Thread by @studentactivism

Yes. And let's call it what it is: This is white supremacy, in the purest, clearest, most specific sense of the term.

https://twitter.com/tzimmer_history/status/1491784090349146113

The thread linked above is very good and very clear, and well worth reading.

I've been arguing for years for the importance of the specificity of the term "white supremacy"—referring, as it originally did, to the political project of implementing white rule. It really is an essential framing for understanding the modern GOP.

One quick thing about white supremacy. In an electorate in which white people are an overwhelming majority, it doesn't require exclusion of people of color from political life.

You can see this in California in the early 20th century. In communities in which Japanese-Americans were a small minority, there tended not to be as much segregation. As their numbers rose, so did racial oppression.

There are times and places where racism against tiny minorities (or even non-present groups) drives politics. But you can have white supremacy without racial exclusion, when and where white people are numerically dominant.

This is why it's no contradiction to note (1) that there are people of color in the GOP and (2) that the GOP is a white supremacist party—because what's central to GOP ideology right now is maintaining a majority-white electorate, not excluding people of color entirely.

One more thing on Obama's presidency. Yes, as Zimmer notes, it marked the end of white voters' numerical dominance in presidential elections.

https://twitter.com/tzimmer_history/status/1491783300838477824

But note the symbolism as well. The Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, a white southern Democrat.

Here's the winner of every election since then:

1964: White male southern Dem.
1968: GOP
1972: GOP
1976: White male southern Dem.
1980: GOP
1984: GOP
1988: GOP
1992: White male southern Dem.
1996: White male southern Dem.
2000: GOP
2004: GOP
2008: Obama
2012: Obama
2016: Trump

Through all the turmoil of the 1960s and the economic and demographic transformation that followed, Democrats were represented in the White House only by moderate white male Southerners. Until Obama. And then all hell broke loose.

(Once you work through all this, by the way, the underpinning of contemporary arguments for the centrality of the Electoral College to American democracy becomes crystal clear.)