AMERICA IS A FASCIST STATE
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.
AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE
A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.
AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE
A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.
"What's Past is Prologue..."
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2024/12/defeat-fascism-before-fascism-defeats.htmlFROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on December 15, 2024):
Sunday, December 15, 2024
All,
Since the national presidential election on November 5, 2024 and Kamala Harris’s defeat to Donald Trump there has inevitably been an endless deluge of random finger pointing, fiery recriminations, performative ego outbursts, and blatantly accusatory blame gaming leveled by various functionaries, professional surrogates, alienated voters, and high ranking officials of the Democratic Party hierarchy aimed at both Harris and a very wide range of people associated with Harris’s campaign documenting how and why she and it ultimately failed.
So while it’s clear that a number of structurally and thus electorally vulnerable mitigating factors played various roles in what went wrong and why it is equally or even more important to highlight what far too many self serving pundits and Monday morning quarterback activists have simply failed or refused to see, understand, and explain with regard to what actually happened and why on a broader scale.
So while I generally agree with the still rather limited overall critical assessment that Harris’s campaign took a defensive, shallow, and absurdly passive/aggressive tactical stance/position on the crucial issue of the political economy in favor of spending far too much time, resources, as well as strategic and tactical focus and energy on the tacit support of rightwing anti-Trump Republicans like Liz Cheney (who it was incorrectly assumed would positively influence and/or reliably deliver votes from suburban Republican women and other ‘moderates’ within the rank and file of Republicans generally who are appalled by Trump’s misogyny, racism, and clearly fascist agenda), I am as always nevertheless deeply dismayed and disgusted by the Democratic Party’s perennially major problem in their typically and far too often braindead and stubbornly reductive “critical assessments” of what is obviously “wrong with their Party.” These deeply structural, ideological, ethical, and institutional problems have been integral to both national political parties for well over a century now and show absolutely no evidence of changing in any significant progressive manner on behalf of genuine social, economic, and political change for the society in general and the poor and working class in particular.
However what is emphatically missing from these general analyses of what and who is responsible for our current ongoing crises is the proper framing of establishing precisely why both national political parties as well as their leaders and elite donors, and most importantly their respective national citizen bases of grassroots support and advocacy are as usual currently facing the major encroaching dilemma and hegemonic contradiction in American politics today.
That fundamental dilemma and foundational contradiction is the ominous rise, rapid expansion, and finally widespread institutional, systemic, and bureaucratic reality of economic inequality, cultural repression, social manipulation, and political oppression that openly and covertly embodies, represents, and expresses fascist ideas, values, and practices. So it’s never merely a case of determining who to vote for in an election “no matter what.” If one is serious about engaging in the long term struggle for genuinely radical and transformative social change from the left one is compelled whether one likes it or not to go beyond what we are being told by the various individual “mainstream” candidates and their endless number of donors, advisors, handlers, and press agents what we as voters “can and should strive for” instead of setting an independent agenda of our own as engaged citizens that truly reflects what our collective perspectives, values, ideas, and desires are and then actively fighting on behalf of grassroots activism that essentially will steadfastly challenge and critique any and all already agreed upon “consensual” candidates and platforms chosen and approved of in advance by the hierarchy of the Democratic and Republican Parties.
Thus In my view what has been strangely overlooked, taken for granted, and/or bizarrely dismissed in the 2024 presidential election is any larger practical sense or baseline understanding of what the deeply fascist national MAGA movement and its brazenly criminal titular leader Donald Trump actually is and represents ideologically, politically, economically and culturally, and even more importantly what its massive zombie cult tentacles within the GOP and gigantic white electoral base is absolutely dead set on doing no matter what we may think or do otherwise.
Unless and until we collectively and realistically face and soundly defeat this overarching existential and empirical threat and its deadly menace all talk of what is insanely and rather childishly still called “politics” in the United States is utterly meaningless. Thus in response to this ongoing crisis I have amassed a very wide array of articles, essays, polemics, statements, critical analyses, reflections, and conceptual ruminations on what we all need to do far above and beyond what we have presently done and not done, thought deeply about and recklessly ignored, intimately embraced, and stupidly pushed away. To say that our very survival not merely as a society or nation state emphatically hangs in the balance but our very existence as a species on this raging embattled planet is truly endangered is a terrifying understatement. Stay tuned, stay diligent, and stay woke because the worst--and our fierce battle against it in all its forms--is yet to come…
Kofi
“What’s Past is Prologue…”
January 21, 2022
The major problem in American politics over the past century is the overwhelming support of the great majority of white American voters (both male and female) for the white supremacist, sexist, and xenophobic agenda of the Republican Party. In fact for the past 72 years straight in every single election since 1952 a majority of white American voters have voted for a Democratic Party presidential candidate only ONCE (1964).
UPDATE (2024): In the past three elections with Donald Trump on the ballot (2016-2024) an average of 58% of white American voters across the board from every single individual class group in the country from the poor, the working class, the middle class, the upper middle class and the wealthy have voted for Trump. No other candidate from either the Democratic or Republican Party in American political history have accomplished this feat (not even Franklin Delano Roosevelt who as a Democrat won four elections in a row from 1932-1944). In the process Trump has received a mind boggling 214 million votes over the course of these three elections which is the most by far of any other candidate in U.S. history as well and breaks the previous record of 134 million votes formerly held by Barack Obama from 2008-2016.
Let's be absolutely 100% clear here:
The major problem in American politics today is the overwhelming support of the great majority of white American voters for the white supremacist and sexist agenda of the fascist Republican Party led both ideologically and politically as well as morally and ethically by Donald Trump. This was the case in 2016 when Trump received 63 million votes of which over 80% of these votes were from white American voters in general. This was the case in 2020 when Trump received an astonishing 74 million votes--11 million more than he received in 2016 and of which 80% of his votes came from white American voters. And this is the case NOW when Mitch McConnell and the entire 50 member GOP caucus viciously opposes the human, civil, and constitutional rights of African American voters in particular and thus the entire overall ideological and political agenda of Democratic Party progressives in both the House and Senate, aided and abretted as always of course by the 'fifth column' DP betrayal support of the objectively white supremacist and corporate capitalist donor class sponsored machinations of Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema.
The only outstanding truth here is that BOTH national parties--and most importantly the 60% of white American voters nationally who in general have supported not only Trump but every single white Republican rightwing politician in Congress and beyond--have turned their backs on the actual needs, desires, and democratic rights of the masses of Americans in general who are neither rich nor white nor fascist. Joe Biden's milquetoast, cowardly, and clueless administration as well as the typically opportunist and elderly DP leadership deserves at least 50% of the blame for this ongoing debacle because it has not and it clearly will not STAND ON PRINCIPLE and FIGHT for democracy and against its enemies both in the GOP and its own party. Without genuine courage, integrity, honesty, independence, and the eternal imperative to speak truth to power in not mere words alone but in terms of real action throughout the country as a whole it is and remains impossible to "change" or "reform" a damn thing...
Kofi
"What's Past is Prologue..."
http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-central-role-of-mythology-white.html
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
The Central Role of Mythology, White Supremacy, Capitalist Hegemony and Ideological Hubris in Modern American Politics Since 1945
NOTE: The following piece is an excerpt from a much longer forthcoming essay-in-progress on the cumulative societal effects of Modern American Political History since 1945:
THE NEW CONFEDERACY IS EXACTLY LIKE THE OLD ONE (PLUS IT TOO HAS ACCESS TO SOCIAL MEDIA...)
by Kofi Natambu
The Panopticon Review
"...There are many debilitating myths about American history in general and American politics in particular. In fact it could be said that the widespread intellectual and social reliance, even obsessive dependency, on this enormous cobweb of lies, distortions, half truths, misrepresentations, and fallacies have contributed to an atmosphere of social discourse that is often drowning in a cesspool of rhetorical evasions and blatantly false assertions. One of the most dangerous and paralyzing of these myths has to do with the alleged progressive attitudes and values of the national white American electorate—especially in the so-called modern era since the end of World War II. One of the persistent articles of faith of this mythology has it that since the popular notion of the ‘American Century’ (which we now often rather arrogantly refer to as the recent history of ‘Amercian exceptionalism’) emerged as a slogan following the collective defeat by the Allies of the United States, Europe, (and ironically by the then Soviet Union) of the global forces of fascism led of course by the German Nazi Party, there has been an endless promotion in the media, popular culture, and in academia of the idea that the United States is fundamentally a progressive, forward looking nation that deeply loves and supports democracy and is a firm believer in the systemic eradication of all forms and vestiges of such virulently anti-democratic, repressive, and reactionary ideas and practices as institutional and structural racism, sexism, class oppression and exploitation, homophobia, and imperial militarism. However even a cursory examination of the actual history of the U.S. since 1945 indicates that this reading of a substantial majority of the white American electorate is not merely inaccurate and off the mark but delusional.
For a stark and very significant example consider what the national voting record of white Americans in presidential elections has been since 1948. It was in that year that former Vice President Harry Truman first ran for the office as the Democratic Party candidate following the untimely death of his predecessor President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April of 1945 (who in November 1944 had won the presidency for an unprecedented fourth term—a future possibility that was eliminated by the passage of the twenty second amendment to the constitution in 1947 which stated that no presidential incumbent could henceforth serve more than two terms). However despite this new ruling and the fact that both the far left and far rightwing segments of the national Democratic Party bolted from Truman candidacy and ran their own independent campaigns (i.e. former Vice President in Roosevelt’s last administration in 1944 Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party and then Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of the openly racist and segregationist “Dixiecrat” Party) Truman was still able to garner 53% of the white vote nationally, that along with the heavily truncated/segregated 71% of the black (male) vote was barely enough to provide Truman with a surprising but very narrow victory over his Republican opponent New York Governor Thomas Dewey, whom the media and most political pundits had erroneously predicted would easily beat Truman.
What’s also significant about the national presidential election of 1948 is that except for only ONE other occasion in the past 64 years(!) the Democratic candidate for President (whether he was an incumbent or not) has failed to receive anywhere near a majority of the national white vote. Please allow me to repeat this harrowing statistic: In the last 16 presidential elections following Truman’s victory in 1948 and going back 64 years to the next presidential election in 1952, a substantial majority of white American voters have voted for the Republican candidate--again whether he was the incumbent or not--15 times. The ONLY exception in the past six decades is 1964 when former Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who assumed the presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963, ran on his own for the office a year later vs. arch conservative and rightwing political reactionary Barry Goldwater. Clearly, in what was essentially a national sympathy vote for the successor of the slain President Kennedy, Johnson received a whopping 60% of the national white vote, a figure that hasn’t been reached by any presidential candidate in the Democratic Party in the fifty years since; one would have to go back 70 years to 1944 in Franklin’s Roosevelt’s last presidential victory to find any Democratic Party candidate who won as large of a percentage of the white vote. In fact in the last 16 presidential elections Democratic Party candidates have only won a cumulative national average of 38% of the white vote.
So the obvious question looms: What do these dramatic statistics tell us about the modern white American electorate since 1945? Well for starters it clearly tells us that the average white voter in general since 1945 has not supported and does not currently support a progressive social and economic agenda by the government. Of course this may change at some point in the near future (say in a decade from now) but I highly doubt it will change anytime soon in the foreseeable future (i.e. the next two national presidential election cycles leading up to and probably including 2020)…"
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/election-black-voters-white/
Politics
Enough With the Bad Election Takes!
Since the national presidential election on November 5, 2024 and Kamala Harris’s defeat to Donald Trump there has inevitably been an endless deluge of random finger pointing, fiery recriminations, performative ego outbursts, and blatantly accusatory blame gaming leveled by various functionaries, professional surrogates, alienated voters, and high ranking officials of the Democratic Party hierarchy aimed at both Harris and a very wide range of people associated with Harris’s campaign documenting how and why she and it ultimately failed.
So while it’s clear that a number of structurally and thus electorally vulnerable mitigating factors played various roles in what went wrong and why it is equally or even more important to highlight what far too many self serving pundits and Monday morning quarterback activists have simply failed or refused to see, understand, and explain with regard to what actually happened and why on a broader scale.
So while I generally agree with the still rather limited overall critical assessment that Harris’s campaign took a defensive, shallow, and absurdly passive/aggressive tactical stance/position on the crucial issue of the political economy in favor of spending far too much time, resources, as well as strategic and tactical focus and energy on the tacit support of rightwing anti-Trump Republicans like Liz Cheney (who it was incorrectly assumed would positively influence and/or reliably deliver votes from suburban Republican women and other ‘moderates’ within the rank and file of Republicans generally who are appalled by Trump’s misogyny, racism, and clearly fascist agenda), I am as always nevertheless deeply dismayed and disgusted by the Democratic Party’s perennially major problem in their typically and far too often braindead and stubbornly reductive “critical assessments” of what is obviously “wrong with their Party.” These deeply structural, ideological, ethical, and institutional problems have been integral to both national political parties for well over a century now and show absolutely no evidence of changing in any significant progressive manner on behalf of genuine social, economic, and political change for the society in general and the poor and working class in particular.
However what is emphatically missing from these general analyses of what and who is responsible for our current ongoing crises is the proper framing of establishing precisely why both national political parties as well as their leaders and elite donors, and most importantly their respective national citizen bases of grassroots support and advocacy are as usual currently facing the major encroaching dilemma and hegemonic contradiction in American politics today.
That fundamental dilemma and foundational contradiction is the ominous rise, rapid expansion, and finally widespread institutional, systemic, and bureaucratic reality of economic inequality, cultural repression, social manipulation, and political oppression that openly and covertly embodies, represents, and expresses fascist ideas, values, and practices. So it’s never merely a case of determining who to vote for in an election “no matter what.” If one is serious about engaging in the long term struggle for genuinely radical and transformative social change from the left one is compelled whether one likes it or not to go beyond what we are being told by the various individual “mainstream” candidates and their endless number of donors, advisors, handlers, and press agents what we as voters “can and should strive for” instead of setting an independent agenda of our own as engaged citizens that truly reflects what our collective perspectives, values, ideas, and desires are and then actively fighting on behalf of grassroots activism that essentially will steadfastly challenge and critique any and all already agreed upon “consensual” candidates and platforms chosen and approved of in advance by the hierarchy of the Democratic and Republican Parties.
Thus In my view what has been strangely overlooked, taken for granted, and/or bizarrely dismissed in the 2024 presidential election is any larger practical sense or baseline understanding of what the deeply fascist national MAGA movement and its brazenly criminal titular leader Donald Trump actually is and represents ideologically, politically, economically and culturally, and even more importantly what its massive zombie cult tentacles within the GOP and gigantic white electoral base is absolutely dead set on doing no matter what we may think or do otherwise.
Unless and until we collectively and realistically face and soundly defeat this overarching existential and empirical threat and its deadly menace all talk of what is insanely and rather childishly still called “politics” in the United States is utterly meaningless. Thus in response to this ongoing crisis I have amassed a very wide array of articles, essays, polemics, statements, critical analyses, reflections, and conceptual ruminations on what we all need to do far above and beyond what we have presently done and not done, thought deeply about and recklessly ignored, intimately embraced, and stupidly pushed away. To say that our very survival not merely as a society or nation state emphatically hangs in the balance but our very existence as a species on this raging embattled planet is truly endangered is a terrifying understatement. Stay tuned, stay diligent, and stay woke because the worst--and our fierce battle against it in all its forms--is yet to come…
Kofi
“What’s Past is Prologue…”
January 21, 2022
The major problem in American politics over the past century is the overwhelming support of the great majority of white American voters (both male and female) for the white supremacist, sexist, and xenophobic agenda of the Republican Party. In fact for the past 72 years straight in every single election since 1952 a majority of white American voters have voted for a Democratic Party presidential candidate only ONCE (1964).
UPDATE (2024): In the past three elections with Donald Trump on the ballot (2016-2024) an average of 58% of white American voters across the board from every single individual class group in the country from the poor, the working class, the middle class, the upper middle class and the wealthy have voted for Trump. No other candidate from either the Democratic or Republican Party in American political history have accomplished this feat (not even Franklin Delano Roosevelt who as a Democrat won four elections in a row from 1932-1944). In the process Trump has received a mind boggling 214 million votes over the course of these three elections which is the most by far of any other candidate in U.S. history as well and breaks the previous record of 134 million votes formerly held by Barack Obama from 2008-2016.
Let's be absolutely 100% clear here:
The major problem in American politics today is the overwhelming support of the great majority of white American voters for the white supremacist and sexist agenda of the fascist Republican Party led both ideologically and politically as well as morally and ethically by Donald Trump. This was the case in 2016 when Trump received 63 million votes of which over 80% of these votes were from white American voters in general. This was the case in 2020 when Trump received an astonishing 74 million votes--11 million more than he received in 2016 and of which 80% of his votes came from white American voters. And this is the case NOW when Mitch McConnell and the entire 50 member GOP caucus viciously opposes the human, civil, and constitutional rights of African American voters in particular and thus the entire overall ideological and political agenda of Democratic Party progressives in both the House and Senate, aided and abretted as always of course by the 'fifth column' DP betrayal support of the objectively white supremacist and corporate capitalist donor class sponsored machinations of Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema.
The only outstanding truth here is that BOTH national parties--and most importantly the 60% of white American voters nationally who in general have supported not only Trump but every single white Republican rightwing politician in Congress and beyond--have turned their backs on the actual needs, desires, and democratic rights of the masses of Americans in general who are neither rich nor white nor fascist. Joe Biden's milquetoast, cowardly, and clueless administration as well as the typically opportunist and elderly DP leadership deserves at least 50% of the blame for this ongoing debacle because it has not and it clearly will not STAND ON PRINCIPLE and FIGHT for democracy and against its enemies both in the GOP and its own party. Without genuine courage, integrity, honesty, independence, and the eternal imperative to speak truth to power in not mere words alone but in terms of real action throughout the country as a whole it is and remains impossible to "change" or "reform" a damn thing...
Kofi
"What's Past is Prologue..."
http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-central-role-of-mythology-white.html
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
The Central Role of Mythology, White Supremacy, Capitalist Hegemony and Ideological Hubris in Modern American Politics Since 1945
NOTE: The following piece is an excerpt from a much longer forthcoming essay-in-progress on the cumulative societal effects of Modern American Political History since 1945:
THE NEW CONFEDERACY IS EXACTLY LIKE THE OLD ONE (PLUS IT TOO HAS ACCESS TO SOCIAL MEDIA...)
by Kofi Natambu
The Panopticon Review
"...There are many debilitating myths about American history in general and American politics in particular. In fact it could be said that the widespread intellectual and social reliance, even obsessive dependency, on this enormous cobweb of lies, distortions, half truths, misrepresentations, and fallacies have contributed to an atmosphere of social discourse that is often drowning in a cesspool of rhetorical evasions and blatantly false assertions. One of the most dangerous and paralyzing of these myths has to do with the alleged progressive attitudes and values of the national white American electorate—especially in the so-called modern era since the end of World War II. One of the persistent articles of faith of this mythology has it that since the popular notion of the ‘American Century’ (which we now often rather arrogantly refer to as the recent history of ‘Amercian exceptionalism’) emerged as a slogan following the collective defeat by the Allies of the United States, Europe, (and ironically by the then Soviet Union) of the global forces of fascism led of course by the German Nazi Party, there has been an endless promotion in the media, popular culture, and in academia of the idea that the United States is fundamentally a progressive, forward looking nation that deeply loves and supports democracy and is a firm believer in the systemic eradication of all forms and vestiges of such virulently anti-democratic, repressive, and reactionary ideas and practices as institutional and structural racism, sexism, class oppression and exploitation, homophobia, and imperial militarism. However even a cursory examination of the actual history of the U.S. since 1945 indicates that this reading of a substantial majority of the white American electorate is not merely inaccurate and off the mark but delusional.
For a stark and very significant example consider what the national voting record of white Americans in presidential elections has been since 1948. It was in that year that former Vice President Harry Truman first ran for the office as the Democratic Party candidate following the untimely death of his predecessor President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April of 1945 (who in November 1944 had won the presidency for an unprecedented fourth term—a future possibility that was eliminated by the passage of the twenty second amendment to the constitution in 1947 which stated that no presidential incumbent could henceforth serve more than two terms). However despite this new ruling and the fact that both the far left and far rightwing segments of the national Democratic Party bolted from Truman candidacy and ran their own independent campaigns (i.e. former Vice President in Roosevelt’s last administration in 1944 Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party and then Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of the openly racist and segregationist “Dixiecrat” Party) Truman was still able to garner 53% of the white vote nationally, that along with the heavily truncated/segregated 71% of the black (male) vote was barely enough to provide Truman with a surprising but very narrow victory over his Republican opponent New York Governor Thomas Dewey, whom the media and most political pundits had erroneously predicted would easily beat Truman.
What’s also significant about the national presidential election of 1948 is that except for only ONE other occasion in the past 64 years(!) the Democratic candidate for President (whether he was an incumbent or not) has failed to receive anywhere near a majority of the national white vote. Please allow me to repeat this harrowing statistic: In the last 16 presidential elections following Truman’s victory in 1948 and going back 64 years to the next presidential election in 1952, a substantial majority of white American voters have voted for the Republican candidate--again whether he was the incumbent or not--15 times. The ONLY exception in the past six decades is 1964 when former Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who assumed the presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963, ran on his own for the office a year later vs. arch conservative and rightwing political reactionary Barry Goldwater. Clearly, in what was essentially a national sympathy vote for the successor of the slain President Kennedy, Johnson received a whopping 60% of the national white vote, a figure that hasn’t been reached by any presidential candidate in the Democratic Party in the fifty years since; one would have to go back 70 years to 1944 in Franklin’s Roosevelt’s last presidential victory to find any Democratic Party candidate who won as large of a percentage of the white vote. In fact in the last 16 presidential elections Democratic Party candidates have only won a cumulative national average of 38% of the white vote.
So the obvious question looms: What do these dramatic statistics tell us about the modern white American electorate since 1945? Well for starters it clearly tells us that the average white voter in general since 1945 has not supported and does not currently support a progressive social and economic agenda by the government. Of course this may change at some point in the near future (say in a decade from now) but I highly doubt it will change anytime soon in the foreseeable future (i.e. the next two national presidential election cycles leading up to and probably including 2020)…"
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/election-black-voters-white/
Politics
Enough With the Bad Election Takes!
To properly diagnose what went wrong, we need to look at the actual number of votes cast.
by Steve Phillips
December 11, 2024
by Steve Phillips
December 11, 2024
The Nation
Why did Democratic turnout contract? (Will Newton/ Getty)
The road to recovery and healing must begin with a proper diagnosis. Just as a good doctor conducts tests and rigorously reviews the results before prescribing a course of treatment, those seeking to revive the Democratic Party need an accurate assessment of what actually happened in the 2024 election. Unfortunately, recent weeks have seen an avalanche of dubious interpretations of the election results.
As bruised and battered party leaders search for solutions and explanations, they have had to contend with politically shallow, culturally ignorant, and mathematically incorrect interpretations of electoral data. These bad takes have come from myriad sources, most recently and alarmingly from The New York Times and its chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, who occupies one of the most prestigious and prominent spots in the political media universe because of his paper’s outsize influence on public opinion.
In his December 3 newsletter, Cohn argued that it would be a mistake “to conclude…that Harris might have won if [Democrats] had voted in the numbers they did four years ago.” Cohn based his contention on the belief that “millions of Democrats soured on their party and stayed home, reluctantly backed Harris or even made the leap to Trump.” Then he sought to buttress that position by pointing to the election results in Clark County, Nevada, where the Democratic margin shrank from 9.3 percent in 2020 to 2.6 percent this year. Citing statistics that Democratic voter turnout fell, Cohn posited that “two-thirds of the shift toward Trump was because voters flipped his way.”
Cohn’s conclusions are not only mathematically incorrect; they are, in fact, absurd. For some inexplicable reason, far too few people in politics pay attention to the single most important data set there is: actual votes cast. Looking, as Cohn does, at shifting statistical margins and percentage turnout rates by party misses the more obvious point of who actually voted. Cohn completely misses the fact that Kamala Harris got almost the exact same number of votes in Clarke County as Joe Biden did in 2020.
If the Democrats lost a lot of voters to Donald Trump in Clarke County, then how did Harris get nearly the exact same number of votes there as Biden did four years earlier? (Vote tallies are not yet final, but Harris is just 1,665 votes shy of the 2020 number, in a county with more than 1 million voters.) At a minimum, she would have had to backfill those allegedly lost voters with new Democratic voters, but this inconvenient fact is completely overlooked.
The underlying reality that many in the media and politics are missing is that in four of the battleground states—Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Wisconsin—Harris exceeded Joe Biden’s performance four years earlier. The biggest story of the election is not that Trump succeeded in flipping the allegiances of previously Democratic voters; it is that Republicans did a better job of mobilizing their previously infrequent voters, while Democrats squandered far too much money on television and digital ads trying to appeal to Republicans.
To properly understand why Republican turnout expanded while Democratic turnout ultimately contracted, it helps to look at the now centuries-long role that white racial resentment and fear have played in US politics. New York Timesreporter Astead Herndon’s podcast The RunUp touched on this reality when he conducted a focus group after the election. One of the participants broke it down clearly when she said, “People just came out of the rural areas and came out of everywhere to make sure that that Black woman would not win.”
A similar wave of racial resentment surfaced in Georgia in 2018 when Stacey Abrams came within 55,000 votes of winning the gubernatorial election. Abrams boosted Democratic turnout by 68 percent over the 2014 numbers, but fell just short because of a combination of massive voter suppression (e.g., purging hundreds of thousands of people from the voter rolls) and a historic increase in white voter turnout that occurred at the same time that Georgia was as close as it had ever been to having a Black female governor.
One of the reasons that it is essential that those attempting to analyze election results have deep cultural competence is that the electoral power of white racial grievance has long been a staple of American politics. In 1948, Southerner leaders outraged by President Harry Truman’s support for civil rights banded together to form the Dixiecrat Party whose platform unapologetically stated, “We stand for the segregation of the races.” Twenty years later, staunch segregationist George Wallace, governor of Alabama, used his defiant call for “segregation now…segregation forever” as a springboard to his 1968 presidential campaign. In 1980, Ronald Reagan launched his presidential campaign by traveling to the county in Mississippi that was nationally famous as the place where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. The same Southern states that anchored the Confederacy made up the cornerstone of Wallace’s, Reagan’s, and now Trump’s electoral support.
Understanding this historical context—the kind of “family history” that a doctor takes—illuminates the proper path forward. Given the abundant evidence of the electoral power and endurance of white racial fear, Democrats must do even more to maximize voter turnout of their supporters than they have in the past. Nearly half of Democratic voters are people of color, and the country’s profound racial wealth gap means it takes even more resources to help those families surmount the myriad financial and logistical hurdles that make it harder to vote. And Democrats must aggressively pursue a policy agenda that will galvanize the proponents of equality in commensurate numbers as the enemies of racial and gender justice.
If this election proved anything, it is that no amount of money or television ads are going to change the minds of voters susceptible to the fear-based and divisive politics of the Republicans. The good news is that there are still tens of millions of supporters of justice and equality among the ranks of those who did not vote this year. And despite what you may have read in The New York Times, prioritizing policies and politics that engage, inspire, and mobilize those potential voters is the correct course of treatment and path back to power for the Democratic Party.
Why did Democratic turnout contract? (Will Newton/ Getty)
The road to recovery and healing must begin with a proper diagnosis. Just as a good doctor conducts tests and rigorously reviews the results before prescribing a course of treatment, those seeking to revive the Democratic Party need an accurate assessment of what actually happened in the 2024 election. Unfortunately, recent weeks have seen an avalanche of dubious interpretations of the election results.
As bruised and battered party leaders search for solutions and explanations, they have had to contend with politically shallow, culturally ignorant, and mathematically incorrect interpretations of electoral data. These bad takes have come from myriad sources, most recently and alarmingly from The New York Times and its chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, who occupies one of the most prestigious and prominent spots in the political media universe because of his paper’s outsize influence on public opinion.
In his December 3 newsletter, Cohn argued that it would be a mistake “to conclude…that Harris might have won if [Democrats] had voted in the numbers they did four years ago.” Cohn based his contention on the belief that “millions of Democrats soured on their party and stayed home, reluctantly backed Harris or even made the leap to Trump.” Then he sought to buttress that position by pointing to the election results in Clark County, Nevada, where the Democratic margin shrank from 9.3 percent in 2020 to 2.6 percent this year. Citing statistics that Democratic voter turnout fell, Cohn posited that “two-thirds of the shift toward Trump was because voters flipped his way.”
Cohn’s conclusions are not only mathematically incorrect; they are, in fact, absurd. For some inexplicable reason, far too few people in politics pay attention to the single most important data set there is: actual votes cast. Looking, as Cohn does, at shifting statistical margins and percentage turnout rates by party misses the more obvious point of who actually voted. Cohn completely misses the fact that Kamala Harris got almost the exact same number of votes in Clarke County as Joe Biden did in 2020.
If the Democrats lost a lot of voters to Donald Trump in Clarke County, then how did Harris get nearly the exact same number of votes there as Biden did four years earlier? (Vote tallies are not yet final, but Harris is just 1,665 votes shy of the 2020 number, in a county with more than 1 million voters.) At a minimum, she would have had to backfill those allegedly lost voters with new Democratic voters, but this inconvenient fact is completely overlooked.
The underlying reality that many in the media and politics are missing is that in four of the battleground states—Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Wisconsin—Harris exceeded Joe Biden’s performance four years earlier. The biggest story of the election is not that Trump succeeded in flipping the allegiances of previously Democratic voters; it is that Republicans did a better job of mobilizing their previously infrequent voters, while Democrats squandered far too much money on television and digital ads trying to appeal to Republicans.
To properly understand why Republican turnout expanded while Democratic turnout ultimately contracted, it helps to look at the now centuries-long role that white racial resentment and fear have played in US politics. New York Timesreporter Astead Herndon’s podcast The RunUp touched on this reality when he conducted a focus group after the election. One of the participants broke it down clearly when she said, “People just came out of the rural areas and came out of everywhere to make sure that that Black woman would not win.”
A similar wave of racial resentment surfaced in Georgia in 2018 when Stacey Abrams came within 55,000 votes of winning the gubernatorial election. Abrams boosted Democratic turnout by 68 percent over the 2014 numbers, but fell just short because of a combination of massive voter suppression (e.g., purging hundreds of thousands of people from the voter rolls) and a historic increase in white voter turnout that occurred at the same time that Georgia was as close as it had ever been to having a Black female governor.
One of the reasons that it is essential that those attempting to analyze election results have deep cultural competence is that the electoral power of white racial grievance has long been a staple of American politics. In 1948, Southerner leaders outraged by President Harry Truman’s support for civil rights banded together to form the Dixiecrat Party whose platform unapologetically stated, “We stand for the segregation of the races.” Twenty years later, staunch segregationist George Wallace, governor of Alabama, used his defiant call for “segregation now…segregation forever” as a springboard to his 1968 presidential campaign. In 1980, Ronald Reagan launched his presidential campaign by traveling to the county in Mississippi that was nationally famous as the place where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. The same Southern states that anchored the Confederacy made up the cornerstone of Wallace’s, Reagan’s, and now Trump’s electoral support.
Understanding this historical context—the kind of “family history” that a doctor takes—illuminates the proper path forward. Given the abundant evidence of the electoral power and endurance of white racial fear, Democrats must do even more to maximize voter turnout of their supporters than they have in the past. Nearly half of Democratic voters are people of color, and the country’s profound racial wealth gap means it takes even more resources to help those families surmount the myriad financial and logistical hurdles that make it harder to vote. And Democrats must aggressively pursue a policy agenda that will galvanize the proponents of equality in commensurate numbers as the enemies of racial and gender justice.
If this election proved anything, it is that no amount of money or television ads are going to change the minds of voters susceptible to the fear-based and divisive politics of the Republicans. The good news is that there are still tens of millions of supporters of justice and equality among the ranks of those who did not vote this year. And despite what you may have read in The New York Times, prioritizing policies and politics that engage, inspire, and mobilize those potential voters is the correct course of treatment and path back to power for the Democratic Party.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Steve Phillips
Steve Phillips is a best-selling author, columnist, podcast host, and national political expert. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Brown Is the New White and How We Win the Civil War. He is also the founder of Democracy in Color, a political media organization dedicated to race, politics, and the multicultural progressive New American Majority.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democrats-white-voters-trump/
Politics
Democrats Must Change Their Whole Approach Toward White People
Most of them are with Trump, and that’s not going to change. Instead, Democrats should target a far more winnable group of voters.
by Steve Phillips
June 17, 2024
The Nation
PHOTO: Former president Donald Trump attends a rally on June 9, 2024, in Las Vegas. (Eric Thayer / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Democrats need to realize that if Donald Trump’s felony conviction won’t weaken his support among most white voters, then nothing will.
In the days after Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsification of business records, white leaders from coast to coast rushed to microphones and social media to pledge their allegiance. Polls show no meaningful erosion of backing for Trump among voters (a New York Times/Siena survey found just 3 percent of his supporters saying they plan to switch their vote after the conviction).
None of this should be surprising. In a country that is growing increasingly racially diverse, the Republican Party remains disproportionately white (83 percent of GOP voters are white, according to Pew Research analysis of exit polls). White rage has always been the rocket fuel powering Trump’s ascendance and continued political relevance. Most have forgotten that when he entered the 2016 presidential contest in the spring of 2015, he languished in the polls with the support of just 5 percent of Republican voters. Then, in his presidential announcement in June of 2015, he demonized Mexicans as rapists and murderers and clearly sent a signal that he would be the defender of white people and the culture he claimed immigrants of color threatened to destroy.
The political fruits of the speech were instantaneous. Trump rocketed to the top of the pack in a matter of weeks and has never looked back. He infamously marveled at the fervor of his (overwhelmingly white) supporters when he commented in January 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Now, Trump stands alone as the first former president impeached twice by Congress and criminally convicted of a felony (well, 34 felonies to be exact, but who’s counting?). One would think that if anything would dampen the enthusiasm among members of a political party that once embraced law and order and the criminal justice system as core to its identity, it would be that criminal justice system rendering 34 guilty verdicts. But that has not been the case.
Even former Trump critics and ostensibly moderate voices such as former Maine senator Susan Collins have quickly come to Trump’s defense, saying, “The district attorney, who campaigned on a promise to prosecute Donald Trump, brought these charges precisely because of who the defendant was rather than because of any specified criminal conduct.”
Why are Collins and other Republicans being so craven? Simple: The evidence has been clear for decades for anyone who cared to look. From a quantitative standpoint, championing white nationalism in this country has always been good politics.
In 1968, unapologetic white segregationist governor George Wallace of Alabama ran for president and won five states. Twenty years prior, South Carolina leader Strom Thurmond—who infamously conducted the longest filibuster in US history when he tried to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957—ran for president on the overtly segregationist platform of the Dixiecrats, and won four states. And 88 years before that, the entire presidential contest turned on the question of whether white people could legally buy, sell, and own Black people—48 percent of the voters backed pro-slavery candidates (the slave states couldn’t agree on a single candidate and divided their votes, making it possible for Abraham Lincoln to prevail with just 39 percent of the vote).
The implications of this history for Democrats are profound. The dominant strategic focus of the Democratic Party has been and remains to woo white voters, but in my 30 years in national politics, I have seen precious few examples of empirical data and research guiding this quest to win white support.
To address this gap, I have spent the past year working with the groups Showing Up for Racial Justice and the Working Families Party to conduct a study on what the data really shows about white voter behavior over the years. We just released the resulting report titled “Expanding the White Stripe of Our Multiracial Coalition” this week (“white stripe” as in how to broaden the white stripe of the multiracial rainbow that is the Democratic electorate). In conducting the report, we analyzed decades of electoral data, Census reports, and field experiments by a wide range of social change and political organizations.
With the clarity that Trump’s conviction won’t dislodge his white supporters, the findings in the White Stripe Report are more timely and urgent than ever. The report offers three top-line calls to action. They are:
• Target the right white people
Much of the media and too much of the Democratic focus has primarily centered on trying to change the minds of voters inclined towards Trump. But there are millions of progressive-leaning whites who are infrequent voters but would likely support Democrats if they did come out and vote. This pool of people is a far more promising demographic to target. Political strategist and former political director of the AFL-CIO Mike Podhorzer has described the necessary shift in approach as pulling back the lens to look at the working-class female food servers pouring the coffee for the white guys in those stereotypical Midwestern diners that so many reporters flocked to in the wake of Trump’s win in 2016. That woman is far more likely to vote Democratic, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s all-out assault on reproductive rights over the past year.
Our analysis of the nonvoting population among registered voters in 2020 identifies 26.9 million whites who didn’t cast votes but would probably have backed Biden. A far better use of funds this year will be making sure that those white people vote, instead of spending millions of dollars on endless television ads trying to get Trump supporters to switch allegiances.
• Spend proportionately
There comes a point where Democratic spending on white people results in diminishing margins of returns. The results of every presidential election over the past 32 years show that white support for Democrats remains in a narrow band from 39 percent to 44 percent.
• Run toward—not away—from racial issues.
Though this may seem counterintuitive, it turns out that being explicit about race doesn’t diminish support among white voters. In fact, it could increase support by activating those millions of progressive nonvoting whites.
The default impulse of most white people when it comes to issues of diversity, racial justice, and equality is to change the topic. In the research we examined, the data shows that pushing back on these attacks and summoning people to be their highest and best selves actually works. Democrats received their highest share of the white vote in the past 24 years when they challenged America to elect a Black man as president, and Obama secured 43 percent of the white vote in 2008.
In the Kentucky gubernatorial election last year, the Republicans backed Daniel Cameron, an African American Trump follower who had defended the notorious police killing of Breonna Taylor in 2020. In his 2023 campaign, Cameron deployed the divisive tool du jour of attacking transgender youth, but the incumbent governor Democrat Andy Beshear, a white man, fought back, vetoing a bill targeting transgender children, saying, “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God.” Beshear handily won.
What this moment is showing all of us is that there is virtually nothing that will change the minds of the tens of millions of whites who support Trump. If Democrats want to win, they need to embrace this reality and turn their attention and resources to doing what works to get the maximum number of realistically attainable white votes possible.
