Hate speech and threatening marches are overt acts, and they are a prelude to violence. These ongoing events need to be viewed in this light, or the fascist regime will be upon us before we have a chance to respond.
If anyone claims to need further proof beyond what we all witnessed on 1.6.21, the days leading up to it, and what has transpired since, then no evidence will suffice to establish a basic truth— fascism has been openly embraced by rank and file GOP voters.
I believe rank and file GOP voters— aka the fascist crowd, without whom the fascist regime could not exist— know who they are choosing to align with, and can observe, like the rest of us, what results from this choice.
Absolving someone’s involvement in an organization that openly promotes bigoted violence and autocratic rule, because one has not yet discerned what lies in their ‘true heart of hearts’, seems historically, factually and morally indefensible.
We need to view, and treat, each and every rank and file GOP voter as an adult, making deliberate, conscious decisions with whom they align and support.
For adults, taking responsibility for one’s decisions and actions, as the young folk might say it, is a thing.
So is, accordingly, culpability,
To exonerate the rank and file GOP voters of their conscious decision to associate with, and provide support for, an organization that is actively engaged in crimes against humanity and the dismantling our democracy, because one does not wish to see them a certain way, because it unsettles views one has long subscribed to, does not bear close scrutiny, nor does it represent some sort of moral virtue.
Absolution given cheaply allows those who perpetrate horrors to feel empowered, it does not ‘bring them into the conversation’, or ‘bring them round to our way of seeing things’.
White supremacy is what the nation was- literally- built upon.
We each need to reckon with the full reality of this history, but recognize it is not relegated to history:
REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORY OFWHITE SUPREMACY IN THE UNITED STATES
The Rev. Dr. William J. Gardiner
March, 2009
“History …is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by its many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do…And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. In great pain and terror one begins to assess the history, which has placed one where one is and formed one’s point of view. In great pain and terror, because, therefore, one enters into battle with that historical creation, Oneself.” —James Baldwin
Wanting to forget the racial past is not a new attitude for those of us who are white. This was a common desire among whites after the American Revolution as they struggled to reconcile their newfound freedoms with the institution of slavery. But when it comes to addressing issues of race today, history is critical because our current race relations are deeply embedded in our history.
As Matthew Frye Jacobson notes, “Racism is fundamentally a theory of history. It is a theory of who is who, of who belongs and who does not, of who deserves what and who is capable of what.” For me, coming to terms with our history is essential if we are to move toward becoming a more racially just society. In addition any attempt by those of us who are white to deal with issues of white identity must be grounded in an understanding of how white identity came to be shaped over the past four hundred years… [pg. 1]
The term white supremacy defines relationships of power between whites and people of color. Matthew Frye Jacobsen refers to race as an “organizer of power.” 5 Similarly we could say the white supremacy is an organizer of power. One form of the power of white supremacy is the power to oppress, control, disempower, and destroy people of color. Another form of the power of white supremacy is the power to provide power and privilege to those who are identified as being white… [pg.2]
We might remember the strong resistance which Native Americans made to the conquest of the lands they were living on. The European colonists would never have been able to conquer the Native Americans if whites had been a divided people. One way the colonists unified themselves was to strengthen the white racial identity they brought with them from England. As whites came into North America they were intent on taking the land of the Native Americans. When whites first arrived there were an estimated 7,000,000 people divided into approximately 600 distinct communities. Through a process of conquest, war, disease, and broken treaties Native Americans were decimated so that by the end of the 19th century only 225,000 survived. The conquest of Native Americans and the taking of their land was an essential part of forming white supremacy… [pg. 5]
Just as the conquest of Native Americans shaped white supremacy so did the enslavement of African peoples. Three important factors led to the social construction of whiteness in relation to African peoples: the need for cheap labor, the desire for social control, and the fear of insurrection. As Rubio notes in his book A History of Affirmative Action: ”Neither slavery not the white race constituted fixed or natural categories or activity, but rather both were institutions devised over the course of the first century of settlement by 7Anglo American colonial authorities in Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas in order to cut labor costs and blunt the threat of labor solidarity and rule.” [pp.6-7]
The Confederacy and Jim Crow were the well-spring of fascism, along with a few centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe:
White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots
Adam Serwer/ The Atlantic
April 2019
The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States. What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents. Perhaps the most important among them was a blue blood with a very impressive mustache, Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe…
Most Americans, however, quickly forgot who Grant was—but not because the country had grappled with his vision’s dangerous appeal and implications. Reflexive recoil was more like it: When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in. Jonathan Peter Spiro, a historian and the author of Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (2009), described the backlash to me this way: “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology…
His thesis found eager converts among the American elite, thanks in no small part to his extensive social connections. The New York Times and The Nation were among the many media outlets that echoed Grant’s reasoning. Teddy Roosevelt, by then out of office, told Grant in 1916 that his book showed “fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail.” In a major speech in Alabama in 1921, President Warren Harding publicly praised one of Grant’s disciples, Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy offered similar warnings about the destruction of white society by invading dusky hordes. There is “a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” between the races, Harding told his audience. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.”
Harding’s vice president and successor, Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping…
“It was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.” Hitler and his followers were eager to claim a foreign—American—lineage for the Nazi mission.