Our New Civil War And Jim Crow
The ascendancy of Donald Trump and his overt xenophobia, racism, white nationalism, and outright cruelty gave license to a broad swath of Americans to act out in the same way. Trump verbalized and normalized the beliefs and feelings that many Americans apparently had held for years but had suppressed because of our societal norms. And, for many, it was a bonding experience to know others felt the same way and were now ready to act on those beliefs. As Adam Serwer wrote in 2018, “It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear…It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united”. Trump made them feel powerful, perhaps for the first time in decades.
From the very start, Trump was not leading a political campaign per se, but a war on democracy itself. By definition, his opponents were illegitimate. Ted Cruz was ineligible for the presidency because he had been born in Canada. Hillary Clinton needed to be “locked up”. If he lost a primary or an election, it was “rigged”; if he won, it was “a beautiful thing”. The media was “an enemy of the people”. And calls to violence were an integral part of his pitch. He directed his supporters to “knock the crap out” of those who protested, even offering to pay their legal fees. He celebrated violence against the media. He proposed a Second Amendment solution should Clinton win the presidency.
Although unrecognized at the time, in many ways, Trump’s candidacy was the start of a kind of low-intensity civil war. With his encouragement, Trump’s most fervent supporters would regularly engage in an orgy of violence directed at those they hated and feared. A Trump “superfan” sent defective pipe bombs to 13 prominent Democrats. Three Kansas men plotted to blow up an apartment complex inhabited largely by Muslims. There was the anti-Semitic riot in Charlottesville and the resulting murder of Heather Heyer. Mass shooters in Pittsburgh and El Paso were inspired by Trump’s white nationalist rhetoric. QAnon cultists engaged in numerous acts of political violence and even killed their own children in order to “protect” them. In addition, over the course of his four year term, ABC News identified 54 instances of violence or threats of violence where the perpetrator invoked Trump.
Those shared feelings of power that Serwer described are not something Trump’s fervent supporters are going to give up lightly. By Trump’s own definition, the victory for Democrats in 2020 was illegitimate and his supporters’ belief in a stolen election is really less about actual voter fraud than about the de facto illegitimacy of certain segments of the Democratic coalition. But the failed 1/6 coup represents a severe escalation to near open civil war. We now know that elements within the Trump administration were trying to create legal justifications for the overthrow of the government. Trump allies set up a “war room” to help coordinate pressure for a “legal” coup. We know that three sitting GOP congressmen helped organize the rally which was the staging point for the coup. There is now evidence that coup participants coordinated with other members of Congress and senior White House staff.
While establishment Republicans plotted legal justifications for overthrowing the government and radicalized their base, the actual coup participants and its supporters constituted specific groups that no longer believe in the American democratic system, despite its institutional bias in their direction. As Kathleen Belew notes, the participants in the 1/6 coup represented the merging of three strands of militant right wing activity. “One is organized white power activism…another strand is QAnon…and the third is much bigger and amorphous, the Trump base…[T]he ‘nation’ in white nationalism…is not the United States, it is the Aryan nation, and that is thought of by the people in this movement as of higher importance than the United States and certainly outweighing any kind of democratic system”.
Obviously, there is some overlap in the three strands that Belew identifies. The Oath Keepers, an anti-government extremist group, were the most organized far right presence at the coup, breaching the Capitol with military-like precision. Besides infiltrating law enforcement organizations, the group has now become part of the establishment Republican party. At least 47 current and former state and local Republican officials have been identified as being part of the group. One Oath Keeper who was at the attempted coup is now actually running for office in New Jersey.
A separate segment of that amorphous Trump base that is largely uninterested in maintaining our democratic system would be parts of the evangelical community. A group of Proud Boys, yet another far-right white nationalist extremist group, gathered and prayed for the restoration of their “value systems” before going to attack the Capitol on 1/6. Another attendee of the coup declared, “We are fighting good versus evil, dark versus light”. As one sociologist put it, “You can’t understand what happened today [1/6] without wrestling with Christian Nationalism. They provided the political and theological underpinnings of this, and it has allowed anarchy to reign”. In 2017, a leader at the Council for National Policy, a secretive umbrella group of religious and social conservatives, declared, “I almost think we might want to call it [identifying organizations on the left] tracking and defeating evil. The activists on the left and the people who fund them are out to destroy everything you hold dear. Your families. Marriage. Your businesses. Your freedom of speech. Your freedom of religion. Everything.”
In the MAGA universe, the participants in the 1/6 coup are revolutionary heroes who fought against the tyranny of a fraudulent election and a government run by illegitimate Marxist/socialist/communist Democrats abetted by the violence of Black Live Matter protestors. As Marjorie Taylor Greene puts it, “there’s a clear difference between January 6th and the Marxist-communist revolution that antifa, BLM, Democrat ground troops waged on the American people in 2020…And if you think about what our Declaration of Independence says, it says to overthrow tyrants”. Ashli Babbitt has now become a martyr to the cause and some Trump supporters now speak of him in messianic terms, with one saying that she has “complete faith that this man [Trump] is going to basically save the world. Not just us. Everyone”.
The violent escalation of 1/6 is now just feeding on itself. Increasingly, Trump supporters openly talk of actual civil war. At a recent Trump rally in Iowa, one supporter declared, “They don’t care about the American people because they’re in their elite little tower. So we’re just sick of it, you know, and we’re not going to take it anymore. I see a civil war coming. I do. I see civil war coming.” The undefined “they” is pretty clearly just Democrats as a whole. At another right-wing event, an audience member wondered, “This is tyranny. When do we get to use the guns? No, and I’m not — that’s not a joke. I’m not saying it like that. I mean, literally, where’s the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” And it’s not just radicalized Trump supporters. We seem the same rhetoric from the Republican political establishment. Madison Cawthorn, a House GOP Representative from North Carolina, recently stated, “The things that we are wanting to fight for, it doesn’t matter if our votes don’t count. Because, you know, if our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place — and it’s bloodshed…I will tell you, as much as I am willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there is nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American”.
As Ed Kilgore writes, “The treatment of right-wing insurrectionism, actual or potential, as the work of patriots as blessed by the Founders is…intrinsic to the Second Amendment absolutism that is dangerously popular among conservatives these days. The doctrine holds that the ultimate purpose of the right to bear arms is to ensure a citizenry that is willing and able to ‘resist tyranny’, with the meaning of ‘tyranny’, of course, left up to those choosing violence to battle it. And it was also implicit in the tea-party-era movement known as ‘constitutional conservatism’, which argued that conservative policy prescriptions…were eternally embedded in the Constitution in conjunction with the Declaration of Independence by the Founders, who themselves had divine sanction for their work. Thus any contrary policies imposed via democratic representative government were inherently illegitimate and warranted resistance…The same anti-democratic creed is alive and well in MAGA circles”.
All of this is backed up by an incredibly diverse and effective propaganda network supported by right-wing billionaires. The most popular show on Fox, Tucker Carlson Tonight, regularly spews white nationalist talking points. Think tanks like the Claremont institute provide the intellectual foundations, such as a recent article that stated, “Let’s be blunt. The United States has become two nations occupying the same country…Practically speaking, there is almost nothing left to conserve…Overturning the existing post-American order, and re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice, is a sort of counter-revolution, and the only road forward…The U.S. Constitution no longer works.” Well-funded astroturf campaigns, combined with social media propaganda, can now mobilize and radicalize the Republican base with ease.
This seemingly unstoppable propaganda machine is how we get the Tea Party spouting nonsense like “Keep your goddamn government hands off my Medicare”. It’s how we get the Big Lie of a stolen election fomenting an actual coup and the concurrent efforts at massive voter suppression. It’s how we end up with huge swaths of the country believing a vaccine now given safely to hundreds of millions around the world is dangerous and that mask mandates are “tyranny”. It’s how Critical Race Theory, (CRT), which is graduate school level material, is driving violent protests against school boards around the country. Much of this propaganda just feeds the Republican base’s scorn for those they fear and hate. A recent study showed that much of the misinformation on social media is spread by people who, as the Washington Post summarized, “want to stick it to the people they hate, whether or not the actual complaint is true”.
The Tea Party was about ensuring that minorities don’t get access to health care. The CRT revolt is about ensuring that a truly white-washed history of America is all that can be taught. The Big Lie and the 1/6 coup were expressions of a refusal to accept an America that goes beyond white and Christian nationalism. And the refusal to accept vaccine and mask mandates are really just an extension of the unwillingness to work for the common good of that greater America beyond what white and Christian nationalism represent, even if that means that they themselves may end up martyred to that cause.
Historical analogies are sometimes helpful, if often incomplete. Chauncey DeVega recently wrote, “For all intents and purposes, today’s Republican Party, encouraged by Trumpism, has dug up the putrid corpse of Jim Crow and married it. Refusing to allow a vote on the Freedom to Vote Act is, in a sense, a perfect metaphor or synecdoche, since Republicans are also engaged in a nationwide campaign of voter exclusion, voter suppression, partisan and racial gerrymandering and other means designed to shrink the electorate with the goal of ensuring one-party rule”.
Partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression have already created “democracy deserts” in a handful of states. A recent study of the 2020 elections showed that Alabama, North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, Florida, and Georgia are now comparable to virtual autocracies like Turkey and Syria. In Wisconsin, democracy has already effectively died, with gerrymandering leaving Republicans in control of the state legislature even when Democrats win more votes. Remarkably, many of these “democracy deserts” are actually considered “swing states” nationally. And it will only get worse with the upcoming round of redistricting, locking these states in one-party rule for yet another decade.
The Jim Crow metaphor can be extended further to include far more than just the restriction of voting rights. As with Jim Crow, Republicans are engaged in a terror campaign on multiple fronts. Republicans are terrorizing non-partisan voting officials in an attempt to intimidate and/or gain control of election administration and the actual counting of votes. Secretaries of State and other election officials who upheld the 2020 results are receiving death threats and are quitting under the pressure. Nearly one-third of election officials now claim they feel unsafe at their jobs. Trump loyalists who believe the 2020 election should be overturned are running to take their place. School boards and school administrators are being terrorized in an attempt to quash any discussion of the genocide of Native Americans and the country’s history of racism, as well as preventing mask mandates from being enforced. Red State legislatures are passing laws banning the teaching of certain subjects as well as banning specific books.
Second Amendment fundamentalism is traumatizing children with mass school shootings and active shooter drills. Physical assaults on journalists by the public and law enforcement, as well as efforts to expand libel laws, are designed to intimidate the press. And there is the generalized terror of being a public-facing employee and dealing with violence from people refusing to wear masks or prove they’ve been vaccinated.
Like Jim Crow, law enforcement seems entirely ill-equipped to deal with this terror, when it isn’t actually complicit in it. For years, the government has intentionally downplayed the dangers of far-right terror. So far, most of the participants in the 1/6 coup have only received the lightest of sentences. This has prompted one judge to highlight the disconnect between the alleged crime and the recommended sentence, saying, “No wonder parts of the public in the U.S. are confused about whether what happened on January 6 at the Capitol was simply a petty offense of trespassing with some disorderliness, or shocking criminal conduct that represented a grave threat to our democratic norms,” Let me make my view clear: The rioters were not mere protesters”. None of the organizers of the coup have been brought to justice. The coup’s abettors in Congress have not been reprimanded in any way. Trump himself has survived two impeachments and is the likely GOP nominee in 2024. Law enforcement is unable to protect those lesser figures being threatened today. There are not enough resources to adequately protect election officials and school boards. So, the intimidation succeeds and the failed coup becomes a training exercise for a successful one.
And like Jim Crow, this pervasive sense of terror is designed to create the quiet acceptance of a white Christian nationalist state resembling the post-Reconstruction through mid-1960s American South. And just like the end of Reconstruction, Democrats seem uniquely incapable of actually confronting this erosion of American democracy. As Ari Berman writes, “There are eerie parallels now to the end of Reconstruction, when insurrectionist Democrats (then the party of white supremacy) used every means necessary to retake control of the state and federal governments, while accommodationist Republicans (then the party of civil rights) appealed to bipartisan unity and supported the filibuster to block voting rights legislation, leading to decades of Jim Crow”. Today, Democrats are repeating the Republicans’ mistakes of 150 years ago. There seems to be no urgency to support voting rights. There is a seemingly unfounded belief that bipartisanship and/or successful economic policies can defuse the broad attack on democracy. And there is still significant support for the filibuster within the Democratic caucus.
Even among Democrats who understand the current dangers and recognize the destructive constitutional structures of American democracy – the Electoral College, the US Senate, the filibuster, the Supreme Court, and the exceedingly high thresholds to change the Constitution – that allow for and actually encourage minority rule, there is a sense that nothing can be done to fix it. Chris Edelson, writing at the American Constitutional Society, would even agree with the Claremont Institute that “our Constitution has failed”. But he can offer no solution, only saying, “No system can guarantee its survival, but if the Constitution has failed, we can think creatively about how to increase the odds in favor of liberal democracy…[A]t the moment, the prospect of drafting a new constitution is wildly implausible. It’s past time, however, to consider the cost of inaction. If we do nothing, these pathologies will persist. We need creative thinking to find a solution to the problem of our Constitution’s failure”. Asking for “creative thinking” is not really a solution to the problem. Even Jamelle Bouie admits defeat when writing about “the need to reform the structures of American government, from the Electoral College to the Senate itself…Yes, the odds of serious reform are low to the point of nonexistent, right now and for the foreseeable future. And yet I still think it’s worth it to make the case.”
As one noted law professor states, “The United States is effectively a great empire. And a common story about how great empires decline is that the institutions are not able to address the basic social problems the society faces”. With the looming almost existential crisis of climate change and a sclerotic government threatened by and unable to respond to an energized and empowered autocratic minority engaged in what is close to a civil war, it’s hard to see American democracy surviving for very much longer.