8/30/20
The use of white fear and white victimhood as potent political weapons is as old as the country itself. Donald Trump is just the latest practitioner of this trade. Even the founding fathers used white fear of the “other” for political benefit. And when they didn’t have the facts, they were not above fabrication. White fear of rebellions by the enslaved marked American life before the Civil War and Reconstruction and informed the legal code. This white fear of Black violence was part of what gave birth to the Black Codes and Jim Crow, and it pervaded pop culture. It was a central theme in “The Birth of a Nation,” which helped revive the Ku Klux Klan and was the first movie ever screened at the White House by President Woodrow Wilson, a racist who once wrote: “The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant Negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers.” One could argue that Trump’s law and order mantra has its roots in Richard Nixon’s success with it in the 1968 presidential campaign. As Time magazine reported at the time, to some it was “a shorthand message promising repression of the black community”— and to that community, it was “a bleak warning that worse times may be coming.”
The 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, may have tapped into it a bit when she claimed that Barack Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” And now Trump has brought it raging back. He knows, as politicians have known before him, how white fear of violence can be exploited and used as a political tool. He has done it before, and he will do it again. White people still, for now, are the majority of the population in this country and hold the lion’s share of the country’s power. Trump knows that if he can convince enough of them that they are under threat — that their personal safety, their way of life, their heritage, and their hold on power are in danger — they will act to protect what they have. Trump believes what his departing counsel Kellyanne Conway told “Fox and Friends” last week: that “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.” But Trump isn’t the originator of law and order demagogy, he’s just its latest vicar.
