Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
The culture of white supremacy has gone fully mainstream. And Trump has presided over this phenomenon as the official culture-warrior-in-chief.
Trump was, and continues to be, the chief executive not of a nation, or of the Republican Party, or even of a cult, but of a culture — namely a culture of white supremacy.
This is actually worse than it sounds. Even very “woke” Americans tend to see white supremacy as an isolated dynamic synonymous with racism, the “bad” America. But what many people don’t realize is that white supremacy is a culture that is much broader and deeper than that. It is about racialized power, an assumed authority of white people (chiefly men) to set and enforce the social and moral order as they see fit, often in the service of values that on their face sound noble, like tradition or family.
In this culture, the presidency, electoral politics, the Constitution, rule of law, democratic ideals, liberalism, decency — all are incidental. They can never matter as much as white peoples’ ultimate right to power.
The gravitational pull of white supremacy in America is not new. It is part of who we’ve always been. What is new is that in 2022, under the increasingly thin guise of conservatism — and greatly aided by the internet, social media and big media like Fox News — the culture of white supremacy has gone fully, almost gleefully mainstream. Republican policy agendas have been replaced with relentless attacks on critical race theory and the whole notion of social justice; voter suppression is orchestrated out in the open; Jan. 6, an attempt by a largely white minority to subvert democracy, has been met with less than universal condemnation from GOP leadership.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/11/20/donald-trump-culture-white-supremacy-00069597
Trump was, and continues to be, the chief executive not of a nation, or of the Republican Party, or even of a cult, but of a culture — namely a culture of white supremacy.
This is actually worse than it sounds. Even very “woke” Americans tend to see white supremacy as an isolated dynamic synonymous with racism, the “bad” America. But what many people don’t realize is that white supremacy is a culture that is much broader and deeper than that. It is about racialized power, an assumed authority of white people (chiefly men) to set and enforce the social and moral order as they see fit, often in the service of values that on their face sound noble, like tradition or family.
In this culture, the presidency, electoral politics, the Constitution, rule of law, democratic ideals, liberalism, decency — all are incidental. They can never matter as much as white peoples’ ultimate right to power.
The gravitational pull of white supremacy in America is not new. It is part of who we’ve always been. What is new is that in 2022, under the increasingly thin guise of conservatism — and greatly aided by the internet, social media and big media like Fox News — the culture of white supremacy has gone fully, almost gleefully mainstream. Republican policy agendas have been replaced with relentless attacks on critical race theory and the whole notion of social justice; voter suppression is orchestrated out in the open; Jan. 6, an attempt by a largely white minority to subvert democracy, has been met with less than universal condemnation from GOP leadership.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/11/20/donald-trump-culture-white-supremacy-00069597