Destroying Democracy, an American Tradition
By 
As I continue being cranky about liberals referencing Nazis all the time when talking about Trump instead of realizing everything he is doing is very, very American, one of the things that we see is that liberals really want to believe in an American history that is better than it is. But this nation was in no way, shape, or form a democracy before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and our very young democracy is barely hanging on for dear life today. Earlier attempts to create democracy in this nation were crushed in ways quite similar to what Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are doing right now. The comparison we need to understand is Jim Crow.
Saying “it can’t happen here” is dishonest because it has already happened here, and our communities are still struggling with the aftermath.
I have written before about the effects of colonization on the Lumbee Tribe, my Tribe, and how we had to flee to impassable swamps in order to evade the encroaching early American colonists. History is rife with examples of groups of Indigenous people either being relocated or outright murdered because Americans (and their colonial predecessors) saw Indigenous land as more valuable than Indigenous lives and cultures. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Indigenous children were taken from their homes and forced into government-funded boarding schools as a means of erasing Indigenous culture. Many of them never returned home and were buried in mass graves on the grounds of these schools.
The late 19th century also saw the backsliding of American democracy across the South. After the Civil War and the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, people of color in the South began to make actual political progress. In 1870, the Mississippi legislature elected Hiram Revels, of Black and Indigenous descent, to the United States Senate, making him the first Black person to serve in that body. Black people held elected office across the South, much to the chagrin of white supremacist politicians. However, by the turn of the twentieth century, Black progress in the South was almost entirely eliminated, and the flame of democracy was extinguished.
There are stories in every Southern state of how this came to be. I wrote a detailed piece in Legal Ruralism about how my home state of North Carolina went from a multiracial democracy with multiple competitive parties to a single-party ethnostate. The election of Daniel Russell to the North Carolina governor’s office in 1896 on a Republican/Populist fusion ticket was the flashpoint that pushed the white supremacists to move to dismantle democracy.
It is important to note here that the white supremacists did not openly state their intent to dismantle democracy. They appealed to the pro-democratic senses of the electorate. Mainstream media reports in North Carolina at the time said that white supremacy was necessary for democracy. In Robeson County, where I grew up, The Robesonian printed an article saying that white supremacy was the “child of necessity.” These media outlets, often the only news source that rural people had, hammered home the point that white supremacy was the only thing that could save democracy.
This rhetoric was extremely powerful. It led to a fracture in the Populist/Republican fusion as many white Populists were persuaded by the white supremacist ideology. South Carolina governor Ben Tillman even used his Red Shirt militia to intimidate voters, prompting a denied request by U.S. Senator Jeter Pritchard for the deployment of federal troops to North Carolina to ensure access to the ballot. In 1898, the Democrats, then the party of white supremacy, took control of the state legislature. Since the governor of North Carolina had no veto power at the time, this essentially led to them having unchecked power over the state government.
It’s not that it can’t happen here. It’s that it has happened here, again and again. That’s American history. That’s the American tradition. That’s Donald Trump.