Its that mob, that base, that's the problem. That's the reservoir of bigotry that demagogues tap into to promote policies that benefit them (the demagogues)while preying on the very constituency they have conned into supporting them. There are not really that many of them, perhaps a quarter or, at most, a third, of the adult population. But they see themselves as a class, and they have achieved a class consciousness, (one typified by a historical, cultural and economic constellation of shared values and beliefs and interests) and unscrupulous leaders have convinced them this constellation is somehow centered on their ethnicity and their race, their nationality or their nativism. And as a class, they act with a common purpose and respond to a common message.

And the question is, where does that reservoir spring from, what is its origin, its source? That's a historical question, one for another post. But as long as that reservoir is present, the Trumps of this world will have an endless supply of followers. And its not just here, you can see it happening in Europe, in Russia, wherever there is a middle class that feels threatened and cheated, a bourgeosie that senses hard times are just around the corner (if not already here!) and that refuses to identify who the real villains are because it has been conned into following the wrong leaders.

No one enjoys realizing they have fallen for a con. Most would rather blame some external enemy; the foreigners, the Jews, the Communists, the Liberals, the "elites", ANYBODY but the caste they have chosen to trust and who they wish to emulate. They have been promised that if they worked real hard and followed the rules that they would be rewarded, that they would be offered a seat at the table. Unfortunately for them, the hard work and denial they lavished on this promise has been harvested by someone else. And now they are pissed and looking for scapegoats. And the Trumps of this world are only too eager to provide them.

Who are they? They go by many names, in my youth they were "hard hats" or "rednecks" or "straight dudes". Today they are "deplorables" or "white nationalists" or "populists". They were in Germany and Italy and Spain, too, where they followed Hitler and Mussolini and Franco. In Argentina they followed Peron and Evita. But its not their fault. Its just those people who are disappointed and forgotten who suddenly realize what has happened to them, that they have indeed been abandoned, betrayed, stabbed in the back, and who have somehow been misled into thinking that the very peoples and ideologies responsible for their troubles are now the only possible source of their redemption.

Trump is not the root cause of the decline of American Democracy. He's just the inevitable symptom and latest manifestation of it. If it wasn't him, it would be someone else. The Conservative movement is full of substitutes ready to take his place, and they share the same ideology of fear, hate, anger, suspicion and revenge.