Tag Archives: racism

An Insider Analysis

Some of the most distressed observers of our national plunge into the very unAmerican, neo-fascist nightmare we’re experiencing are the political strategists who spent years working to elect Republicans. A number of them are now “Never Trumpers” who are wrestling with hard questions: how much of GOP rhetoric was simply PR? What was it in the GOP incentive structure that took the party down this disastrous path? What were the danger signals they failed to see?

One of those Never Trumpers is Stuart Stevens, and a while back, he wrote an essay in the Bulwark in which he tried to trace how the “law and order party had become the party of Jeffrey Epstein.” As he began,

Let me begin with a question that a lot of us are asking ourselves. How did we get here? How is it that right now, as we speak, there are American citizens that haven’t been charged with a crime, much less convicted, sitting in a concentration camp in Florida while one of the most notorious, evil, child sex traffickers of our time has cut some sweetheart deal so that she has been transferred from a prison in Florida to a Club Fed in Texas?

Stevens noted that Maxwell’s transfer violated clear Prison Bureau guidelines, and questioned how America had gotten to so lawless a place. “How did it happen? Well, the easy answer is that we elected Donald Trump. But that’s really a cop-out because it’s not just Donald Trump.”

When Trump first started to dominate the Republican Party, many of my Bush-era Republican friends talked about how Donald Trump had hijacked our party. This never made sense to me. The hijacker on the plane is not popular with the passengers. No one is thanking the hijacker for the chance to go to Cuba instead of grandma’s house. But Donald Trump quickly became the most popular figure in the Republican Party by a wide margin.

That, of course, is the question all sane Americans are constantly asking ourselves–especially those (like yours truly) who spent years in the Republican Party, assuming that the party’s political rhetoric accurately reflected its political and philosophical beliefs. As Stevens glumly concludes, “Trump didn’t hijack the Party, he revealed it.”

It’s hard to disagree with that conclusion; as Stevens writes, “People don’t abandon deeply held beliefs in a matter of months… What the party called ‘bedrock principles’ turned out to be nothing more than marketing slogans.”

As Stevens probes the reason for the GOP’s enthusiastic embrace of Trump, he comes to the same conclusion I did. It all goes back to America’s original sin: racism.  He points to the telling homogeneity of today’s Republican Party.

Race is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. This isn’t new to the Trump era. In 1956, Eisenhower got 39% of the Black vote. In 1964, Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act and received 7% of the Black vote. In 2020, Trump got 12% of the Black vote, a number he improved to 13% in 2024. That’s a six-point increase in 60 years.

In the Bush 43 years, in what seems like a long time ago in a galaxy far away, the party admitted it had failed to attract Black voters and took responsibility for the failure. In 2005, the Chairman of the Republican Party, Ken Melman, gave a speech at the NAACP convention apologizing for the Southern Strategy, which leveraged white racist anger to maximize Republican votes. Does it mean anything that you apologized? I think it does. It’s an acknowledgement that what had happened is wrong and that the party had to endeavor to earn more Black support.

That all ended in 2016 with Donald Trump’s openly racist campaign.

Today’s parties have sorted themselves into White Nationalists versus everyone else.

As Stevens notes, the homogeneity of the Republican Party makes it much easier to message to core voters than it is to message to the far more diverse Democratic Party. And Stevens ties that observation to the fecklessness of Congressional Republicans, pointing out that a “party that spends 60 years relying on candidates who can win by maximizing white voters inevitably draws a different kind of candidate than a party that requires appealing to a more diverse electorate.” That observation goes a long way toward explaining the current Republican politicians who exhibit “a North Korean-style supplication to their leader.”

It’s hard to discount Stevens’ “insider analysis.”

His essay answers the persistent question–why on earth would anyone vote for a pathetic, delusional ignoramus in possession of not a single redeeming human quality? That answer is depressingly simple. For far too many voters, primal hatreds overcome humanity and rational self-interest.

But who knew there were so many of them?

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No More Dog Whistles

What has surprised me the most about America’s pell-mell plunge into autocracy and chaos under MAGA and Trump has been the rapidity with which the veil of civility has been discarded–how quickly a depressingly-large segment of our population has abandoned pretense and “dog whistles” and proudly paraded their racism. Even the pretense that DEI and “woke-ism” were really efforts at “reverse discrimination” has been so ludicrous it might as well have been delivered with a wink and a sneer.

We live in an ugly time–a time that has favored the emergence of some particularly ugly people. In a recent post, Charlie Sykes profiled one of them, an “out and proud” Nazi named Nick Fuentes. As he writes, “I confess, I still find it amazing — and deeply disturbing — that a Hitler-praising, crypto-Nazi troll has amassed a following in a movement already packed with cranks, bigots, and loons.”

Sykes quotes liberally from an Atlantic article that quite accurately notes, “Fuentes is not your garden variety racist — he serves it up in all its vile purity.”

Earlier this year, in yet another stream, Fuentes described Chicago as “n*gger hell.” He then laughed and added: “I just came up with that, just now. Isn’t that good?” Fuentes has also said that Hitler was “really fucking cool” and posited that “we need to go back to burning women alive.” (Fuentes did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.)

As Sykes observes, “this is shocking rhetoric even in 2025, when the far right has embraced race science and the federal government could be mistaken for pursuing the aims of the Proud Boys.”

And he quotes the Atlantic article for the observation that– in the deeply racist MAGA media ecosystem– “it’s working.”

Fuentes is among the most popular streamers on Rumble, a right-wing platform similar to YouTube; his videos regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views. He’s gained more than 100,000 new followers on X since late June. The White House now posts on X in a gleefully cruel style that seems inspired by Fuentes’s followers, who call themselves “Groypers”—in fact, at the end of May, Trump posted a meme of himself that was first posted by a Groyper account. At least one Fuentes supporter, Paul Ingrassia, works in the administration as a liaison to the Department of Homeland Security. Ingrassia, who didn’t respond to an interview request, has also been nominated to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. No matter how far Fuentes pushes his bigotry, his influence continues to rise.

Those of us who live in a very different world–a world where we recognize that humans come in assorted sizes and colors, a world where the mere fact of difference doesn’t translate to “existential threat”–can only be disheartened and baffled by these numbers. Yes, there have always been deeply disturbed individuals clinging to hateful ideologies that reassure them that they are blameless victims of one or another “Other.” But we are now seeing evidence that their numbers are far greater than most of us could have imagined.

When we look at the horrific damage being done to American government every day, when we see the corruption and self-dealing and kowtowing to the wealthy, it’s tempting to blame America’s plutocrats–the all-too-sleazy billionaires who surround our Mad King. And they certainly are not blameless. But their weapon–the appeal that allows MAGA to win elections and exercise power–is the viciousness and extent of racism and other assorted bigotries.

The public emergence and popularity of figures like Nick Fuentes is a sign of a deep social illness. I have no idea how to cure that illness, but I do know that we dismiss its significance at our peril. There are obviously millions of damaged, unhappy, resentful Americans–people who are desperate for someone to blame for their problems, desperate to identify some “Other” whose perfidy explains why their lives haven’t gone the way they wanted.

They are MAGA–and their version of a “great” America is terrifying.

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Calling It What it Is

When Trump won a first term in 2016, virtually all pundits and traditional media outlets bent over backwards to give his voters the benefit of the doubt. They mostly attributed his support to economic anxiety, despite the fact that a significant majority of poorer Americans had voted for Hillary Clinton. 

Research in the wake of that election pointed to a very different motive for those votes: racism. Over the intervening years, it has become abundantly clear that what scholars delicately refer to as “racial resentment” is the glue holding MAGA together–and yet, the legacy media still seems reluctant  to call it what it is.

Non-“legacy” sources, however, increasingly point to the elephant in the room. (Pun intended.)

Heather Cox Richardson recently took on Trump’s efforts to cow museums into an alternate view of history, writing

When Trump says that our history focuses too much on how bad slavery was, he is not simply downplaying the realities of human enslavement: he is advocating a world in which Black people, people of color, poor people, and women should let elite white men lead, and be grateful for that paternalism. It is the same argument elite enslavers made before the Civil War to defend their destruction of the idea of democracy to create an oligarchy. When Trump urges Republicans to slash voting rights to stop socialism and keep him in power, he makes the same argument former Confederates made after the war to keep those who would use the government for the public good from voting.

Talking Points Memo has been equally blunt. In a recent Morning Memo titled “Trump Pushes White Nationalist Agenda Across Multiple Fronts,” Josh Marshall wrote that Trump’s anti-immigrant animus is

fundamentally a story about racism, xenophobia, and othering. It’s about preying on our fears, differences, and prejudices to create a villainous foe whom he can easily vanquish in repeated set-pieces. It’s about letting loose the worst of our impulses to heighten and sustain divisions among us.

The mass deportation agenda is just one part of a larger agenda in which white Americans are fronted as the real America and everyone else is second-class, unless they individually demonstrate in lavish ways a high enough degree of fealty to Donald Trump.

And at Lincoln Square, Stuart Stevens was even more direct, writing that Trump is a racist and that fact needs to be called out.

After decades of evidence — the dog whistles, the calls for innocent black men to be executed, the bizarre fixation on the Confederacy, his alliance with known Nazis and White Christian Nationalists — saying these things, that Donald Trump is a fascist, that he is a racist, should be the least controversial thing to say about him….

For seven months, he’s rounded up brown people for deportation, imprisonment, or total disappearance. He’s attempting to convince his base that slavery wasn’t so bad, after all. Some in his orbit are echoing this sentiment, going so far as to claim we shouldn’t actually blame white people for slavery.

He doesn’t like Black or brown people. Nearly every action is motivated by that dislike. Every breath he takes is flush with a fear and hatred of people who are not white.

What would you call that?

Ever since 2016, Americans of goodwill have tied ourselves in knots trying to understand why any sentient person would vote for Donald Trump–an ignorant buffoon with a limited intellect and unlimited self-regard. The answer to that question has always been obvious, despite a well-meaning desire that it not be so. 

James Carville was wrong. It isn’t “the economy, stupid.” It’s the racism, stupid! As my youngest son observed, way back in 2016, only two kinds of people voted for Donald Trump: those who shared his racism, and those for whom it wasn’t disqualifying.

The civil war really never ended. It just morphed.

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That Pesky Thing Called Reality

There’s an old adage that counsels us to be careful what we wish for.

Before our mad king’s ascension to a second term, lots of Americans held negative views of immigrants. Political pundits attributed a good deal of Trump’s support to his promise to rid the country of these terrible people, the majority of whom (he asserted) were criminals and rapists.

That’s one promise the Trump administration is trying to keep, unlike its promises to curb inflation and cut out government “waste and fraud.” ICE has sent masked, armed enforcers after those nefarious lawbreakers–well, really, after everyone who “looks” undocumented (basically, engaging in racial profiling, yet another Trump administration unconstitutional practice).

So, how much has the keeping of that promise– the delivery of a result that MAGA folks ardently wished for–increased support for the administration? Strangely enough, it turns out that reality has punctured the always dishonest portrayals of America’s undocumented immigrants.

Gallup polling has charted that unanticipated turnaround:

Just months after President Donald Trump returned to office amid a wave of anti-immigration sentiment, the share of U.S. adults saying immigration is a “good thing” for the country has jumped substantially — including among Republicans, according to new Gallup polling.

About 8 in 10 Americans, 79%, say immigration is “a good thing” for the country today, an increase from 64% a year ago and a high point in the nearly 25-year trend. Only about 2 in 10 U.S. adults say immigration is a bad thing right now, down from 32% last year.

What has caused the shift? 

Well, first of all, despite Trump’s dishonest descriptions of an “invasion” of undocumented criminals, it turns out that there really aren’t many criminals out there. Experts have calculated that there may be–at most– only around 78,000 undocumented immigrants with any sort of  criminal record, and of that number, only 14,000 have been convicted of violent crimes. Given Stephen Miller’s demand that ICE arrest 3,000 people a day, ICE has turned its attention to farm workers and day laborers.

For example, multiple media sources have confirmed that the great majority of detainees held at Alligator Alcatraz, the immigration detention center (concentration camp) built in the Florida Everglades, do not have criminal records or charges pending against them in the U.S. — despite Donald Trump claiming the facility would hold “the most vicious people on the planet.”

For that matter, in the case of immigrants who do have records, most of those records are for immigration violations, which are technically civil offenses.

Business owners–especially landscape companies, construction companies and restaurant/hotel owners–have lost significant segments of their workforces, as ICE has rounded up workers who may have been undocumented but who were anything but dangerous criminals. Grocers (and their customers) are dealing with increased prices, as farmers have lost numerous undocumented workers who picked their crops.

And as ICE has moved to deport their friends and neighbors, many more Americans have come to recognize the indiscriminate cruelty of these sweeps. It turns out that abstract promises about ridding the country of undocumented criminals is conflicting with the reality of these roundups.

Masked ICE agents have refused to show ID as they continue to engage in a variety of offensive and unconstitutional behaviors, sparking outrage.

Not only have ICE “enforcers” engaged in racial profiling, “immigration enforcement” is increasingly being used as a barely-veiled cover for efforts to chill the exercise of free speech. Columbia University student, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained by ICE, his student visa revoked, and he was threatened with deportation– not for criminal activity, but for involvement in pro-Palestinian protests. His arrest was widely–and accurately– seen as a part of Trump administration efforts to crack down on student activism. Another widely reported example was the arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk, a 30-year-old Tufts University student. She was taken off the street by masked ICE agents near her home. A court subsequently determined that her arrest had been prompted by her co-authorship of an article about the ongoing war in Gaza. 

There’s much more.

The bottom line is that there is a difference between fantasy and reality. When political promises are based on “alternate realities,” the effort to fulfill them can become an (unintentional) educational exercise. 

It turns out that the American economy is heavily dependant on immigrants, both documented and “illegal.” It turns out that constitutional guarantees for everyone are weakened when an administration decides that some people aren’t entitled to them.

It turns out that immigration enforcement is “more complicated than that,” and that pesky realities are significantly different from the racist fantasies that spawned them.

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As If We Needed Confirmation

The Washington Post recently published an article with the shocking news that “Republicans are abandoning pluralism.” Forgive my language, but no shit, Sherlock!

Let’s take an honest look at what the MAGA cult–the 21st Century version of the Confederacy– has accomplished in its effort to remake the United States into a country dominated by White men.

Thanks largely to Mitch McConnell, the GOP successfully managed to subvert the Supreme Court–to replace dispassionate judges with submissive pawns willing to jettison constitutional precedents and eviscerate the Separation of Powers in a wholly unAmerican effort to take the country back to the days when White Christian males ruled the roost, and women and minorities were decidedly unequal.

MAGA has always been about one thing and one thing only: Making America White Again. Good people frequently express astonishment over the cult’s devotion to Trump–an odious gangster unfit for any office, let alone the presidency. What they fail to see–or perhaps resist acknowledging–is the racist basis of that support. As we’ve seen with the passage of the horrific “Beautiful Bill,” MAGA folks are willing to deprive themselves of healthcare, willing to accept a lower standard of living, willing to bend the knee to masked ICE brownshirts, if they can thereby assure themselves of the continued social dominance of men with white skin.

MAGA emerged to confront their existential dread of a society in which women, Black folks, Jews and Muslims–not to mention gay folks–could consider themselves civic equals. When rational people scratch their heads and wonder why poorer Americans are “voting against their own interests,” they fail to recognize where those interests truly lie–and it isn’t in the pocketbook issues where Democrats (understandably but erroneously) believe those interests lie. Their interests are cultural, not financial.

Only people who are intentionally blind can fail to see the anti-DEI hysteria for what it is. Efforts at equity and inclusion are seen by MAGA as an assault on their privilege. In the racist mind, equality and inclusion of the previously marginalized is simply discrimination against White guys.

The cited essay by Philip Bump includes a report I’ve seen elsewhere, about a sixth-grade teacher who had hung a banner in her classroom, one that many of us have seen elsewhere: it shows a range of heart-holding hands, each in a different hue. The banner has a single statement: “Everyone is welcome here.” As Bump notes, “It’s an anodyne sentiment, at worst, but also a celebration of multiracial community. And for that reason — and explicitly that reason, as a school official explained in an interview in March — the banner was determined to be unacceptable.”

Saying that “everyone is welcome” has become a political statement in the way that “science is real” has become one. Not because these statement themselves are political or even particularly controversial. No, they are now tainted with politics because they reject the right’s rejections of both objectivity and pluralism.

It isn’t only race, of course. Misogyny and homophobia are part and parcel of the White Christian Nationalist worldview.

Bump notes, for example, that Republican support for same-sex marriage has fallen since 2022, when most Republicans supported it. Now, only 4 in 10 do, a level not seen since 2016.

CNN released polling last month that illustrates another shift centered largely among Republicans. Conducted by the firm SSRS, the poll asked Americans whether “having an increasing number of people of many different races, ethnic groups, and nationalities in the U.S.” was threatening or enriching to American culture. Most respondents said enriching — though Republicans were about evenly split between the two.

Notably, the pollsters asked the same question in 2019. Since then, Republicans have gotten 25 percentage points more likely to say that American diversity is threatening to our culture. Among White people, the increase was 16 points.

Bump shared polling that showed Republicans much more likely than others to say that White people face discrimination.Research also shows that most Republicans don’t see discrimination as having anything to do with economic inequality. Instead, Republicans are likely to attribute those inequalities to a lack of hard work and “will power” by Black Americans.

MAGA is filled with fearful, angry people desperately clinging to the evaporating tribal privileges that Trump is promising to restore. They’ve made a lot of progress while the rest of us weren’t paying attention, and it is going to take a monumental, concerted effort  to defeat them.

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