Americans go to the polls today. When those polls close, and the results are announced, we’ll know whether we live in the America whose motto is e pluribus unum or Trump’s “Christian” America (note quotation marks) that wants to be White again.
Paul Krugman often speaks truth to power, and his recent column in the New York Times pulled no punches.
In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in the midst of a wave of hate crimes. Just in the past few days, bombs were mailed to a number of prominent Democrats, plus CNN. Then, a gunman massacred 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Meanwhile, another gunman killed two African-Americans at a Louisville supermarket, after first trying unsuccessfully to break into a black church— if he had gotten there an hour earlier, we would probably have had another mass murder.
All of these hate crimes seem clearly linked to the climate of paranoia and racism deliberately fostered by Donald Trump and his allies in Congress and the media.
Killing black people is an old American tradition, but it is experiencing a revival in the Trump era.
Krugman titled his column “Hate is on the ballot next week,” pointing out that the perpetrator of the synagogue massacre had been motivated by a widespread Neo-Nazi conspiracy theory that was part and parcel of Trump’s despicable attacks on the would-be immigrants who are still some 900 miles from our Southern border.
The fearmongers aren’t just portraying a small group of frightened, hungry people still far from the United States border as a looming invasion. They have also been systematically implying that Jews are somehow behind the whole thing. There’s a straight line from Fox News coverage of the caravan to the Tree of Life massacre.
The main target of Krugman’s ire was what he termed “whataboutism” and “bothsidesism”–a refusal to distinguish Republican White Nationalism from Democratic garden-variety bullshit.
False equivalence, portraying the parties as symmetric even when they clearly aren’t, has long been the norm among self-proclaimed centrists and some influential media figures. It’s a stance that has hugely benefited the GOP, as it has increasingly become the party of right-wing extremists.
This election season, arguing for equivalence takes real effort. Republicans haven’t even tried to dampen the racist rhetoric being spewed by many of their candidates, or hide their efforts at vote suppression. In a column that in many ways echoed Krugman’s, Michelle Goldberg focused on the Governor’s race in Georgia.
Right now America is tearing itself apart as an embittered white conservative minority clings to power, terrified at being swamped by a new multiracial polyglot majority. The divide feels especially stark in Georgia, where the midterm election is a battle between Trumpist reaction and the multicultural America whose emergence the right is trying, at all costs, to forestall.
Abrams’ Republican opponent, Brian Kemp, is the Georgia secretary of state–an office responsible for overseeing the election in which he is a candidate.
Last week, Rolling Stone obtained audio of Kemp telling donors of his “concern” about what might happen in Georgia “if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote.” As the secretary of state overseeing his own election, he’s taken steps to make that harder. His office has frozen new voter registrations for minor discrepancies with official records, and, starting in 2012, purged around 1.5 million people from the voter rolls — some simply because they didn’t vote in previous elections.
It isn’t a coincidence that the vast majority of registrations Kemp found “questionable” were from African-Americans.
Kemp is the candidate of aggrieved whiteness. During the primary, he ran an ad boasting that he drives a big truck “just in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take ’em home myself.” (That would be kidnapping.) A person who claimed to be a Kemp canvasser recently wrote on the racist website VDare, “I know everything I need to know about what happens when blacks are in charge from Detroit, Haiti, South Africa, etc.” Kemp cannot be blamed for the words of his volunteers, but he’s made little discernible effort to distance himself from bigots. This month he posed for a photograph with a white nationalist fan in a T-shirt saying, “Allah is not God, and Mohammad is not his prophet.”
It’s no accident that Trump has emboldened the haters. His intent has become so obvious that last week, Florida’s former Republican state chairman called him out for an outrageous anti-immigrant ad.
“You are a despicable divider; the worse social poison to afflict our country in decades,” Cardenas wrote on Twitter on Thursday morning. “This ad, and your full approval of it, will condemn you and your bigoted legacy forever in the annals of America’s history books.”
Voters aren’t going to the polls today to choose between candidates or parties. They are choosing between incompatible versions of America.