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A few months ago, I told a friend that maybe this whole Trump mess started with two Merle Haggard songs.

One was "The Fightin' Side of Me," and the other was "Okie from Muskogee," both anthems of a defiant, exclusive American identity that locked out "hippies" and any "squirrelly guy who claims that he just don't believe in fightin'."

"I wonder just how long the rest of us can count on bein' free," Merle asks, in "Fightin' Side," a song released in 1970, a year when no American was facing any threat to his/her freedom.

"We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse," Merle wrote in "Okie," as though every town in America didn't do the same.

It's hard to reconcile Haggard's exclusionary jingoistic yawp in those two songs with the delicate Depression-era poetry of "Mama's Hungry Eyes," or the dead-on minimalist pain of "Today I Started Lovin' You Again."

You hate to think that Haggard wrote his "if you don't love it, leave it" song "Fightin' Side of Me" as just a way to milk a couple bucks out of the 1970 pushback against anti-war protesters, but at the same time, that would at least be an excuse that ran back to money rather than true belief.

Contrast "Okie's" line, "Football's still the roughest thing on campus, and the kids here still respect the college dean," with a verse from "Mama's Hungry Eyes": "A canvas-covered cabin in a crowded labor camp / Stands out in this memory I revive / Cuz my daddy raised a family there with two hard workin' hands / And tried to feed my mama's hungry eyes."

That verse dances with socialism, and you wonder if they waved Old Glory over the labor camp. If they did, $10 says it was over the office where they called you in to tell you they couldn't use you anymore.

There is no such thing as Trumpism. It's just the latest incarnation of the White Citizens Councils in the 1960s, and the legally segregated neighborhoods of the 1950s and South Boston in the 1970s and Sen. Joe McCarthy with his imaginary list of "communists" embedded in the United States government.

Pushing the future back is a dirty, greasy business, but the money can be pretty good, better than anything you'll make in a labor camp, or laboring on the floor of an Amazon "fulfillment center," where everything will be fulfilled but you.

Slap a cowboy hat on it, fly a flag over it, blame the rich men north of Richmond who would never try that in a small town where we still say "God Bless the U.S.A."

"Still" is the key word in the line, "We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse," because it implies that there are places that don't wave Old Glory, but there are still true places that do, and those places that do are in peril unless we push back hard and defend our flag and support the troops and crush all opposition.

If we don't do these things, the American places that still believe will drown under a rolling wave of gun confiscation, and the grade school nurse will castrate your 9-year-old son Shane so he can be a girl because his Communist teacher told him he wanted to be a girl.

I still love country music, and I probably always will, even if I do listen to rap, too, and some country blues and that old commie Woody Guthrie. I suppose the key word is "still."

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read words by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.