D.L. Hughley summed it up best: “If you voted for Trump and have diabetes, you must hate [black people] more than you love your own feet.”
The joke was about more than goobers with tiki torches marching on stumps after Trump takes away their health insurance; it was about the death of democracy when people choose their own tribe over the common good. Nazi hatred of Jews destroyed Germany, the Hutu slaughter of the Tutsi wrecked Rwanda, Serbian genocide against Bosnians set the Balkans on fire, and Burmese murder of the Rohingya threatens to isolate and sink Myanmar.
Yet, they persisted, putting the welfare of their own clan (and the hatred of another) above any concept of decency or the national good, looking for a strong, authoritarian leader to carry out their dreams of an ethno-state based on “race.” This is how nations, and democracies, die.
The white nationalist Trump regime was powered into office by the white vote – 53 percent of white women, and 62 percent of white men. And as the new book “Identity Crisis” makes clear, what drove that vote was white grievance – specifically, the white grievance that too many non-white “parasites” were getting too large a share of federal benefits. Authors Lynn Vavreck of UCLA, John Sides of George Washington University, and Michael Tesler of the University of California dove into every single study, every poll, and every survey about the 2016 election. Their deep mining concludes that race, gender, and ethnicity were the big issues that elected Trump.
Under their microscope, the white “economic anxiety” excuse for voting Trump morphs into something completely different, identified by the authors as “racialized economics,” which they define as “the belief that undeserving groups are getting ahead while your group is left behind.” In plain English, whites demanded a transfer of wealth and beneficial government programs to their communities from black and Hispanic communities. We’ve already seen the beginnings of this, with federal aid lavished on the (mostly white) coal and steel industries, and federal bailouts for (overwhelmingly white) farmers hit by Trump’s tariffs, while at the same time money for programs perceived as benefiting minorities, from free school lunches to food stamps, has been slashed.
For those white voters, Trump’s preening authoritarianism was a feature, not a bug; just as Mussolini “made the trains run on time,” they figured a strutting American imitation of the Italian dictator needed to be an authoritarian to jam through their vision of a white America where blacks were kept in their place and as many non-white immigrants as possible were deported. In their pinched, angry vision, America would abandon being a beacon of hope and democracy for the world in favor of becoming a walled-off white ethnostate.
Another factor in their vote was religion, not in the sense of worship but as metaphor, “Christian” in their minds being shorthand for white, conservative Christianity. This is religion as an ethnic identifier, in the same way Mussolini’s Catholicism was less about religion and more about the Pope and the Vatican being Italian nationalist institutions.
As we’ve seen under the Trump regime, it’s a short step from being elected to Make America White Again to attacking the fundamental institutions of pluralist American democracy. If government institutions don’t support a strongman’s vision of what the country should be, they will be purged and the institutions rebuilt, this time as adjuncts to authoritarian rule. If the schedule holds, we get a double feature on the end of democracy tomorrow.
Thursday is when Prof. Christine Blasey Ford will be grilled by 11 white male Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, none of whom believe her story of being sexually assaulted by U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. At the same time, Trump may fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the man overseeing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into presidential crimes, collusion, and obstruction of justice. The spectacle of middle-aged white men mercilessly attacking an alleged victim of sexual assault so they can confirm a justice who will help overturn a woman’s right to an abortion pairs nicely with a depraved, possibly treasonous president preparing to dismiss a man with authority over an investigation into that same president’s suspected crimes.
This is what authoritarians do. They rush their appointees onto a nation’s courts and purge disloyal elements from national law enforcement so that their crimes will never be prosecuted and, if they are, will be upheld by the courts. In my career, I’ve seen it happen in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, where strongmen take over and seem to maintain the old democratic institutions, while hollowing them out to serve their purposes. Now it’s happening here.
The avalanche of public opposition to Kavanaugh’s nomination (his support, 34 percent, is the lowest ever polled for a Supreme Court nominee), and public support for Mueller’s investigation (63 percent in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll) mean nothing to Trump and his minions. They know that GOP congressional enablers of Trump will continue to support him, and figure that a combination of voter suppression and gerrymandering mean that Republicans will continue to control the government after the November 6 midterm elections.
Former Trump strategist and white nationalist Steve Bannon has summed it up crudely, but succinctly: poor blacks at the bottom of the economic ladder gave up on voting a long time ago. Other blacks won’t show up in consequential numbers without a black candidate on the ballot, and because voter ID laws suppress their turnout. Young people talk a lot, but hardly ever vote. Union households aren’t Democratic anymore. The white Trump base will vote in overwhelming numbers to keep the House and Senate in Republican hands. So screw the polls and popular opinion.
Putting Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, stopping the Mueller probe, and even Trump himself, are only symptoms. The disease that caused them remains America’s original sin: racism.
Charles Jaco is a journalist, author, and activist. Follow him on Twitter at @charlesjaco1.
