The election of Trump and his embrace of white christian authoritarian governance couldn’t have happened without the intensification of racism. The two go hand in hand.What triggered such an intensification? There were, I’m sure, multiple causes, but three things immediately come to mind: The first is, ironically, the election of Barack Obama in 2008. His victory was greeted at the time with buckets of joy by tens of millions of Americans of different backgrounds. It felt like better days were ahead. A river had been crossed. Freedom bells were ringing.

But that wasn’t the only reaction to the election of our country’s first Black president. Less reported, millions of others, including representatives of the capitalist class, felt their world had been turned upside down, their way of life upended. Racial bitterness not joy were widespread in this crowd.This racially charged environment was the force field in which the Tea Party, a precursor to the MAGA movement, was born. While its ostensible target was the unfairness of the tax system, its racist venom was directed at Obama and his political agenda. Short of impeaching him, the hope of Tea Party leaders and activists was to sabotage his presidency.

While claiming to be a continuation of the spirit and traditions of the American Revolution, it’s more accurate to say that the Tea Party’s vile rhetoric and practice drew its inspiration from the bloody counterrevolution in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. That counterrevolution, beginning in 1877, violently overturned Reconstruction and its many democratic and working class achievements. It restored rule of the former slaveholding class and imposed by bloody force a system of systemic racism and heightened class exploitation — Jim Crow. This reign of terror came to a close nine decades later and only because of the heroic struggles of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement.

Meanwhile around the time of the rise of the Tea Party, new demographic studies were released showing that the country would be “majority minority” by the century’s midpoint or sooner. While these studies went unnoticed by many people, they set off alarm bells and white panic among the mass base and leaders of the extreme right.

If all this wasn’t enough to churn the racist stew, right wing extremist ideologues like Tucker Carlson began peddling the discredited “Great Replacement Theory.” According to this theory, the immigration of people from the global south will sooner rather than later “replace” white people, turning them into a subordinate and shrinking group assigned to the edges of a society in which people of color are dominant and occupy every position of power.

If this theory were confined to the narrow fringes of society it wouldn’t be worth mentioning. But that isn’t the case. According to one study nearly a third of white Americans were on board with it. And when combined with the election of a Black president and the prediction of a majority minority population, it fueled the intensification of racism and greased the political skids for Trump’s successful presidential runs.

In Trump, this far flung, multiclass coalition (with the billionaires in the driver’s seat) found a self aggrandizing and resentful demagogue who deployed racism to press for an authoritarian white christian nationalist agenda, while enriching himself, his family, and his corporate friends in the process. If his election in 2016 signified a fracture in and assault on the existing democratic order, his reelection eight years later turned into a systematic, racialized, fascistic onslaught on the whole panoply of democratic rights and structures of governance at the national and global level.

The good news is that this onslaught is meeting growing resistance at the ballot box and on the street.