Sharing power is anathema on the right
When in 1619 settlers on this continent imported the first abducted Africans, they thought they were creating an enslaved labor force, cheap farm hands and house servants. They were creating something else centuries before we had a term for it: a social safety net.
For white people.
African slaves were laborers, yes, but their presence in the colonies represented a social floor below which no white man or woman could fall, not matter the lowliness of their family’s status or emptiness of their pockets. Slavery wasn’t sold that way, but having a caste of untouchables was a fringe benefit even non-slave owners would fight a civil war to protect. Skin color simply made the untouchables easy to identify in a crowd so everyone knew who was whom and who was better than whom.
Settlers did not trade in human flesh to create that informal safety net, but they created it nonetheless. By the 19th century, it was simply a cultural understanding. Six years after Brown v. Board, Sen. Lyndon Johnson explained why whites across the South were so upset to see holes poked in the safety net to which they’d grown up entitled.
If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you. — Sen. Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas to Bill Moyers (1960)
Then came the civil rights legislation under Johnson’s presidency. The Southern Strategy followed. With the election of the country’s first Black president, the backlash against America’s ideal of equality has strengthened. With the election of an openly racist and misogynist president, white supremacists had a new champion for the 21st century and a campaign slogan not so far removed from “old times there are not forgotten.”
Hatred of non-whites and immigrants, and the propagation of dehumanizing memes about Mexicans and Somalis and Muslims and Indians by the MAGA “legion of doom” is racially tinged, sure, but it’s ultimately about power. Voter suppression laws and fantastic rumors about non-citizens voting are less about race than about power. About which of us has it and which does not. About status anxiety. About the loss of a social safety net that provided even the lowest white people the comforting warmth that no matter how low they fall, at least they’re not one of those people. The insistence that women’s worth lies solely in being baby factories is not about race but about men losing their power to dominate them.
Donald Trump’s comments about immigrants taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs,” and his Tuesday rant about Haitians eating pets is more of the same. Now he faces defeat at the hands of a powerful Black-Asian woman. In the words of Stephen Stills, he and his MAGA cult are scared shitless.
It’s a cliché to hear American politicians proclaim after some outrage that America is “better than that.” We have yet to live up to that boast.