When Trump was elected in 2016, I was regularly reprimanded for insisting that MAGA was all about racism. People kinder than me (and that’s a lot of people) wanted to see MAGA voters as folks voting pocketbook issues, not as a re-emergence of the Confederacy or KKK.
The political science research that just keeps coming, however, supports my much less polite analysis.
Let’s face it: we are fighting a new version of the Civil War. This time, the people who stand to benefit most from defending bigotry aren’t the owners of plantations–they are the plutocrats and grifters dismantling the American system for profit–but like those plantation owners, our contemporary would-be overlords are using racism to enlist the support of a population desperate to believe that their religion and/or skin color makes them superior.
The evidence is overwhelming. There are the efforts to erase that hated DEI, the constant war on “woke-ism,” and the very unsubtle movement to substitute nationalist mythology for accurate history.
A recent example: An administration that has hollowed out the ranks of rangers who tend our national parks is now insisting that those who remain scrub park gift shops of “corrosive ideology.”
Remaining staff members have been ordered to report the presence of any retail item that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” or that includes in its description “matters unrelated to beauty, abundance or grandeur.” (It will be interesting to see how park leaders follow the administration’s directive in parks established to pursue an individual mission–for example, parks created to inform the public about the civil war, Indigenous history, slavery or other topics the Trump administration considers “defamatory” of historical Americans.)
Hardly less obvious is the scorn and contempt constantly heaped by MAGA on urban America. As Paul Krugman has recently–and accurately–noted, these ugly assaults on the nation’s cities are both vile and dishonest–and all about bigotry. What really bothers MAGA about urban life is the idea that non-white people are exercising political power.
After Mamdani won New York’s Democratic primary, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared that New York is about to turn into “Caracas on the Hudson.” As Krugman observed,
Bessent isn’t really deeply worried about Mamdani’s economic ideas. But he feels free, maybe even obliged, to slander a foreign-born Muslim with language he would never use about a white Christian politician, even if that politician were (like some of his colleagues in the Trump administration) a total crackpot.
Krugman points to the resurgence of raw racism emanating from the Trump administration. That racism is apparent in the cuts at the National Institutes of Health, which are
so tilted against racial minorities that a federal judge — one appointed by Ronald Reagan! — declared he’d never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. You can see it in the renaming of military bases after Confederate generals — that is, traitors who fought for slavery. You can even see it in a change in the military’s shaving policy that is clearly custom-designed to drive Black men — who account for around a quarter of the Army’s new recruits — out of the service.
One problem with bigotry is that it feeds on itself. The definition of “my tribe” contracts. We saw it in Nazi Germany, where–as Martin Niemoller famously wrote, eventually there is no one left to “speak out for me.” As Krugman writes,
Now, maybe you imagine that you yourself won’t suffer from this new reign of bigotry and imagine that everyone you care about is similarly safe. But if that’s what you think, you’re likely to face a rude awakening.
I personally don’t have any illusions of safety. Yes, I’m a native-born white citizen. But my wife and her family are Black, and some of my friends and relatives are foreign-born U.S. citizens.
Furthermore, I’m Jewish, and anyone who knows their history realizes that whenever right-wing bigotry is on the ascendant, we’re always next in line. Are there really people out there naïve enough to believe MAGA’s claims to be against antisemitism, who can’t see the transparent cynicism and dishonesty?
The fact is that the Trump administration already contains a number of figures with strong ties to antisemitic extremists. The Great Replacement Theory, which has de facto become part of MAGA’s ideology, doesn’t just say that there’s a conspiracy to replace whites with people of color; it says that it’s a Jewish conspiracy.
There really is no “middle ground” between White Christian Nationalism and the American Idea. Which of those will prevail is what this iteration of the Civil War is all about.
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