Excerpt from Thomas Zimmer's essay on the two Americas--this is from Part 2.
thomaszimmer.substack.com
Intro:
This is Part II of a broader reflection on how to situate our Trumpist moment in U.S. history – sparked by a question I have been getting constantly in recent months: “Why is America suddenly so divided?”
If you need a refresher or didn’t read the first part and want to jump right in, here is the argument I have made so far: America has always conceived of itself as a democracy. This has obscured the fact that a variety of different regimes, of competing social and political orders, of incompatible visions of what the country should be, have existed side by side throughout the nation’s history. A hierarchical ethno-state dominated by white Christians or a pluralistic democracy with sincere egalitarian aspirations? That conflict was not resolved in 1776. It wasn’t settled in 1865. And unfortunately, contrary to the dominant mainstream narrative, the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 didn’t usher in democratic consensus either. Instead, the forces who fear and disdain the vision of egalitarian pluralism have been engaged in a comprehensive counter-mobilization spearheaded by movement conservatism. On January 20, those who explicitly reject the creedal or civic national identity came to power. Their overarching goal is to restore white male domination in all spheres of life and recenter the social and political order around strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion and wealth - as opposed to equality and egalitarian principles. The Trumpists didn’t depart from a previously stable democratic consensus. They represent the radical wing of a rightwing coalition that was never on board with egalitarian principles and democratic pluralism. They believe any measure – regardless of how extreme – is now justified to defend “real America.”
But why now? Why has the Right radicalized so much in the early twenty-first century? What is it about our particular moment in this longer-term struggle over what “America” should be that allowed the extremists to take over and catapult Trump to power? Let’s tackle those questions in Part II below.
excerpt from part 2:
Against this backdrop of an already riled-up rightwing base, Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008. In the rightwing imagination, Obama – a moderate liberal politician by any reasonable standard – epitomized the threat from brown foreigners, the dangers of Black radicalism, and the triumph of extreme leftism. His presidency dramatically heightened the white reactionary fear of demographic change, it supercharged the perception of a loss of political and cultural dominance.
By the end of the Obama era, it had become dogma on the Right that Democratic governance was fundamentally illegitimate – an existential threat to the very survival of the nation, actually. Shortly before the 2016 election, Michael Anton, now Director of Policy Planning in the State Department, channeled this perception in an infamous essay published in the Claremont Institute’s online magazine, titled: “The Flight 93 Election.” Anton called on conservatives to unite behind Donald Trump – who had, not coincidentally, risen to political prominence as the most famous proponent of the racist birther conspiracy theory. According to Anton, Democrats constituted a threat to America akin to the terrorists of 9/11. The Republican establishment had failed to stop them; far more radical measures were needed than what a “normal” conservative politician was willing to even consider. Trump, however, was different: “Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.” Since Trump, in this interpretation, wasn’t bound by norms, traditions, or precedents, he alone could be counted on to do whatever was necessary to fight back against the “wholesale cultural and political change” - to “charge the cockpit,” in Anton’s crude analogy, like the passengers of United Airlines flight 93 on September 11, 2001, one of the four planes hijacked by terrorists: It never reached its target and crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, as the passengers decided to fight back. In many ways, the “Flight 93” mentality has completely taken over the Right – it is now all “Flight 93” politics, all the time.
The Right quickly fell in line. Even among political and intellectual leaders who had initially vowed to stand “Against Trump” because they saw him as insufficiently conservative, most quickly settled for Trump being sufficiently anti-Left.
However, the first Trump presidency did not bring about the comprehensive undoing of all the racial and social change the Right disdains so much. Instead, it ended with millions of people protesting against racist police violence in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. On the Right, the mass mobilization of a multi-racial coalition was not seen as a glimpse of a desperately needed racial reckoning, but instead as the harbinger of national doom. The summer of 2020 was yet another in a series of inflection points that further escalated the perception of imminent threat. It has become a key element of rightwing political identity to regard the protests as irrefutable proof that radically “Un-American” forces of “woke” extremism were rising, that “the Left” had started its full-on assault. This interpretation is a central component of the permission structure that governs rightwing politics. Building up this supposedly totalitarian threat from the “Left” enables the Right to justify its actions within the long-established framework of conservative self-victimization. It’s a permission structure that doesn’t ever allow de-escalation or retreat. Clinging to the idea that “The Right won’t go THAT far” is futile because they have convinced themselves that their leftist enemies have already gone *much further*.
And then Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election. Well, if he didn’t “steal” it, necessarily, he was still an illegitimate president. That’s what a clear majority of Republicans believed throughout Biden’s time in office. It’s not even necessarily the case that they all bought into Trump’s Big Lie or truly believed the specifics of this conspiracy theory or that conspiratorial rumor. Many of them probably conceded there was nothing technically wrong with how the election was conducted. But that didn’t affect their assessment of Biden’s presidency as illegitimate very much. Republicans didn’t start from an investigation of how the 2020 election went down and came away from that exercise with sincerely held doubts. The rationalization worked backwards: They looked at the outcome and decided it must not stand. Accusations of fraud gain plausibility among conservatives not because of empirical evidence, but because they adhere to the Right’s “higher truth” of who is and who is not legitimately representing – and therefore entitled to rule – “real” America. The Right disputes the legitimacy of the 2020 election not necessarily on the basis of claiming fraud and conspiracy, but because democracy itself subverted the will of “the people” by allowing a supposedly illegitimate coalition to pursue its fundamentally “anti-American” project.
The rightwing intellectual sphere has articulated these claims in remarkably stark terms. In the spring of 2021, the magazine American Mind published a particularly instructive essay by Glenn Ellmers, entitled “’Conservatism’ is no Longer Enough.” Although the author made no claim that the 2020 election was “stolen” and explicitly acknowledged that more people had voted for Joe Biden than for Donald Trump, he maintained that the outcome was illegitimate. According to Ellmers, Biden’s presidency represented a vision of multiracial pluralism that was hostile to what he referred to as “authentic America.” In his view, everyone who voted for Joe Biden and his “progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves” was simply not worthy of inclusion in the body politic. Ellmers declared that “most people living in the United States – certainly more than half – are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” Only “authentic Americans” allowed – a clearly racialized idea of “the people,” mostly represented by “the vast numbers of heartland voters.” On the other side, the “Un-American” enemy for whom Ellmers knew nothing but disgusted contempt, not coincidentally characterized by their blind admiration for a young Black artist and activist: “If you are a zombie or a human rodent who wants a shadow-life of timid conformity,” Ellmers raged, “then put away this essay and go memorize the poetry of Amanda Gorman. Real men and women who love honor and beauty, keep reading.” Ellmers demanded to redraw the boundaries of citizenship and exclude over half the population. For “authentic America” to survive, he was sure, a different kind of leader had to emerge: “What is needed, of course, is a statesman who understands both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure.”
A rightwing “counter-revolution”
The general sentiment that traditional conservatism needs to be replaced by a much more radical form of politics is being echoed across the Right – among pundits, activists, politicians, intellectuals. People at the center of rightwing politics are now rejecting the label “conservatism” outright. In October 2022, for instance, The Federalist published an instructive piece titled: “We need to stop calling ourselves conservatives.” It pleaded with people on the Right to accept the “need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment.” No more restraint, no more “small government”: “The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life – and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.” John Daniel Davidson, the author of the piece and senior editor at The Federalist, was fully aware of the implications of what he demanded: “If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.”
What unites all factions on the Trumpist Right is the belief that a “leftist” revolution has already taken place, that the radical “Left” has taken over all the major institutions of American life. In this view, the civil service, the universities, the “liberal media” – they are the power centers from which a leftist subversion is quickly spreading. As the Left now has command of America, all that is noble has been destroyed, there is nothing left to conserve; nothing short of a radical “counter-revolution” can now save the nation. When Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts infamously declared that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be” a little over a year ago, he was merely expressing what is now the defining sensibility on the Right. A brazen threat of violence, fully in line with the logic that dominates rightwing politics. As Roberts wrote in his Foreword to Project 2025’s policy report: “With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error. Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost.”
So little time left. The Right’s political and intellectual leaders believe they are engaged in a noble war for the “soul,” the identity, the very existence of the nation. If the stakes are so high, if the other side is out to destroy all that is good about America and not only tear the nation’s moral fabric apart, but erase the natural order in the process, moderation, restraint, and patience are not an option. There is therefore no line they don’t feel justified to cross.
Where does America go from here? “Normal” politics is not an adequate response to the kind of challenge the country now faces. In fact, a return to pre-Trump “normalcy” is not even desirable, as it would merely restore a deeply dysfunctional, deficient system that gave rise to this mess in the first place. America needs transformative change. But as we are locked into an existential struggle, is it even remotely realistic to hope for a democratic leap? What are the actual chances of transformational progress in a society so fundamentally divided?
Let’s end this Part II here, as we are almost 4,500 words in. This last question deserves proper reflection, and we will tackle it in a Part III - to be published early next week. |
