Watching the Trump phenomenon from outside the United States is a strange spectacle. I am often asked to explain by puzzled observers how such a bombastic, obnoxious, moronic, misogynistic, chauvinistic, racist, and hustler businessman with a record of serial bankruptcies could ever be a serious candidate, indeed a front runner in the Republican Party primaries who seems poised to win the nomination and might be within striking distance of capturing the presidency. Many are often surprised that I am not surprised.
Trump is a Republican creation, notwithstanding the ferocious civil war his candidacy, appeal, and electoral victories have unleashed in the party, the incredulity and panic he has provoked among the party establishment. Trump articulates and represents with frightening clarity the Republican underbelly that same establishment has nurtured for generations, the party’s enduring values—the incurable racism, bigotry, and intolerance, the reflexive jingoism, nativism, and imperial aggression. In Trump, therefore, the chickens of age-old white supremacy and modern neo-conservatism are coming home to roost.
Trump is the ultimate embodiment of white racist rage in the Republican Party and American society triggered by the Obama Derangement Syndrome. Obama’s historic presidential victory in 2008, engendered racist paranoia, as it symbolically upended the stubborn racist order ushered by America’s original sin, slavery; it subverted the abiding hierarchies and hypocrisies of white supremacy and black inferiority. Trump became the prophet of birtherism, the insane notion that Obama was not American born, was not a real American, did not love the country, was a dangerous Muslim radical bent on the destruction of the United States.
The birthers and other white supremacists were cheered on by the Republican Party, shamelessly cultivated, courted, cuddled, and celebrated. The party adopted unyielding opposition to President Obama’s policies even those borrowed from Republicans such as the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, his signature achievement. They treated him with utmost personal disrespect, vowed to make him a one-term president, and when that spectacularly crashed in 2012, to turn him into a failed president. Most recently, in an unprecedented break with tradition the Republicans even refused to hear the president’s budget and flatly declined to consider his nomination to replace the deceased racist Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.
Republican obstructionism and intransigence, their contempt for government and governing, and racist disdain for Obama paved the way for Trump, the hypocritical outsider, and celebrity neo-fascist. Trump’s bloated ego and desperate rhetoric to make America great again tapped into and inflamed the dark forces of white supremacy threatened by vast disruptive forces at home and abroad. Domestically, there is America’s changing demographics, and the rekindled struggles for equality most powerfully represented by the Black Lives Matter movement spawned by police brutality. Globally, American power is in decline, sapped in part by the very historic geopolitical strategic blunders of the neo-conservative wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the rise of new powers especially China.
These disparate developments are connected in the collective mind of Republicans and white racists by the Obama Derangement Syndrome. This syndrome derives part of its power from the fact that Obama’s election simultaneously underscored changes in American society and stoked fears of those changes by many whites whose claims to privilege have historically been embodied in the color of their skin, not the content of their talents. No wonder the widely reported rising self-destructiveness of so-called white Middle America through suicides, alcoholism, and an epidemic of substance abuse. These angry whites constitute the bedrock of Trump’s campaign and followers. Thus the Obama and Trump phenomena underscore both the erosion of racism as a result of generations of civil rights struggles and its resurrection from the battered closets of white supremacy.
The Obama Derangement Syndrome offers a potential historic turning point in American politics on the scale of the realignments of the 1930s-1940s and the 1960s-1970s. The Roosevelt New Deal created a new coalition of the Democratic Party that included African Americans who drifted from the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln. In the immediate aftermath of the successes of the Civil Rights movement, the Republican Party launched its ‘Southern Strategy’ that turned the South from the Democrats to the Republicans.
The transformation accelerated with the defection of the ‘Reagan Democrats’ discomfited by the growing presence of minorities and women and their agendas in the party who found succor in the predominantly white and masculinist Republican Party. The Clinton administration largely conceded Republican hegemony with its ‘New Democratic Coalition’ and ‘Third Way’ rightward centrism. Under President Obama the Democratic Party not only recovered and flexed its long muted liberal voice, the Republicans lost the cultural wars and began spiralling into the tailspin of the Obama Derangement Syndrome. This was evident in the rise of the fundamentalist zealotry of the Tea Party and Washington’s descent into shameless incivility and ungovernability.
Now, we are witnessing the fracturing of the Republican Party under its incurable infection by the Obama Derangement Syndrome. This is one reason Obama is a historic president, notwithstanding all the limitations of his administration both self-imposed and those inflicted by Republican obduracy. His era will be remembered for ushering a possible realignment of American politics reminiscent of the interwar and post-civil rights eras. The future will be played, at least for a while, on terms his presidency has set.
The Obama Derangement Syndrome is of course not confined to electoral politics, to the flirtations and fixations with Trump’s dangerous buffoonery. It can be seen in other institutional contexts from corporate boardrooms to college campuses, and in the often deadly encounters of black communities with police, in the backlash against diversity and inclusion, in the perverted discourses of white victimization. The Obama Derangement Syndrome gave rise to the Tea Party and Trump phenomenon, which spawned new struggles for equality and inclusion spearheaded by the Black Lives Matter movement.
In the academy, the institutional context I'm most familiar with, the Obama era initially seemed to open new possibilities for minority faculty, students, and administrators but gradually gave way to the corrosive reversals of microagression and the persistence, even new reincarnations, of structural exclusions. For example, at one of my former universities in New England, far from the allegedly more racist South, after I and another black administrator left, the senior administration reverted to being blissfully all white. This would make Trump and his fervent supporters proud and at home there.
No wonder Trump is making electoral waves across the proverbial divides of the North and South. He is the Frankstein created by Republicans and racists, inflamed and unhinged by the Obama Derangement Syndrome. He offers America an ugly mirror of its past and present and future in its failure to slay the beast of racism, bigotry, and intolerance.
Republicans, Racists, and the Obama Derangement Syndrome
Trump is a Republican creation, notwithstanding the ferocious civil war his candidacy, appeal, and electoral victories have unleashed in the party, the incredulity and panic he has provoked among the party establishment. Trump articulates and represents with frightening clarity the Republican underbelly that same establishment has nurtured for generations, the party’s enduring values—the incurable racism, bigotry, and intolerance, the reflexive jingoism, nativism, and imperial aggression. In Trump, therefore, the chickens of age-old white supremacy and modern neo-conservatism are coming home to roost.
Trump is the ultimate embodiment of white racist rage in the Republican Party and American society triggered by the Obama Derangement Syndrome. Obama’s historic presidential victory in 2008, engendered racist paranoia, as it symbolically upended the stubborn racist order ushered by America’s original sin, slavery; it subverted the abiding hierarchies and hypocrisies of white supremacy and black inferiority. Trump became the prophet of birtherism, the insane notion that Obama was not American born, was not a real American, did not love the country, was a dangerous Muslim radical bent on the destruction of the United States.
The birthers and other white supremacists were cheered on by the Republican Party, shamelessly cultivated, courted, cuddled, and celebrated. The party adopted unyielding opposition to President Obama’s policies even those borrowed from Republicans such as the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, his signature achievement. They treated him with utmost personal disrespect, vowed to make him a one-term president, and when that spectacularly crashed in 2012, to turn him into a failed president. Most recently, in an unprecedented break with tradition the Republicans even refused to hear the president’s budget and flatly declined to consider his nomination to replace the deceased racist Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.
Republican obstructionism and intransigence, their contempt for government and governing, and racist disdain for Obama paved the way for Trump, the hypocritical outsider, and celebrity neo-fascist. Trump’s bloated ego and desperate rhetoric to make America great again tapped into and inflamed the dark forces of white supremacy threatened by vast disruptive forces at home and abroad. Domestically, there is America’s changing demographics, and the rekindled struggles for equality most powerfully represented by the Black Lives Matter movement spawned by police brutality. Globally, American power is in decline, sapped in part by the very historic geopolitical strategic blunders of the neo-conservative wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the rise of new powers especially China.
These disparate developments are connected in the collective mind of Republicans and white racists by the Obama Derangement Syndrome. This syndrome derives part of its power from the fact that Obama’s election simultaneously underscored changes in American society and stoked fears of those changes by many whites whose claims to privilege have historically been embodied in the color of their skin, not the content of their talents. No wonder the widely reported rising self-destructiveness of so-called white Middle America through suicides, alcoholism, and an epidemic of substance abuse. These angry whites constitute the bedrock of Trump’s campaign and followers. Thus the Obama and Trump phenomena underscore both the erosion of racism as a result of generations of civil rights struggles and its resurrection from the battered closets of white supremacy.
The Obama Derangement Syndrome offers a potential historic turning point in American politics on the scale of the realignments of the 1930s-1940s and the 1960s-1970s. The Roosevelt New Deal created a new coalition of the Democratic Party that included African Americans who drifted from the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln. In the immediate aftermath of the successes of the Civil Rights movement, the Republican Party launched its ‘Southern Strategy’ that turned the South from the Democrats to the Republicans.
The transformation accelerated with the defection of the ‘Reagan Democrats’ discomfited by the growing presence of minorities and women and their agendas in the party who found succor in the predominantly white and masculinist Republican Party. The Clinton administration largely conceded Republican hegemony with its ‘New Democratic Coalition’ and ‘Third Way’ rightward centrism. Under President Obama the Democratic Party not only recovered and flexed its long muted liberal voice, the Republicans lost the cultural wars and began spiralling into the tailspin of the Obama Derangement Syndrome. This was evident in the rise of the fundamentalist zealotry of the Tea Party and Washington’s descent into shameless incivility and ungovernability.
Now, we are witnessing the fracturing of the Republican Party under its incurable infection by the Obama Derangement Syndrome. This is one reason Obama is a historic president, notwithstanding all the limitations of his administration both self-imposed and those inflicted by Republican obduracy. His era will be remembered for ushering a possible realignment of American politics reminiscent of the interwar and post-civil rights eras. The future will be played, at least for a while, on terms his presidency has set.
The Obama Derangement Syndrome is of course not confined to electoral politics, to the flirtations and fixations with Trump’s dangerous buffoonery. It can be seen in other institutional contexts from corporate boardrooms to college campuses, and in the often deadly encounters of black communities with police, in the backlash against diversity and inclusion, in the perverted discourses of white victimization. The Obama Derangement Syndrome gave rise to the Tea Party and Trump phenomenon, which spawned new struggles for equality and inclusion spearheaded by the Black Lives Matter movement.
In the academy, the institutional context I'm most familiar with, the Obama era initially seemed to open new possibilities for minority faculty, students, and administrators but gradually gave way to the corrosive reversals of microagression and the persistence, even new reincarnations, of structural exclusions. For example, at one of my former universities in New England, far from the allegedly more racist South, after I and another black administrator left, the senior administration reverted to being blissfully all white. This would make Trump and his fervent supporters proud and at home there.
No wonder Trump is making electoral waves across the proverbial divides of the North and South. He is the Frankstein created by Republicans and racists, inflamed and unhinged by the Obama Derangement Syndrome. He offers America an ugly mirror of its past and present and future in its failure to slay the beast of racism, bigotry, and intolerance.
Republicans, Racists, and the Obama Derangement Syndrome
