Perhaps this begins to make sense of the daily horror movie we endure: the Civil War never ended, Lee’s surrender merely a pause while those forces of aristocracy and white supremacy took the time to remake themselves into what we see now: a blatantly racist President of a blatantly white supremacist Party, supported by an array of reactionary corporate interests, appealing to a narrowing base of almost wholly white voters with a message of fear and a solidarity of hatred, and using brute, physical intimidation and a wholly corrupted Justice Department as his new, American Brown Shirts.
This idea in not original. I’ve seen it expressed elsewhere. This is my attempt to figure it out in its particulars.
First, a pause to consider what the words white supremacy mean because much of what we’re seeing in Trumpism is an expression of that term. After all, he began his political rise with the lie of ‘Birtherism’, the right wing propaganda that President Obama was not an American.
White Supremacy refers to a scrap heap of ideas and impressions and fears — ‘that whites are somehow smarter for how else could they have become wealthier. There are poor whites, yes, but not nearly as many poor blacks. There must be something in the genes that gives whites an edge. And look at ghettos, look at the crime and the drugs. What can’t they just leave? I would. Why do they speak that way, listen to that music, dress as they do? Why are they so angry all the time? Someone will say, “There are good one’s,” and name a couple of athletes or musicians or long dead, no longer dangerous figureheads. What would happen if they moved here? It would all go bad. Look at this town or that, they’ll say. Oh, and look at how many are in prison. How can you tell who is a criminal and who is not?’ And if any one objects to this set of beliefs, one rejoinder is always ‘you’re being naive. I know them. I know their true nature.’
White supremacy believes in its wisdom with absolute certitude.
Underneath white supremacy is a refusal to think, not an inability to think, but a rejection of thought as complete as an acceptance of dogma. Deep thought requires the ability to question one’s assumptions, to press for explanations that are complex and nuanced. In the case of white supremacy, it requires a desire to see black people as human beings like themselves, also subject to historical forces like themselves. It requires an acknowledgement that black lives matter … as much as their own white lives.
Now, follow my reasoning about a continual Civil War. By 1877, Reconstruction was over, brought down by Southern Democrats, national economic woes and the KKK, organized in 1866, one year after the end of the War. What followed was racial terror enforced by lynchings and night riders, laws which disenfranchised blacks, the reemergence of Plantation aristocrats, and a Gilded Age concentrated in the North, that concentrated enormous wealth in a small group of corporate interests. Teddy Roosevelt and FDR softened and even reformed some of those economic effects but the power of white supremacy never wavered and only grew in influence through Jim Crow laws and a complete suppression of the power of the vote for blacks. It took Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement’s consistent agitation for 9 years to finally bring a Civil Rights Act to fruition in 1964. Lyndon Johnson understood what one of its effects would be: “After President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he reportedly turned to his press secretary and lamented that Democrats ‘have lost the South for a generation. ’Johnson’s judgment was optimistic. Despite brief flashes of strength during the presidential elections of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Democrats—particularly white Democrats—have been losing ground in the South for half a century.”*
Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes, the apotheosis of Trump — they have all ridden the racial fear of their constituents to power. Fear the inner city, fear the spread of black people to the suburbs, to your white schools, fear brown people crossing the border, fear immigrants, fear Muslims. They have used that fear to cover their shift of economic power to corporate and donor interests.
Which brings us to the present day and children taken from their mothers, children held in cages, cronies of Trump pardoned for protecting his lies and abuses, an Administration that rests upon pleasing dictators and on enormous corruption, a pandemic criminally mishandled by Trump and his allies in Georgia, Texas, Florida, Arizona. That list of abuses could go on for pages.
Trump is not a dictator, and the US retains, for now, an invigorated opposition to Trump and the Republicans, and a rickety but occasionally effective stopgap in the exercise of the law to their worst impulses. Still, Trump has elevated criminals to positions of power and pardoned them or pushed to dismiss their charges when they were caught. He has politicized the rule of law through Attorney general William Barr. He has made the preservation of white supremacy his rallying cry for re-election.
Trump’s reign has released a level of fanaticism we have not seen in American history since the Civil War. Those voters who remain with him now will search for another figurehead in which to pour their desire for continued, untrammeled power –Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are already positioning themselves to be the next iteration of the ‘white leader’.
In Portland, Trump is using a secret police force, larval Brown Shirts, of unidentified, masked, Federal Agents to try to intimidate protestors and create an atmosphere of fear and chaos as a method of control and as a re-election strategy.
However, the good news, and I take this as a matter of faith based upon empirical evidence, is this: Trumpism and its host, the Republican Party is dying. I may not witness its last breath, but it is dying. It is shrieking in rage as it dies, and its death spasms will get worse. Young people, by and large, with the exception of some young white males, are abandoning the Party for its relentless support of racism and tax cuts for the wealthy, its refusal to consider a serious health care policy, its embrace of an insane gun rights dogma and its cozy relationship with right wing evangelicals.
If he finds a way to steal the election through voter suppression or foreign interference or through the grotesque nature of the Electoral College, he will have 4 more years to do so much more damage. He and his Party have already destroyed so much — the honor of truth, tens of thousands of lives lost to the Virus, who knows how many brown children have been destroyed in its cages, any last vestige of a belief that this America under their rule values fairness or integrity or anything other than grotesque wealth and abusive power.
Even if Trump loses in November, he will continue to throw out hatred and conspiracy theories via Twitter and talk shows and perhaps through his own network. The crazy years are not going to end. His supporters are probably going to become even crazier. Fanaticism never gives up its beliefs. When it becomes politically ineffective, it is through the attrition of its believers.
Joe Biden is a frail, 77 year old man who could stumble badly in the next few months. He is, at best, a placeholder and a stopgap. He is not a Lincoln figure, the man who will end this long Civil War, but he is the only alternative to Trump.
Addendums:
- How 9/11 and our reaction to it also contributed to the rise of Trump and our current mess is a Post for another day.
- Trump is not Stalin, but we have seen pictures of our current political reality before. Any of this sound familiar? It should:
“On the other side there remained only the idea of the Party. The Party, cut off from its social justification, now rested on dogma alone. It had become, in the most classical way, an example of a sect, a fanaticism (6, 7).”
“Stalin began from the 1920’s to build up a personal group of agents, chosen for their lack of scruple and totally dependent on and devoted to himself …. a cadre which had abandoned all normal political or even Communist standards and which may be regarded as a personal group of hatchet men, ready for any violence or falsification at the orders of their leader (14).”
“Machiavelli mentions several instances of actual criminals rising to control the State …. (15).”
“Stalin’s other evident political objective had also been attained. In the struggle with the people, there was no room for neutrality. … It was once again a question of ‘My Party right or wrong’ (21).” **
*The Economist, November 11, 2010
**The Great Terror by Robert Conquest
