The Republican convention's first day was filled with sturm und drang, warnings and fear, hysteria and demagoguery. And what were they so concerned about?

The largest fear seems to be that Black people would move into the suburbs, with Black Senator Cory Booker telling them which white houses to take over.

Right behind that was the terror that the Democrats would raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, and use the money to pay for healthcare for low-income people. Especially low-income Black people.

Finally, speakers at the Republican convention repeatedly pointed to the violence Trump intentionally provoked in Portland as a warning about future violence in our cities. Although the majority of Portland protesters were white, the message from the Republican speakers was that Black people are going to burn down our cities, just like when Roger Stone was advising Richard Nixon back in the day.

Sadly, most of the media is treating Trump and the weird show of supplicants and family members last night, as if he were some sort of aberration. In reality, Donald Trump is the logical endpoint of the Republican Party that started, in the Nixon and Reagan years, embracing racialized fear, irrational hatred, and a strategy of pitting Americans against each other.

From Nixon's "silent majority" and "war on drugs" to Reagan's first speech as a presidential candidate near the Mississippi site were three civil rights workers were murdered as he warned an all white crowd about the urgency of "state's rights," the GOP under Donald Trump is fundamentally no different than it has been for the last 60 years.

As much as anti-Trump Republicans on TV like to complain that Trump and his followers have gone over the top, the simple reality is that they are really offended that he is explaining the Republican agenda in simple English.

He's making it clear that "law and order" means keeping down minorities and suppressing dissent, while promoting a police state mentality among law enforcement.

He has explained how "voter fraud" means, in reality, "We have to keep Democrats from voting!"

He has come right out and said that balanced budgets are irrelevant and the only "small" part of "small government" that he cares about are those parts of government to protect Americans from corporate predators.

He has openly called for the destruction of Social Security within the next three years, and his party continues to promote that idea.

The good news is that Americans are waking up to the scam the Republican party has run on them for the last three generations. The bad news is that a third of Americans still buy it.

The survival and future vitality of democracy in this country no rests in the hands of an awakened public. Will our republic survive? Or will we be thrown into the dystopian hellscape that Richard Nixon described and Ronald Reagan begin putting into law?

-Thom