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Far
from recoiling at Trump’s failed coup of January 6, the GOP is
avidly regrouping around him and launching an even more ruthless
campaign of voter disenfranchisement to seize power. The polarization
between racist authoritarianism and a multiracial democracy is
white-hot.
There
are many things that progressives need to do to win this historic
fight. One of the less obvious, yet crucial, projects is to sharpen
the conceptual understandings that guide our work.
For
example, the Black Lives Matter movement, flanked by immigrant and
Native struggles, has energized public appreciation of “systemic
racism” and renewed Black-led antiracist activism. Among
progressives, “racial capitalism” has won an enthusiastic
audience as more people realize that U.S. capitalism and racism are
inseparable.
As
these concepts get popularized, we ought to deepen them and oppose
the inevitable attempts to water them down, de-radicalize, divide and
de-center the struggle against racism.
THE
STATE AND WHITE SUPREMACY
I
also believe that our movement needs to more thoroughly digest and
strategically act upon the harsh reality that racism is, first and
foremost, imposed by white racist political power. In particular, the
fight against racism is choked if it does not target white power and
its constituent political institutions, especially the institutions
that embody and exercise the power of the state.
To
help capture this, I will highlight the concept of the “white
republic” and discuss its historical basis and strategic
implications.
By
calling the U.S. a “white republic,” I mean that the U.S.
government was, from the very beginning, built by and for whites and
as a dictatorship over Black and Native peoples. (It could also be
called a “racist state,” which is less provocative but
has the same meaning, and I will use them interchangeably.) This is
why, for centuries, “American” was nearly synonymous with
“white,” while African Americans were bereft “strangers
in their own homeland.”
In
my view, the “state” (commonly referred to as
“government”) is the most potent form that ruling class
power takes and wields to fashion the society as a whole in its image
and interest. Laws, taxes, and armed forces are its foundations.
However,
no ruling class can gain the broad social base needed for stability
without forming fairly durable but still changing alliances with
other social forces. Governmental laws and institutions incorporate
these non-ruling class social forces and become the most potent form
of these partnerships.
Thus,
the dominant ruling class force of the time and place usually shape
the state. But it is also defined by the unities and contradictions
between competing ruling class fractions as well as the agreements
and conflicts with major non-ruling class forces, primarily those
inside the ruling alliance, and even international forces. The state
can also be impacted by those who may challenge it, and even occupied
or toppled.
Consequently,
when I refer to the U.S. as a white republic, I mean that the
dominant ruling class fractions and their main alliance partners have
been overwhelmingly white and united by and for the system of white
privilege, racist oppression, and settler colonialism throughout its
history.
White
privilege and racial oppression.
White privilege and racial oppression are inherently interconnected,
two sides of the same coin. White privilege most famously consists of
systemic economic and social benefits denied to non-whites, such as
favored access to better jobs, housing, wealth, and education.
These
material benefits are augmented by political power (such as the
ability to vote and have one’s vote counted and the ability to
influence or determine public policy), freedom (versus racist terror
and discrimination), police and court protection, and citizenship,
not to speak of an enduring sense of cultural and intellectual
superiority.
Such
privileges vary by class, gender, nativity, and other historical
factors. But even today, a household headed by a white non-high
school graduate has twice the wealth of a household headed by a Black
college graduate. Such a family is also unlikely to suffer from voter
disenfranchisement, discrimination, hate speech, or police murder.
Together
these privileges constitute a formidable material, ideological, and
psychological “white racial interest” and “white
identity” that often undercuts the class interests and
democratic sensibilities of many white people. White privilege is an
indispensable glue that unites many white people of all classes with
the ruling class against racial justice. It has also, from the
beginning, often given rise to neo-fascist populist movements for
white terror and authoritarianism like the one we see today.
Race
is pivotal.
The now centuries-old racist white cross-class alliance of those who
support white power and privilege is central to the U.S. ruling
alliance and U.S. state. For much of U.S. history, white racist
coalitions dominated both of the main political parties, and there
was little difference between them on racial policy. The most
apparent exceptions were during the Civil War and Reconstruction and
the Civil Rights era to today.
After
the Voting Rights Act of 1965, for the first time in U.S. history,
the vast majority of the worst racists and reactionaries migrated to
one party, the Republican, while most of those left of center,
including most voters of color, gravitated to the Democrats. The
political and racial polarization between the parties has reached an
extreme. Since the 2000 presidential election, it has become evident
that the Republicans cannot win without suppressing voters of color,
and the Democrats cannot succeed without unleashing those voters.
Race
is the pivot of U.S. politics.
STAGES
OF GOVERNING POWER
Recognizing
that the U.S. is a racist white republic helps ground our
understanding that the racist state plays a central role in shaping
and enforcing racial capitalism and systemic racism. It helps clarify
that the present-day struggle against racist authoritarianism
continues a central theme of U.S. history; it’s no temporary
aberration. It suggests that we can only win by building a
cross-class antiracist alliance powerful enough to divide and defeat
the multi-class racist forces that stand in the way of racial,
social, economic, and climate justice, peace, and democracy.
It
also means that racial justice forces need to win governing power
within the current system and then continues to build the strength to
dismantle the racist state and replace it with an antiracist one.
Virtually
all the government institutions—among them the U.S. Senate, the
Electoral College, the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE), the military, the Federal Reserve, Treasury—were
constructed to serve the white republic. Racism and other forms of
oppression are built into their missions, assumptions, structure, and
functioning.
Struggles
to defund the police, abolish ICE and prisons, and transform the
Electoral College directly challenge racist state institutions.
Efforts to reform these institutions can lead to significant gains,
and calling for their immediate abolition is not always the best
tactical choice. But we should place specific reform campaigns in the
context of a strategic framework that envisions replacing these
institutions with a new system of antiracist, social justice
institutions.
Such
a process promises to be long and complicated, but if we do not set
our sights on it now, we will never get there. Unless we ultimately
replace most or all state institutions that reinforce and re-embed
racism, racial justice will remain a “dream deferred.”
Our advances will constantly be subject to racist rollback and
restoration within a system that tilts strongly in favor of white
supremacy.
Twice
before, U.S. movements mounted powerful challenges to the white
republic: The Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights
period, the Second Reconstruction. Both times the movements won
historic advances but ended in the restoration of the racist state.
This
time, however, the political conditions are more favorable. A third
reconstruction anchored
in the fight for racial justice would start us on the path to
dismantling white supremacy and be a huge step forward for the
working-class and people’s power. It would thereby lay the
basis for ending the entire system of racial capitalism.
The
fight against the white republic and for an antiracist democracy is
the central democratic and class struggle of our time.
SLAVEHOLDERS
LED THE INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT
More
than 150 years before the founding of the most infamous racist state,
the apartheid state of South Africa, the U.S. was founded as a white
slaveholding settler-colonial state. The new U.S. was an advanced
democracy—but for white people only. It was a terroristic
dictatorship for Black and Native peoples on whose land and labor the
entire enterprise rested. The U.S. was not simply a “democracy
with flaws that needed correcting.”
The
anti-colonial independence movement in the U.S. was led by
slaveholders rather than anti-slavery forces as in former slave
colonies such as Haiti and Cuba. U.S. slaveholders’ main elite
allies were white merchants, the biggest of whom sold the products of
enslaved laborers (tobacco, cotton, rice, sugar) at home and abroad.
Their
mass base was the majority of the white population of small farmers
and independent tradespeople. These people were free of exploitation
and endowed with historically extraordinary political and individual
rights, and eyeing even more opportunity to the west.
Consequently,
with the invention of the cotton gin and the burgeoning international
market for cotton, the country intensified and expanded slavery and
the expropriation of Native peoples while strengthening and
institutionalizing the power of slaveholders, settler colonialists,
and their allies to shape the country as a whole.
The
U.S. was founded on federalism that gave states and localities some
autonomy, and it was vast in territory compared to its population.
Consequently, there were many variations in race relations, what Van
Gosse calls a “patchwork
nation.”
There were class conflicts among whites and radical movements to
expand democratic rights, such as the abolitionist and women’s
suffrage movements. A few states gave limited rights to a few Black
property owners.
But
even in the places with the most expansive expression of democratic
rights, whites were in control. They excluded African Americans and
Native peoples from the ruling coalition and the polity.
The
Civil War and Reconstruction destroyed slavery and threatened the
racist state. The revolutionary 13th,
14th,
and 15th
Amendments, the Union occupation of the former Confederacy, and
disenfranchisement of most former slaveholders, produced the first
democratic period in U.S. history.
But
in less than fifteen years, a renewed cross-class white consensus for
white supremacy and Indian removal decimated Reconstruction.
Sharecropping, prison labor, Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement
enforced by racist terror, lynching, and genocide again excluded
Black and Native peoples from the fruits of their land, labor, and
rights–and spread to encompass Mexicans and Chinese.
The
white republic, now led by northern industrial and finance
capitalists instead of slaveholders, was restored and settler
colonialism expanded into global imperialism.
CIVIL
RIGHTS: THE SECOND RECONSTRUCTION
The
U.S. racist state was once again threatened in the 1960s, this time
by the Black-led Civil Rights and Black Power movements, flanked by
the Chicana/o, Native, and Asian American movements, the anti-Vietnam
war and international solidarity movements, white student radicalism,
widespread workers’ strikes, and the women’s and gay
liberation movements.
These
movements won great victories, revitalizing, broadening, and
deepening the post-Civil War amendments with the Civil Rights Act,
the Voting Rights Act, the Immigrant and Nationality Act, and the War
on Poverty. They expanded the New Deal to include people of color
(though domestic and farmworkers were still excluded from many
benefits). It was a Second Reconstruction.
But
the Democratic Party leadership’s commitment to the Vietnam War
undermined these gains, split the antiracist movement, and opened the
way for a rapid Republican-led white backlash. Black enfranchisement
could not overcome a 90% white electorate backed by the racist power
of the state.
Former
McCarthyite Richard Nixon won election in 1968 on a racist
law-and-order program. Ronald Reagan consolidated the white
cross-class consensus to destroy the antiracist movements and
re-enforce white power. These resulted in decades of conservative
Republican rule and a fractured, centrist Democratic Party. Nixon and
Reagan’s all-out attacks stifled the peoples’ movements.
Colorblindness,
meritocracy, privatization, fiscal conservatism, and neo-liberalism
became the ideological cloaks for the new corporate racism. The
Rainbow Coalition mounted a powerful challenge to Reaganism and
Democratic backsliding but could not sustain itself.
Matt
Bruenig’s
summary of a Federal Reserve study was on point: “Whites
are so advantaged that the median wealth among white families headed
by someone with less than a high school diploma ($51,300) is larger
than that for Black families headed by someone with a college degree
($25,900) and Hispanic families with a college degree ($41,000).”
Meanwhile, about two million people are imprisoned, and unarmed
African Americans are still being murdered on the streets by
police—who usually get off scot-free.
The
Civil Rights
movement ended the white dictatorship, but the U.S. government is
still mainly built for and by white people. Lani Guinier aptly dubbed
it “The
Tyranny of the Majority.”
NEW
CHALLENGES TO THE RACIST STATE
The
victories of the 1960s also set in motion two significant
developments that would mature into today’s challenge to the
racist state. Massive immigration and electoral mobilization among
people of color changed the political landscape, starting in the
1990s.
Racial
Demographic Change.
The de-racialization of immigration policy won in the Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1965 as part of the Civil Rights revolution
ignited a vast increase in people of color. In 1965 Latinas/os
numbered approximately four million and Asians only 1.2 million.
Today there are more than 60 million Latinas/os and 18 million Asians
in the U.S., along with millions of immigrants and their U.S.-born
descendants from the Middle East and Africa.
By
the early 1990s, it became common to project that people of color
would become the majority of the U.S. population by about 2040.
Electoral
alignment in communities of color.
Meanwhile, African Americans, Asians, Latinas/os, and Native peoples
steadily increased their voter turnout and became more politically
aligned as a progressive Democratic bloc. Blacks powered the voter
turnout, especially starting in 2000. By 2012 their voter
participation eclipsed that of whites for the first time. Latina/o
voting grew as millions gained citizenship and communities organized
in opposition to the anti-Latina/o, anti-immigrant Republican
politicians in California in the 1990s and nationally since.
Asian
Americans have transformed from a majority Republican vote in the
mid-1990s into a 70% Democratic vote. Arab and Native voter groups
report heavy Democratic voting and claim that Arabs were a key to
flipping Michigan and Native voters helped to win Arizona in 2020.
Energized
by alarm over the Republican election fraud in the 2000 presidential
race, opposition to the (second) war in Iraq, burgeoning economic
inequality, and the Great Recession, a vigorous progressive movement
among whites joined the new people of color electoral alignment. This
emerging “new majority” scored its first big victory in
Barack Obama’s election in 2008.
Together,
these changes lay the basis for a Third Reconstruction—a
challenge to the white republic that could be more powerful and
durable than the first and second reconstructions.
The
white right fights back.
The modern far-right, founded in the early 1960s to reestablish white
supremacy in the wake of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, grasped
the political implications of these changes and moved more quickly
than the progressive forces. Already galvanized by their near-defeat
in 2000, they began to reorganize to preserve the white republic
within hours of Obama’s election.
The
far-right decided they must seize the Republican Party from the
traditional conservative elite and triumph in the general election to
implement the vast anti-democratic program that they knew was
necessary to accomplish their aims. They openly embraced the most
violent and myth-driven sections of the white supremacist right and
harnessed technology to build a vast right-wing media apparatus that
could evangelize the racist right-wing narrative, inoculated from
mainstream "fake news."
The
far-right almost succeeded in the 2012 presidential election. They
won the early primary votes but failed because their candidates kept
self-destructing. Romney, a traditional conservative, won the
nomination by default.
In
2016, the white supremacist right unified behind Trump and took
control of the GOP. The Trumpist bloc successfully radicalized tens
of millions of white conservatives into white nationalist
reactionaries who were willing to discard their supposedly cherished
democratic traditions and institutions to strengthen the racist
state.
Under
today's political conditions, the racist far-right can now defend the
white republic only by shredding accepted democratic norms,
unleashing a tsunami of categorical lies and outlandish conspiracy
theories, and mobilizing the most violent white supremacists and
Nazis.
This
is the true meaning of “Make America Great Again.”
For
12 of the last 20 years, the presidency has been held by Republicans
who lost the popular vote and came to power only by the racist
and anti-democratic Electoral College.
PROGRESSIVES
PICK UP THE PACE
The
progressive ecosystem moved more slowly and failed to see the racist,
authoritarian strategy behind the far right’s vicious attacks
against President Obama. Dependence on Obama demobilized many
progressives. Many more failed to believe the importance of the
electoral struggle.
But
we have picked up the pace. Occupy detonated the public debate about
economic inequality. The early BLM movement started to shift public
understanding of how central racism is in this country. In 2016,
Bernie Sanders carved out space for progressives in electoral
politics for the first time in decades. Immigrant rights groups
mounted unprecedented May Day demonstrations in 2006 and have done so
each year since.
The
gigantic Women’s Marches and powerful #MeToo movement set the
early tone for the anti-Trump resistance. Standing Rock marked
renewed activism among indigenous people. The COVID-19 pandemic
exposed and aggravated all existing inequalities. And last year’s
historic BLM uprisings were the most extensive street actions in U.S.
history.
Combined
with the consequential danger of a Trumpist victory in 2020, these
led most of the left and progressive movements to finally center the
fight against white supremacy. They threw down to defeat the right at
the ballot box (often from independent platforms) for the first time
since the 1930s and rallied to protect the results. The forces that
took this stance expanded their base, power, and infrastructure. They
potentially make up the nucleus of a coalition strong enough to beat
back the attempt to re-entrench the racist state.
But
to further build this movement, another level of strategic
understanding may be crucial.
A
CROSS-CLASS FRONT AGAINST THE WHITE REPUBLIC
Racist
authoritarianism is at the crux of the current political
polarization. On one side stands an overtly racist alliance mobilized
to reinforce the racist state by force. On the other is a broad and
diverse anti-right alliance.
But
even if we win, we will still face another strategic stage of the
struggle to eliminate racism: dismantling the racist state and
building an antiracist, social justice one.
The
struggle against racism is pivotal foremost because it distorts,
impoverishes, and shortens the lives of more than 100 million U.S.
citizens and residents who before long will become the majority of
the country. It is also pivotal because:
The
white republic is the primary obstacle
to democracy and socio-economic justice in the U.S. We have many big
problems, especially climate change. But, politically, the
cross-class racist social/political forces are the main enemy of all
progressive forces. Their defeat is a precondition to open the way to
significant social progress on all fronts.
We
narrowly won this round, but the white supremacist right still holds
power in most states and counties and on the federal bench. They were
within a few tens of thousands of votes of winning the presidency and
the Senate. Far from chastised by the response to their January 6
coup attempt, they are already ramping up an even more vicious
campaign of voter disenfranchisement.
To
decisively defeat racist authoritarianism, we must overcome political
disenfranchisement and win substantial reform of many institutions,
laws, and policies such as the filibuster and gerrymandering. We will
also likely be compelled to abolish (or transform) the Electoral
College and, for the first time, establish a one-person, one-vote
democracy in this country. (This goal is best accomplished by
energizing the state-by-state
referenda
that change the way each state allocates its electoral votes. A
constitutional amendment is politically impossible for the
foreseeable future.)
The
fight over the Electoral College started after the 2000 presidential
election debacle but needs to be revitalized. Otherwise, we will
probably be mired in decades of aggravated struggle with the
seditious right over wafer-thin margins in shifting battleground
states, even as we win the popular vote.
Campaigns
for other key institutional transformations are also underway. These
include significant reforms to the voting rules, rights restoration
for formerly incarcerated felons, campaigns against gerrymandering,
expanded paths to citizenship, union rights, and universal access to
health care. And, of course, struggles to defund the police and
abolish prisons and ICE.
As
we take on the formidable task of defeating the far right at the
polls, the progressive forces will also need to gain the political
power to dismantle or radically transform the racist state
institutions, or racist authoritarianism will remain a serious
danger. Such a movement would combine electoral, street, media,
cultural, and intellectual organizing to change every facet of U.S.
life.
Targeting
the country’s central racist political institutions will bring
staunch racial justice forces face-to-face with some anti-right
allies. Most moderates and liberals will fight the white
supremacists. But many may hesitate, block, or even go to the mat
against us over implementing the transformative policy,
institutional, and system changes necessary to bring racial justice
into proximity.
If
we are to defeat the far right, we should strive to keep the broadest
possible coalition intact. However, the struggles internal to the
democratic bloc and our ability to build a powerful independent left
will markedly impact our immediate and long-term prospects of
success.
The
white republic has produced its opposite:
a powerful antiracist movement of people of color and whites, mainly
Black-led, determined and able to lead other social forces to
overturn it. The struggle for social justice in the U.S. is a
multi-class, multi-racial, multi-national, multi-sectoral fight. Once
called the Rainbow Coalition, we need a new concept that evokes a
shared identity among the U.S.’s oppressed and progressive
people today. I believe the two main historically consequential
enemies of this front are racist authoritarianism and climate change.
Numerous
issues divide this broad front, such as the struggle between those
who resist racism and those who accommodate it among people of color;
the fight between inclusion and exclusion in the working-class
movement; ethnic, racial, gender, and class divisions among people of
color; overcoming white privilege, patriarchy, homophobia, and
transphobia in the movement; centralizing climate safety in our
program and strategy; continuing to expand and deepen antiracist
unity; and of course the balance of political and class forces and
program. But the 2020 election and the massive BLM and other
Black-led racial justice actions showed that only a broad front can
be victorious.
The
only period of U.S. history where class was the main animator of a
mass fight for social justice was the 1930s. At that time, the newly
emergent, massive, and economically homogeneous industrialized
working class was bitterly exploited, stripped of rights, just
getting organized—and galvanized by the Great Depression and a
powerful left/center alliance.
Before
the 1930s and especially since the 1960s, cross-class movements have
surged to the forefront. These include the struggles against racism
and those for Native sovereignty, women's and LGBTQ liberation,
immigrants' rights, peace, and environmental sustainability. The
advent of a mass racist, authoritarian far-right that threatens
democracy and the imminent dangers of climate change makes this even
more evident now. As the most organized section of the working class,
labor remains a crucial piece of the anti-right front. We need to
strengthen it.
Right
now, the primary form that broad unity against racist
authoritarianism takes is electoral opposition to a Republican Party
that is all in for white tyranny. The unity includes generally voting
Democratic to defeat it. Divisions within the anti-right front are
also reflected within the Democratic Party. Therefore, it is a vital
terrain of both unity and struggle between progressives and the
ruling class and elitist forces who still dominate its electeds and
various structures.
The
U.S. left is only beginning to develop an effective strategy to move
the Democratic Party leftward simultaneous with strengthening the
entire front against the right. Such an approach would require
developing at least as much sophistication in operating “inside”
the electoral arena and halls of power as in building massive
organizations and movements “outside” the electoral
arena, and synergizing the two.
To
develop, much less implement, that kind of complex strategy, it is
necessary to create powerful left/progressive forms independent of
the Democratic Party and
independent of ruling class forces. We can work inside and outside
the one and in complicated unity and struggle with the other. In
both, we will face
obstacles that the structures of the white republic put in the way of
our fight for governing power.
We
need to build the independent strength of the most determined racial,
social, climate, and economic justice constituencies—those that
understand that inequality, war, and environmental destruction are
rooted in capitalism and that the corporate class is an unstable
opponent of racism and authoritarianism. This is crucial to our
capacity to finally defeat the white supremacist right, transform or
replace the racist institutions that dominate the country, and
reconstruct society based on peace, sustainability, and justice.
The
fight to prevent the re-entrenchment of the white republic and
replace it with a systemic racial justice democracy is central to the
class and democratic struggles in the United States.
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