The immediate impact of what he says or does is less problematic than the precedent he sets for future politicians, particularly on the right, and the example he sets for people inclined to follow him. (Although telling people in all seriousness to inject bleach will obviously have immediate real-world implications among those who take his advice.) Suddenly, it became OK to run for higher office without releasing your tax returns and without divesting from businesses, even if they directly and indirectly benefit from the office you hold. Even more troubling was the message he sent that he was within his rights to use his platform as the most powerful person on the planet to attack private citizens and career civil servants simply because they were exercising their First Amendment rights or upholding their duties to the Constitution. He took those rights and duties as a challenge to his authority and his impunity. He believed that he could use his extraordinary powers to cover up his crimes.
* * *
While it’s obvious that white is the default in America, what might be less obvious is that Protestantism is implied in our whiteness. Essentially, “real” Americans are not just white, they are Protestants. As such, white Protestants are overrepresented in government, and are disproportionately represented in Congress. Currently 77 percent of Congress is made up of whites, compared with 60 percent of the general population, and 55 percent of Congress identify as some kind of Protestant, compared with 43 percent nationally.
People at the highest levels of government, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence, adhere to fundamentalist evangelical and Dominionist dogma, which is the “belief that Christians are biblically mandated to control all earthly institutions until the second coming of Jesus,” as Daniel Burke wrote in the Huffington Post. They also sought to impose it politically. This dogma is the end of a long arc that extends from the influence of the Puritan ethos on early America and the associated impulse toward anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism (in the sense of elite as expert). It is the enemy of an open society that embraces diversity and plurality of thought, and yet it is a main driver of the Republican Party’s trend toward fascism.
Whites assume, correctly, that without maintaining their whiteness, they would lose power, privilege, and status, and they’ve never been able to imagine how dismantling the system of white supremacy might compensate them for the loss of those things. The idea that living in a country that is more just and fair for all people might be of benefit to you remains elusive if you are unaware of the structural inequality that exists to benefit you in the first place. Instead, the problem of racism is viewed as a zero-sum game—not that most white people would acknowledge it in this way, but the bottom line is that the power, privilege, and status that accrue from being white in America disappear if racism does, too. When police murder Black children and no charges are filed, no one even gets fired or loses their pension, or on those rare occasions when those responsible are brought to trial and acquitted in the face of sometimes overwhelming evidence, that’s not a sign that the system is broken—no, that is a sign that the system is operating in exactly the toxic way it was designed, to uphold the two tenets that have shaped America: white supremacy and the infallibility of power.
White people are not a homogenous group; they span and they represent a broad spectrum of beliefs and ideologies, from the Proud Boys on one end to antiracists on the other. But no matter where somebody falls, those who identify as white still have the power, privileges, and benefits of whiteness. Whether they want them or not, whether they are aware of them or not, at birth they automatically possess these privileges and benefits and the power that attaches to them simply because they are white.
* * *
Seventy-four million people voted for Donald in 2020. This number is mind-boggling. It only makes sense if we refuse to believe that the constituents of the modern Republican Party voted for him with their eyes wide open and understood exactly what they were voting for.
The term “base” is thrown around to describe the core group of supporters for both parties. Besides implying their equivalence, calling the core of Republican voters “the base” elides a description of the kind of people who comprise the base. At one end of the spectrum are the unrepentant fascists and unreconstructed white supremacists like the Proud Boys, who currently represent the views of many if not most elected Republicans. We’ve known this since the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right protest against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, which resulted in the murder of counterprotester Heather Heyer. The fundamental problem wasn’t that Donald called Nazis who chanted “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us” very fine people, it was that there were no consequences for his doing so. Nobody from his administration resigned in protest and nobody from his party demanded his resignation. His shout-out to the Proud Boys during the first 2020 presidential debate—“stand back and stand by”—was just another reminder of how explicit the rightward shift of the party now is.
On the other end of the spectrum are the low-information, knee-jerk Republican voters. In general, people are unlikely to switch political parties over the course of their lifetimes, and party affiliation is more important than the party platform. Regardless of how far from the mainstream Republican ideology becomes, it is always a better bet than the “Marxist,” “socialist,” liberal Democratic Party.
In between these two extremes fall the “I’ve got mine” people, whose notion of what is good is what is good for them, and the authoritarian-leaning voters who prefer the status quo and are made uncomfortable by diversity. And then there are one-issue voters—taxes, abortion—who can’t be swayed by any other considerations, such as the candidacy of an unfit racist, misogynistic autocrat in the making.
Many of the seventy-four million choose to ignore the evidence that liberal policies work or that they themselves do better under Democratic leadership. Instead, they are convinced by outlets like Fox News and Newsmax that they should be afraid—of immigrants, of demographic changes, of socialism, and of universal health care. Fear can make people easy to manipulate, but it’s an uncomfortable feeling, so Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson stoke their viewers’ outrage by focusing incessantly on nonexistent threats like the War on Christmas, or by priming them for violence against parents who have their children wear masks to protect them from COVID. On the one hand, this serves the purpose of increasing their viewers’ susceptibility to conspiracy theories; on the other, it increases the likelihood that their viewers will vote against their own self-interests, which has been the goal of the Republican Party for at least four decades—all because of a false identification with a glorious past that never existed and the ancillary benefits they receive for being white.
* * *
On January 6, Confederate flags and Nazi symbols were on display, in homage to the man who had been stoking white grievance for four years, in the halls of our Congress, in an effort to impede the peaceful transfer of power. This was not performative—their rage, their violence, and their threats were real. Their belief in the injustice they had suffered—that the votes of women, Blacks, Jews, and LGBTQ people were allowed to count—matched their belief in the delusion that is white supremacy.
The symbolism—of the flags, of the Camp Auschwitz T-shirts—is not lost on them. They’re not confused about the Lost Cause, or what happened in the Nazi concentration camps. They know what they champion. They don’t just tolerate the barbarity, they revel in it. And they were willing to murder the vice president of the United States to advance their white supremacist, antidemocratic agenda.
Because of how thoroughly we’ve equated “good,” “privilege,” and “power” with whiteness, people would rather identify with slavers who tortured, raped, murdered, terrorized, dismembered, and incinerated Blacks because of the color of their skin than with the people who were brutalized by their enslavers.
That’s part of the ethos that Donald tapped into, the idea that your (white) rights are more im
portant than everybody else’s. There is a disconnect on the right between what’s actually good for people and this insistence on keeping everything exactly as it was in the 1950s. That’s why Donald promised to preserve the coal industry, while protecting his followers from the evils of solar power and “cancer-causing” windmills. Again, this idea has been the cornerstone of the Republican Party going back to Reagan, who removed the solar panels Jimmy Carter had installed from the White House roof. Why would you go to that much trouble, take a step backward, just to score a political point? It’s pandering to people who don’t seem to understand why they’re being pandered to.
In this way, the leader’s contempt for his followers becomes a method of control that is slowly accrued through microaggressions (like abandoning them at rallies in either the freezing cold or blistering heat) that build to situations in which they literally risk their lives to appease the unappeasable ego of their leader. The rallies Donald staged in the months preceding the 2020 election were superspreader events in which his followers were expected to crowd together, shouting, often unmasked, while he stood safely apart.
In a stunning (even for him) display of sadism, Donald got into a sealed SUV with two Secret Service agents so he could wave to the crowd of his supporters that had gathered outside Walter Reed Hospital, where he was being treated for COVID. The display was necessary for him to feed his need for attention, which he’d been deprived of for two whole days, and to dispel the notion that he was weak for having contracted a virus that he had spent most of the year denying. As the SUV approached, one man in the crowd shouted, “Oh my gosh, I love you! There he is, there he is! There he is!” Then, more forcefully, he said, “God bless our president. I will die for him. I will die for that man, happily. I will die for him. Anybody want to mess with him, you mess with me first. He is a hero, that man,” which says much more about the state of mind of Donald’s followers than it does about the man himself. The psychologist Robert Jay Lifton coined the phrase “malignant normality” to describe this phenomenon, in which people begin to see their lives and culture through the lens of the person in power. In other words, their experience and understanding of the world become unmoored from reality and cohere around the narrative proffered by somebody like Donald, a narrative that is both self-serving to him and destructive to them.
* * *
The United States Senate is one of the institutions that has been most damaged in recent years. The four years of the Trump administration are notable for the breadth of the damage caused and the depth of the cynicism that inspired it. The mastermind of the damage, Mitch McConnell, will come to be considered one of the greatest traitors to this country since Robert E. Lee, with this difference—McConnell has been trying to take us down from within.
More perhaps than any other politician, Mitch McConnell has torpedoed the notion that, above all, his job and the job of his colleagues is to serve the American people. He’s earned—and embraced—the nickname “The Grim Reaper,” because of the frequency with which he has killed measures sent to the Senate by the Democratic-controlled House. Instead, even in his reduced role as minority leader, his compulsive drive for power merely seeks partisan advantage and partisan victories, betraying the whole concept of governance.
It has to be pointed out, however, that McConnell’s project has been carried out within the system as it exists. It’s unlikely that the founders explicitly designed the government of the United States to be used against itself. But McConnell, who appears to be motivated by a desire for raw power and the prospect of establishing minority rule, undoubtedly doesn’t care what the founders or anybody else would think.
In an incisive description of McConnell’s unique awfulness, author Robert Schlesinger writes in a piece for NBC News that he “is the living, breathing, calculating face of everything that is wrong with our current politics. To the extent to which our system has become dysfunctional, McConnell is the single chief architect of that sclerosis. Donald Trump is a dangerous, blundering wrecking ball, but McConnell was undermining the system well before (and is likely to outlast) him.”
In addition, we are living in a time in which the minority has an outsized percentage of power in the federal government. Currently, the Senate is divided fifty-fifty. The fifty Republican senators represent a population that comprises approximately forty-one million fewer citizens than the Democrats represent.
Senator Joe Manchin, likely the only Democrat alive who could win a statewide election in West Virginia, currently finds himself uniquely positioned to block any legislation in the Senate because of his demands for bipartisanship and his unwillingness to do away with an antiquated, racist procedural rule known as the filibuster, which allows any senator or group of senators to block a vote unless sixty of their colleagues vote to stop debate. With the Senate evenly split, and in the current political climate, that is an almost impossible feat. But unless Manchin is willing to vote with his party on particularly divisive issues, he can essentially hold President Biden’s entire agenda hostage. It is also notable that Manchin is one of two senators representing a state that has a population of 1.79 million people, or one-twenty-second of California’s population. West Virginia is also 93.5 percent white and hardly representative of the American electorate. And yet Manchin is able single-handedly to stymie legislation—on gun safety, infrastructure, or voting rights—favored by 70 percent of the American people.
It isn’t that our leaders fail to learn from history. Some of the leaders we choose, particularly among the Republicans, learn exactly the wrong lessons: that they can, with impunity, and within the bounds of the system governing this country, engage in antidemocratic, counter-majoritarian tactics that increase the power of the minority to impose its will on the rest of us. As it turns out, it’s the tyranny of the minority we have to worry about.
This system can only fix itself. If it’s corrupt or if the majority in power is the thing that needs to be fixed, then nothing is going to happen. This is the situation in which we now find ourselves. Eight sitting senators repeated and promulgated the Big Lie right up until the insurrection and beyond. They are seditionists and should have been immediately removed from office and put on trial for treason. Yet they continue to sit in the United States Senate, crafting laws and voting on legislation that will shape the future of a democracy they no longer believe in or support. There are hundreds of people in the same position in the House of Representatives. Any government that doesn’t have the means to remove provable traitors can’t succeed in the long run.
Donald is an instinctive fascist who is limited by his inability to see beyond himself. Or, as the historian Timothy Snyder puts it, “His vision never went further than a mirror.” Still arguing about whether or not to call Donald a fascist is the new version of the media’s yearslong struggle to figure out if they should call his lies lies. What’s more relevant now is whether the media—and the Democrats—will extend the label of fascism to the Republican Party itself.
Donald’s administration used an array of tools to coerce or co-opt government officials, many of them experts in their fields, to undermine, dismantle, and pervert our government institutions, turning them away from their mission to represent and help the American people. In this way they were able to repurpose them or, as Robert Jay Lifton would say, “Nazify” them. We cannot downplay this threat. It must be faced head-on, with eyes wide open. To downplay it, to ignore it, is to open the door to worse.
Donald was incompetent, but others in Donald’s administration were anything but. What they built was a lean and ruthless machine for advancing fascism. With the help of some luck, complicit institutions, an unprepared media, and a party of willing converts, that machine largely succeeded.
CHAPTER 8
The Long Shadow
By the time I was a sophomore in college, I knew more about the Holocaust than I did about the genocide of Native Americans and the complete oppression of enslaved Africans and their subsequent generatio
ns in my own country. The message I’d received through most of my years at school, and my life in general, was that Black American history was not my history, and it was not “our” history, but something separate, other. Toni Morrison wrote, “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” And as a white person, it has been so easy for me to remain unaware of that, to fall in line with the prevailing and self-serving wisdom that the election of one Black president after an unbroken stretch of forty-three white presidents before him was enough to undo centuries of underrepresentation and misrepresentation. The line from slavery through Jim Crow to the overlapping crises of mass incarceration of Black men and the epidemic of police murders of innocent Black men, women, and children remains unbroken—a line largely unacknowledged by those who have the luxury of pretending that such injustices don’t have any impact on their lives.
In a recent Washington Post op-ed in support of reparations, Gary Abernathy spoke of his previous disdain for the whole concept: “Like most conservatives, I’ve scoffed at the idea of reparations or a formal apology for slavery. I did not own slaves, so why would I support my government using my tax dollars for reparations or issuing an apology? Further, no one in the United States has been legally enslaved since 1865, so why are Black people today owed anything more than the same freedoms and opportunities that I enjoy?” Abernathy describes what is still a commonly held position among Americans across political affiliations and races, only 20 percent of whom favor reparations as a partial antidote to centuries of discrimination.
Part of this reluctance might be linked to the fact that, generally speaking, the story of America is told in a way that preserves the color divide. The narrative promoted about the American civil rights movement—simple, linear, with obvious heroes—stands in stark contrast to the almost nonexistent narrative about the legions of white men and women, private citizens and legislators, who used any means at their disposal—from the Senate filibuster and threats of intimidation to the most vicious acts of violence and domestic terrorism—to impede the progress of the fight for civil rights. It is as if civil rights activists were combating a system entirely devoid of actors, other than a few public figures like George Wallace, Bull Connor, and David Duke, rather than a large population of people in every walk of life. It is a whitewashed story for easy consumption that, more than anything else, is designed to make white people feel good about themselves. It avoids having to tell the tumultuous and often brutal history by carefully selecting its heroes, downplaying the tactics, ignoring the catalysts, shrouding in mystery the contributions of whites to Jim Crow, and disappearing all but the most obvious villains.
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