The Lesson of January 6: Zero-Sum Racism is the Biggest Threat to U.S. Democracy
A Preview of the Paperback Afterword from The Sum of Us
In my book, The Sum of Us, I tally the ways that racism ultimately costs everyone in society. It’s the source of our deepest dysfunctions and our greatest collective peril. And since the attacks on January 6th, it’s become even clearer that racism is threatening the very foundation of American democracy.
By tracking the hundreds of insurrectionists who have been arrested over the past year, researchers from the University of Chicago were able to conclude that the rioters’ primary driver was “fear of the ‘great replacement’, the belief that the rights of minorities will overtake that of whites.” Those arrested from Trump’s mob weren’t “economically anxious” — quite the contrary: a whopping 1 in 4 were business owners — and the majority hailed from counties that Biden won. In fact, the strongest geographic indicator among rioters was a home county with a declining white population share, places where Trump’s calls to “take your country back” fan the flames of a racial panic about demographic change.
The attacks on January 6th happened after I finished writing The Sum of Us, but I’ve been asked about it often in discussions about my book. So, for the paperback version — in stores February 8th — I wrote a new afterword, and here’s what I wrote about that fateful day and the Big Lie that created it:
I remember that when I wrote Chapter Six back in 2020, I took pains not to overstate the case about the GOP’s willingness to surrender democracy to preserve a white supremacist power structure. But then on January 6th of the next year, a mob, sporting Confederate flags and Nazi symbols, breached the US Capitol, beating police officers and threatening to hang elected officials, including the Republican vice-president. Despite universal condemnation in Washington during the violent siege, on the next day, the majority of the House Republican caucus voted to do what the mob wanted: refuse to certify the election results.
Within weeks, the guilt-minimizing logic of white supremacy had allowed the right-wing narrative to completely absorb a murderous insurrection attempt. The siege was akin to a “normal tourist visit”, said a congressman, or, worse, patriots out to avenge a legitimate injustice. Republican officials cynically went along with the Big Lie that Democratic voters stole the election, using it as a pretext to introduce nearly 400 state laws making it harder to vote.
The lie of the stolen election is not just a wild fantasy — it is anchored in our long history of zero-sum racial hierarchy. That’s where you’ll find the Big Lie’s racial common sense: of course, the winner of the white vote is the legitimate president, and votes cast by people of color are by definition taking something from rightful white voters. The elaborate conspiracy theory — what’s needed to say this without actually saying it — seems plausible to 50 million people only because of the longstanding stereotype that people of color are inveterate criminals. To believe the Big Lie, you have to think that it’s just as safe to assume that black and brown people are criminals committing fraud as it is to assume they’re eligible citizens exercising their civic duty.
The Sum of Us went to print months before the failed insurrection, but it did include the eerily similar story of the massacre in Colfax, Louisiana in 1873, when a white mob attacked their courthouse to overthrow an interracial government. It was the most violent of the many Reconstruction-era clashes between white people defending the interests of the plantation class and black people defending democracy. “The white citizens murdered their neighbors,” I had written about a history we were apparently willing to repeat, “and burned the edifice of their own government rather than submit to a multiracial democracy.”
The iconic photo from January 6th of a white man proudly marching the Confederate flag through the Capitol building is a reminder of the many fronts on which we are still fighting the long war against the plantation class. We’re fighting over laws to restrict the vote and, most insidiously, partisan takeovers of election administration to make it easier to overturn election results. The federal legislation that would save our democracy is stalled in Congress because of the filibuster, a “Jim Crow era relic” that allows for the Senate minority to block legislation. Although created in 1806 because of a drafting error, the filibuster was honed by white supremacists in the 20th century to thwart civil rights bills, and now it’s being used for just that purpose again. The tools and strategies of zero-sum racism are still wreaking havoc in our democracy, at a cost to the entire project of self-governance.
Throughout my journey to research The Sum of Us, I encountered white people desperate enough to buy racist fallacies (as I did on a live C-SPAN call-in show recently). No matter how offensive the comments, I have disciplined myself to keep asking, “who’s selling this person these ideas, and who’s profiting?” When you look up the supply chain of racist delusions, you inevitably find a self-interested elite peddling the lies. They’re the ideological (and sometimes literal) descendants of the plantation class, still using racism to prop up their greed. It’s these elites who win when the masses of people who have the most to benefit from democracy and a functioning government are willing to destroy it rather than share it across the color line. When you track who funded the “Stop the Steal” movement and ongoing plans to overturn elections, they’re the same people who benefit from tax handouts and corporate giveaways when Republicans gain power despite losing the majority of votes.
Despite the us-versus-them insanity of the current moment, it’s important to remember that the future the zero-sum mob fears is a chimera. When Americans of color gain political power, as we did after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we don’t demand retribution. We simply demand that America — our America, too — live up to her own stated ideals of equality and the pursuit of happiness. The agenda that gets majority support from Americans of color would mean better-funded public schools and infrastructure for everyone, better health care for everyone, higher-paying jobs and cleaner air and water for everyone. We support these measures in higher numbers than do white Americans, in no small part because racial resentment has made white folks forget how much they benefit from government.
Thankfully, we still have a chance to save multiracial democracy from the right-wing plot against it. GOP senators representing 43 million fewer Americans than the Democrats in the majority have been quietly filibustering voting rights legislation. But this week, the Senate Majority Leader announced that there will be a vote before the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday to amend the filibuster rule. Pro-democracy legislation has majority support in the Senate and in the country; it could address voter suppression, secret money in politics, partisan gerrymandering and yes, the kind of partisan election interference that the January 6 mob was cheering on. This is our chance, to choose between the zero-sum delusions of white supremacy and the benefits of a truly multiracial democracy. Let’s pledge, on this terrible anniversary, to do all that we can to protect democracy.
To contact your Senators about amending the filibuster rule to protect voting rights, you can use Indivisible’s tool to call.
