized, and are in fact being screwed to the wall. They will get no sympathy from me; and none, I hope, from you.

NOTE: “The Social Imaginary as Signs of Social Regression: Trump’s Retrotopia,” by María Pía Lara, Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico City, in the on-line international journal of social imaginaries (2025)