A Hello to Arms

Mollie Hemingway has decided that the following things represent a “coup:”

(1) Using the mechanisms provided by the Constitution to impeach and remove Donald Trump.

(2) Voting Donald Trump out of office via an election that has been stolen “by hook or by crook” (The Universal Wingnut Translator renders this phrase as “by too many non-white people voting.”)

Serwer is of course absolutely correct that this simply the historical logic of American white supremacy and herrenvolk democracy being played out to its natural and indeed inevitable conclusion:

[B]ehind this unfailing submission to Trump also lie more troubling influences. As the parties have become more racially polarized, and the Republican Party has become more exclusively white and Christian, Republicans have begun to think of themselves as the only genuinely legitimate actors in the polity. This is why Republicans draw districts that hand them more offices even when they fail to win a majority of the votes; it is why Republican legislatures strip Democratic executives of their powers when the electorate foils their efforts to rig elections in their favor; it is why the Trump administration attempted a fraudulent scheme to use the census to diminish the influence of minority voters relative to white voters; it is why Republicans seek to pass laws intended to suppress minority votes; it is why every night on Fox News, viewers hear one host after another outline deranged conspiracies about how Democrats want to steal America from its rightful white owners through demographic change.

Attempts to strip minorities of their rightful place in the polity are a bipartisan American tradition. They emerge whenever one party becomes beholden to an ethnically diverse constituency, and the other answers almost exclusively to white Christians. The contest between the universalist principles espoused by the Founders and their sectarian application in practice has been the principal conflict of American democracy since the beginning.