I’ve written in earlier posts this month about how metaphors for race relations in American history like “original sin” or “racism in the national DNA” can be problematic.
Chauncey DeVega recently used another kind of metaphor that has its own limits but is also helpful:
Many political observers point to Pat Buchanan's infamous 1992 speech at the GOP national convention as the beginning of the so-called culture war in America. However, the roots of this fascist and authoritarian campaign are much older: Jim and Jane Crow and white-on-black chattel slavery, genocide against First Nations peoples and white settler colonialism are America's native forms of fascism. When located in the proper historical context, neofascism and the Age of Trump are properly understood as being but the most current manifestation of much older birth defects in American democracy and society.1 [my emphasis]
The birth defect metaphor is ambiguous, in that it can suggested initial problems that can be corrected or ones that are permanent and can only be mitigated.
While the precedents he identifies are real, I’m not ready to be quite so flexible with terms like fascism and genocide. Fascism was a 20th-century phenomenon that of course had antecedents. The 19th-century Know-Nothings and the original Ku Klux Klan gangs were anti-democracy but it’s hard to compare them to the post-World War I movements of Mussolini in Italy or Hitler in Germany or their various cousins. And genocide, if we take the concept as seriously as we should, can be very complicated to identify, as the work of Jeffrey Ostler2 carefully shows.
And while fascism is still a useful contemporary concept and there are real fascist movements out there including Trumpism, the term is used so promiscuously these days that projecting it back 19th, 18th, or 17th centuries (1619!) muddles more than it clarifies.
But the current so-called “culture war” being waged by the Republicans has very strong roots in the practices of the Jim Crow/segregation era, including the authoritarian insistence on “patriotic” Christian-nationalist indoctrination in the schools.
He refers to a column by Jason Stanley who criticizes that push in Florida in particular for Ron DeSantis’ version of Patriotically Correct education in the public schools including in particular materials that accurately describe the realities of white racism in American history, in which Stanley writes:
So what is the ultimate goal of these bans? In the first instance, these laws are there to protect white innocence – that is why they are so popular with many white parents, who carry their own burdens of guilt (similar laws would be popular with many Germans, for the same reason). But there are deeper and more problematic aims of these laws.
Democracy involves informed decision-making about policy. These laws are intended to render such deliberation impossible when it comes to minority groups. The United States suffers from immense racial disparities, which result in periodic outbreaks of political protest. Without an understanding of the structural factors that keep schools and cities segregated, and certain populations impoverished, Americans will not be able to react to these outbreaks with understanding – they will find them befuddling. These laws eliminate the knowledge and understanding required to react democratically to Black political protest to structural injustice.3 [my emphasis]
That is a reversion to the post-Reconstruction decades of public policy in the South. And the effects of that white-supremacist education are partially reflected in the successful perpetuation of those attitudes even decades after the formal end of segregation.
DeVaga, Chauncey (2023): It is Not a "Culture War": The Republicans and "Conservatives" are Actually Waging a Fascist War on Multiracial Democracy. Indomitable 04/07/2023. <http://www.chaunceydevega.com/2023/04/it-is-not-culture-war-republicans-and.html> (Accessed: 2023-16-04).
Ostler, Jeffrey (2019): Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States From the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
Stanley, Jason (2023): Banning ideas and authors is not a ‘culture war’ – it’s fascism. The Guardian 02/14/2023. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/13/african-american-studies-republican-ban-florida> (Accessed: 2023-16-04).