American Fascism from the Southern Strategy to Donald Trump
I’ve spent this week discussing the proto-fascist core of the post-Civil War American South. The Lost Cause Myth and its favorite organization, the Ku Klux Klan, were never poised to take over the United States like the German Nazi Party. They were simply too regional and too focused on the state and local level to take over the federal government.
All of this changed a century after the end of the Civil War. The Republican Party saw its power and influence in steep decline. The Southern branch of the Democratic Party realized that it no longer belonged in the political party that was ushering in the Civil Rights Act. These forces realized that they needed to re-write the rules of the game.
When I say that re-wrote the rules I’m talking about Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Presidential election, and the Southern Strategy. This is the part of American history that apparently never happened according to everyone’s racist uncle on Facebook. According to the racist uncle the Democrats are the real racists and the Republicans are the real defenders of freedom because Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and the Democrats were the party that seceded in 1861. What this ignores is the events of 1964 and 1965 when Lyndon B Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law, effectively reversed the Democratic Party’s stance from the century before, and essentially completed Lincoln’s legacy.
The main opponents to the Civil Rights Act in 1964 were Southern Democrats, known as the Dixiecrats. The primary Senate opposition came from Richard Russell, Robert Byrd, and Strom Thurmond, all Democrats from Georgia, West Virginia, and South Carolina, respectively. Two months later Strom Thurmond would switch party affiliation to the Republican Party. In 1968 he was a key figure in gaining the South for Richard Nixon. In this he was assisted by George Wallace, who split the Democratic ticket with Hubert Humphrey that year.
This was the realization of the Southern Strategy. It began in 1964 when Barry Goldwater won the Deep South as a Republican on his way to losing the election to Lyndon B. Johnson. The Republicans simply did not win in the South up until that point but the Democratic Party’s increasing support for civil rights was angering Southern white conservatives. In 1968 the Republicans specifically targeted the South and, aided by George Wallace’s third-party run and the switchover of prominent Dixiecrats, won the South. The Republicans have held onto the South ever since, save for the 1976 election when Jimmy Carter, a Georgian, managed to wrestle it away, and 1992 when the Clinton/Gore ticket, consisting of an Arkansan and a Tennesseean, managed to nab a couple of the Southern States.
The Southern Strategy has long depended on the Confederate sympathies of the South and that proto-fascist streak that has lived in the hearts of the unrepentant secessionists who still make up a vocal minority of the population below the Mason-Dixon Line. Much as the South simply lacked the capability of winning the Civil War the retrograde elements of the Southern electorate aren’t enough to carry the entire country in an election. The lessons learned in 1964 and 1968 taught the Republicans that there are enough people out there who can be swayed by a Southern Strategy style campaign to win elections. This is what gave us the rise of the Tea Party and right wing rhetoric against immigrants and Muslims and homosexuals. Immigrants and Muslims and homosexuals all represent a form of other that’s scary to some segment of the American population.
The final, key aspect of a true fascist movement was still missing. There was no leader. Nixon was, for all of his faults, not going to play the role of American Hitler. Ronald Reagan was happy to exploit the sentiments of the proto-fascists but wouldn’t have taken on the role, either. Bush the Elder was too much the old-fashioned American political scion and Bush the Younger too much his father’s son. The movement lay in wait, nurtured by the Republican establishment, but unprepared to fully blossom.
Then came the Tea Party. It anointed Sarah Palin its Dumbass-in-Chief and America’s proto-fascist movement finally broke free of the shackles of the gentrified Republican Party establishment.
This is the electoral ring into which Donald Trump threw his Make America Great Again cap last year. I honestly believe he thought he was just going to have a laugh and sell a few books. I don’t think he set out to become an American Mussolini but he managed to do exactly that. His rhetoric actually hits on all of the main points of fascist propaganda starting with that Make America Great Again ball cap. It says that America was once the pinnacle but has been dethroned and someone needs to step up and fix it. Who is it that ruined American greatness, according to Trump’s rhetoric? Illegal immigrants, liberals, the media, and non-white people in general. He then presented himself as the strong man with all of the answers to all of the problems and his followers created the cult of personality that’s the final key to the fascist movement.
Historians have often asked how Germany went insane in the 1930s. This is the answer to that question. It starts small. It starts with people turning against their neighbors in small ways. It starts with the leadership applauding the actions of those who turn on their neighbors. Germany did not wake up one morning and say, “Hey, let’s put Hitler in charge and kill all of the Jews.” The Nazis took over a small percentage of the Reichstag and eventually rose to just under 40% control. From there they stopped the government from doing anything while forcing von Hindenberg into declaring Hitler Chancellor. Even that was met with protests.
The American political system has many protections that Germany of the 1930s lacked. The biggest protection America has is that there is no single, unified concept of “American-ness.” Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler could point to long traditions of the people in their particular lands and tease out a perfect representation of what it meant to be of that place. America is too vast and its history too filled with immigrants for anyone to point to a single image and say, “Yes, that is an American.”
This doesn’t mean people don’t try. The proto-fascists make it a point to claim that very thing. They usually code it, of course, with concepts like America as “a Christian nation,” and telling anyone who isn’t white that they should go home. The image of the true American to them is of a white, Protestant Christian, generally from a rural area.
White, Protestant, rural Americans make up a minority of the country. While there are examples of a minority ruling over a majority (South Africa under apartheid and, well, the antebellum American South come readily to mind) the pieces simply aren’t there in America. Demographics are shifting away from white America quickly and a large enough slice of current white America is just fine with that and welcomes a more diverse society that a theoretical war won’t come down to whites v everyone else.
It’s important to remember that even in the 1860s when the North was mostly populated by tremendously racist people the Union Army was filled with white men who took up arms to end the injustice of slavery. That drastically oversimplifies the reasons Union men fought in the war, but it’s still important. The North was not an enlightened culture on racial issues by any means. The Union did not originally take up arms to explicitly end slavery. Following the Emancipation Proclamation the war was turned into a referendum on chattel slavery. In the darkest days of 1864 when it looked like Lincoln might actually lose his re-election bid the army turned out in droves and voted him back in by a huge margin over former General of the Armies George B. McClellan, who has gone down in history as an absolutely atrocious general but who was loved by his men. Those same men voted to have Abraham Lincoln continue ordering Ulysses S. Grant to send them into the meat grinder around Richmond, Virginia.
It looks grim sometimes when we’re stuck in the day-to-day grind of Donald Trump’s reckless Twitter tirades. He has played the role of American Mussolini for far too long. But this is not the end.
Stay tuned as I wrap this up tomorrow with a longer breakdown of why I don’t believe that it really can happen here on a large enough scale, even if Trump wins the election. As always, please like and share if you feel so inclined.
