Anthony Bogues is a Professor of Humanities at Brown University and a Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg.
This is an edited version of a longer article, ‘We grabbed him by the vote,’ that appeared in the South African based Mail and Guardian Thought Leader, November 11, 2020
On Saturday, November 7th, as the news of Biden’s victory at the polls was being declared, the renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington DC became a site for all-night celebrations. Donald Trump the 45th American President who had for four years represented some of the deepest conservative political currents in American political thought and politics had lost the election.
The electoral statistics tell the story, with the largest voter turnout in America’s political history for over 120 years. President elect Biden and Vice President elect, Kamala Harris, garnered nearly 78 million of those votes, and President Trump 72 million. The story of the overall electoral turnout resides in the robust voter organizing activities of black voter education groups. America has never been a full representative electoral democracy. As a republic, it was founded with an electoral system based upon the exclusive political equality of white men with property. There have always been fierce political battles about the electoral franchise. Women did not get the right to vote until 1920, with the passing of the 19th amendment. The African American population was vigorously denied political equality, first as part of the American racial order of racial slavery, and then Jim Crow – the apartheid system of the American state – and after that by various tactics of voter suppression. A consequence was that voting became a central black political activity. In the 1960’s one of the most popular campaign buttons of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was, “one man one vote”. Massive voter registration drives were sometimes called “freedom registration”. With this history of deep struggles for political equality and voting rights, a key issue which emerged in this election was how would voter suppression be fought?
Trump followed a political line about voter suppression, returning to the political language of Ronald Reagan. In the 1970’s, when the Carter presidency proposed a series of reforms to the electoral process – which in his words prevented “millions of Americans from voting in every election by antiquated and overly restrictive voter registration laws” – Ronald Reagan commented that the reforms created the “potential for cheating”. The Heritage Foundation noted that the proposed reforms would allow “eight million illegal aliens to vote” and stated further that it was a “mistake to take for granted that it is desirable to increase the number of people who vote”. This election, then, was not just about Trump but American electoral democracy. The political work of broadening American electoral democracy was led by black political figures. Perhaps the most significant example of this was the work of Stacy Abrams. Defeated in 2018 in an electoral contest for Governorship of Georgia by voter suppression, she and others undertook one of the most extraordinary voter education campaigns ever seen in American history. Recalling the Civil Rights Movement and the complex struggles for political equality which culminated in the Voting Rights act of 1965, 100 years after the abolition of racial slavery, and honoring those who had died for this right, Abrams along with the Georgia Project, and in collaboration with groups such as “She the people”, and other organizations which comprise the Movement for Black Lives shifted their political organizing focus to a massive “get out the vote” campaign. The success of their efforts points to the centrality of the political demands and activities of the African American population, and specifically to the critical role of black feminist groups. It is not a matter of demographics, as some commentators would have it, but rather how the racial oppression of African Americans, and the struggle against this subjugation, continues to be a fundamental factor in American society and politics. The broadening of the American electoral democratic process with the electoral victory of Biden was a sign of relief for many as it thwarted the drive of conservatism. In a world where many authoritarian regimes still hold sway, a great number of persons felt that at least there was now a new liberal normal.
Donald Trump lost the election, even as he is yet to concede, but is Trumpism defeated? Over 70 million Americans voted for him, and in any disaggregation of this vote, while his support was reduced in the so-called rust belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, he extended and deepened his base in the rural areas. The data tells us that overall, Trump carried white voters by 15 points. He was also able to carry 12 percent of black male voters, while in some states he was able to win over large sections of the complex Latinx vote bloc. This did not only happen in southern Florida, where this voting bloc is largely composed of anti-Castro Cuban Americans and Venezuelan Americans who myopically believe that Biden is a socialist. In states such as Arizona, where there is a significant Mexican American population, there were millions of votes for Trump. As one such voter said, “I am a Catholic and do not believe in abortion, so even while I am upset about how he treats immigrants I do not believe we should have a government which approves of abortion”. All this means that one critical political issue in the post-Trump era is that of Trumpism itself, and the admixture of social and cultural ideas that constitute it. It means that a central political issue is not about healing the nation, and the divide between red and blue voters because “we are all Americans”; rather, the central political issue is the political and ideological defeat of Trumpism.
The American Studies scholar Donald Pease has made the point that at the core of Trump’s political practice has been his efforts “to disconnect American democracy from its liberal foundations”. Central to this practice was his animating political discourse, rooted in white settler colonialist language and ideas. Trump’s political project was to remake America into an “illiberal democracy”. That is, a state where institutional liberal democratic norms are the constitutional frame of mainstream politics, but are consistently undermined by daily political practice. This is a core element of authoritarian populism. In a series of essays in the 1980s, the late Jamaican born British cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall noted how authoritarian populism foregrounded the political ideological dimension in what he called “class democracies.” So what is the character of Trump’s political practice?
For the Trump project to succeed at least temporarily, it had to tether itself to white supremacy as the hegemonic common sense of America. So, it was not just that Trump was racist – of course he was – but that the issue was how and why did he tap into and then create the grounds for the public resurgence of white supremacy, with its armed militias, even while the FBI recently identified these groups as the most active domestic threat in America? In understanding this, we move from thinking about politics as primarily about elections to grappling with how political practices operate at the level of the affective – how political discourse touches individuals affectively and moves them to action. Understanding how capitalist globalization has adversely impacted various social groups, Trumpism initially seized upon a form of American nationalism. To “make America great again” (MAGA) was both an imperial and national project. Drawing from racially imagined nostalgia, Trump constructed a coalition with whiteness at the core of an imagined community. It is why when white supremacy groups marched in Charlottesville, he commented that there were “good people on both sides”; why he advocated for the protection of confederate monuments, and history projects which confirmed conventional histories of America, and made illegal – or anti-American – any education to the contrary. To make the illiberal project work politically, Trumpism had to create a series of affective ideological fantasies, based on “alternative facts”. Additionally, drawing from a long history of American political culture in which paranoia, fear and conspiracy theories were the yeast of American politics (recall the communist witchhunts of 1950s McCarthyism) , Trump was able to create a political sensibility of white fear, and more than that, a general illusionary sentiment amongst his supporters of being the aggrieved outsider. Historically, this has been how authoritarian regimes function as they erode liberal democratic norms.
The fact that over 70 million voters voted for the continuation of such a project is of note. It points to the firm social strength of a deep conservatism in American society. In this regard, one recalls how the election of President Obama in 2008 galvanized American conservatism and led to the rise of the Tea Party, opening a new chapter in the history of American conservatism. American conservatism defines freedom and citizenship in terms of “free white persons”. It makes the argument that the 1790 American Naturalization Act is the consolidation of this imagined community of whiteness. American conservative political thought and politics draws upon white supremacy as a founding precept. As well it supports patriarchy and the re-interpretation of certain Christian religious ideas. Trump was able to pull all this together in a political coalition for electoral purposes, making Trumpism a mosaic of social ideas, feelings and sentiments, rooted in what many understood as fundamental aspects of the American political tradition. In this way he was able to re-energize American conservatism, making it a form of authoritarian populism.
It would have been strange, both politically and historically, if Trump had won an electoral victory in the wake of the Black Lives Matter uprising, in which 26 million people marched for months. The uprising punctured the hegemony of white supremacy. But puncturing is not defeat, and while the celebrations are signs of relief, the conditions for the return of conservatism remain. When Obama won the elections in 2008, the mood was euphoric, and indeed many commentators began to write about a post racial moment. That so-called post racialism quickly proved to be illusionary. Now, in our relief, we may be tempted to think in terms of a post Trumpian moment. In doing so, we make the mistake of conflating figures with historical currents. Figures might represent currents, but they are not the currents themselves. For relief to become a new political moment requires new eyes on the prize – how to transform America?
