America Is Already Genocidal, a Trump Administration Just Reinforces That
When trying to discuss my fears of a potential Trump Monarchy, I tend to fail in conveying my sense of urgency. Even people who staunchly oppose The Donald seem almost willfully blind of exactly how fast the lights in this country will go off when he — or the next autocratic politician with “Presidential Immunity” — comes to power. I’m speaking about Trump as an electoral inevitability not because I have any particularly unique insight into November, but because nobody in contemporary politics seems to want to discuss how a series of Supreme Court decisions — starting with Bush v Gore and concluding with Trump vs United States — really removed all the guardrails of our democracy.
I’m particularly concerned with the Heritage Foundation, because they’re just the latest incarnation of powerful special interests that have, historically, despised democracy. But the dark, awful historic roots go back beyond the infamous “Business Plot” of 1933, in which businessmen attempted to install USMC General Smedley Butler as dictator. Obviously, that attempt failed, and is papered over in American History classes, because high school civics teachers don’t want to encourage their kids to become politically involved and educated.
Journalist Ari Berman argued in his book Minority Rule that our own Constitutional Framers didn’t trust the public with democracy, so they developed our convoluted electoral system to concentrate electoral power in the hands of the few. The persuasiveness of the argument is debatable, but I’ve personally never encountered a person in a position of authority who felt like debating or relinquishing authority, so I have a difficult time imagining that a bunch of insanely rich white guys who just fought a war over marginal tax rates were fundamentally differnt than the current bunch of insanely rich white guys who are prepared to destroy American Democracy over marginal tax rates, so, I find Mr. Berman’s arguments regarding minoritarianism persuasive.
If you want to adopt my mindset for this piece; our earliest formal, Federal Government would have far more in common with the 1968 Apartheid government of South Africa than it does with modern (read: pre-Alito) Federal Government. Those are our collective, democratic roots, and, depending upon your viewpoint, those are marginally democratic.
The anti-democratic practices that remained pevasive and well-documented in modern American history — such as poll taxes, codes that penalized race (and disenfranchised those groups) remain in place. We sort of got some near-reform with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but systems used to disenfranchise entire demographics — like refusing convicted felons their voting rights — remain in place. Even our nominal democracy is younger than both of my parents. We’re still very much a brand-new democracy, and a major part of my concern is that new democracies aren’t exactly stable.
The powers fighting against the full realization of the American Experiment — in which every American gets an equal chance at it, and can politically express themselves freely — really mobilized in the 1970’s-1990’s. Jeffrey Toobin does a deep dive into some of the more-shadowy mainstream figures that quietly encouraged and may have even helped train individuals like Timothy McVeigh in his quest to create Lebensraum for white men in America.
I don’t feel like veering into antiSemitic conspiracy theories, when George Carlin already explained the phenomenon:
What fills me with dread about a second, permanent Trump Presidency is that we’re seeing an unholy convergence of political and economic forces onto anti-democratic, theocratic, authoritarian groups that have, arguably, always existed in this country, but now feel safe stepping into the light. Kevin Roberts, of the Heritage Foundation was captured on TikTok saying, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.” The fact that we did not rise up, as a unified people, to ask what, exactly, he meant by that, suggests a terrifying apathy on the part of the American public. I’ve shattered my tibia. I’ve survived a lot of trauma. And, in every case, although my physicians had to do things that caused me some pain (infusions are awful), they never, ever prefaced it with, “This won’t hurt if you resist it.” So, Roberts’ warning is less reassuring, to me, than it is a threat of political violence. And Americans absolutely adore political violence.
We started with a revolution, after wiping out countless Indigenous Tribes on the East Coast (a genocide that is ongoing, but now mostly-economically-based), THEN we kidnapped Africans to bring them to the party, THEN we fought each other over the fate of said Black Americans, THEN they didn’t get to become fully American in their own country for another 100 years, THEN it was quite legal to enslave them via incarceration. And that’s just Black folx. We legally forbade immigration for certain groups — in some cases, like the Chinese Exclusion Act, we actively prohibited certain groups from citizenship. My LGBT+ friends (do Demisexuals count?) can tell everyone stories of what happened when they came out, and they have marriage equality.
Political violence in America predates the founding of the country, and has always been a deepseated, unspoken problem with this country. From Indian Reservations and the BIA, to Japanese Internment Camps, to our bizarre tax system that gives preferential treatment of certain groups; our country is addicted to political violence — or, at the very least, the permanent and deliberately dangerous degradation of certain citizens’ legal rights.
So, when the Supremes told America that, when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal; that should’ve been the wake-up call to every single American who doesn’t fit with the Heritage Foundation’s rather limited reading into who qualifies for citizenship. It represented not only a usurpation of legislative power to the Judiciary and Executive, it communicated, to those of us who can hear in the dog-whistle range and know our history, that the party is officially over. Traditionally, our Courts and Legislature acted independently to safeguard vulnerable minorities. And, with the unholy dissolution of the checks and balances that gave American government the image of just and balanced governance, there is a very real chance that the full force of Federal government will go to help the kops at Selma. That the Proud Boys will be federally deputized, so long as they don’t attack “white” people (racial definitions will be the exclusive purview of the Oval Office, so, be careful if you think your skin tone will protect you).
If I got the sensation that America was unanimously horrified and enraged by the political violence on full display — both literally with Trump’s assassination attempt, and more figuratively, when Jim Justice indirectly threatened mutiny if The Donald loses at the ballot box — I wouldn’t be as terrified about my fate. However, because Gov. Justice introduced his dog before announcing a potentially secessionist sentiment, we’re all watching the dog. Team Trump learned the unfortunate truth 21st century America; We’ll ignore anything if there’s a cute pet video involved.
Minorities in America are fully aware of how perilously close we are to Manzanar 2.0. Some of my friends aren’t even planning to be in the country in November. I’ll be the first to admit that my ongoing attempts at self-deportation are playing directly to Ginny Thomas’s priorities. I would also be the first to point out to every majority member reading this knows what happens when Team Trump decides to deploy the Marines to the border. If there is no mass uprising (unlikely), there will be a slow, steady chorus to the non-MAGA, “Go away; you have no place here.” That’s upsetting and really dark to contemplate, but I know from history that there’s a very short time between the brutal, dangerous “Go away” chorus, and the far more sinister chorus, “Don’t worry, it will all be okay, as long as you arrive at your holding camp by next month.” My question to everyone out there is, “How long do you want to gamble, with your life, before one sentiment becomes the other?
Because, historically, America’s addiction to various forms of political violence never waned or even significantly diminished. As I told a friend; the fences in those Internment Camps still stand. They might be historic monuments kept as reminders of when American Political Violence overcame American Political Discourse, but they are now only an Executive Ordr away from being returned to their original use. And they stand as testament to the unwavering, universal truth of America and American Political Violence: the groups most-targeted are always other Americans who have been politically and legally degraded to be “less than.” How long do you want to sit on that potential issue before JD Vance decides, for you?
