The elephant in the room is white supremacy, double meaning intended. As pundits attempt to analyze and explain the phenomenon exposed by Trump and Trumpism, they tend to avoid considering or discussing the centrality of race and racism in Trump’s MAGA-world. Such avoidances might doom efforts to overcome this democracy-destroying activity. Max Stephenson, recently wrote an insightful article about the history and current manifestations of this assertion of white supremacy. Stephenson is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning and Director of the Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance. He titled his article, “On the Consequences of Racist Lies and Illusions.” I provide some excerpts below. 

…The central issue in this calculated morass is not whether GOP officials and would-be officials have followed Trump’s sordid example and adopted and employed his cynical lies in their quest for power, but, instead, why citizens—Republican Party supporters—would so readily accept such assertions despite mountains of readily available contrary data. The answer, it appears, inheres in good measure in those individuals’ desire to ensure what they perceive to be their rightful status in society. Indeed, rather than seek to dissuade this group from turning to the casually cruel racism such a stance implies, Trump and the GOP have instead played to, and stoked, those beliefs in ever more overt ways.

Many historians have drawn parallels between the current xenophobic, chauvinistic, and racist turn in the Republican Party and arguments advanced in the secessionist era and later, amplified and revisited during Reconstruction and implanted as enduring elements in American political and social thought. I cite one of those analysts here to underscore the salience and import of such claims in today’s GOP. Thereafter, I illustrate how myths and lies concerning the supposed inherent superiority of white citizens have been repackaged by today’s Republicans to generate mobilizing, but callously misguided, “controversy” concerning an array of public matters, including, the names assigned public schools.

Writing in The Washington Post on June 15, Elizabeth Varon, the Langbourne Professor of History at the University of Virginia, argued that the House Select Committee’s methodical analysis of Trump’s coup attempt has spotlighted the reality,   

… that the Jan. 6 insurgency was, indeed, precedented, [and] rooted in long-standing efforts to preempt, delegitimize and suppress black voting. … Aware that roughly 90 percent of black voters supported Joe Biden in 2020, former president Donald Trump tried, through his ‘Stop the Steal’ movement, to invalidate and suppress votes in African American population centers; he maintained, in effect, that ‘Black people ha[d] no right to vote him out of office,’ as Eugene Robinson succinctly put it. More than 150 years ago, Southern secessionists laid the groundwork for such arguments by maintaining that blacks had no right to vote Lincoln into office.

Perhaps the most influential of those secession-era white supremacists, Thomas R. R. Cobb, contended in a speech on November 12, 1860, shortly after Lincoln’s victory that his election,           

violated the ‘spirit of the Constitution.’ ‘This Union was formed by white men,’ he noted, ‘for the protection and happiness of their race.’ The Founders did give each state the power to declare who should vote, but they assumed that only citizens—Whites—would exercise that power.

…Then as now, there were individuals willing to argue that white control that kept African Americans particularly, but also other minorities, in a status of submission could be the only legitimate form of rule. 

…Beyond these observations, one may draw at least three larger conclusions from this brief treatment of an ongoing saga of misguided hate. First, the anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian lie that sustained slavery and launched a civil war remains healthy in our polity and continues to animate white citizens to press demands they believe will ensure their social standing. A central lesson of Shenandoah County’s ongoing school name debacle is how small and constricted citizen views can become and how readily they may be open to lies that deny others equal rights. 

…Finally, this case should remind those of us whose professional lives daily address governance concerns that as important as the often technical, administrative and processual institutional issues that daily occupy so much of our time and attention may be, they are only infrequently determinative of the freedom and equality experienced by the citizens we serve. Therefore, it is incumbent on us to be mindful, too, of the socio-cultural firmament that shapes those institutions, for it is there that the views, perceptions, values and behaviors are born and nurtured that either will impair or ensure the freedom and equality of our nation’s citizens.