There will be blood

Jamelle Bouie (gf) points out that the current political struggle is, at the most fundamental level, one between Abraham Lincoln’s America and Donald Trump’s:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers, brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” said President Lincoln. This, wrote the editorialist, was nonsense. Does the Constitution, he asked, quoting those parts that allude to slavery, “dedicate the nation ‘to the proposition that all men are created equal?’ ” No, he said, and moreover, “Mr. Lincoln occupies his present position by virtue of this constitution, and is sworn to the maintenance and enforcement of these provisions.”

Far from dying to consecrate a new birth of freedom, he wrote, “It was to uphold this constitution, and the Union created by it, that our soldiers gave their lives at Gettysburg.” Lincoln was wrong — very wrong. “How dared he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government? They were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that negroes were their equals, or were entitled to equal privileges.”

The outcome of the Civil War and the subsequent enactment of the Reconstruction amendments was supposed to have resolved the evident contradiction between Lincoln’s rhetoric and the original Constitution, but the spiritual descendants of the slavers never gave up, and today they are winning:

Vice President JD Vance is, as I’ve discussed previously, a leading light of this effort. But he is not the only Republican to carry the standard. Last week, at an annual conference for “National Conservativism” — the illiberal Right’s term of choice for its movement — Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri gave a speech that, in its rejection of the creedal vision of the American republic and in its embrace of an exclusionary racial nationalism, went even further than Vance has in his public statements.

“For decades, the mainstream consensus on the left and the right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an ‘idea’ — a vehicle for global liberalism,” Schmitt said. “We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty, and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors.”

We should pause, here, to reflect on the radicalism of Schmitt’s dismissive contempt for the universalist aspirations of the American political tradition. Those “five words about equality” — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” — are among the most important in human history. They represent a unique moment in the story of the world, the merging of a powerful notion of universal equality with a revolutionary claim about the sources of political authority.

Trump and Trumpism represent, more or less openly, a radically reactionary political movement whose fundamental principles are white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and patriarchy. This is not hyperbole: this is simple fact to anyone with eyes to see and ears to listen.

In a very interesting essay contrasting his views with those of Robert Reich’s — before reading it I was incompletely aware of how far Reich has moved politically from being a classic Clinton neo-liberal to becoming an enthusiastic supporter of Bernie Sanders — historian Paul Starr points out that while the post-New Deal struggle for economic equality has faltered badly, the other half of the left-liberal agenda — the various crucial features of social equality that go above and beyond narrow class relations — had flourished between the 1960s and the ascendance of Trump:

Republicans were so hostile to unions that Democrats could take labor’s support for granted. But what for Bob Reich is Reagan’s “giant U-turn” is, in my account, only a “half-turn right.” While Reagan’s policies increased economic inequality, neither he nor his Supreme Court appointments brought about the full counterrevolution against modern liberalism and equal rights that Trump and the Roberts Court are now undertaking. In the decades after Reagan, the rights-oriented movements persisted and, in the case of LGBTQ+ people, gained ground. This continuing skew, the broadening of social equality together with the exacerbation of economic inequality, helped produce the crisis we now face.

The 1990s were a historical turning point, though they didn’t lead in a straight line to Trump. In national politics, the past 35 years have been a 50-50 era, with two sharply divided but closely matched parties. Democrats won the popular vote in seven out of eight presidential elections from 1992 to 2020. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point out in their book Tyranny of the Minority, Democrats also won a majority of the votes cast nationally in Senate elections over every six-year cycle from 1996 to 2020 (it takes six years for every seat to come up for election). But the structure of American institutions worked against them. In both 2000 and 2016, the Electoral College gave Republicans the presidency, and during 12 of the 24 years from 1996 to 2020, Republicans had Senate majorities because of their dominance of smaller states. Defeats that matched the actual voting patterns of the public might have led Republicans to move back toward the center; instead, Republicans learned they could move further right at no cost.

In short, American politics since the 1990s has been a tie game in which Democrats have been losing. When they’ve won the presidency, they haven’t won Congress by large enough margins, or for a long enough time, to sustain anything like a New Deal or Great Society agenda. But losing has posed more serious risks than in the past because Republicans are no longer the center-right party they used to be. As Trump gained control of two institutions—the Republican Party and the Supreme Court—the critical change has been Republican radicalization, not a symmetrical polarization or big Republican electoral gains.

America has become a 50-50 country in another sense. Until the late 20th century, the United States was a 90-10 society: Americans thought of the country’s racial makeup as 90 percent white, 10 percent Black. It is closer to a 50-50 society in the white-minority balance today, though not nearly at that point. In the 1990s, the media began proclaiming a majority-minority future based on census projections that, as the late Richard Alba explained in The Great Demographic Illusion, were fundamentally misleading.

Obama’s election in 2008 confirmed for many Democrats that demography was political destiny, and for many Republicans that America was near a dangerous tipping point that required drastic action. Contrary to the hopes that Obama would bring a “post-racial” future, his election increased anxieties among racial conservatives. That too was part of the sleepwalking pattern. Alarm bells were ringing on the right, and Democrats failed to understand that immigration and border security, like trade, could have explosive political repercussions.

The main difference between Reich’s account and mine is that I don’t reduce the story to economics. The concerns about race, gender, and sexuality—what some dismiss as “identity politics”—are not just distractions from the economic stakes. The American revolutions of the 20th century had a tragic historical timing. They developed in an era when, for independent reasons, working-class livelihoods were being undermined. The two developments became the basis on which a far-right movement could find new support, just enough to win the tie game.

The danger now is that Trump and the Roberts Court can entrench a right-wing regime for the long term. This was always a risk in a constitutional system that, as Trump has shown, is vulnerable to an executive coup. America was born in the contradiction between freedom and racial slavery, from which our later conflicts between freedom and social subordination have been descended. It was a lovely illusion that the arc of the universe bends toward justice. Freedom and equality were never truly guarantees. They have to be fought for over and over, and it will be a fight now even to preserve elementary fairness in elections and the law. That is all we can say with certainty about the American prospect.

This touches on a huge shift in the Republican party, especially among in its elites, with the rise of Trump. Prior to Trump, the Republican elites were at least somewhat ambivalent about radical social reaction. Ronald Reagan exploited racist dog whistles, certainly, but his administration’s attempts to roll back affirmative action and abortion rights were fairly tepid — something that filled the reactionary right with frustration even at the time, as is chronicled in many a vituperative Scalia dissent and National Review editorial. The first George Bush administration spoonsored a fairly moderate and even in some ways progressive extension of the 1964 Civil Rights Act: an unimaginable thing within the context of Republican party politics a generation later. The second Bush was, despite his horrendous record in so many other areas, neither personally racist nor at all eager to exploit the white supremacist roots of the new right coalition. Both of the Bushes were obviously very ambivalent about rolling back reproductive rights, and opposing gay rights, as were other key Republican figures of the era such as McCain and Romney.

This isn’t to say that radical social reaction wasn’t a central part of the Republican coalition pre-Trump: it certainly was. But the Republican establishment was ambivalent enough about the radical reactionary agenda that, in terms of social rather than economic equality, the Democratic coalition won many victories from the Great Society through the first election of Trump.

All that is now over: the Republican party is, as Bouie lays out, fully committed to white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and patriarchy, along with the traditional plutocratic agenda that the Bush I & II, McCain, Romney, etc., always embraced with an enthusiasm that they never had for rolling back the civil rights and feminist revolutions.

But, as Starr emphasizes, they can only do this because of the tyranny of the minority that’s enabled by the structural features of the American political system. Neither plutocracy nor radical social reaction are actually popular positions in contemporary America, and a democratic politics would reflect this. That is why Donald Trump et al are now in the process of dismantling what’s left of the democratic features of the American experiment.