RACE TO THE BOTTOM

MAGA’s White Supremacist Obsessions

By G.J. Nelson

The exaltation of power, wealth and sadism can take many forms, so MAGA is a lot of things to a lot of different people. But certainly, racism and xenophobia are high in the running. Without the ideology of white supremacy, very little of MAGA makes practical sense.

How else does one justify banning and deporting refugees from virtually every country in the world while carving out an exception for white South Africans? Why would Trump invite the South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to the White House to berate him about a completely fictional “white genocide?” Why would he present photographs from a completely different African country as evidence of said genocide?

You might bring up Trump’s political grudge over South Africa’s inconvenient resistance to core features of US foreign policy (like support of Israel’s Gaza campaign), but that alone cannot account for the false framing: Black savagery against white farmers. While expressing deep concern for a handful of farmers, the regime went out of its way to dismantle USAID programs that save thousands if not millions of lives in Africa.

The whole TV production was a spectacle designed to play to the profound ignorance and racism integral to the MAGA cult. Importing South African farmers while our borders are closed to everyone else is only a contradiction if you discount the racial component. That isn’t to say that every Trump supporter is a dyed-in-the-wool racist, but racism is clearly a motivating force for a lot of them.

The entire suite of anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-unnaturalized resident policies have but one clear goal: a whiter, more anglophone United States. The overkill is telling.

It’s one thing to scour the country for people breaking the law. It’s another entirely to overhaul the whole system of legal entry into the U.S. It’s one thing to deport families residing here because of recent Biden-era programs; it’s another to go after birthright citizenship. It’s one thing to detain someone overstaying their visa; it’s another to try to unilaterally ban all international students attending Harvard.

Trump and his ghoulish chief of staff Stephen Miller are not subtle. They wear their xenophobia proudly. Their entire cadre is rife with antisemitic conspiracy theorists, IQ-fixated “race-realists,” pro-natalists obsessed with white birth rates, and not a few open white nationalists. This isn’t liberal slander. It’s factual reality.

Their entire anti-DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) project, which has targeted federal agencies, state governments, nonprofits, and schools (both k-12 programs and higher education) is predicated on the laughably absurd idea that white people—who deserve everything and owe nothing—are the true victims of discrimination. For the regime, it’s a zero-sum game where any assistance or protection benefiting nonwhite minorities is a grave and unjust liability for white people.

Donald Trump has publicly vilified non-whites for decades. In 1989, he called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, young Black men falsely accused of raping a white woman. His later obsession with the birther conspiracy theory, insinuating that Barak Obama was not a US citizen, was part of a long Trump tradition of disparaging any successful Black person outside the world of sports or entertainment. These attitudes go all the way back to his slumlord beginnings.

Under Trump, major figures in MAGA have giddily lied about Black people and immigrants, disparaging them as rapists and thieves, gang members, pet-eaters, and “very bad hombres.” They’ve carted out every isolated act of violence carried out by an immigrant as evidence of their criminal nature, while ignoring the reality that nearly all violent crimes are committed by people born in the United States. A person is far more likely to be assaulted by a close friend than a migrant laborer.

They have gone out of their way to villainize any Black person killed by a police officer, white vigilante, or rent-a-cop. Any minority person unjustly killed by a cop is retroactively recast as a career criminal whose death was inevitable.

The MAGA Mythology

For the far right, slavery—abolished one-and-a-half centuries ago—is ancient history and its legacies negligible. The brutal network of slave labor camps that crisscrossed the South was good for the slaves and the forcible conversion of Black people to Christianity, one of the least Christ-like things you can imagine, was a net gain for everyone. Please ignore the mass murder, torture and sexual violence carried out against human beings.

There are people alive today who lived under the thumb of Jim Crow segregation, Black people and other nonwhites who experienced the constant threat of white terror. MAGA treats this as something that happened hundreds of years ago. But it’s a living memory for millions, who experienced the final years of segregation firsthand. Poverty, environmental degradation and neglect are still facts of life across many of the cities and towns subject to it.

They’d like you to believe that by the 1970s, after Jim Crow segregation was put to bed (at least officially), white racism was magically expunged and that the white people who supported segregation and vigilantism simply stopped existing, passed on nothing to their children, and since that time their descendants have become, like the South African farmers, the real victims of racism.

The far right has worked tirelessly for the last five decades to roll back desegregation and anti-discrimination laws, demonizing Black people as an “inherently criminal” element every step of the way. Any program, like say Affirmative Action, that increased the number of nonwhites in elite institution, was a horrible injustice. Please ignore the race of virtually every MAGA elite or financial backer.

Mass Delusions

Perhaps the biggest lie of our age is that racism isn’t present among “colorblind” white people. The problem is that every white person—including myself—knows this is patently false. Some of us are in denial. Some of us lie about it. But racism hovers like a ghost in all our closets. And no matter how much gaslight has gone into self-delusion, we know it.

Like most every white person I knew growing up in the 1980s and 90s, I had racist relatives. I’m not talking about soft “just asking questions,” “reverse-discrimination” racism. I mean virulent, n-word hurling, violence-tinged racism. Now, I’m not suggesting every white person was like this—my parents certainly weren’t—but you didn’t have to dig very deeply to find it.

The amount of bigotry I heard from white kids and their families growing up could fill a ten-volume set of books. It ranged from the relatively humdrum (“black welfare moms”) to out-and-out racist (“be careful of the Black kids playing next door”) to borderline genocidal (“America is for white people”). An uncle of a close friend was a cop, and his racist diatribes against Latinos reached King Lear levels of drama.  

I’ve been hearing a sermon of white resentment my entire life. And like a lot of white people, I internalized a lot of it. Since I was a teenager I have always viewed myself as enlightened person and an anti-racist, and yet I still made dehumanizing “un-PC” jokes about minorities, usually with winking irony (“I’m not supposed to say this, but…”).

I went out of my way to preach anti-racism to people, even violent neo-Nazis, and yet I still indulged grotesque stereotypes of Black people. I was so clueless, I’d even share some of that “humor” with Black friends. It took me a long time to overcome that, but it still hangs over my shoulder. It’s not something you can just shake off in good conscience.

I know racism exists in this country every time I walk down the street on a pleasant Sunday afternoon and feel completely free. I barely notice police cars when they pass. I’m not afraid of an ICE agent with a black bag in a shrub racially profiling me as I walk by. When I’m in the country, I can have a nice conversation with MAGA whites in Confederate flag tees. I’m a well-dressed white man, and I know my innocence is assumed.

I have nothing to fear because I’m an “all-American kid.” This is the essence of being a white person, especially one in the right income bracket. Nonwhite friends don’t live like this; they can’t be endlessly carefree. (Maybe when the regime makes my opinions a criminal act, I’ll get a small taste of what it feels like.)

So, when I hear white people on the street or in the media or at the White House press room pretending that racism plays no role in how white Americans vote or what policies they support, I stifle a snort. It’s patently insane, denial taken to the point of mass delusion.

When I see them claim that white people—who were freely lynching Black people 70 years ago and now hold most of the wealth and positions of power in the U.S.—are the real victims of racism, I ask for a can of the gasoline they’re huffing. Don’t look for supporting evidence or facts that support their claim. There are none. It’s all a racist lie.

They present all their destructive vitriol as a correction, a rebalancing of society. But, in fact, it’s a forcible white takeover of all spaces minorities were present in, and an ideological attack on any suggestion that white people might enjoy unfair advantages in a society where minorities are continuously belittled and demonized.

At this point, they may be targeting institutions and companies with explicit diversity hiring practices or minority outreach, but it’s only a matter of time before they start going after any institution or employer with “too many” women or Black people. Even with affirmative action gone, Republicans are still questioning minority enrollment numbers at colleges.

They have used the Civil Rights Act, which came about to help Black people and other minorities overcome over a century of segregation and discrimination, to dismantle programs they claim “discriminate” against white people. They take obvious glee in the offensive irony. It is show designed to entertain racists at everyone else’s expense.

The Matter of Black Lives

The social retrenchment following Black Lives Matters’ legitimate calls to end police abuse and killings of Black people is a useful object lesson on how the right has minimized Black suffering while recasting white people as victims.

In the months following protests over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, it took little time for the Blue Lives Matter or All Lives Matter pushback to take hold. In the right-wing media sphere, the expression “Black lives matter” was immediately recast to mean that police and white lives don’t matter. They took a slogan intended to humanize Black people and turned it into an opportunity to over-humanize police officers as perfect and infallible heroes and Black people and their allies as antisocial agitators.

Around that time, you couldn’t go a day without seeing the quasi-fascist thin blue line flag or “Police Lives Matter” bumper stickers. You could tell even then that all the promises that municipalities had made to activists to reform their police departments were going to crash and burn.

While few activists or municipal governments ever got that far in “defunding” police departments, in MAGA world it was treated as a real and widely adopted liberal policy. In fact, most blue cities did not seriously try to reduce police budgets. Without DOJ intervention, a lot of them would have happily ignored calls for reform altogether. 

The reactionary response to BLM shows how brittle the racist ego is, how threatened it is by the barest suggestion that maybe Blacks and other minorities are disproportionately impacted by heavy-handed policing. The MAGA assumption is that police tactics are already perfect, and their victims always have it coming (unless it’s a Capitol rioter).

When Trayvon Martin was killed walking home through a residential area, it didn’t even matter that the guy who killed him was a belligerent rent-a-cop. If a Black person died, their criminality is assumed and their killer is not only not guilty, but a hero worthy of veneration.

When Rittenhouse shot and killed two protesters in the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, his innocence was immediately taken at face value by MAGA. Despite the fact he traveled from Antioch, Il. to the protest fully intent on using his firearm to defend businesses, his boyish whiteness made him sympathetic, an innocent child.

Rittenhouse may have feared for his life before he opened fire, but he shouldn’t have been there with a gun in the first place. But the protesters he killed were there on behalf of black people and were therefore framed immediately as villains. He ultimately beat the charges.

The Limitations of Universality

When Democratic pollsters and strategists complain about the party being “too far left” they sometimes mean progressives attacking big business, but usually they mean it’s too focused on minority constituents.

According to many liberal mandarins, the party needs to focus on winning over white (and increasingly, Latino) working class voters. I’m not a Democrat, but I’d say this is likely true on its face. However, this advice often comes with a side order of throwing people under the bus. Diversity is a liability, trans people are a problem, maybe the larger coalition of minorities should be jettisoned.

The argument is that by shifting to more universalist economic and social policies, they can short circuit the culture war, avoid all the identitarian mines the Republicans have laid, and attract a broader voter base with appeals to shared prosperity. It sure sounds nice.    

Going back a few years, Bernie Sanders’ lefty campaign proposals, like building a robust social democracy by taxing the wealthy, were certainly appealing. Indeed, a genuine public health care system, social housing, high-quality public schools, and generous welfare benefits would help everyone. All boats would rise together.

Race is something Sanders has never been especially comfortable talking about, and he seems to believe you can neutralize it by putting everyone on steadier ground. If everyone knows they’re not going to be evicted, left uninsured, or want for any necessity—the logic goes—they’re not going to be as vulnerable to racially charged resentment politics. Someone should tell that to white union bosses in the 1960s.      

The new-fangled Abundance movement among mainstream Democrats takes a different approach, which in part involves unleashing market forces to solve problems like housing shortages. While I am skeptical of the private sector’s ability to solve social problems, I think there is a sincere debate to be had here. But like Sanders’ social democracy, tricky issues like race and identity politics are sidelined in favor of broad-based prosperity.  

What these approaches share is the idea of using universal solutions to sidestep the toxic racial and identitarian politics of the culture war (which have been prematurely ceded to the far right), offering an attractive and practical alternative to MAGA’s empty appeals to economic “populism,” one of the most meaningless terms ever devised.   

But running away from racism isn’t going to make it go away. And it’s not going to guarantee that the fruits of the welfare state or economic abundance will be equally distributed to people facing discrimination, bias, and pervasive stereotypes.

If the Democrats somehow, by way of magic, reversed the Trumpian assault on government and pushed through serious reforms, the radicalized right will still be there, laser-focused on any minority group they think are benefiting too much. As soon as there’s a perception that nonwhite people are getting something from white taxpayers—even if white people are still getting most of the pie—it becomes a racial flashpoint. It happened to welfare and HUD housing; it can happen with social housing and UHC.   

And that’s the problem. Racism and white supremacy are ideologies that work both on the macro level, a biological theory of racial inequality, and the micro, the everyday biases held by many powerful and not-so-powerful white people. These biases affect virtually every professional or personal interaction they have, from who they hire to who they call the cops on.

Because it’s a mythology, it can persist without economic or political incentives. And it can be weaponized with a single false accusation. It’s not rational; it’s an emotional worldview that doesn’t care about reason, pragmatic results, or efficacy.

American white supremacy might have been born out of an economic relationship (e.g., slaveowner and enslaved person, factory owner and migrant laborer, settler and native), but it’s now a disembodied spirit that has persisted beyond its utility. You can’t wave a wand and make everyone forget it. Universal access to quality health care, cheap housing, and job security may mitigate racism, but it will not end it. Socialism will not cure it. And its resentments will always reappear when the system breaks down.

Look at MAGA to get a sense of how pervasive and totalizing racist appeals are to millions of Americans. It’s a tap they can turn on at any time. There are always uses for new resentments and political wedges. Without laws protecting the rights of nonwhite minorities and immigrants—especially those who have been historically oppressed—they will always be vulnerable to MAGA and the far right’s increasingly violent bigotry.

White supremacy is a ghost we will either come to fully embody under the grip of authoritarianism or exorcise with love, a sincere belief in our shared humanity, and antiracist solidarity. Racism must be confronted directly with no equivocation.  

If we’re going to save what’s left of this democracy, we must fight for the freedom and prosperity of every single person. Taking on racism is a tall order, but the first step is easy: admitting it exists.

 A Brief Note on “Woke”

When the so-called alt-right first poured into the streets of Charlottesville with the more-than-tacit approval of Trump, that should have been the end of discussion about MAGA’s views on race. And yet somehow the “nonpartisan” mainstream media was more fascinated than repelled by the new buttoned-up racism of insiders like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and posturing clowns like Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin McInnes.

Who can forget the NY Times’ Bari-Weiss-enabled romance with the rancid “just asking questions” posturing of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, which sought to undermine “liberal” notions of the way things are (including issues of race) in the guise of free speech absolutism? 

Or the endless efforts to wash the racism out of the white male rage of MAGA, the fascination with far-right gadflies pushing “race science” or the defensive focus on the plight of the “white working class” (as if no other kind of working class exists)? The mainstream media seemed more amused than fearful about where all the rage was being directed: women, minorities, and effete “coastal elites.”   

Perhaps the far right’s greatest coup was seizing the word “woke” from Black people and weaponizing it—with the help and support of mainstream op-ed writers and talking heads.

“Woke” is a now snarl word to minimize any legitimate complaint, interpretation or observation MAGA doesn’t like. “Woke” is a containment system designed to ghettoize any perspective or knowledge that makes the reactionary uncomfortable. As a political strategy it has been incredibly successful, giving cover to a host of antidemocratic attacks on both civil rights and free speech.