The MAGA Arc Bends Towards Full-Spectrum Bigotry and Fascism

From the inception of Trump’s drive to the White House, once it stopped being funny, I saw the specter of anti-Semitism. Perhaps I was paranoid, but recent events around such personalities as Kenye West, Marjorie Taylor-Green, and Trump himself have allowed that apprehension to age well. Here I would like to suggest that a development embodied in the title above is a lawful social and political process, not one inherent in Trump himself, his gross deficiencies notwithstanding.

Racists tend to be homophobes. Transphobes tend to be racist. Anti-Semites tend to be Islamophobes. All such deplorables are illiberal. The reality is that we are all — LGBTQI, Jews, Muslims, blacks, latins, non-white immigrants, and the Left — under the same bullseye. The logic of our common cause is starkly obvious.

The presence of selected examples of blacks, gays, Jews, Muslims, and non-white minorities displayed prominently by the Republican Party makes perfect sense and is perfectly meaningless.

My thesis is that the logic of this movement, as it grows in power, is to be increasingly exclusionary, because the beast that it feeds is white supremacy. “White” in this context means misogynistic, racist, homo- and trans-phobic, and Christian dominionist. As this movement grows, it will have less and less need for its non-white stooges. They will be cast aside. Some of them will wake up along the way. Because white supremacy is founded on political thirsts that are fundamentally unquenchable, its internal logic is also to stipulate and lash out at new ‘others.’ It must purify its own ranks.

There is a great book entitled “How the Irish Became White.” It chronicles the history of exclusion followed by assimilation of an initially despised immigrant class, commonly described as a “race.” There were subsequent arcs of exclusion and acceptance of later immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, but what W.E.B. DuBois highlighted as “the problem of the color line” has endured.

Some months ago, in a meeting of our local school board, an African-American women stood up to lambaste Critical Race Theory. Her anguish and sincerety were clear. I am confident that, like most critics — and supporters! — of CRT, she has little understanding of what it is. What was clear to me — perhaps mistakenly — was her need to belong in this heavily white county. To be like everybody else, to be treated with respect, to live a good, normal life. I hope she fulfills that wish, but I fear she may not.

The CRT campaign is really a type of cultural ethnic cleansing aimed at our public schools, not unlike Russian efforts to extirpate the Ukraine language in territories it controls, or Chinese efforts to mandate the Chinese language for the Uyghur people of Xinjiang (as they do in Tibet). Here it has nothing to do with CRT instruction, which does not exist. Rather, it is aimed at removing efforts in the vein of ‘DEI’ — diversity, equity, and inclusion. Put upon by the county’s segregationist history, the school authorities are at pains to maintain an environment that is conducive to non-white students’ academic success. Sabotage of these timid efforts, under the banner of anti-racism no less, is a central MAGA organizing focus here in Virginia.

There is ample precedent in the case of the Nazi Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s street goons or “brownshirts.” What is less well-known about this formation is that it was rhetorically anti-capitalist, much like the Nazi leader Gregor Strasser and his ‘Strasserites.’ Once Hitler had solidified his support among leading sectors of German society, especially the military, these riff-raff were a political embarrassment and ideological nuisance. They were liquidated in the famous Night of the Long Knives in June and July of 1934.

Too many are doing too little about this.