One of the more stunning concepts, arising out of certain hopeful Republicans to somehow distinguish themselves from the overwhelming and suffocating presence of Donald Trump, was the idea that the United States is “not a racist country.” Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley floated this theory last week, declaring on Fox News that the U.S. had “never been a racist country.”
Before he ignominiously bowed out of the race on Sunday, Ron DeSantis, when asked, echoed—in rather pathetic fashion—similar sentiments, stating “the U.S. is not a racist country,” but “we’ve overcome things in our history.” Haley’s statements were even more fascinating, however, in light of the fact that she’d previously ignored slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War.
But all political pandering aside, Republicans had better believe the United States is, in fact, a racist country. Because if it isn’t, they’ve been wasting literally the last 60 years and billions in political donations in a strangely quixotic quest to nail down the racist vote and make it their own. In fact, if this nation were not as racist as it is, there likely wouldn’t be a modern Republican party to begin with.
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Although both political parties in this country clearly benefit from the largesse of the nation’s big-money donors and ultra-wealthy family dynasties and individuals, Republicans have overwhelmingly been the greatest beneficiaries of that largesse. This trend has continued up to and including the most recent national elections, and there is no reason to suspect that will change.
Even so, few Americans would say they are motivated to vote by the prospect of giving this nation’s wealthiest citizens yet another gargantuan tax cut. Probably not too many cast their ballots so that billionaires such as Jeffrey Bezos, for example, can do more back flips in zero gravity or acquire another media outlet. And even fewer likely cast their vote so Koch Industries or its sprawling network of subsidiaries and associated conglomerates can freely pump hazardous chemicals into our air, churn massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, or dump toxic waste byproducts near where those voters live.
And yet the country remains about evenly divided politically. Millions of ordinary American voters continue to vote for a party whose entire existence is predicated on satisfying the economic interests and desires of the relatively tiny percentage of this nation’s uber-wealthy. These voters continue to do this even though they personally disapprove of those policies. A substantial portion of those people premise their vote on religious sensibilities, primarily their opposition to abortion. However, there simply aren’t enough of those people to form a national majority, and Republicans know this.
That is why the Republican Party has, for the past 60 years—and now, even more virulently thanks to Trump—turned to crude racism as its chief motivator to get out the Republican vote. Because its actual policy goals of more tax cuts and more deregulation don’t particularly inspire people, Republicans must rely on something that does. That “something” is and will continue to be appeals to racism, the seemingly overwhelming human impulse to believe, as Webster’s explains, that a person’s race is determinative of inherent superiority or inferiority, and that policies and attitudes should implicitly work to advantage one race over another. In practice, such racism is typically channeled as a justification for discrimination and oppression, and this country is certainly no exception to that rule.
The United States has the dubious distinction of being the only major country to have fought a massively lethal civil war over the singular issue of perpetuating the enslavement of Black people as a legitimate, sanctioned institution. That war and its sordid century-long aftermath alone, in which the country was (again) roughly equally divided on that one issue, ought to be enough to put to rest any question as to whether this country is, in fact, racist.
The U.S. (or at very least a substantial part of it) has been inherently racist since its formation, it continued to be racist up to, during, and long after that Civil War, and continues still to be divided by racist sentiment in the present day. Obviously a large segment of the American public do not (at least consciously) allow racism to intrude on their political choices, but many, many Americans still do, even though a multiplicity of laws have been passed over the past six decades in an attempt to neutralize the enduring pull of virulent, senseless racism.
While Republicans—through their judicial appointments and legislation—have continually sought to undermine those laws, they have not succeeded in re-establishing racism as a fixed governing principle on a national level, the way the American South sought to perpetuate slavery over its territory by instigating the Civil War. But it certainly hasn’t been for lack of trying, which is why statements of people like Haley—a person ostensibly aiming to lead the Republican party in its current incarnation—rise to the level of grotesque absurdity. In its quest to satisfy the needs and desires of its primary donors and sponsors, the Republican party has quite deliberately exploited the continued appeal of racism in this country at nearly every turn over the past 60 years. This has been ever since a Democratic administration rebuked the expectations of a racist, overwhelmingly Southern voter base, a contingent which then immediately reversed its political orientation, and now regularly votes Republican.
That’s why nearly every pronouncement, policy, or other feature of Republican politics now incorporates racism or some vestige of it. That has been the case since Nixon implemented his “Southern Strategy” and ever more overtly since Ronald Reagan delivered his campaign speech in Neshoba county, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. Racism is integral to all Republican politics because it motivates those voters unenthused by the prospect of continually providing succor and privilege Republicans routinely bestow on this country’s wealthiest citizens and the mega-corporations most of them control.
And it no longer simply targets Blacks, although they represent the omnipresent, go-to bogeyman implicit in most Republican politics (hence Fox News’ overweening focus on “crime” which—if you pay attention—is unusually focused on crimes committed in Democratically run states that contain large Black and Latinx populations). The same pandering to racism has now grown to encompass all immigrants of color to the point where the “Great Replacement” theory formerly spewed by fringe white supremacist groups is now a standard talking point for Republicans, exploited to the hilt by Trump. When Trump bloviates to his nearly all-white rallygoers about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of our nation, he is channeling racism in its purest form. Neither Trump nor any Republican seeking reelection can brag about the tax cut passed under his last administration (Trump’s only substantive policy achievement), because few if any of those who attend his rallies saw any benefit from it.
The Republican crusade against so-called “wokeness,” in public (and private) schools; diversity, equity and inclusion policies in businesses; and attacks on every other institutional means of addressing and reversing racial discrimination all owe their origins to the GOP’s reliance on racism as a motivating factor for their base. The entire idea of “wokeness” stemmed from conservatives’ horrified reaction to the revanchist threat they saw in such popular works as The 1619 project and galvanizing cultural movements such as Black Lives Matter. Republicans rightly perceived these movements as undercutting their ability to continually demonize other races by demagoguing crime and government programs that (they assert) disproportionately benefit racial minorities, so they attacked them. If continually stoking racism in this country is your only tactic, you can’t very well have people (least of all high school students on the cusp of voting themselves) acknowledging the reality that it exists.
One of the most glaring examples of the disconnect between what Republicans (like Haley and others) would have other Americans believe about race and the actual reality was provided by none other than the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Immediately after the court (in Shelby v. Holder) gutted Sec. 5 of the Voting Rights Act based on the contrived fantasy that race relations in this country had improved to the point where strict scrutiny of the former slave states’ voting laws was unnecessary, Republican legislators in those states immediately proceeded to enact a wave of voter suppression laws, all of them specifically geared to disenfranchise Black voters. Those suppression efforts have continued to the present day, demonstrating that little if anything has really changed: a substantial portion of this country remains just as firmly racist as it was over a century ago.
The entire Republican agenda—to the extent it’s actually articulated to its voting base—relies on racism as the very rationale for its furtherance. That it both dovetails nicely with while still disguising the corporate imperatives dictated by its actual donor base has been a feature of Republican politics since most people in this country were old enough to vote in the first place. Their party’s standard-bearer, Trump, clearly views exploiting Americans’ racism as a viable political strategy. He’d be awfully disappointed (and probably politically impotent) if that weren’t the case. Because if it was, both he and the rest of his party would have to explain to their voters what their actual goals are. And those voters would probably not be impressed.
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