With the MAGA riot, Donald Trump’s GOP lives out its Confederate dreams
It was always going to come to this. Trumpism, like Nazism and Islamism, was never really a political ideology; it was an attempt to use politics to exorcise psychic demons. Such things never end well, because politics, under any adult construal, is ill-suited for such purposes. It is too incremental, too oblique, too frustrating for that. Those who expect it to bind their wounds will soon find its endless compromises and disappointments unbearable. What begins in rage and hurt must end in agitation and violence.
And so it did.
But while Trumpism is not essentially political, it still incorporates political ideas. It looks to politics as one theatre in which its resentments can be satisfied. It is no coincidence that the many pathetic and noxious images of the MAGA riot included displays of the Confederate flag. The Confederacy has long functioned as a kind of lodestar for Trumpism, its shadow Camelot. Charlottesville made this plain, as did Trump’s resistance to the removal of Confederate statues and names from public places. The dark energies that Trumpism draws upon, the wounds it both inflames and grieves, are echoed in the history— the tragedy, as Trumpists see it— of the Confederacy. Its lost cause is their cause. When the MAGA mob breached the Capitol, when they poured into the House and Senate chambers, they fulfilled the dreams of the old Slave Power. A vision of those same moments had surely animated Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest and the entire Confederate host. A dream deferred, indeed.
I have written of Trumpism, but that is mostly a conceit. I could just as well have said “Republicanism.” Because functionally there is, right now, no difference. Trump did not “take over” the Republican Party: he accepted its invitation. Since at least 1964, the GOP has been engaged in a process of radicalization driven by racial, cultural, and ethnic anxieties. Trump did not lead this process; he merely benefited from it. Ultimately it succeeded in hollowing out the ideas of Lincoln and, in an enormous historical irony, replacing them with the ideas of John Calhoun and George Wallace. In many cases, the words in which these ideas are expressed did not change, which was, indeed, part of the point. It provided tactical cover for GOP politicians. But the psychic valence of the ideas, the dream-work they expressed, did change. Lincoln’s aspirational vision curdled into something occluded and punitive. The MAGA assault on the Capitol is the inevitable outcome of these changes; the logic of Trumpism is the logic of today’s Republican Party. We cannot deal effectively with its aftermath unless we understand where it came from.
***
Beginning in 2013, I wrote a series of articles for Salon in which I examined the behavior of the Obama-era GOP. I wasn’t interested in the fact that many Republicans opposed some of Obama’s policies and priorities; I would have been surprised if they hadn’t. That kind of conflict is the mother’s milk of politics. In fact, what drew my attention was how the routine friction of normal politics had been replaced by a hysterical and vengeful paranoia. Republican rhetoric seemed to aim not so much at opposing Obama as at deconstructing him as a citizen and a person. He wasn’t just another Democrat with some bad ideas; he was a “socialist,” a “Mau-Mau,” a man whose “foreign” ancestry infected him with a poisoned view of “Western values.” The logical conclusion of all this, of course, was the GOP’s embrace of birtherism. This demented conspiracy theory, flogged most famously by Donald Trump, served Republican purposes in two ways. In holding that Obama wasn’t really an American citizen, it essentially vacated his entire presidency; the GOP thus confronted not a political rival but an illegitimate usurper. This licensed its program of relentless obstruction while removing any need to justify it with specific arguments based on policy. Even more important, though, was its exploitation of Obama’s perceived “otherness” — his racial difference, his unfamiliar name, his “exotic” ancestry. This spoke directly to the real nerve of the Republican response to Obama— their suspicion that he simply couldn’t be one of us. It was this anxiety about his identity, this conviction that he couldn’t be a “real” American, that was the deepest reservoir of Republican opposition. But why? After all, there were plenty of other reasons, grounded in political values, for Republicans to disagree with Obama. Why did these vanish into a toxic stew of identity politics and racial suspicion?
In the articles mentioned above, I argued that the signal event in the evolution of today’s GOP was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. There is much in those pieces I now find confused or mistaken, but this part of the argument still strikes me as correct. The Republican Party was born in 1854, in the political wreckage created by the nation’s slow unraveling over slavery. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had imposed a hard boundary on the expansion of slavery into the northern tier of the country. In the firestorm that followed, the Whig Party cracked open, its northern branch shearing off to form the core of what became the anti-slavery Republican Party. As the Columbia historian Eric Foner showed in his book Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, this primal version of the GOP insisted that the expansion of slavery was inconsistent with prosperity for the great mass of white workers. Locked out of the South after the Civil War, Republicans flourished in the small towns of the North and Mid-West. Their creed provided a political ethos for an aspirational middle-class and for a new kind of economic power— the corporation— that emerged from the post-war industrial boom. Democrats, meanwhile, owned the South and competed with Republicans in large cities across the country, where Democratic sympathy for the white working-class often attracted immigrant populations.
This was the order of political battle in America until the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum after World War II. Until then, the most obvious racial fact about American politics, on the right and the left, was that it addressed itself almost entirely to the concerns of White people. The post-Civil War settlement was stable so long as this was the case. The first tremors appeared in 1948, when dozens of Southern delegates walked out of the Democratic National Convention. Already dismayed by President Truman’s executive order desegregating the American military, they were horrified when the convention, at his suggestion, included a civil rights plank in its platform. A hastily cobbled together “States’ Rights Democratic Party” — usually known, less syllabically, as the “Dixiecrats” — nominated South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond, a vicious racist, as its presidential candidate. He won four deep South states in the November election.
The South remained wobbly during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, with some states, usually on the Southern periphery, drifting in and out of play. This changed in 1964. After Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law in July of that year, the Republicans chose Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater to oppose him in the presidential election. Personally untouched by racism, Goldwater was a Mid-Western libertarian conservative, concerned to keep government small in order (as he saw it) to enlarge the sphere of personal, especially economic, freedom. He opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the grounds that it represented undue federal encroachment on state sovereignty, and this “states’ rights” emphasis was warmly received by Southern racists desperate to preserve their American version of apartheid. Johnson obliterated Goldwater in the fall election, winning forty-four states; but five of the six states Goldwater captured were in the deep South, including the four Thurmond had won in 1948. As the nation moved into the second half of the 1960s, with racial unrest flaring in the cities and widespread resistance to court-ordered busing, Republicans sensed an opportunity. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” charted a course in which a superficially moderate “law and order” rhetoric would peel away Southern voters whose embarrassment at crudely racist appeals— such as those emanating from Alabama Gov. George Wallace— might otherwise tempt them to remain loyal to the Democratic Party. It worked. Nixon and Wallace split the South in 1968, with the Democratic candidate, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, completely frozen out of the region. Except for Jimmy Carter’s campaigns in 1976 and 1980, it would be twenty-four years— essentially an entire generation— before a Democratic presidential candidate won another Southern state.
This electoral realignment definitively destroyed the New Deal coalition forged by FDR in 1932, which had depended on a “solid South” of (white) Democratic voters. It also presented the newly ascendant Republican Party with a quandary. Its earlier roots in the North and Mid-West had left it no more obviously racist— and considerably less so— than some other political actors, especially those in the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. The Civil Rights Act, for example, received more Republican than Democratic votes. The GOP at the time had a reasonably coherent ideology to offer: what matters most in politics, for personal well-being and material prosperity, is individual liberty; individual liberty, in turn, is most secure when law-making and law-following happen close together. Proximity protects autonomy. The federal government becomes dangerous when it acts outside a carefully circumscribed sphere of powers and concerns, even if it does so out of otherwise laudable motives. On this view, the American experiment had succeeded because it filtered the exigencies of political life— the inevitable conflicts of order and liberty— through a hierarchy of sovereignties: federal, state, and local. The experiment would continue to succeed only if each of these effectively discharged its own prerogatives while respecting those of the others.
There was an obvious problem with using this logic to oppose federal civil rights action. How were Black citizens supposed to influence their state and local governments when some of these actively denied them the right to vote? But there was no conceptual conflict between rejecting federal action on civil rights while endorsing the goal of Black equality. One simply had to focus one’s efforts on persuading state and local authorities to pass the appropriate laws. But this, of course, would have alienated the very Southern voters whose support was now suddenly available to Republican candidates. This was the choice the GOP confronted. Would it insist on the priority of individual liberty, but bring this principle to bear on Jim Crow regimes in Southern localities; or would “states’ rights” exhaust its interest in racial justice, even when those rights were used to crush the individual liberty of Black citizens?
We all know how they chose.
***
As millions of Southern voters rushed into the GOP, they gave its libertarian-leaning conservatism— really a federalist version of so-called “classical” liberalism— a decidedly harsher hue. The main reason for this lies in the distinctive influence of the South’s history as an apartheid regime.
Every political community faces two fundamental tasks. The first is to define the principles that will shape the rights and duties of citizens. The second is to decide who can be a citizen— that is, who can be a full-fledged member of the community.
In democratic states, citizens share in the law-making power. But this makes the question of citizenship a fraught one. A feature of political life that does not receive enough attention is that— outside of very small city-states, at least— it mostly takes place among strangers. That persons I don’t know will have a hand in making laws I must obey can be a deeply unsettling idea. It forces to the surface one of the basic issues of political life— the issue of social trust.
Historically, democratic states have managed this problem in two different ways. At any given moment, they have often restricted access to the law-making power— to full citizenship— to those with characteristics shared with powerful in-groups. These characteristics (often various kinds of class, religious, racial, and gender markers) effectively served as gateways to political power. But in the long term, this strategy tended to yield, barrier-by-barrier, to the universalist logic of modern liberalism: to its implicit premise that all persons are created equal and hence are potential members of the political community. Thus men without “property,” women, Blacks, non-Christians, and LGBTQ Americans were all eventually accepted as citizens in good standing, with the full panoply of political rights and powers. This universalist conception of citizenship is one of the defining features of what I have elsewhere referred to as “political modernism.” (Though it would have been better to call it “liberal modernism.”)
But not everyone is a political modernist. The strains and stresses of political life cut very deeply, and universalism is simply more than some people can bear. (It goes without saying that this is not a problem only in the United States.) In particular, the extension of social trust it requires can be difficult, if not impossible, for those who regard certain forms of difference as an existential threat.
It was exactly this scar, I think, that slavery and apartheid inflicted on the minds of some Southerners. The antebellum South, and its Jim Crow descendants, were essentially garrison states in which white people lived side-by-side with millions of Blacks whom they routinely defiled and abused. (At the time of the Civil War, slaves constituted about one-third of the South’s total population.) As is often the case, the guilty recognition of their own violence was processed by whites as a fear of Black vengeance. The only way to avoid it, to forestall a holocaust of violent reprisal, was to keep their knees on Black necks. For those imbued with this level of paranoia and suspicion, there could be no question of welcoming Blacks into the community or of sharing political power with them. That power, such persons insisted, would only be turned against them.
When the refusal of universalism is grounded in psychological energies so poisoned and pervasive, its effect on the political imagination is ruinous. It can make a politics of pure domination seem inescapable. This nightmare vision of political life— in which power is restricted to one group of persons who use it to terrorize and oppress others— is familiar enough in history. But liberals, and liberal modernists specifically, reject this vision. Politics, for them, is the search for a form of social life in which every trace of domination and exploitation has been removed from human relations.
***
1964 was fifty-seven years ago— more than two generations. In part because of the civil rights legislation Barry Goldwater opposed, political modernism has flowered in many places in the South. But not everywhere. One of the ironies of Donald Trump’s GOP is its infatuation with only one face of the South. It is not drawn to the region’s many vibrant cities, where diverse populations have created dynamic and prosperous local cultures. Its attentions are lavished instead on the Southern hinterland, exurban and rural areas pockmarked by economic stagnation, opioid abuse, and demographic decline. But these places do have two distinguishing characteristics. Typically they are areas of relatively low racial diversity, in which whites significantly outnumber Blacks. They also tend to be areas of lower educational attainment, a factor strongly correlated with racial animus.
It might seem strange that a political party would devote itself to such unpromising areas. In the GOP’s case, part of the explanation surely lies in the vagaries of the American constitution, where the design of the Electoral College and the Senate gives disproportionate power to rural populations. Just think how different the Party would look if it had to compete with Democrats for the support of diverse urban voters. But this is only part of the answer. Just as important— more so, I would argue— is the political logic of the GOP’s turn to the South.
We tend to have an over-simple idea of how political parties interact with their supporters. We think of it as involving little more than assembling a slate of candidates before each election, then assisting them with financing and messaging in hopes they will attract a majority of voters. Certainly these are essential functions of any political party, but they would be exhaustive only in a world in which parties did not exist between elections. The fact is that they do: a political party is an ongoing concern. Even when no election is imminent, it must raise money, attract volunteers, hire staff, vet candidates. And in preparing for elections— including primaries— parties know it isn’t a majority of voters per se that matters, but a majority of the voters who turn out. In other words, a party must manage its supporters in a way that maximizes their investment in the political process. The greater that investment, the more likely voters are to donate money, volunteer, advocate to neighbors and on social media— and to show up on election day.
Given this, the proper strategy for any party is clear. First, it must settle on a rhetoric and program well-suited to evoke this kind of loyalty in the largest possible segment of the electorate. Then it must repeat these messages to them as clearly and directly— and ceaselessly— as it can. It reinforces the message in order to reinforce their urgency.
But the process is dynamic: voters, confronted with this insistent signaling, engage in their own decision-making. They can react as the party hopes they will, with renewed passion and interest, but some might find the new rhetoric unpalatable and off-putting. If so, they may reconsider their involvement in the party. At the limit, they may decide to exit its ranks in favor of other affiliations. The basic point here is that a political party does not just shape itself as it selects its program and language: it also shapes its electorate. And at each stage of this process, it must calculate whether it is, on balance, gaining more activist voters than it is losing.
We can see precisely this strategy at work in the GOP’s interactions with its new Southern voters. Goldwater’s superficially neutral language of “states’ rights” and Nixon’s moderate-sounding “law and order” eventually gave way to Reagan’s far less coded rhetoric about “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks.” Then came Willie Horton. Then the generalized cultural chauvinism of Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay (Gingrich: “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz. I see evil all around me every day”). Then the flyers in the 2000 South Carolina primary claiming that John McCain, George W. Bush’s principal opponent, had fathered a mixed-race child. Then Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, at the time the incoming Senate Majority Leader, opining on the hundredth birthday of Strom Thurmond that if the country had supported Thurmond’s presidential campaign, “[W]e wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.” Then came birtherism. Then Trump’s kick-off of his first presidential run with the claim that Mexican immigrants were “rapists.” Then his defense of white supremacists and Neo-Nazis at the lethal event in Charlottesville, Va. “Shithole countries.” Then his defense of public commemoration of Confederate officials as “heritage.” Then…. But you get the point.
The path from Goldwater to Trump was, as they say, long and winding. At each turn, or potential turn, the GOP faced a choice: should it intensify its already inflamed racial rhetoric, or should it retreat to more moderate and inclusive language? It unfailingly chose the former, and it did so to leverage the loyalty of its Southern partisans. But of course these decisions had a downside: they drove large numbers of liberal and moderate Republicans out of the party. Nor was this simply collateral damage; as the American historian Geoffrey Kabaservice shows in his brilliant Rule or Ruin, the best history of the GOP’s post-war evolution, the party’s conservative wing deliberately targeted its more centrist and liberal rivals. The agency of right-wing actors drove the radicalization of the Republican Party.
This process, with its endless series of purges, its relentless patrolling of the border that divides “real” Republicans from “Republicans in Name Only” (“RINOs”) — a primary function of right-wing media— is what gave us the GOP of today. Its recent loss of college-educated suburban White voters— long a mainstay of the Party— is just the latest step along the path. Now almost entirely restricted to sparsely populated areas of the South and Mid-West, the GOP is ideologically purified but geographically (and demographically) isolated. In this situation, those rural redoubts become even more important to the Party’s electoral survival— which of course just incentivizes further radicalization. The hinterland is now the dark heart of Republican politics; the spiritual, if not the literal, home of Proud Boys, White Nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and Anti-Immigrant Militias everywhere. When they dream their dreams of racial instauration, this is where they lay their heads.
***
I said above that those earlier articles contained mistakes. In closing, I would like to elaborate on two of these.
The first was not realizing that the Confederacy is now, for want of a better phrase, a state of mind. It doesn’t refer only to the historical entity created to defend slavery; it’s also a trope, a metaphor. It collects all the nervous paranoia of the nation’s vicious racial past, all its occult power, its guilty assurance that reconciliation is impossible and harm must follow harm or all is lost. It is as much talisman as history. As such, it can exert a powerful influence on weak minds geographically remote from the American South. Trump’s shocking 2016 victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are proof of that.
More fundamentally, I failed to understand the extent to which the Confederate Mythos is as much about psychology as ideology. Doubtless this is one reason it so efficiently displaced the GOP’s earlier insistence on the bloodless dogmas of free-market capitalism. It also facilitates the trans-sectional appeal just noted.
In 2013, I coined the phrase “paranoid narcissism” to describe the mentality of the Tea Party. It was narcissistic because it defined “real” America in terms of the racial, religious, and cultural markers of its own members; it was paranoid because, having effected this identity, it interpreted any change in the nation’s demography as a threat to its own sense of self. Politics became a matter of psychic survival; what was at stake was not a policy agenda, but the basic unity of a personality.
I still think this idea a good one. But I should have emphasized its most obvious corollary: that for all its bluster and agitation, the right-wing self is racked by fear, by an existential anxiety. It is permeated by vulnerability. It feels itself always in danger of being dispossessed, replaced, abandoned— of passing out of the world. It is, in short, infantile.
This, I think, is the secret shared among Trump and his followers, the real liturgy of Trumpism. Trump’s own obvious infantilism chimed deeply with that of the Republican “base.” (Never was a segment of the electorate more justly named.) Their bond was forged in neoteny. Trump’s anarchic impulses, his nervously modeled version of toxic masculinity, his chaotic, incoherent speech— all these things found a deep echo in the roiled souls of his acolytes. Nothing makes this more clear than the pathetic images of the MAGA rioters inside the Capitol. Some surge through its hallways and chambers, seized by a frenzy of jagged violence— that is, by a tantrum. Others wander aimlessly, touching the statuary, taking selfies, gazing at the ceilings— the gawking, ogling behavior of villagers who storm their lord’s castle but, once inside, are mesmerized by its treasures: an admission of inferiority, of a permanent immaturity.
The Red Menace, the Yellow Peril, Islamist Terrorism, the dreaded forces of Black Lives Matter— the assembled ghosts of threats past. We forget that the most direct and deadly assault on the American state was launched in the name of White supremacy. As a reminder, we have the much more recent events of January 6. White nationalist violence is an inherent possibility of our politics because it is an indelible feature of our history. Trump’s demons whispered to those haunting the souls, the cracked minds, of his followers, and another episode of White necromancy followed. This much we can be certain of: as long as the Republican Party exists in its present form, more acts of sorcery are to come.
Kim Messick 