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Are Trump voters ready to die for the Donald? This Trump advisor thinks so.
Donald Trump has begun laying the groundwork for resisting an electoral defeat at the hands of Hillary Clinton. On Sean Hannity's Fox Newsshow Monday, Trump said: "November 8, we'd better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged... I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it's going to be taken away from us."
This fits with advice that Trump operative Roger Stone gave to Breitbart's Milo Yiannopoulos a few days earlier, saying: "I think we have widespread voter fraud... If there's voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate... we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government... I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath. The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in."
That's very big talk from Trump and his supporters. Stone says he's only arguing for nonviolent civil disobedience, but that a "bloodbath," presumably instigated by the government, will be the inevitable result. Given the amount of violence encouraged and seen at Trump rallies already, one should heavily discount any claims to non-violence from his corner. But in any case, there are real reasons to doubt that Trumpists are ready to die en masse for their beloved candidate, as Stone suggests. Conditions are hard in many parts of the U.S. — but not nearly hard enough to produce the kind of fanatical zealotry necessary to step into a hail of bullets.
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The talk of resistance, a fall of the government, and a "bloodbath" strongly reminds me of the fate of white right-wing political fortunes in South Africa. During the negotiations to end the apartheid system in 1994, one of the biggest stumbling blocks was a hard core of Afrikaner white supremacists who wanted a boerestaat, or whites-only nation, carved out somewhere. Under the leadership of Eugène Terre'Blanche's Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement, or AWB), sporting Nazi-esque imagery, Afrikaner militants violently disrupted the negotiations between the South African government and the African National Congress — at one point driving an armored vehicle into the building where talks were being held.
Their last stand came in Bophuthatswana (or Bop, for short), the bantustan homeland of South Africa's Tswanas. There Lucas Mangope ran a puppet government propped up by the South African military, and he resisted the anti-apartheid movement sweeping the nation, as it would have meant the end of his regime and career. Mangope solicited the help of ConstandViljoen's Volksfront, a more moderate white right-wing formation, to defend his regime, and the AWB came along to assist.
However, the AWB's reputation was so abysmal that the mostly-black Bop military refused to cooperate. Making things worse, while the Volksfront and Bop military leaders tried to convince them to leave, AWB militants drove around nearby black communities shooting random people. Bop soldiers and policemen were enraged.
Finally the AWB agreed to leave. But as a column of cars was driving out, one AWB militant took aim at a Bop soldier, prompting a hail of gunfire in response. One militant was fatally injured, and two more wounded. As they sat next to their car, begging for medical assistance, with journalists and TV crews right beside them, a furious Bop policeman walked up and shot the two men dead in cold blood.
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It was gruesome and shocking. But the result was a complete collapse in violent white resistance to the end of apartheid. Taking potshots at random civilians was one thing, but it turned out the vast majority of the tough-talking, heavily-armed Afrikaner extremists were not particularly willing to be gunned down fighting for a whites-only nation. They turned tail and retreated.
Three of them were shot like dogs in the glaring publicity of television lights and cameras. That had an enormous effect on the right-wing willingness to resist the elections further by means of violence and terrorism. [The Death of Apartheid]
ANC operative Mac Maharaj added: "I think mothers, wives, parents, for the first time realized that this talk of fighting for a boerestaat meant that their sons and daughters will be killed no matter how tough they talked."
The fascists who took over Italy and Germany, by contrast, organized in a culture far more desperate and accustomed to brutality than South Africa in 1994 or the U.S. today. World War I unleashed unimaginable violence on huge fractions of the European population — unlike the relative handful of people in today's volunteer military. Both Hitler and Mussolini were veterans, as were many of their followers. Economic crises, particularly in Germany, caused extreme deprivation in an age before strong welfare programs. Modern Americans — particularly the reasonably well-off people who actually vote for Trump — are swaddled infants by comparison.
I have no doubt that Trumpists will immediately conjure up a conspiracy theory should Trump lose. They already do that for any poll that doesn't show him winning. And if he does, there will be no shortage of fire-eating extremists like Roger Stone urging a coup d'etat. But there is an abyss between talking big on the internet and attempting some sort of organized massive resistance that might end up in a violent confrontation with the state.
That's not to say there won't be a handful of Trumpist extremists who will try individual acts of terrorism or sabotage. But that's a very different thing from an organized effort to overthrow the government. If the actual violent arm of the state sides with Trump, it might be a different story, but his army of keyboard commandos does not remotely have the courage to shoot it out with the Marines.
