The sum of their fears, Part 2
by Tom Sullivan
What keeps aging, white Republicans up at night. Image: National Geographic, October 2013.
The episode a week ago involving Covington Catholic High School, MAGA-gear-wearing students, a drumming Native American elder, and shouting Black Israelite cultists at the Lincoln Memorial is already history, and should be. It is another minor culture-war skirmish fueled by the accelerant of social media. There were competing commentaries over whether or not the student mocked, smirked at, etc., activist Nathan Phillips, and over who did what to whom first. The deeper divide got lost in the gaslighting by defenders of the students who insisted videos posted online did not show what they showed.
One observation that went by too fast this week came from Chris Hayes, one of those “I wish I’d written that” commentaries. Watch it below, but read it as well, so it sinks in:
The defining conservative experience of this era is the palpable terror and rage at a social hierarchy that is threatening to tip over and land on its head, one in which those who enjoy a certain basic kind of American privilege — the right to due process and second chances and charitable readings of their actions and even mistakes — find themselves, seemingly without warning, tossed instead onto the unforgiving bonfire of snap judgment and harsh punishment.
And I understand why they are scared of that, why they want to fight it.
Because America is already the most punitive developed nation on Earth — for poor people, for people of color, for those who don’t have Brett Kavanaugh’s pedigree, or the authority of the badge, or $10,000 a year to spend on private school tuition, or money to hire a PR firm.
We throw millions of lives onto that bonfire every year. They just don’t normally look like the teenagers in MAGA hats.
The answer isn’t a society that is more punitive or social media mobs doxxing children, one that permanently marks for life teenagers of all social strata, but rather a society of empathy, compassion and accountability, evenly, equitably and justly applied.
But, funnily enough, it is hard to get the modern conservative grassroots mobilized on behalf of that goal when the kids being stamped and judged and locked away don’t make them think, that could be my son.
The same network of conservative activists mobilized to defend the white Covington kids was outraged after the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin when President Barack Obama remarked, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
No video of that incident. No audio. But an immediate assumption on their part that a black kid walking down the sidewalk carrying Skittles and iced tea deserved what happened to him, well, for being a black teenager and a threat by definition. No charitable readings for him.
The election of Donald Trump is not an existential crisis for America so much as an expression of it. The threat to traditional white, Christian dominance of the culture has been simmering in the back of white minds for decades. Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act shifted the ground under them. The once solidly Democratic, Jim-Crow South went Republican. But even then, change was slow in coming. The Reagan years and the growth of the religious right signaled that “a certain basic kind of American privilege” remained intact. The election of Bill Clinton and the assault-weapons ban annoyed movement conservatives and the NRA and fed the growth of right-wing talk radio. But whatever else, Clinton was a pudgy white guy from Arkansas. He still looked like one of them.
The September 11, 2001 attacks were seismic. The underlying sense of American military supremacy that held through most of the Cold War was shattered. The threats to the cultural dominance to which many Americans felt entitled became palpable. Mark Steyn warned in the Wall Street Journal in 2006 that Middle Eastern immigration to Europe and their Muslim high-birthrates versus the West’s threatened to end western civilization through a kind of cultural suicide. For people who view their dominant position in the social hierarchy in zero-sum term, demands by marginalized groups empowered through social media that America live up to its created-equal advertising could only come at conservatives’ expense. They characterized equality demands by non-white, non-Christian, and LGBT Americans as a form of persecution against Christians. This has always been a straight, white, Christian-male country, founded to be a straight, white, Christian-male country by God Himself, a straight, white, Christian male. To think otherwise is to believe the world is round.
Then a black man moved into the White House in 2009.
Efforts at suppressing the vote by non-whites via voting law changes as well as locking in Republican power in the states through gerrymandering accelerated in 2010. By 2019, two years into the Trump presidency, conspiracy theories with origins in the 1990s about white genocide had become mainstream as well as fears of diseased, brown-skinned immigrant-criminals. The president of the United States now promotes them.
His MAGA hats are cultural signifiers of nudge-and-wink bigotry and existential fears of a coming America that no longer looks majority white.