AFTER the Democratic Party Convention, I believed America had fallen into grave danger. After the Republican Convention this past week, I am now convinced of it.

President Trump and his Republican cohort put on a convention immodest in all of its substantive aspects. Yet, I must give the Republicans credit. Their convention was more dramatic and technically better orchestrated than the Democrats’ gathering.  The Republican Convention was a boisterous parade through white supremacist Fantasyland. They painted a picture of a pristine, holy America that never existed. In doing so, they absolved themselves of the violent evils that mar American history. In that they materially benefit from both former ae well as present injustices makes them feign even harder to be blind to the misdeeds committed in their behalf.

Both conventions reveal the moral bankruptcy of the nation pretending to be God’s oasis on earth. Both Republicans and Democrats gloat that America is the world’s exceptional nation. They may be correct but not in the majestic sense they intend. America has the most powerful military and its economy is the largest in terms of monetary GDP. This is quite a feat but past empires have matched it. What makes America exceptional is a cruel trifecta. America is the rare nation created from:  1.) mass murder of the land’s original inhabitants and mass thievery of the land, 2.) ruthless enslavement/legal subjugation of another race and last, 3.) the evolution into a global empire that on multiple occasions has deemed it fit to smother the flicker and flame of liberty in distant lands so that America might profit from a source of inexpensive raw material or from even cheaper human toil.

Thus, in his acceptance speech, Trump waxed nostalgically about white men travelling west toward the Great Plains and Pacific Ocean in covered wagons to settle land, build farms and plant their cities. This is the stuff of western movies, the myth of America. Most people see movies and view the invading cowboys as heroes. The forlorn red man merely trying to defend his land and way of life is perceived as a savage villain.

The Native American had homes, towns, farms and villages, and loved ones. What became of them we all know.  But we have been duped not to care about their extinction because the white American is supreme to the extent that he can do no wrong; even his wicked deeds are woven of sublime and enlightened material. In this mindset, people of other color are wrong for having interests and beliefs different than his; they are wrong for living on land he wants, wrong for owning natural resources he craves, wrong for thinking themselves his equal.

America is that exceptional nation which passed a national law pilfering the land of the five great Indian tribes in the southeastern United States. The law did more than that. It forced members of these ethnic groups to walk a thousand miles with but the meagre possessions they could tote on their backs. Out of the tens of thousands forced into this march, most perished on the way. This march of misery bears the title the “Trail of Tears.” The weary survivors were forced to resettle on strange, less fertile land. After a few decades, they were even forced of this space to areas more remote and desolate. The mass evacuation was for a tainted and malign purpose. America was to perfect a compound evil.

With towns and vast tracts of fertile lands now vacant, whites established the large plantations that would become integral to American lore. They would also take over the homes, towns and lucrative businesses they had forced the Indians to leave behind. On many of the large tracts of land, cotton would be planted. Enchained black people would be “sold down the river” or across the ocean to plant and pick the lucrative crop for those white men eager to lash their aching backs with the whip of daily oppression. These plantations became the blossoms of the American economy.

On the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley, the very heart of this belt of cotton, was the richest part of the country, having more millionaires as a percentage of the population than New York and Wall Street. The aggregate monetary value placed on the enslaved population exceeded the aggregate value of the nation’s entire infrastructure and factory equipment. To hold to this wealth in cotton and slaves, the South ignited the Civil War.

Yet war is but the collision of competing political and economic interests and ideas reduced to violent, physical encounter. After the physical conflagration, the conflicting ideas and interests persists unless one side it utterly vanquished. In the American context, the Republican party is heir to the antebellum white South. The Democratic party is child of the pre-war white North. The North in the Civil War ultimately fought against slavery but it was a rare northern white who viewed a black person as his equal. Mostly for economic and political reasons, Northerners decided it was in their interest for blacks to be free but not as their friends, neighbors or equals.

Over 150 years later, the Republican and Democratic parties remain wedded, with some modest adjustments, to Civil War perspectives on blacks. While white Democrats politically ally with blacks, they do not seek black equality or genuine progress. They merely attempt the minimum necessary to keep black support. Usually this is reduced to a lot of words and a few promises most of which are broken or forgotten soon after an election is done. Republicans just want to resume cracking the whip.

Do not be fooled by the number of black speakers who appeared at the Republican Convention. Black America, like any people, has its scoundrels and opportunists just as it has heroes and martyrs. For the past four centuries, every gathering of blacks that can be described as a struggle for black freedom were infiltrated by traitors. Every slave revolt, every Civil Rights group, Garvey’s movement, Malcolm’s organization, the Black Panthers were subverted by blacks more loyal to white owners or paymasters than to the cause of their own people.  Sad to say, the blacks speaking at the Republican Convention are modern disciples and honor students of the graduate school of black racial treachery.

Thus, the black Attorney General of Kentucky could bleat to the nation that Donald Trump is the savior of Western Civilization. Such an outlandish claim should bar this man from public office. In a romanticized version of things, one can say Roosevelt and Churchill, with a lot of help from Stalin, saved Western civilization from itself by teaming to defeat the Nazi onslaught. However, Trump’s redemptive value to civilization lies somewhere between that of a used car salesman and an itinerant peddler of cheap novelties and potions.

Housing Secretary Ben Carson, the once respected black neurosurgeon, asserted that Trump was a man of great empathy, without a racist bone in his anatomy. To say this, Uncle Ben had to ignore most public utterances Trump has made on race and politics. The most obvious of which are his wild claims that President Obama and now Democratic VP nominee Harris, both nominally black, were not qualified for office because they are not native-born Americans. That Trump only hurls this accusation at blacks is no accident. Yet, Carson can ignore Trump’s blatant racism because position and pocketbook have instructed him to so do. Some charitable souls would suggest with a twist of irony that the once prolific brain surgeon now appears to be in dire need of brain surgery himself. That is not the case. He has not lost his mind. He has sold his soul.

Trump’s and other speeches were replete with phrases like “law and order,” “protection of the suburbs,” and “preservation of the American way of life.” To the uninitiated, these words sound reasonable. If versed in American political history, you see these as shopworn racist euphemisms. Their true meaning is the “black scare” and “ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” These catch phrases convey the same old message: black freedom and equality are to be kept at bay for the good of the white race.  This is but the confederate theme of the Civil War converted to modern lingo. For this reason, Trump and his team bitterly oppose the removal of Confederate Civil War monuments. Most of those monuments were built over 80-100 years after the war itself. Thus, they were not built to commemorate the past; they were constructed to demonstrate that the past was very much alive.

If you don’t take my word, then take that of Trump’s running mate. In one phrase, Vice President Pence revealed the stark racism of his party. During his speech to the adoring convention, Pence said:

“The American People know we don’t have to choose between supporting law enforcement and standing with our African-American neighbors…”

What! The meaning of this sentence is clear.  Pence sees the “American people” as whites. Blacks may possibly be neighbors, and distant at that. However, they do not rise to the status of being “American People.” That status is a whites-only category. The word construction used by Pence was neither a slip of the tongue nor a slip in logic. Perhaps it was Freudian Slip. Willful or not, Pence meant what he said. American people are not blacks and blacks are not American people in his universe. Pence would never consider saying that “the American people know their white neighbors are not racists.” Never in a thousand millennia would he utter such a thing. He would sooner remove his tongue than give voice to such a radical sentiment.

Pence’s phraseology gives deeper context to Trump’s obsessing that Obama and Harris are unqualified for the White House. I am no fan of Obama and Harris, but that they are Americans is unassailable unless you believe America should a racist preserve.