Thread by @jsmian

1) Race has always been the central dividing line in American politics.

It would be a mistake to underestimate Trump and the power of white hype as an electoral strategy.

THREAD 3/3 👇

2) After signing the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson said to his press aide, Bill Moyers:

“I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”

3) He was right. Johnson was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win a majority of white votes, not only in the South but nationwide.

Whites have slowly but consistently moved away from the Democratic Party.

4) Carter won 48 percent of the white vote in 1976. Clinton won 39 percent in 1992 and 44 percent in 1996. Gore won 42 percent in 2000. Kerry won 41 percent in 2004. Obama won a slightly larger share in 2008, but then dropped to 39 percent in 2012. Clinton got 37 percent.

5) The Republican Party provided a veritable avenue for the aggrieved white voter who felt nostalgia for an age when their dominance could be taken for granted.

6) America was becoming less white and less Christian with each passing year.

By 2045, whites are set to become a minority in America.

7) A deeply historical understanding of American race relations proposes that Donald Trump captured the presidency not in spite of his racism, but precisely because of it.

The politics of white supremacy completed its conquest of the White House.

8) This is not an aberrant moment in time.

The arc of American history is continuing as it always has after every “political outbreak” or period of black progress: Reconstruction (1865-1877), Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968), and President Obama (2008-2016).

9) What follows is an evangelical zeal to establish white dominance.

Trump understood the power of whiteness and capitalized on white racial resentment after enduring eight years under a Black president.

10) Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites.

He won all the former Confederate states except Virginia.

Combined, those 10 states provided 155 electoral votes—more than half of his total.

11) On June 20, Trump held his first campaign rally since the coronavirus outbreak in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where, in 1921, a white mob attacked the country’s wealthiest black community, the worst incident of racial violence in American history.

12) Lest we forget, Ronald Reagan, who opposed the Civil Rights Act and called the Voting Rights Act “humiliating to the South,” kicked off his 1980 campaign in Neshoba, Mississippi, a hotbed of white supremacy where, in 1964, Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan.

13) By most objective measures, Trump will lose his reelection bid. There’s ample polling and models to back that up.

But it's worth considering what happens if he wins.

14) Through artful drawing of district boundaries, Republicans have locked in partisan advantages in key states.

Even if Democrats secure a higher popular vote than in 2016, their chances of substantial legislative gains are limited by gerrymandering.

15) In Wisconsin, maps are crafted with such micro-precision that Republicans can win close to a supermajority of House seats even with a minority of the two-party vote.

Wisconsin’s largest paper has called the election “the most undemocratic in the state’s history.”

16) Trump’s path to a second term is clear: he can lose Pennsylvania and Michigan and secure victory by carrying Wisconsin (or flipping Minnesota) and winning every other state he won four years ago.

17) The real shocker will be if Trump wins in Minnesota, where he is fanning the flames of division after George Floyd’s death.

In 2016, he lost by just 45,000 votes despite spending limited money and attention there and nearly a half-century of Democrats dominance.

18) “It’s what keeps me awake at night,” said Pete Giangreco, a Democratic strategist.

“I think there are a lot more people who support this president who didn’t vote last time than opposed this president and didn’t vote last time. That is how they win.”

19) If Trump wins, it will be hard for most Americans to trust the integrity of the November election.

How can Democrats fail to beat a candidate as unpopular as Trump during a pandemic and a devastating recession?

20) Legions of anti-Trump protestors would join BLM to reclaim democracy.

White vigilantes would take up arms to defend the republic.

Imagine if, during this time, Derek Chauvin escapes a murder charge for killing George Floyd.

America is a tinder box right now.

21) President Trump, the strongman that he is, would greet protests with more violence than what we have seen.

Consider the clarity and conviction from his 1990 Playboy interview.

22) Speaking with governors after the Minneapolis police station was burned down, Trump said the “whole world was laughing.”

He called governors “weak” and told them to “toughen up” and “dominate.”

Bill Barr said he would treat protest violence as “domestic terrorism.”

23) Trump’s second term would reveal just how much a demagogue can get away with.

The president may invoke the Insurrection Act, a 213-year-old law that allows him to deploy the US military to cities across the country to quash domestic unrest.

Trump’s power is absolute.

24) According to Fr. Bryan Massingale, professor of theology at Fordham University, what allows racism to exist in American society is that there is not a critical mass of people who are angry.

25) “To put it more directly,” he said, “we don’t have a critical mass of white Americans who are angry about the situation. Anger is a passion that moves the will to justice.”

26) Once America turns into a garrison state, and civil liberties long taken for granted are eroded, perhaps then, and only then, enough white Americans will be angry about the situation and ready to address the prevailing systems of racial and social control.

27) We’ve got some difficult years ahead. The worst is just beginning.

You can read more here. 👇
stray-reflections.com/article/161/Wh…

This is the first thread of the series.

https://twitter.com/jsmian/status/1317523419529945088

This is the second thread of the series.

https://twitter.com/jsmian/status/1319990604517040128