by Adam Serwer
1
THE CRUELTY OF
BACKLASH
Many people woke up on November 9, 2016, feeling like their country hated them.
Donald Trump had run a campaign that, from its inception, sought to blame those he defined as foreigners for the failures of modern society. He announced his campaign by declaring that Mexican immigrants were “rapists” “bringing drugs” and “crime.” He called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims” entering the United States and regaled campaign audiences with apocryphal tales of how dipping bullets in pigs’ blood had helped Americans suppress a Muslim insurgency in the Philippines. He decried the “war on police,” calling for nationwide stop and frisk and comparing black American neighborhoods unfavorably to “war zones.” Every one of these problems, Trump assured his supporters, could be solved with the ruthless application of state force: arrest, execution, exclusion, or expulsion. And then just short of a majority of 2016 voters, more than 60 million people, decided to put him in charge of the country.
If you were part of, or related to, one of the groups Trump targeted so effectively, you woke up on November 9 with the knowledge that some, perhaps many, of your work colleagues, perhaps your friends and family members, chose a man who promised to use the violence of the state to keep people like you in your place.
My mother and uncle were born into the long shadow of Redemption, the white-supremacist backlash to Reconstruction, in Florida. During Reconstruction, Southern states like Florida briefly experimented with multiracial democracy, only to fall into the shadow of racial authoritarianism in the 1870s. In the 1940s, when my mother was born, Florida was a Jim Crow state. Black voters were disenfranchised by law, schools, public transportation, and restaurants were segregated, and interracial marriage was banned. All of these laws were backed by the threat of both state and vigilante violence, in a state where more than three hundred Americans would be lynched between 1877 and 1950.
Like many other black southerners in that era, my grandparents packed up and fled north, settling in New York State, where their children would not have to attend segregated schools. What they also brought with them was the memory of racial backlash—the knowledge that previously unimaginable progress like that of the South during Reconstruction could be attained and then quickly destroyed. If a black president seemed the stuff of fiction prior to Obama, the racial backlash that followed—the election of a president who rose to power on the slander that the first black president was not even an American citizen—was all too familiar.
I wrote “Is This the Second Redemption?” shortly after the 2016 election results, with the knowledge that this backlash would not be as complete as the one that followed Reconstruction. Unlike the backlash of the late 1870s, Trump had won because his support was ideally geographically distributed for the electoral college, not because he had commanded support from a majority of the electorate. Trumpism did not command anything close to the political consensus among white Americans that white supremacy did at the close of the nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, he had been elected to destroy Obama’s legacy, and for those Americans who were not as familiar with this chapter in America’s past, I felt that Redemption was a useful analytical frame for what the future might hold. These family legacies are obviously not necessary to understand American history. But in a country where the typical education consciously elides the dark currents of our past, or portrays them as long vanquished, the living memories of your flesh and blood provide a potent counternarrative.
Unfortunately, much—though not all—of what I described in this essay was prescient. The Civil Rights Division under Trump filed a single voting-rights case in four years, and his Commerce Department tried and almost succeeded in deliberately using the census to increase white voting power at minority voters’ expense. The Trump Justice Department abandoned systemic oversight of police departments, while the president himself vocally encouraged police brutality to audiences of officers who responded with applause. Migrant youth were deliberately separated from their parents and placed in squalid camps, for the express purpose of torturing such families into giving up their hope for a better life in America. The conservative-controlled Supreme Court blessed Trump’s travel ban targeting Muslim countries once the administration removed explicit language referencing religion. In doing so, the right-wing justices wrote the blueprint for Trump-era discrimination: Even when the president announces his bigoted intentions to the world, the Supreme Court will turn a blind eye as long as the lawyers can provide a neutral-sounding pretext and adequate legal paperwork. But Trump’s bluster and cruelty were sometimes a disadvantage. Republicans’ attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act—which was responsible for ensuring coverage for tens of millions of people—failed by a single vote, that of Senator John McCain, Obama’s 2008 rival and a frequent target of Trump’s insults.
Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election may take the country in a new direction, but his lingering grip on his party suggests Trumpism will endure. The former president’s most recent campaign was notable for shifting his rhetorical focus from enemies abroad to enemies within, making other Americans internal foreigners with no legitimate claim to govern. This too is an old American strain of thought—in the ransacking of the Capitol in early January 2021, one can still see the echoes of Redemption, repeated as both tragedy and farce. It was the first time that a sitting president had encouraged a mob to attack the legislature in an attempt to overturn an election. But throughout the South in the late nineteenth century, scenes of insurrectionary political violence were common. As with the so-called Redeemers, defeat at the ballot box may inspire further violence in pursuit of political dominance.
IS THIS THE SECOND REDEMPTION?
NOVEMBER 10, 2016
Between 1870 and 1901, there were twenty black representatives in Congress and two black United States senators. Between 1901 and 1929, there were none.
Those simple numbers offer a small glimpse of the totality of the Southern counterrevolution against Reconstruction after the Civil War and the subsequent bloody Southern Redemption, after which the political power of black Southerners was effectively extinguished. The radical dream of an interracial politics, with its attendant federal investment and redistribution of resources toward the poor, had been destroyed. The optimism of emancipation leading to racial equality in the South was annihilated with a completeness that is difficult to fathom.
Southern Redemption had been led by white Democrats and their paramilitary allies, but crucial to their decisive victory was the willingness of the Republican Party to abandon black Southerners to their fate. “Many Northern Republicans also hoped to use the crisis to jettison a Reconstruction policy they believed had failed,” wrote historian Eric Foner in Reconstruction. “The freedmen, insisted former Ohio Gov. Jacob D. Cox, must moderate their ‘new kindled ambition’ for political influence and recognize that they lacked whites’ ‘hereditary faculty of self-government.’ Ulysses S. Grant, who had sent federal troops into the South to suppress the Ku Klux Klan, privately concluded that the 15th Amendment, adopted to protect the freedmen’s right to vote, had been a ‘mistake.’ ”
House speaker Paul Ryan announced Wednesday that “this needs to be a time of redemption, not a time of recrimination.” But however hopefully the speaker meant it, the idea that America needs to be redeemed, like the notion that it needs to be made great again, rests on the notion that something has gone horribly wrong.
The notion that Trump’s victory and the perception that society must be “redeemed” have nothing to do with a racist backlash might be comforting, but they fly in the face of available statistical evidence.
A Reuters survey in June found Trump supporters were more likely than Clinton supporters to see blacks as “criminal,” “unintelligent,” “lazy,” and “violent,” though Clinton supporters were certainly not immune to those prejudices. Ana
lysis by the RAND Corporation’s Presidential Election Panel Survey found that “Trump performs best among Americans who express more resentment toward African Americans and immigrants and who tend to evaluate whites more favorably than minority groups.” And even those Trump voters who did not approve of his remarks and policy proposals aimed at black people, Muslims, and Latinos did not find them disqualifying.
The election of Donald Trump and the complete dominance of the Republican Party both in the federal government and in the states may usher in a new era of Redemption, one that could see the seemingly astounding racial progress of having a black president relegated to little more than symbolism.
The federal government currently protects people’s ability to find a home, to make a living, to cast a ballot, to worship freely, to drink clean water and breathe clean air. A Trump administration can leave these rights unprotected for the people most vulnerable to having them denied because of the color of their skin or their faith, without having to ask Congress for a single vote on legislation.
The conservative backlash against Obama limited much of his agenda after the first two years to things that could be achieved by the executive branch. Trump can easily reverse these steps, beginning, as Bloomberg reports, with Obama’s extension of relief from deportation to undocumented immigrants. That will affect some 750,000 people. Trump can shift deportation priorities so that undocumented immigrants previously considered a low priority for deportation—mothers with U.S.-citizen children, for example—no longer will be. That proposed ban on Muslim immigration? He won’t even need Congress.
The entire civil-rights enforcement apparatus of the federal government will be under the control of a candidate who campaigned on using the power of the state against religious and ethnic minorities, proposing to ban Muslim immigration, establish a “deportation force” to purge the country of America’s largely Latino population of undocumented immigrants, and establish “national stop and frisk,” a policy that has targeted black communities. The Obama administration’s aggressive enforcement of anti-discrimination law in housing, employment, and voting is likely to suffer. The Obama era saw an unprecedented rise in the Justice Department’s efforts to combat racial discrimination in local policing. Trump campaigned with the explicit support of unions representing law enforcement and on “giving power back to the police.”
Will a Trump administration continue to enforce federal religious-freedom laws in cases where local jurisdictions attempt to prevent mosques from being built? Will it advocate for Muslim women who are told by their employers they are not allowed to cover their hair at work? Would a Trump Equal Opportunity Employment Commission continue Obama’s aggressive interpretation of civil-rights law protecting LGBT workers? Should women who are sexually harassed by their bosses expect that a president who bragged about sexual assault will defend their rights? Will the strict rules on sexual assault on college campuses survive in the Trump Department of Education? In each of these cases, the Obama administration moved to use federal power to protect the rights of minorities; absent the same commitment, they will not enjoy similar protections under Trump.
The Obama administration promulgated strict rules under the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. Republicans have already indicated their intention to revoke them, consequences that will be borne by everyone but most explicitly by the poor and people of color.
With the Republican dominance of the federal government, however, even Obama’s legislative accomplishments are in peril. Congressional Republicans have long sought to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would not only allow health-insurance companies to discriminate on the basis of preexisting conditions but would strip health-care coverage from 15 million of the poorest Americans. The 2010 Wall Street Reform Act, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency built specifically to prevent another 2008-style economic crisis, will be on the chopping block. The CFPB’s attempts to prevent financial services from preying on poor and working-class Americans is in peril. The impact of repealing these laws will fall most harshly on people of color, but poor and working-class whites will be hurt as well.
The Democrats will resist—how strongly or effectively, we will soon see. But history suggests they will fail. And with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, there would be little else standing in the Republicans’ way.
As Foner wrote in Reconstruction, “1877 marked a decisive retreat from the idea, born during the Civil War, of a powerful national state protecting the fundamental rights of American citizens.” But the consequences were also dire for the white poor, for the simple reason that they stood to benefit from an activist government as well. “While the region’s new upper class of planters, merchants, and industrialists prospered,” Foner writes, “the majority of Southerners of both races sank deeper and deeper into poverty.” Similarly, Republican dominance of government across the nation will reverse the Obama-era expectation that the state should work to even the playing field between the haves and have-nots.
The broad economic devastation wrought by the Redeemers might have been seen by Republicans as a political opportunity to forge an interracial coalition. But it was not to be. “The failure to develop an effective long-term appeal to white voters made it increasingly difficult for Republicans to combat the racial politics of the Redeemers,” Foner argued.
Democrats now face a renewed white-identity politics whose appeal will be immensely difficult to neutralize, and the notion that a more vigorous left-wing economics will return the white working class to the Democratic fold is likely a fantasy. The last Democrat to come close to winning the white vote was Bill Clinton, who combined his economic populism with promises to “end welfare as we know it” and advertised his willingness to use state violence against black Americans, turning the execution of Ricky Ray Rector to his political advantage.
The uncomfortable truth is that, whether you’re Donald Trump or Bill Clinton, economic populism is most effective in American politics when it is paired with appeals to racism. Maybe the Democrats can and will find a way to do so without such appeals. By the time they do, it may simply be too late to stop what is coming.
The Republican Party of yesteryear championed amendments abolishing slavery and seeking to protect the rights of the freedmen. It still abandoned black Americans when the political cost of defending them became too high. Today’s Democratic Party is perfectly capable of doing the same to elements of the diverse coalition that twice secured the presidency for Barack Obama.
So America stands at the precipice of a Second Redemption. Unlike the first, it was not achieved by violence and has not ended in the total disenfranchisement of people of color. Its immediate consequences may not be as total or as dire. Yet it has a democratic legitimacy that extends far beyond the American South. The erasure of the legacy of the first black president of the United States will be executed by a man who rose to power on the basis of his embrace of the slander that Obama was not born in America.
Early historians of Reconstruction depicted it not as the terrible demise of interracial government but as an era when corrupt Republicans violated the South’s natural order by “forcing” self-government on primitive blacks who were unprepared for the responsibility. “To the bulk of the white South,” Foner wrote, “it had become axiomatic that Reconstruction had been a time of ‘savage tyranny’ ” that “accomplished not one useful result, and left behind it not one pleasant recollection.” Prepare for the Obama era to be framed in similar terms.
It took another few decades of scholarship, and the civil-rights movement, to shift the public perception of the era toward the truth. The few dissenting voices, like W.E.B. Du Bois, were ignored at the time and vindicated by historians only after decades of hindsight.
Perhaps the Trump administration will diverge from what Trump himself has promised to achieve. Perhaps he will move to enact his campaign-trail promises and voters
will repudiate his agenda. But it seems more likely that someday Americans will look back at the Obama era much as historians have now come to look at Reconstruction: as a tragic moment of lost promise, a failed opportunity to build a more just and equitable society.
2
THE CRUELTY OF
THE LOST CAUSE
The popularity of “The Myth of the Kindly General Lee” was an unhappy accident. During the spring and summer of 2017, a movement to remove statues honoring the Confederacy—which had begun in earnest years earlier, after the massacre of black churchgoers in Charleston by a white supremacist—had gathered momentum. In May, then–New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu had removed four such memorials, including three devoted to the Confederate military leaders Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard and one devoted to the 1874 victory of the terrorist White League over New Orleans’s outnumbered and outgunned integrated police force.