Democratic backsliding and race

Weird how those who are okay with democratic erosion and violence also want to restore the old racial hierarchy

Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 inauguration, nearly thwarted by a pro-slavery mob

The events coming out of the Trump administration over the past month remind us of the link between democratic erosion and racism. The Secretary of Defense firing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, having raised no issue of concern about him other than his being Black, and replacing him with an under-qualified white Trump loyalist is just the latest example of this. Over the past month, we’ve seen example after example of the administration illegally firing people, defunding research and education programs, ending civil rights enforcement, and dismantling government functioning for little reason other than an effort to end “DEI” programs and restore an earlier racial hierarchy. This isn’t just a Trump-era phenomenon.

As I’ve written previously on this site, Trump represents the conservative populist wing of the Republican Party, and it’s a wing with a very long pedigree in the United States. This conservative populism has a longstanding association with democratic decline and political violence, both in the United States and around the world. Populism, after all, is the general sense that the nation is divided into a “corrupt elite” and a “virtuous people,” and given that the governing systems have, in this world view, been corrupted to advantage the elites, regular political participation — voting, demonstrating, writing your elected officials, etc. — is by definition futile. A regular person simply can’t get a fair shake using regular avenues for political action. So if they really want to pursue a change, the only way to do it is extra-legally, and that can mean undermining democratic institutions and even participating in political violence.

A variety of research shows that, among American voters, support for political violence and anti-democratic action is strongly associated with perceived victimhood, authoritarian beliefs, populism, and white identity. That is, people willing to support or even participate in political violence tend to feel that their deserved status or their pride are being unjustly taken from them, that they are losing ground to a less deserving group.

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book Stolen Pride captures an important modern paradox, in which Democratic-leaning states have had relatively successful economies in recent decades but also have developed political cultures that view collective action as more responsible for individual wealth than individual action. Meanwhile, Republican-leaning states have faced tougher economic hardships, yet have a political culture that credits or blames people’s circumstances on their own individual initiative. This creates a situation in which violent right wing, even white supremacist groups have an entrée into the conservative states. In Hochschild’s words, the appeal sounds something like:

You’ve lost your regional pride, your well-paid jobs, suffered devaluation of what you do have, and you’ve had enough. We on the violent right will erase shame from you and seamlessly divert your shame to blame — blame of Jews, Muslims, Blacks, immigrants, liberals, and Democrats. Your access to the American Dream? They took it! Everything that ever hurt you is their fault. Our guns are cocked and loaded.

A History of Violence

Even if Trump and conservative populists have been more tolerant or even encouraging of political violence, they hardly invented it, and the period between the 1800 election and January 6, 2021 was not a peaceful and easy 221 years. Obviously the Civil War stands out as an important moment where the losing party did not accept the outcome of a presidential election, and it chose to violently secede rather than accept a federal government it didn’t want. Even before that conflict began, a pro-slavery mob gathered in front of the U.S. Capitol on February 13, 1861, to prevent the Congress from ratifying Abraham Lincoln’s election. It was a prime example of a group of white supremacists viewing democratic processes as inherently suspect and resorting to extra-legal and violent means to protecting their status.

There were many proximate causes of the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, especially a Civil War draft law that targeted poor men for Army recruitment. But the violence that ensued was overwhelmingly perpetrated by whites, especially Irish immigrants, and directed at whom they perceived to be the cause of the war, Blacks. Hundreds were killed in what remains the largest urban civil disturbance in U.S. history.

1863 NYC Draft Riots

The post-Civil War South was rife with attempts to violently overthrow legitimately elected governments and to reduce or eliminate Black voter turnout through intimidation campaigns, all in the name of restoring whites’ political power and status. The city of Wilmington, North Carolina, which had a properly elected bi-racial government in 1898, was violently overthrown by a mob of some 2,000 white men. The mob killed dozens of people, destroyed many Black-owned businesses, and expelled both white and Black officials from the city on pain of death.

The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in which a white supremacist mob destroyed a vibrant Black commercial center, killing dozens and leaving thousands homeless, can be viewed in a similar way. So can the pogrom in Corbin, Kentucky, in 1919, when a white mob forced all 200 Black residents onto a freight train, expelling them from the town. The attempted insurrection in January 2021 — seeking to prevent the installation of Barack Obama’s former vice president, as well as that of a new vice president who was of African and Indian descent — was not precisely a repeat of such events, but it resonated in many ways with the nation’s history of racial violence.

And of course American political violence was not limited to the Civil War and its aftermath. The U.S. was arguably not a full democracy until 1965, when the Voting Rights Act put the federal government in charge of enforcing 14^th amendment voting rights and guaranteeing Black Americans access to the polls. Prior to that, Black voter turnout was much lower, especially in the South, and was indeed negligible in some southern counties for nearly a century. This was due to Jim Crow laws that simply made it harder or impossible for Blacks to register as voters, and to decades of terror campaigns led by the Ku Klux Klan and related groups and designed to intimidate Black voters and kill their organizers.

Recent years have seen an increase in some very high profile political violence, as well. The 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which white supremacists marched to defend Confederate monuments and promote Great Replacement Theory, resulted in more than 30 injuries and the death of one counter-protester. Armed militia members effectively shut down the Michigan legislature in an anti-masking action during the Covid pandemic, with many participants wearing Trump hats. A 2020 ABC News analysis found that Trump’s name was being invoked in connection with assaults and threats that would otherwise be considered non-political.

As Victor Ray and Hakeem Jefferson have written, “Racial progress has never been linear, nor has it ever been wholly forward-moving.” Racial progress in the U.S. has often been followed by some kind of racial backlash, and that has often taken anti-democratic or even violent forms. Similarly, Julia Azari has written about how periods of relative racial progress by U.S. presidents are often followed by administrations characterized by racial backlash and undemocratic lawlessness.

It’s no coincidence that the Constitutional amendment defending the U.S. from being led by insurrectionists and the Constitutional amendment establishing racial political equality are the same amendment. It’s also no coincidence that that’s the amendment most under attack in the past decade.