Some
Republicans do not support Trump. Some have even spoken out against
him and ignored his calls to overthrow the government and establish a
Trumpocratic MAGA dictatorship. But if they are on board with the
other 99 percent of the GOP agenda—policies that strip Black
people of their rights and dignity—they most certainly are not
our friend.
The
Jan. 6 hearings have introduced the public to profiles in courage—if
by courage we mean Republican officials who did the bare minimum in
fulfilling their duties and refusing to participate in a
neo-confederate takeover of what someday could become a real
multiracial democracy. The bar is set very low these days.
During
the hearings, we have heard from Republicans such as Arizona House
Speaker Rusty Bowers, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger,
and Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, those who are very
conservative Republicans and have opposed Trump and worked against
his attempts to steal the government. While their actions are
laudable, Bowers—who gave emotional testimony about the threats
he received at his home for refusing to appoint fake
electors
in the 2020 election at Trump’s request—would vote for
Trump again. “If he is the nominee, if he was up against Biden,
I’d vote for him again,” Bowers said. “Simply
because what he did the first time, before COVID, was so good for the
country. In my view it was great.”
Raffensperger,
who was heard in a phone recording “standing
up” to Trump
by refusing to find an extra 11,000 votes to reverse Biden’s
2020 win in Georgia, helped preserve the democratic process that day
and did his job. Yet, the state elections official has a history of
standing against democracy, promoting racist voter suppression
efforts and voter
purges,
and on one occasion, he purged close to 118,000 voters from the
rolls. Raffensperger, who won his primary for re-election as Georgia
secretary of state, faces Democrat State Rep. Bee
Nguyen
in the November general election.
Members
of the Jan. 6 committee, Republican Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger were
ostracized by the GOP caucus for voting to impeach Trump and joining
the committee investigating the former president’s treasonous
and treacherous crimes. However, the two have been reliable
conservative foot soldiers
for the Trump Republican Party. Both
lawmakers
voted against the
John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act,
the George
Floyd
Justice in Policing Act
and other measures to bring justice to America. And Cheney calls
herself “pro-life” and applauded the Supreme Court
decision overturning Roe
v. Wade
and allowing states to ban abortion. How can you claim to support
democracy against the violent overthrow of a government, yet oppose
the structural changes that will bring us democracy?
Even
Vice President Mike Pence—who clearly had seen enough gangster
movies to know not
to get in that Secret Service car during the Capitol riot—did
the bare minimum in not calling the election for Trump when Congress
convened to certify the election for Biden. Proud Boys had built a
whole actual noose
and gallows
set outside the Capitol to lynch Pence (and other lawmakers) to turn
him into a white version of strange fruit. Yet, for all his years of
spineless and thankless devotion to his orange mob boss and after
dodging an apparent assassination attempt from his boss, Pence thinks
he will run for president as a Republican. And he even appeared on
Fox
Business
to say that no president in his lifetime has lied as much as Biden.
So,
what is going on here? Well, none of this behavior is surprising in
the least. If some Republicans want to preserve “democracy”
and the rule of law, that’s fine, but they need to do some
introspection and consider that their conservative movement is built
on white supremacy. That’s why they are not our friends.
People
can pretend the world woke up one day and suddenly Trump was
president, and the GOP transformed into a party of racism and white
supremacy. And they would be fooling themselves. The fact remains the
Republican Party has been garbage for quite some time, and evil as
Trump may be, it is unfair to place all the blame on him for a
process that was 50 years in the making.
The
modern conservative movement came into a being through opposition
to civil rights.
The GOP Southern
strategy
beginning in the 1960s capitalized on the resentment of white
Southern Democratic segregationists to Black progress, Black power
and the gains of the civil rights movement. Republicans made
government the problem because the government was helping Black
people. The GOP used a racial
code language
that replaced the n-word with abstract terms like states’
rights and tax cuts, with the idea that cuts will hurt Black people
more than whites. And once fighting for segregation was a lost cause,
the Religious Right turned
to abortion
after the 1973 Roe
v. Wade
decision to galvanize their extremist coalition.
However,
under the era of Trump, the niceties of old-school race card
politics, veiled and subtle white resentment politics and quaint code
language were replaced with full-fledged fascism. Homegrown American
neo-Nazis are the mainstream of the Republican Party, and as we
learned, they are allied with domestic terrorist street gangs, gun
nuts, white Christian nationalists, unhinged conspiracy theorists and
grifters—with support from Aryan strongmen such as Russian
President Vladimir
Putin
and Viktor
Orbán
of Hungary. White replacement theory—the idea that white people
are an endangered species and that Democrats, liberals and Jews are
replacing white people with people of color and immigrants—is
mainstream
thought in
the 21 century GOP.
And
what passes for Republican policy—such as abortion
bans,homophobia,
transphobia,
promotion of gun
violence
and voter
suppression—are
nothing other than human rights violations in the name of upholding
white supremacy.
Rep.
Cheney was correct to condemn the Republican leadership for enabling
white supremacy, white nationalism and antisemitism.
But Cheney and other anti-Trump Republicans must look in the mirror
and ask themselves what their conservative movement amounts to other
than a giant heap of toxic waste. You can’t agree with Trump on
everything but the deadly insurrection, and support violent policies
such as the Muslim ban, wealth redistribution to the rich, voter
disenfranchisement, forced births, kidnapping migrant babies and a
Jim Crow court takeover
and believe your hands are clean.
