Racist grievance: organizing core of Trumpism

In his White House meeting today with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, Trump once again deployed white racist grievance to falsely accuse the South African government of sanctioning genocide against white South African landowners.

This isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last time that Trump appeals to his MAGA supporters along racist lines. It is, after all, a staple and organizing core of his (and MAGA’s) politics. Which is all the more reason that this racist spectacle and national embarrasment should be widely and unequivocally condemned.

Springsteen says it much better than I ever could.

Fault lines

The main fault line in politics today is between the Trump regime and a far flung multi class, peoples coalition challenging that regime. This is the strategic matrix from which everything else — allies and alliances, forms and issues of struggle, demands, etc — flows.

Such a strategy abhors political posturing and narrowly constructed politics, while insisting on sustained initiative, breadth of approach, and tactical flexibility. It is always helpful to remind ourselves that the coalition reststing Trump and the MAGA movement stretches from Angela Davis to Liz Cheney.

White nationalism

From the sustained assault on DEI to the recent welcoming of white South African “refugees,” we see evidence everyday of the white nationalist posture of the Trump administration. Trump and his team make little effort to disguise the dangerous and deadly racist animus that permeates every aspect of their political outlook and practice.

To find a historical antecedent one has to go back to the Southern racists who forcefully overthrew the Reconstruction governments in the aftermath of the Civil War and violently installed the draconian system of Jim Crow — separate and unequal — in the Southern states.

That system of governance and every day practice, resting on terror, remained in place until the rise of the modern Civil Rights movement eight decades later. A similar movement — but broader, deeper, and more powerful — is on today’s agenda if we hope to defeat the latest iteration of white nationalism — Trump and Trumpism — and finally establish an egalitarian and multi-racial society.

A legitimizing cover

Secretary of State Marco Rubio (and Trump) would like us to believe that support for the national rights of the Palestian people is tantamount to supporting Hamas and terrorism. With this cynical and duplicitous sleight of hand, Rubio hopes to provide Netanyahu a legitimizing cover to kill or expel the remaining Palestian people from Gaza on the one hand and on the other throw the movement here for Palestian national rights into a defensive posture and, more broadly, confuse the American people.

We should continue to challenge this line of thinking and the deadly actions that follow wherever we can. Most of us don’t have a big megaphone, but we do have a voice and we do interact with people in our everyday life

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