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The 1619 Project, unveiled by The New York Times some years ago, posited that America really began not in 1776, but when the first African slaves arrived at Jamestown 157 years before. A number of historians across the ideological spectrum took issue with that; most surely, every conservative did.
It’s increasingly apparent, however, that the MAGA movement—both the Trump administration and the institutional Republican Party—is embracing as its central ideology not the democratic and egalitarian credos laid out in the Declaration of Independence, but the white racism of 1619 Virginia. If they’re uncomfortable claiming that date as their defining starting point, here’s an alternative: 1877.
In that year, Reconstruction, which was the project of enabling African Americans to claim full citizenship, with all its attendant rights, was abruptly ended with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. White racists, calling themselves “Redeemers,” then effectively revoked those rights, often through murderous violence.
Today’s MAGA movement is nothing if not the ideological heir to those Redeemers, as determined to reverse every last vestige of the Second Reconstruction—the civil rights laws and values of the 1960s—as the Redeemers were to extirpate the First.
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Yesterday, the Republican justices on the Supreme Court made clear their desire to redistrict Southern states in a way that would eliminate the districts, and the possibility of districts, that send, and could send, Black representatives to Congress. As my colleague David Dayen has pointed out, the more immediate impulse behind the justices’ determination to effectively revoke what remains of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is to ensure that Republicans will pick up a dozen or more House seats through the redistricting the Court will order. They clearly understand, however, that that will mean effectively disfranchising Southern Black citizens. To the extent that Chief Justice John Roberts has adduced a reason for this epochal reversal, it’s that the white racism that the Act’s supporters were combating in 1965 is now, 60 years later, a thing of the past.
But the actually existing Republican Party that the justices mean to keep in power is a veritable storehouse of white racism, reviving and initiating policies for which white racial bigotry is the only plausible explanation. The Trump administration has already made that clear by stipulating that the only foreign refugees it welcomes to our shores are a subset of South African whites, concerned that that nation’s elected leaders (predominantly Black) may use eminent domain powers to repurpose some land for public purposes. By contrast, refugees fleeing for their lives from the Taliban, the ayatollahs, or Central American gangs have had, and will have, America’s doors slammed in their face.
Yesterday, the Times reported that the Departments of State and Homeland Security had sent proposals to the White House for new refugee rules that would favor Europeans seeking to leave their homelands because they’d been “targeted for peaceful expression of views online such as opposition to mass migration or support for ‘populist’ political parties.” In other words, reducing our refugee policy exclusively to an ingathering of white Europe’s far-right and neo-fascists.
Trump’s administration and the Court’s Republicans still occasionally cling to the contention that they are simply reverting to policies of racial neutrality by striking down DEI and affirmative action policies. Trump’s actions, however, belie that argument with each passing day. He has fired, or tried to fire, Black, and female, leaders of prominent institutions—the armed services, regulatory agencies, the Federal Reserve—on either the slimmest pretexts or for no stated reason at all, while populating his administration with very disproportionately white male appointees, as if matching the demographic composition of the Eisenhower administration was his desired goal.
Go deeper down into MAGA ranks and the myth that the movement is only interested in restoring race-neutral policies crumbles at the slightest touch. Consider Charlie Kirk’s stated opposition to the Civil Rights of 1964, which banned racial discrimination in state and local government agencies and businesses serving the public. Consider his and Tucker Carlson’s commentaries questioning the competence of non-white races. Consider the hundreds of racist and sexist comments (building all the way to “I love Hitler”) that Politico discovered and reported on this week in the chats of a Young Republican group that included elected and party officials, their staffers, and campaign consultants. I see no reason to think that this group is unrepresentative of the current young Republican mainstream.
So, does today’s MAGA-fied, Trumpified GOP trace its roots to the violent white supremacists of 1877 or the first American slaveholders of 1619? Whichever, they’re certainly not the heirs of the democrats and egalitarians of 1776. |
