By Addissu Admas
America’s march toward racial justice is best described as “two steps forward, one step back.” Its trajectory has never been straight nor incremental. Every tangible progress has been met with strong retrogression. This has been the case since the beginning of the Republic. Today, we are experiencing the result of a retrogression that began with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Even though it has acquired ideological tinges today, it remains at its core the same racism that has indelibly colored the American experience throughout.
Even though we may want to think that Donald Trump is the incarnation of this new backlash, he is neither its initiator nor its ideological godfather. Trump has simply channeled—and masterfully exploited—the rabid hate and resentment of some 35 percent of Americans, nearly all white, overwhelmingly Christian evangelicals and conservative Catholics, along with various other minorities of questionable intelligence. This motley assemblage is largely manipulated by racist but educated elites financed by right-wing oligarchs who own and run the Republican Party at every level, including the right-leaning justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Mr. Trump would never have become president had he not listened carefully and responded promptly to white supremacists who incongruously call themselves Christian nationalists. Let me reiterate that these are neither Christian nor evangelical—if such a distinction can be made—as they often claim. They are simply a white tribe intent on preserving its racial advantages, privileges, and vast expanses of land against perceived interlopers. They are moved by primal fear that the country is “browning” faster than they imagined. They are terrified that they will be sidelined sooner than expected and that they will have a diminished role in what America will become.
The American media are completely obsessed with Donald Trump. He, for his part, knows how to manipulate them masterfully. They go wherever he goes instead of going where the truth leads them. The reason is simple: America’s corporate media are exactly what their name implies—they are in the business of selling news, not finding truth. Instead of digging deeply into Mr. Trump’s misdeeds, they follow the news cycle he initiates. Trump, as much as we hate to admit it, knows the weaknesses of American media like no politician before him. Corporate media are averse to giving voice to intellectual dissenters who do not glorify America’s “exceptionalism” and uniqueness—those who could propose serious change.
The attempt of white tribalism has always been, instead of accepting historical truths about America’s past—especially concerning race relations—to minimize, revise, or even dismiss the horrendous deeds perpetrated against native and black people by white people. The perpetual effort of racist white Americans is to reinterpret the cruelty and inhumanity of their ancestors toward brown and black people as a mere “side issue” next to the construction of the great Christian Republic. The fact of the matter is that there was never an inkling of Christianity among their ancestors. In fact, I would even venture to say that there has never been any form of Christianity in the Americas except among the oppressed black and brown masses.
The so-called Project 2025 is essentially an attempt to give legal basis to the fascism already underway. It provides a blueprint by which rich white men can maintain power and privilege indefinitely. It lays the groundwork for a nation owned and operated by corporations—a true plutocracy. In essence, it is best described as technofascism.
What the MAGA populace has failed to comprehend is that even though it will continue to receive lip service about its grievances from the powers that be, it will forever be manipulated by the owner class to vote consistently against its own self-interest. Instead of understanding its grievances as a class issue, it will be manipulated into thinking they are religious and racial issues. Apparently, there is no convincing evidence otherwise.
The so-called evangelical Christian churches and their governing hierarchies bear the greatest blame for the present ugliness in American politics. Instead of rejecting white supremacy wholesale, they have become its principal theorizers, ideologues, and apologists. Instead of preaching the “Good News,” they engage in theological acrobatics to justify the humanly unjustifiable actions of the president and the utter un-Christianity of the Republican project.
Every intellectually sound white person knows that white supremacist ideology is simply a form of tribalism. And like all tribalism, it justifies its beliefs and actions not with reason but with fear and irrational resentments. America will, at some point, stop being a mostly white nation and become a mostly multiracial, multiethnic, and multireligious country. Trying to reverse this trend is not only futile but damaging. We already have clear examples of why this is the case.
It has taken decades for America to be accepted on the world stage since WWII. In fact, until the Civil Rights Movement, the country was seen as the bastion of white supremacy and the enemy of black and brown emancipation everywhere. It was the Civil Rights Movement and the legislation that followed that gave America the chance to be seen as a “reformable” country desiring genuine change. If the current trend of erasing the gains of the Civil Rights Movement continues, and white supremacists continue to close the country to legal immigration by non-whites, they must understand that America will be deprived of the most dynamic immigrant groups—those who could maintain or even further its technological edge and thus its economy.
We now live in a globalized reality. We no longer live in a world where all wealth, knowledge, and culture are on one side and poverty, ignorance, and barbarism on the other. Today’s world is multipolar. If one superpower closes itself off, other powers are eager to step in and welcome those excluded.
America has benefitted beyond measure since WWII from the enormous influx of highly educated, trained, and disciplined professionals. It has perhaps benefitted even more from the hundreds of thousands of bright and eager foreign students—mostly from the so-called Third World—who chose to remain in the U.S. after their studies. Today, no reputable institution of higher education or research is without a substantial number of foreign students and researchers. Research clearly shows that the greatest contributions in science and technology are made by immigrants. Even the unrepentantly racist oligarch Elon Musk has admitted as much.
Unlike China, which depends entirely on homegrown scientists and technologists to advance at lightning speed, America has little choice but to depend on immigrant intellectual power. If America chooses to close her borders, moved primarily by racist concerns, she must be prepared to play second fiddle to China or other advanced economies.
What is ultimately behind the recrudescence of racism and pseudo-Christianity is America’s new turn toward extreme capitalism. To sustain unbounded capitalism, corporate oligarchs—with the connivance of their hirelings in Congress and the Supreme Court—have done everything in their power to deprive the average wage earner and keep them at the mercy of the capitalist class. If it were up to them, they would eliminate every hard-won right and benefit of wage earners. In fact, the whole AI project is more about eliminating wage earners to bolster, to an absurd level, the earnings of the absurdly rich oligarchs.
The world, rather than being impressed by this trend, has come to reject America’s unfettered, inhumane capitalism and the political apparatus that sustains it. The heartlessness of this new trend is so unsettling that even Bill Gates—long the world’s richest man—has said that “the picture of the world’s richest man (i.e., Elon Musk) killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.” Indeed, with the notable exception of Gates himself, tech billionaires would rather squander their ill-gained riches on futile “space exploration” than pay their employees decent wages or feed and heal the starving masses of the world.
When the great American tradition of philanthropy begins to decline, so will America’s influence on the world stage. What has fed and nurtured America’s prestige—despite her glaring shortcomings—has been the largesse of her wealthier classes and foreign-aid institutions. If this new trend of “not caring for the poorer classes”, as the tech and racist oligarch Pieter Thiel suggests, the world will have no hesitation in closing its doors to America’s influence. Without influence, there is no power; without power, there is no way of maintaining wealth.
Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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