@McTraveller: the desire for a "return to normal" is nice and all, but it will do nothing but ensure a second trump cones along. Probably a smarter one, too. The grievances that elected him (and they were not all racially motivated, though many of them were)
Well historically speaking, the racial thing is a scapegoat for the underlying grievances. The 'average' German in the 1930s probably wasn't largely motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment as the
underlying reason they were pissed off, it was the collapse of the economy post 1929, and the Nazis, who were the full on anti-semitic people then capitalized by directing that anger at a scapegoat. Similarly the rank and file Nazis probably couldn't really give a shit about Jews or otherwise. They were in it for the power and/or freedom to commit violence. For example, if the death camps had non-Jews mixed in there by accident, do you think any of the killers would give a shit. They couldn't really care any less. They only wanted to kill a bunch of people, regardless of who they were killing. Anti-human at the heart of it, and any specific traits of the people they were killing were only window dressing which made it ok. Run out of Jews, gays, communists etc and they'd probably round up the dirty stamp collectors or train spotters and kill those people too. If such a thing goes on long enough, the bar is constantly lowered on who you're killing / arresting, see Stalin's Russia for examples of that.
Similarly, Trump capitalizes on rust belt loss of jobs by directing that anger at Chinese and hispanics (your job went overseas or someone from overseas is coming to take your job), and capitalizes on urban decay and infrastructure under-investment by directing anger at black people / hispanics (fears of social instability and neighborhoods being encroached by crime). The people losing their jobs aren't
motivated by a deep seated hatred of Chinese people: in neutral circumstances they wouldn't have any opinion on them one way or another.
I think it would be similar with black people too, plenty of southern racist types seem ok with
specific black people they meet, the 'ok' ones, but they will still speak out against the 'group' as a whole but they do so in broad terms linking them to, and blaming them for, negative societal issues and trends. Correct me if I'm totally off base, but relatively few will ever say they don't like black people just because they're black, but rather they link them to real social issues (poverty, homelessness, crime, drugs, collapse of families etc) which are perfectly reasonable to be concerned about, it's just not reasonable to make it a race issue, and that's where the political right come in and exploit these underlying fears of social instability by directing those fears at recognizable targets.
Also, by making those issues a thing that's about black people you no longer have to think about them as much, since they by definition are happening to someone else. So it's no longer the point that family structures are broadly collapsing and divorce rates are skyrocketing, that's the fault of the Democrats and their inner city policies related to black people.
I'll add onto what Max said here, Marx's Historical Materialism is a whole different kettle of fish to the idea of bolting-together a "communist society". Historical Materialism is about how productive forces in a society lead to technological changes and how those changes inevitably change the economic status quo, leading to a paradigm shift*. It takes the emphasis away from specific choices and focuses on systemic trends. e.g. capitalism was the inevitable outcome of the industrial revolution, basically because it outcompetes rival systems. The point here is that systems which
outcompete other systems inevitably rise to be the dominant system. Nietzsche makes similar points. Leninist style communist states attempt to control the whole milieu, so they don't allow the competitive forces that Marx was talking about to even take place. A centralized state which tries to aggressively hold back the competitive elements of production is not much different to a theocratic state which tries to hold back the flood of new ideas and science, and both end up having elements in common.
* the paradigm shift in Marx's communism is actually the point at which the process of automation makes labor itself obsolete (“labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.”. Consider this as the idea that
work itself is moving up Maslow's heirarchy of needs over time; so communism is the point at which you don't need to work for basic needs at all, but you work to have something to do). And he argues that at this point the existing capitalism mechanisms for distributing goods will no longer make any sense: since the economic forces shape the society, it's when there's a paradigm shift in the economic forces that a new system can arise, and not before that. So any state which
centralizes the concept of labor as the organizing principle isn't in fact "communism" under Marx's definition. In fact such labor-states actually fight against the very advancements that would lead to the communist state as envisioned by Marx, since you get vested interests to keep the centrality of labor in the economy, i.e. forced job placements and economic disincentives to further automate since you have to employ those people anyway.
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