A sad thing to do on Christmas Day.

It seems almost perverse to write a blog on Christmas Day, okay there is not much television, there are no newspapers today and its many hours before I confront my Christmas partridge( not mercifully on a pear tree) . However this Christmas I am more than a little disturbed, a few days ago we had a conversation with an old friend in California, Skype is a wonderful tool. Susan, our friend, who is usually the spirit of optimism, the sort of American who could well have been up along there with the founding fathers( except of course she would be a founding mother) who left the old autocracies and tyrannies of Europe to create a new world in a new continent in the spirit of the Enlightenment.

Friends of mine are often quite surprised when they hear me a hardened cynical old leftist speak warmly of the creation of America. Of course it has a history much of which is hideously reactionary that includes the destruction of the Native American people, the ruination of much of the natural resources of the country and of course the horror that was slavery.

Yet yet it's hard not to admire the courage of those men and women who founded the country, who resisted the imposition  of the British Empire and who wrote the constitution that has never been bettered in the history of mankind, although sadly today much of it is ignored and treated with contempt and outright hatred. I know Thomas Jefferson kept slaves( although his death  gave them their freedom) and John Adams may have been a bit of an old detail merchant( yet in the constitution he wrote for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts it enshrined equal education for girls) and even George Washington was a bit autocratic at times.

Yet America produced heroes who challenged the old world  and sought change for the benefit of all mankind, dear old Tom Paine, an East Anglian by birth would have been a remarkable man at any time in history.

So when Susan talked last week about the fears she has for her country drifting into some sort of tyranny, ruled by a despot it seemed to me that her world view was far too pessimistic even for someone living in the belly of the beast.

Then in Sunday's Observer there was an article by Heather Cox Richardson a professor of history at Boston College and sent shivers down my spine and I've been thinking about Susan's words  and also Prof Richardson's piece the last few days. If you have missed the article consider please the opening sentence:

'Since January there have been frightening signs that America is becoming an oligarchy overseen by dictator. From the first, Donald Trump has followed an authoritarian playbook,, beginning with his rejection of objective reality.'s early on to defend the assertion that the crowd at Trump's inauguration was the biggest ever witnessed, presidential spokesperson Kellyanne Conway explained that the administration used"alternative facts". Since then, the president has repeatedly attacked fact-based media as"fake news". Indeed, with his insistence  on alternative reality, from sometimes seems like an elderly Fox news- addled neighbour suddenly given power to make his bizarrely warped view of America  real'.

Prof Richardson goes on to say chillingly:

'But now, it feels all too real, with from delivering on the economic core of his vision.  He has slashed regulations that protect workers, walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership,attacked theAffordable Care Act("Obamacare") and gutted the government. Finally in a dramatic"win" for his administration, the Republicans last week passed a major tax overhaul that slashes taxes primarily for the wealthy and is projected to create an almost $1.5 trillion deficit. Republicans have already said that the only way to address that4 will be with cuts to Medicare and Social Security you.

Prof Robinson pointed out that for decades he has been the policy  of the Republicans that government needed to be small and that regulations and taxes weakened the power of big business to prosper because of course they argued that strong business would eventually ensure a wealthy economy that would trickle down to the poorest in society(sound familiar ?) That's why they were bitterly opposed  FDR'sNew Deal that got America out of the 1930s depression. She went on to draw attention to the policies of Ronald Reagan, whose Conservative policies which argued that government was not the solution to the contrary is problems government he argued was the problem. Of course what that meant was that the poorest in American society got poorer and the rich richer, and more than that it was a white racist policy, because of course so many  Afro-Americans were indeed the poorest and most dispossessed  section of the community.

Reagan personified the rugged Individualist, The myth of the American cowboy hero riding outTo save the virtue of the beautiful white girl.

Trump represents the spirit of Reagan with balls on(an unfortunate image), he has used in a few short months racism and misogyny and as Prof Robinson puts it:
"Brags about how he knows better than anyone how to run a successful business, how to find Isis, how to find  the"best people"for office...... Turning the government over to small cadre of wealthy businessmen, unhampered, to run the country so see fit. When Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore will his cowboy hat and rode his horse to the polls in Alabama, he was deliberately embodying Republican individualist principles.'

If you add to the tribalism and racism inherent in the American Republican right  then it's only a small short step after trashing the press, the State Department, the security services and the FBI and relying only on a small group of unreconstructed Alt-right Crazies(And remember that Nigel Farage is one of them) then the stage is set at some time in the near future for America  to fall apart in chaos  and then the strong leader will emerge taking all power in his own hands(and those of his chums) and declaring that America has redefined democracy in terms of what you would call it- how about neo-fascism?.

Best try and see the musical'Hamilton' before Trump removes the passports from the actors and declares them non-Americans.