The coup failed miserably yesterday. That is no surprise. It had no legs to begin with. What is troubling though is that millions of Trump supporters, living in informational silos, reject the verdict of the electoral college. They still believe that the election was rigged against Trump. We haven’t heard the last from them or Republican leaders who hope to speak for them going forward.
It’s hard to explain why 73 million votes cast for Trump, without acknowledging up front, the determinative role of racism in their voting decisions. In the minds of Trump voters, the fault line framing their thinking is whether 21st century America will be a white republic. Or will it give way to a multi-racial democracy that accents freedom, equality, peace, sustainability, and broad based economic sufficiency?
This retrograde view was always a pronounced current in the country’s politics and historical evolution. But in the opening decades of this century, the election of an African American president, the growing prominence of people of color (as well as women and gay and trans people) in many spheres of national life and the inexorable trend toward a majority minority country has made their dive into racist revanchism particularly acute.
If this were not enough to make millions of white people worry about who sits atop of “their country,” the rise of the extreme right and the election of Trump spiked “white anxiety” to new levels. Political consciousness, we should know by now, is largely politically constructed. It isn’t simply belched up spontaneously from the bowels of the economy and society.
It isn’t entirely surprising that white workers would gravitate toward an unapologetic racist like Trump. It wouldn’t be the first time. A good number of white workers enthusiastically supported the outspoken racist George Wallace in 1968, including more than a few Michigan auto workers. That same year and then four years later, white workers in the South especially, climbed on the bandwagon of Nixon’s Southern strategy, which was racist at its core. In 1980 and then again in 1984, a significant number of white workers – so-called Reagan Democrats – threw their support to Ronald Reagan, who employed more subtly than Wallace racist dog whistles and great-power nationalism.
Years later New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote of Reagan’s campaign visit in 1980 to the Neshoba County fair in Mississippi, not too far from where civil rights activists Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney disappeared in June, 1964 and were found dead two months later, victims of racist murderers. But Reagan wasn’t there to praise the brave young martyrs in freedom’s cause, but for quite a different purpose. Herbert writes:
“Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.
Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.
He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County, Mississippi, they were saying that “when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you.”
Thus, the support of white workers for Trump, the most overtly racist candidate since George Wallace, has its antecedents in U.S. politics. What distinguishes Trump is that his racist invective is unrestrained and, using the White House bully pulpit, he brings it fully into the political and cultural mainstream. And for what purpose other than to lay waste to democracy and democratic governance, as we know it, and set the foundations for a White Republic.
There is a school of thinking that lays the blame for the shift of white workers to Trump on the economic sins of the Clinton and Obama administrations. Clinton and his economic team, for example, shepherded NAFTA through Congress. But what goes unmentioned here is that the turn to corporate globalization, trade agreements (including NAFTA), austerity, and neoliberalism generally got under way during Reagan’s presidency. Furthermore, most Congressional Republicans were full blooded supporters of “free trade,” while many Democrats in Congress opposed it. And it wasn’t like the Republican leaders offered a progressive economic alternative to the Democrats at the time (or any time). The best they could offer in the 1990s was Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” and punishing austerity, hardly a solution to declining wages, plant closings, and corporate globalization.
The George W. Bush administration came up empty too. Its economic policies were all about the 1 percent. At the beginning of his second term, Bush unsuccessfully tried to privatize Social Security. And, of course, Mitch McConnell and Congressional Republicans were no better during the Obama years. They blocked every progressive economic initiative of the Obama administration that would have reduced income inequality and sped up the recovery of the economy from the Great Recession.
Besides leaving unmentioned the economic bankruptcy of the Republican Party as it pertains to the working people, this narrative blaming the stewardship of the economy of Clinton, Obama, and the Democratic Party for the migration of white workers to Trump covers up what should figure at the center of any explanation of this phenomenon: the power of racism
For the past half century the rhetorical power of racism has been systematically shopped by the Republican Party. Plutocratic at the top and in the clutches of right wing extremists, the GOP became the master and conveyor of racialized politics. And its efforts have not been without result. Trump then isn’t an outlier, but a continuation, albeit in a more extreme form, of a party that has been tacking toward white nationalist authoritarianism for 50 years now. As presidential candidate and then president, Trump gave voice to the most vile forms of racism and white nationalism. And in doing so captured the attention and support of a new tranche of white workers. Some are struggling to make ends meet, but others are doing quite well, even in today’s economy.
In effect, Trump, with the assistance of a whole ecosystem of right-wing, even proto-facist, media and social media sites, has reconstructed and racialized the political consciousness of a section of white workers. Whiteness, not class has become the frame through which these workers look at the world, understand their interests, and choose their friends and call out their enemies.
But what he couldn’t do is win another four years in the White House, despite doing everything he could to racialize the elections. On January 20, he will no longer be president. And while Trump will leave the White House, he and his base won’t leave the stage of politics nor will they retire their most powerful weapon. Employing racism, crudely and relentlessly, they will attempt to delegitimize the new administration and disrupt its plans to pull the country out of a devastating and deadly pandemic and onto a trajectory that accents justice, equality, and sustainability. We (meaning the broad and diverse democratic coalition that proved instrumental to Biden’s victory) can’t allow that to happen. The struggle continues!
Biden can and should claim an election mandate. By the time every vote was counted close to 83 million people had voted for him in what turned into an impressive victory over Trump. While the Republicans will contest this claim, most House and Senate Democrats, not to mention most Biden voters, believe that Biden earned a mandate to govern. Much of the broader democratic coalition will be of like mind and disposed to support his agenda, which includes addressing the health and economic crises stemming from the coronavirus and support for popular measures such as a $15 minimum wage, paid sick leave, a public option for health insurance, criminal justice reform, and a massive investment in green infrastructure.
The left, if it is smart, won’t be dismissive of Biden’s mandate and act as if it won the election, and thus in the driver’s seat going forward. But my fear is that some will and as the election becomes yesterday’s news, its support of Biden-Harris and their agenda will turn into righteous opposition. In other words, if the accent in the run up to the election run-up was on cooperation and unity in these circles, the accent in its aftermath will be on conflict and intra-party struggle, thinking that the imperative of unity – and left center unity in particular – no longer holds. But there is little evidence at present or in the historical record in the 20th century to sustain such a view.
In the 1930s, the Communist Party pushed the needle to the left on one issue after another, but it also came to understand as the decade wore on that the enactment of meaningful reforms in the midst of a deep depression wasn’t the handiwork of the left alone. To the contrary, it was the result of the accumulated actions of political and social constituencies, organizations, and parties of varying political orientations. At the head of this coalition at that time wasn’t Earl Browder and the Communist Party, but FDR and New Deal Democrats.
The party, in short, came to learn (and this is to its credit) that only an expansive coalition of diverse forces, albeit with a special emphasis on the industrial working class, Black-white unity, and flexible tactics stood a chance of making the transformative changes that were necessary at the time. Did it always get it right? No. But it got more right than wrong strategically and tactically and as a consequence, the party emerged as a significant force in U.S. politics at the time.
Not since then has the left had such an outsized role in shaping the country’s direction. That could change in current circumstances, but only if the left is able to combine the dialectics of unity and struggle, only it lifts up the necessity of left center unity.
Not just Trump, but the Republican Party seems bent on embracing authoritarian, one party rule. This obviously constitutes an existential danger to our democracy and country. But it also isn’t without perils or dangers for the GOP. It’s making a big bet, which if it loses could (should) endanger its future.
Of course, if the GOP continues to pursue this course of action, don’t expect it to self implode. It will need a push from the broad, diverse, loose democratic coalition that assisted in Biden’s election. As I like to say, it extends from the Lincoln Project on one end to Angela Davis on the other.
