NEW YORK – In celebrating the liberation of Donald Trump’s mistake, we must not forget that the Trump presidency has incorporated the raw politics of white U.S. supremacy. He often spoke as a separate Southern governor in the 1960s, and, after losing the 2020 election, as a secessionist senator on the eve of the Civil War. To maintain the victory over Trump’s destructive politics, we must overcome the racism that brought him to power. That urgent challenge is facing not only the United States, but many multiracial societies around the world.
Trump sold a segment of American society – white, older, less educated, Southern and Western, suburban and rural, evangelical Christian – at the idea that they could reclaim America’s racial past. That group of voters, about 20-25% of American adults, became Trump’s enthusiastic base in the 2016 election. That base was large enough for Trump to seize the Republican Party and then squeak to victory in the Electoral College, though despite losing the popular three million vote.
Other quirks enabled American politics to win Trump in 2016. If a high proportion of Americans voted, as in countries where automatic registration and voting is encouraged or even mandatory, Trump would not have come close to victory in 2016. But barriers to voting put the burden on African Americans, the poor, and the young in the long-standing part of American politics, whose purpose is to maintain the political and economic supremacy of rich white people. In short, their purpose is to enable the election of people like Trump.
Trump’s flamboyant politics showed the persistence of his racial appeal to older white evangelists, and to some younger voters, such as those who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6 and who threatened to lynch Vice President Mike Pence for not obstructing Joe Biden’s victory certification at the Electoral College. Too few pundits emphasized Trump’s longing for racism with Ronald Reagan’s similar politics, which used the almost identical slogan – “Let’s Make America Great Again” – for the same purpose.
Yet racist politics is not just an American problem, even though America has been extremely affected by it since its origins as a slave society. Trump’s political style finds peer in other multiracial countries where racism similarly shapes power structures.
Consider Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, a corrupt politician and other manipulator. Netanyahu has seized power by demonizing Israeli Arabs and denying Palestinian people the most basic justice. American white evangelicals have held a close relationship with Israel’s right, and Trump and Netanyahu have shared the same exclusionary politics.
Or consider Jair Bolsonaro from Brazil, widely known as “Trump of the Tropics.” Here, too, the connection to Trump is more than just style and temperament. White US evangelical groups in Bolsonaro saw one of their own and worked together to help them win.
Or consider Trump’s close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some claim that Putin has a kompromat (compromised material) on Trump. Others see shared financial benefits. But another part of the story is obvious political affinity. One of the main ingredients of Putin’s success has been to remind ethnic Russians that they are the true leaders of Russian multi-ethnic society. Putin’s political embrace of Russian Orthodoxism reflects Trump’s political embrace of white evangelism.
The Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi has been
another fulsome admirer of Trump, and the two lavish praises of each other during Trump’s visit to India in 2020. Modi’s foundation includes right-wing Hindu nationalists who preach hatred against India’s Muslim-minority Muslim population. The Modi government’s military occupation of Muslim-majority Kashmir created little international concern in 2019, but offers a clear example of violent ethnic oppression for domestic political benefit.
Alas, ethnic chauvinism can be found in almost all multiracial societies. It is no accident that Trump actually lauded China’s repression of the predominantly Uighur Muslim population in Xinjiang province. Similarly, Myanmar’s violent expulsion of the Rohingya Muslim population largely silenced the Trump administration. And in Brazil, Bolsonaro now governs by invading Afro-Brazilian culture and native Brazilian populations.
If there is one constant in racial politics around the world, it is this almost universal persecution of indigenous populations. Around the world, indigenous people have been robbed of their lands, forced into captivity, cruelly killed, and pushed into poverty by late arriving settlers. Yet this eviction was never enough for the invaders. As well as inflicting harm, and even genocide, the invaders also blamed indigenous peoples for their woe, maligning them as lazy, unreliable, and dangerous as their lands were stolen.
And yet there is good news as well. Trump’s defeat, and the overwhelming public opprobrium in the United States that met Capitol rebels, holds the lesson that we can move beyond our worst instincts, fears, and trends. White racists in America lose their grip on power, and they know it. Times are really changing. The American people voted Trump out of power. The day before the rebellion, Georgia voters elected African-Americans and Jews as U.S. senators – both first to the state that came at the expense of two incumbents in favor of Trump.
Trump’s departure is therefore an opportunity for a fresh start, not only in deeply wounded US society, but in multi-ethnic divided societies everywhere. Nowhere is there any excuse to govern by racial hatred and ethnic chauvinism. In the post-Trump era, governments everywhere should expel those who hate hate.
The world should also look back in history to help us move forward. In 1948, in the shadow of the horrors of the Second World War, all the new UN member states adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This magnificent statement is based on the principle of universal human dignity, “without discrimination of any kind, such as race, color, gender, language, religion, political or other views, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status . ”
The Universal Declaration must be our home. His 75th birthday in 2023 is fast approaching, and we have a way of saying no to the haters, the demagogues, and the partisans. Trump left America in shambles, with 400,000 dead from COVID-19. Now that we have the Trump administration, we can take on the task of ending the pandemic and healing our deeply divided societies.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2021.
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