Time to call out the GOP’s new Jim Crow tactics
Opinion by
Columnist
November 18, 2020 at 12:03 p.m. CST
The
Wayne County Board of Canvassers, which oversees elections in Detroit, provoked outrage Tuesday
night after its members deadlocked over whether to certify its county’s results
for the presidential election. Eventually, Republicans on the board caved to
certify the results, asking Michigan’s secretary of state to conduct an audit
of the election.
Before
the reversal, the Trump campaign’s legal adviser celebrated the
potential disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of African American
voters:
This
follows the clownish display by President Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani in
a federal court in Pennsylvania. There, he railed against disproportionately
Black cities, seeking to cast doubt on potentially millions of votes. The
Associated Press reports, “Democrats in
control in major cities in those states — Giuliani name-checked Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Milwaukee and Detroit — prevented
Republican observers from watching election workers process mail-in ballots so
the workers could falsify enough ballots to ensure Trump lost, Giuliani
claimed, without evidence to back it up.” (In fact, there is replete evidence
this did not happen.)
Let’s
be brutally honest: We have not seen a coordinated effort of this magnitude and
geographic breadth to disenfranchise African American voters since the Jim Crow
era. Trump — who has embraced white supremacist symbolism (e.g., the
Confederate flag, military bases named for Confederate generals), defended an
accused White vigilante murderer, deployed anti-immigrant fearmongering,
cheered on Proud Boys and tried to scare White suburbanites with the prospect
of racially integrated neighbors — is now leading a campaign that seeks to
exclude African American votes. This should remove any doubt that the Trumpist
Republican Party, like many right-wing populist parties in Europe, is at its
core a racist enterprise.
We are
urged not to assume bad motives of our opponents. Any suggestion that we hold
accountable the purveyors of lies and racist memes is met with howls of
protest. The idea that it would be better for the country and for the
center-right to level the Republican Party with a wrecking ball provokes a
spasm of rage. But let’s get real.
The
majority of Republican members of Congress, Trump enablers in right-wing media,
the Republican National Committee and local Republican leaders of the type in
Wayne County have engaged in a coordinated push to preserve the power of a
shrinking White electorate, which is essential to their grip on political
power. This is far less discreet than the “Southern strategy”; this is the
politics of white supremacy. One need not wear a hood or use racial slurs to
qualify as a proponent of this racist mentality, which rests on the assumptions
that Whites are entitled to hold the reins of power and that the decline of
America is tied to the rise of majority-minority states. Under this ideology,
any action (e.g. lying, voter suppression, inciting violence) is justified in
the existential fight to preserve their place in American society.
But
let’s not forget the thousands of good and decent Republicans in state and
local government — and some such as Christopher Krebs, former head of the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, whom Trump fired for debunking false claims of
fraud in the election — who reject the ongoing assault on our multiracial
democracy. A handful of Republican senators have recognized President-elect Joe
Biden as the legitimate winner. Others, such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad
Raffensperger, personify honor and devotion to the Constitution. They need our
support and praise, but they are being outmanned and shouted down by the
Trumpian horde and right-wing media.
Millions
of Republican voters do not agree with white supremacy, but they delude
themselves when they ignore this rotting core of their party. One cannot simply
brush off Confederate symbolism, race baiting and incitement of White militia
as “just Trump talking” any more than one can pretend the post-election
shenanigans are anything but an effort to disenfranchise Black voters so that
White votes control the outcome. There is no “But Gorsuch” or “But tax cuts” or
“But religious liberty” that justifies this behavior — akin to Whites of the
1950s saying they were not for segregation, just “states’ rights.”
Many
pundits are pleading for the nearly 80 million people who voted for Biden to
try to understand those who did not, but it is time to implore the less than 74
million who voted for Trump to take off their rose-colored glasses, confront
what is at the core of the Trump movement and reject White grievance and Black
disenfranchisement. Unless they do, there will be no healing, no reconciliation
and no multiracial democracy.
