It seems that hooliganism has taken over the presidential elections in the United States, and many of us who are “on the outside looking in” are adopting ever more desperate measures to try to stop the total disintegration of the so-called body politic.  White racist organizations now openly call for the election of candidates like Donald Trump (whether the candidates welcome such endorsements or not) to re-establish White Power and “take our country back” (if that’s what they want to do, then they should get on a boat, go back to Europe and do just that, leaving this country to those who will appreciate its natural wonders – its rightful owners from the First Nations and those of us whose Ancestors were brought here in chains), and those who seek to prevent the next race war are increasingly suggesting electoral strategies that seem to border on desperation.  The days of Black Lives Matter activists loudly interrupting the campaign rallies of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton (something they thankfully still do) now seem downright genteel by comparison.

Here are a few examples from the spectacle we call Electoral PoliTricks 101 from the month of February:

An article titled Ex KKK Grand Wizard David Duke Endorses Donald Trump (http://www.eurweb.com/2016/02/ex-kkk-grand-wizard-david-duke-endorses-donald-trump/), posted February 25 at the Electronic Urban Report (which occasionally reports on politics in relation to the Afrikan-American community but usually concentrates on entertainment and pop culture news), stated the following:

It’s no surprise that Republican candidate Donald Trump has the support of white nationalist and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, David Duke, who today encouraged his radio show listeners to volunteer for the mogul’s campaign.

“Call Donald Trump’s headquarters [and] volunteer,” he said on the “David Duke Radio Program.” At Trump campaign offices, he said, “you’re gonna meet people who are going to have the same kind of mindset that you have.”

According to the Huffington Post, white supremacist groups are working to mobilize their followers to get out the vote for Trump. In Minnesota and Vermont, a white supremacist super PAC called the American National Super PAC has begun circulating a robocall in support of Trump.

“The white race is dying out in America and Europe because we are afraid to be called ‘racist,’ says William Johnson, the leader of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. He goes on to lament the “gradual genocide against the white race,” and how few “schools anymore have beautiful white children as the majority.”

He ends by telling recipients, “Don’t vote for a Cuban. Vote for Donald Trump.”

Like Johnson, Duke also pointed out the racial background of Trump’s GOP rivals, Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Texas). “Voting for these people, voting against Donald Trump at this point is really treason to your heritage,” Duke said Wednesday. And while he doesn’t agree with everything Trump says, he told listeners, “I do support his candidacy, and I support voting for him as a strategic action. I hope he does everything we hope he will do.”

Meanwhile, Harvard University political theorist Danielle Allen (below left) wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post on February 21 titled The Moment of Truth: We Must Stop Trump (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/moment-of-truth-we-must-stop-trump/2016/02/21/0172e788-d8a7-11e5-925f-1d10062cc82d_story.html), in which she analyzes Trump’s rise to prominence in the context of a divided, disaffected and often angry but still immobilized electorate:

Like any number of us raised in the late 20th century, I have spent my life perplexed about exactly how Hitler could have come to power in Germany. Watching Donald Trump’s rise, I now understand. Leave aside whether a direct comparison of Trump to Hitler is accurate. That is not my point. My point rather is about how a demagogic opportunist can exploit a divided country.

To understand the rise of Hitler and the spread of Nazism, I have generally relied on the German-Jewish émigré philosopher Hannah Arendt and her arguments about the banality of evil. Somehow people can understand themselves as “just doing their job,” yet act as cogs in the wheel of a murderous machine. Arendt also offered a second answer in a small but powerful book called “Men in Dark Times.” In this book, she described all those who thought that Hitler’s rise was a terrible thing but chose “internal exile,” or staying invisible and out of the way as their strategy for coping with the situation. They knew evil was evil, but they too facilitated it, by departing from the battlefield out of a sense of hopelessness.

… [W]hen someone asks what is to be done, silence falls. Very many of us, too many of us, are starting to contemplate accepting internal exile. Or we joke about moving to Canada more seriously than usually. …

Trump is rising by taking advantage of a divided country. The truth is that the vast majority of voting Americans think that Trump is unacceptable as a presidential candidate, but we are split by strong partisan ideologies and cannot coordinate a solution to stop him. …

She then follows this analysis by first congratulating Jeb Bush for suspending his campaign and calling on John Kasich, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz to do the same, after which she seems to urge voters to register as Republicans during primary season and cast votes for Trump’s remaining competitor, Marco Rubio, to prevent Trump from securing the Republican nomination.

The only way to stop him, then, is to achieve just that kind of coordination across party lines and across divisions within parties. We have reached that moment of truth. …

Republicans, you cannot count on the Democrats to stop Trump. I believe that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, and I intend to vote for her, but it is also the case that she is a candidate with significant weaknesses, as your party knows quite well. The result of a head-to-head contest between Clinton and Trump would be unpredictable. Trump has to be blocked in your primary.

… If your deadline for changing your party affiliation has not yet come, re-register and vote for Rubio, even if, like me, you cannot stomach his opposition to marriage equality. …

Finally, to all of you Republicans who have already dropped out, one more, great act of public service awaits you. … Be bold, stand up and shout that you will not support Trump if he is your party’s nominee. … Endorse Rubio, together. …

Donald Trump has no respect for the basic rights that are the foundation of constitutional democracy, nor for the requirements of decency necessary to sustain democratic citizenship. Nor can any democracy survive without an expectation that the people require reasonable arguments that bring the truth to light, and Trump has nothing but contempt for our intelligence.

We, the people, need to find somewhere, buried in the recesses of our fading memories, the capacity to make common cause against this formidable threat to our equally shared liberties. The time is now.

Ms. Allen does not go into detail about what strategy she would recommend in the event that Rubio’s political platform, which in many ways is even more xenophobic and dangerous, if less bombastic, than Trump’s, catches fire with the right-wing electorate and poses a real threat to take the White House in 2017. Perhaps that is a subject for a future opinion piece from her.

Ms. Allen, of course, is not the only columnist sounding warning bells about Trump and his involvement in race-infused controversy. A February 17 article in The Guardian titled Donald Trump and the Central Park Five: The Racially Charged Rise of a Demagogue (http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/17/central-park-five-donald-trump-jogger-rape-case-new-york) by Oliver Laughland (below left) discusses Trump’s role in inciting the racist fervor around the case of the Central Park Jogger, who was brutally raped and left for dead in 1989.  Five youths, four Afrikan-American and one Latino, were charged in the rape and assault and were tortured into false confessions.  When the real rapist confessed to the crime and the city of New York released the five after nearly 15 years, Trump expressed outrage at the monetary settlement the city awarded to the now-adult wrongly-accused men, calling it “the heist of the century”.  A few excerpts from the article:

… The miscarriage of justice is widely remembered as a definitive moment in New York’s fractured race relations. But Trump’s intervention – he signed full-page newspaper advertisements implicitly calling for the boys to die – has been gradually overlooked as the businessman’s chances of winning the Republican nomination have rapidly increased. Now those involved in the case of the so-called Central Park Five and its aftermath say Trump’s rhetoric served as an unlikely precursor to a unique brand of divisive populism that has powered his rise to political prominence in 2016. … Michael Warren, the veteran New York civil rights lawyer who would later come to represent the Central Park Five, is certain that Trump’s advertisements played a role in securing conviction. “He poisoned the minds of many people who lived in New York and who, rightfully, had a natural affinity for the victim,” said Warren. “Notwithstanding the jurors’ assertions that they could be fair and impartial, some of them or their families, who naturally have influence, had to be affected by the inflammatory rhetoric in the ads.” … For many who have studied Trump’s rise to prominence, the Central Park case provided an early glimpse into how his racially charged views entered his political and tactical mindset.

“He has this penchant for what you might call otherising,” said Michael D’Antonio, the author of Never Enough, a recently published Trump biography. “I think he knew what he was doing by taking a side, and I think he knew he was aligning himself with law and order, especially white law and order. I don’t think that he was consciously saying ‘I’d like to whip up racial animosity’, but his impulse is to run into conflict and controversy rather than try to help people understand what might be going on in a reasoned way.” …

After declaring in his [2015] campaign announcement that Mexico was “bringing crime” and “rapists” to the US [3], Trump quickly seized on the murder case of a 32-year-old white woman in San Francisco [8] in which an undocumented Mexican migrant is the chief suspect. He has since frequently condoned and incited violence against protesters at his rallies [9], and has vowed to bring back waterboarding of terror suspects [10]. In referencing a promise to issue [11] an executive order to mandatorily execute anyone in the US who kills a police officer, he said: “We just can’t afford any more to be so politically correct.”

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, activists are putting steady pressure on both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to speak out more forcefully on issues of concern to the Afrikan American electorate, from support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities to steps their administrations would take to stop police brutality. According to a February 25 article by Antonio Moore for the Electronic Urban Report, Black Lives Matter Activist Interrupts Hillary Clinton, Demands Apology for Mass Incarceration (http://www.eurweb.com/2016/02/black-lives-matter-activist-interrupts-hillary-clinton-demands-apology-mass-incarceration/):

A #BlackLivesMatter activist, Ashley Williams … held up a sign stating “We have to bring them to Heel”, a statement used by Hillary Clinton in support of the criminal justice bill during the mid 1990’s. The activist also demanded an apology for Clinton’s role in the incarceration of black American youth during her husband’s time in the White House.

The Clinton campaign has a number of questions to answer on this issue, as well as her connections to Wall Street, which Sanders has highlighted over the past few months, and her role in the 2012 attack on Libya in which Libya’s President, Moammar Gaddafi, was killed.  That assault by NATO, which was supposedly done in support of United Nations Resolutions 1973 and 1976, designed to prevent violence against Libyan citizens, went far beyond simply “protecting civilians” and amounted to a series of direct missile attacks on Gaddafi’s headquarters in Tripoli, his home town if Sirte and his fleeing convoy, which left him defenseless against the angry mob that essentially hacked him to death.  This was seen as a curious decision since Gaddafi at the time had renounced terrorism, had awarded monetary settlements to victims of terrorist acts by Libyan agents and had offered to assist NATO in preventing the spread of terrorist groups in North Afrika. 

Meanwhile, Sanders faces a degree of alienation from Afrikan-American voters, and as he works to close that gap, he will ultimately need to deal with a couple of burning (“Feel The Bern”) questions regarding a statement he had made that he did not support Reparations (not that any of the presidential candidates do), though he has made the establishment of comprehensive programs for jobs in the Afrikan-American community, free college education for all, truly affordable health care for all and support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities regular planks in he recent campaign speeches. And his image with the more-progressive Afrikan-American and activist communities was damaged by recent accusations concerning a 1998 vote for a Congressional Resolution that included an attached “rider” calling for the extradition of Political Exile Assata Shakur from Cuba.  That Resolution was also voted on by the cast majority of the Congressional Black Caucus, which Congress Member Maxine Waters (D-California) apologized for days afterward, stating that she had not realized the rider was attached to the Resolution until after the vote.  It is not clear to us at this time whether or not Sanders was similarly bamboozled into voting for the Resolution.

Thus, even as the picture of the presidential race seems to be clarifying itself in terms of thinning the herd of candidates, the issues continue to promote confusion among the voters. A divided country once again further splits itself along racial lines as the Afrikan-American electorate is once again caught between the bombast and xenophobia of the right-wingers and the sometimes-shaky commitment to truth and justice from those on the left.