Want to pass a regressive tax cut for the rich? Just tell economically struggling whites that blacks, Muslims, and immigrants are coming to impose socialism. Far from being a specifically Trumpian tactic, it is the oldest trick in the American political playbook. Stoking mob violence against people of color is typically how rich whites channel poor whites’ grievances away from themselves. The hundreds of millions of privately owned firearms in the US disproportionately belong to whites and as the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz points out powerfully in Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, “gun rights” have long been invoked by vigilante white mobs to suppress blacks and Native Americans.Įnjoy unlimited access to the ideas and opinions of the world’s leading thinkers, including weekly long reads, book reviews, topical collections, and interviews The Year Ahead annual print magazine the complete PS archive and more – for less than $9 a month. As the historian Heather Cox Richardson documents in her brilliant new book, How the South Won the Civil War, this variety of mob violence has been a critical part of upper-class white America’s defense of a hierarchical society for more than 150 years.Īmerica’s culture of white mob violence goes hand in hand with its gun culture. Throughout American history, most mob violence has come not as a spasmodic explosion of protest from below, but rather as structural violence from above, instigated by white politicians preying on the fears, hatreds, and ignorance of the white underclass. It’s all part of the comprehensive assault on our democracy.” “They also want to indoctrinate your children in school by teaching them things that aren’t so.
This is a time for strength,” he declared, deploying familiar riffs. As Trump put it in his speech fomenting the riot, they were out to “save” America. Viewed in this historical light, the mob of righteously indignant “good old boys” who stormed the Capitol had a familiar appearance. These groups were the targets of mob violence stoked by Americans from President Andrew Jackson and the frontiersman Kit Carson in the nineteenth century to Alabama Governor George Wallace in the twentieth. In the past, such mob violence has been aimed at more traditional targets of white hate: African-Americans trying to vote or desegregate buses, housing, lunch counters, and schools Native Americans trying to protect their hunting lands and natural resources Mexican farmworkers demanding occupational safety the Chinese immigrant laborers who previously built the railways and worked the mines. This is sedition, and in stoking it, Trump has committed a capital offense. The aim was to intimidate Congress into stopping the peaceful transition of power. Of course, the circumstance of this rioting is crucial.
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