Political Design Flaw or Feature?
The Ideological Paradoxes of the MAGA/Anti-Woke Movement Reveal the Code
Ever since Donald Trump rode down the escalator with Make America Great Again for his campaign T-shirt, I have been perplexed because the ideas behind MAGA — however scantly slim they might be — seemed logically inconsistent and the expansive gulf between the ideas and their logic seemed to only increase as the years have gone by. For instance, how could men and women with Blue Lives Matter signs battle Capitol police officers for hour after hour on January 6th? Or, how could someone be okay with pregnant women dying due to lack of proper medical care while simultaneously espousing that All Lives Matter?
Recently, it dawned on me that these contradictions might not be design flaws, they might just be features purposely baked into the code of the system. The question then is: “What system has been encoded?” My answer is: We are battling the echoes of an enslaver mindset.
As disgusted as I am to write about this subject, I think it is important to identify it and name it to be able to properly fight it. I came up with far, far more examples to demonstrate my point than I include here. I give you just a few. Whenever you come across a thing that makes you go hmmm take a moment to evaluate it, to ensure it is just a design flaw, not a feature built into the code.
1. Police as the Enslaver’s Tool for Control and Protection
Enslavers created slave patrols, the prototype for the police, to regulate the enslaved because enslavers feared that their slaves would rise up against them. So, if you have the mindset of an enslaver, then the police are your tool or servant. They exist to serve and protect you, to keep you atop the Great Chain of Being. This mindset carries over into today. You may recall the drunk woman who blew through a stop sign going 30 miles over the speed limit who tried to escape accountability by saying, “I’m a very clean, thoroughbred, white woman.” When the police questioned her about why this should even matter, she responded with, “You’re a police officer; you should know.”
When the Black Lives Matter movement against police killing black people for minor infractions started to gain some traction, the Blue Lives Matter signs quickly popped up because police felt “under attack.” Responding to criticism for their reactionary stance, Blue Lives proponents were insistent that they backed the Blue and were not simply opposing black people. Yet on January 6th, Blue Lives supporters engaged in hand to hand combat for hours against black and white police officers and even using their Thin Blue Line flag as a weapon. Initially, I thought that January 6th was just yet one more example that convincingly laid forth the hypocrisy of the Blues Lives movement. Yet, that apparent hypocrisy starts to make some sense in a rather twisted way when viewed from a enslaver mindset.
With this mindset, if the police are your tool in regulating black people, then you are entitled to engage in violence against the police (your tool) when you cannot control them or they don’t protect your interests. Think about it, the same politicians who had been chiming away every election season for “law and order,” which is coded language for going after black people, are now crying “Defund the FBI” and “Defund the Justice Department.”
Hmmm, when did the cries for defunding start? Certainly, not when Black Lives Matter proponents were seeking some funding for social workers and mental health professionals to treat mental health issues instead of criminalizing them. Nope. It started at the moment the federal criminal justice agencies took rather timid steps toward holding the leader of the Republican party accountable for allowing thousands of people to attend parties next to purloined highly classified documents. That infraction sounds like the espionage equivalent of drunkenly driving 30 miles over the speed limit and being baffled about facing criminal justice.
In defending against potential indictments, former President Trump and his cronies have made mystified statements to the effect of, “If they can come for Trump, they will come for you.” In a rule of law country, everyone who violates the law should be subject to the same risks of accountability. So, you would think it would be a good thing. Nope. Former President Trump and his minions speak in tones of pearl-clutching consternation that makes clear that the law should not apply to them or their followers. Umair Haque makes a convincing argument that American fascists want to go farther than being above the law, they want to be beyond the institutional structures and become the law.
Being above or beyond the law was institutionalized during slavery. For instance, enslavers engaged in a practice known as “buck breaking.” Any enslaved person that was deemed resistant could legally have their spirit broken to the point of even being inadvertently killed without accountability. We see echoes of this mindset today in so many areas — such as, stand your ground laws which give a plausible defense for white homeowners who shoot black people that knock on their door, the hysteria over guns that makes it okay for white men wearing face coverings to enter state capitols while openly carrying semiautomatic weapons, and police brutality against black people for any imagined sign of resistance, especially while lawfully carrying guns.
As only a recent example, Mr. Rose who is an African American professional truck driver was ostensibly pulled over for a violation related to his mud flaps. I quote the article covering his 911 call (bold added):
“Right now, I have police officers following me for a long time and I am trying to figure out why they have their guns pulled out,” Rose said in the [911] call, according to CNN and ABC News. “I am just a truck driver. I was about to comply with them, but they all had their guns drawn out. There are like 20 police cars behind me. And I don’t feel safe.”
“You need to pull over,” the dispatcher said. “You’re going to get yourself in more trouble than you’re already in.”
“I don’t know why they’re trying to kill me,” Rose said.
“They’re not trying to kill you,” the dispatcher said.
“Yes they are,” Rose said. “I do not feel safe with stopping.”
Mr. Rose indeed stopped, knelt and raised his hands in the air and then was mauled by a police dog at the command of a police officer. Strikingly, the police department found that the officer who gave the signal to maul Mr. Rose had acted within the policies and procedures of the department and did not use excessive force. Let that soak in for a moment, the rules permit a patrol to order the mauling of a defenseless black man today just as they did in the time of slavery.
“Buck breaking” also included the sexual assault and rape of enslaved men. We can see echoes of this practice in a complaint lodged by two Black men against six Mississippi police officers for allegedly entering their home without a warrant and then engaging in two hours of torture and attempted rape. According to the complaint, the torture culminated in an officer shooting one of the victims in the mouth shattering his jaw and causing permanent brain damage. While this man must have been in excruciating pain, the officers did not render medical aid. In addition to hurling racial epithets, the officers allegedly accused the two men of “dating white women,” which resounds with the echoes of the Jim Crow era.
2. Medical Care and the Devaluation of Lives
Almost daily I hear distressing stories of women facing life-threatening complications during pregnancy, unable to access necessary and life-saving medical care in their state due to new or reactivated abortion laws. White women who tend to be wealthier than women of color are more likely to have the ability to seek medical care out of state, although the trek is becoming more arduous, covering a large swath of the pre-Civil War enslaving states.
It is perplexing that anti-abortion advocates claiming to be pro-life do not prioritize protecting the lives of pregnant women in such situations, until you consider an enslaver’s mindset. This disregard for the mother’s life aligns with the enslaver’s perspective, where an enslaved woman’s worth was measured by her ability to increase her owner’s wealth through bearing children. The implication of today’s restrictive abortion legislation is that if you are a woman who cannot easily pop out a bunch of babies, you have no value and might as well be as good as dead.
Furthermore, the new abortion laws effectively force victims of rape and incest to carry their pregnancies to term. Who in history did not care about raping women and forcing them to give birth to babies as a result of that violence? Enslavers. It didn’t matter to them whether the enslaved child was born through forced breeding or rape so long as the value of their holdings increased. Slavery was so lucrative that it acted as a disincentive to the freeing of slaves.
“I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm; what she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption.”
— Thomas Jefferson
This mindset of a useful life was not just reserved for enslaved women; it also extended towards enslaved men. After all, an enslaver could work any slave to death.
The life span of an enslaved person on a sugar plantation could be as little as seven years. Unfazed, plantation owners worked their enslaved laborers to death and prepared for this high “turnover” by ensuring that new enslaved people arrived on a regular basis to replace the dying.
What if it was not a tone-deaf coincidence that Governor Abbott approved removing water break requirements just as a horrible heat wave started? What if instead, it was a signal to potential donors that he has the mindset they are looking for?
3. Manipulating Education for Control
I see parallels between the education practices of enslavers and recent efforts to control the narratives in education. Enslavers sought to limit education to maintain a docile enslaved population. For instance, a modified version of the Bible was created for slaves that removed 80% of its chapters, such as the Exodus, that might inspire an enslaved person to rebel. I wonder if at any time during the process of deleting 90% of the old testament and more than half of the new testament, whether the editor thought to himself, “Wow, maybe we should keep the Bible and get rid of slavery instead?”
To blunt criticism of the brutality and violence of slavery, post-Civil War former enslavers concocted and perpetuated a romanticized narrative of slavery through the Plantation Myth of happy, singing and contented enslaved people. The narrative makes it sound as if the enslaved Africans were blank slates who needed their enslavers’ guidance in order to reach their full moral and economic potential. You only need know Celia’s story to know that this narrative was fundamentally false. If you need more “proof,” the Atlantic covered Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It from the collected works of the Federal Writer Projects.
Today, we witness attempts to ban critical thinking on matters of race and intersectionality, banning African American AP studies by calling it “indoctrination,” gaslighting rape as being natural, warping abolitionist views, and generally romanticizing slavery as being beneficial for slaves.
Just to be clear, enslaved Africans brought skills with them that benefited America:
Many Africans were deeply familiar with large-scale rice and indigo cultivation, which were completely unknown to European Americans; without the skills of Africans and their descendants, the rice fields of South Carolina and Louisiana might never have existed.
4. All the Right People Know the Party Platform
I have long wondered why impoverished white people might vote for tax cuts that mainly benefit the wealthy and burden themselves with government debt. Or, why they vociferously argue against programs that would make their lives easier.
Could it be that today’s MAGA/Anti-Woke politicians know their political fortunes rest on a strong and ingrained hatred for black people within poor white voters? Could there be such substantial political value in preventing black people from receiving a benefit, even if it means that poor white people are similarly deprived and in continual suffering? This technique has been an open secret. Take for instance, Lee Atwater:
Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.…
Lee Atwater then discusses how the different layers of abstraction make the language coded. Even though on its face the wording might seem racially neutral, the code meant that the party could signal to and win over the racists without being overtly racist.
In this context, it makes more sense why the GOP abandoned any semblance of having a party platform for the 2020 election and hasn’t even made a pretense of having one heading into the 2024 election season. As wackadocious as the 2016 Republican platform was at least it was written down and one could debate its Orwellian specifics. Now, you would be hard pressed to find a written policy stance because frankly, a written one is not needed. And, if it were written, it would be so repugnant to most “normies,” there would not be a chance of electoral success. Yet, those who need to know, know exactly where the party is headed, through classic dog-whistle politicking.
5. The Plausible Deniability of the Dog Whistle.
Just in case a donor or voter might have doubt about a candidate’s bona fides for this repugnant platform, all you need to do is watch MAGA/Anti-Woke politicians bloviate and find new ways to be cruel to the most vulnerable people. At the same time, those who don’t need to know — or possibly don’t want to know — can cloak themselves in plausible deniability as if they never heard the dog-whistle at all.
6. Heeding the Dog Whistle Places One in the Role of the Dog
Certainly, those who hear the whistle may think they’re going to be part of the ruling class in some utopian future white-christian-ethnostate.
For instance, a Texas woman Abigail Shry was recently arrested for threatening to kill federal district court judge Tanya Chutkan in a message that began with “Hey you stupid slave,” followed by the most insulting racial slur. This Texan’s grievance with Judge Chutkan was not related to Ms. Shry’s own criminal matter before the court or even a family member, her message was solely to benefit Mr. Trump, a person already at the highest echelon’s of our society politically and economically being a former president and a presumed billionaire.
Little did she know at the time of making that threat, she is an object, a tool, a means to an end.
I would hope that she and the thousand other individuals who heeded Trump’s dog whistle to come to the Capitol on January 6th and who have been arrested have learned or will learn that they were being used in a fraudulent endeavor.
7. The Economic Cost of Racism
This code of power eventually leads back to money. Bill Moyers wrote of his time as a young staffer to Lyndon Johnson:
Lets talk about how much that pickpocketing is worth. Prior to the pandemic, it was estimated that the economic impact of the black-white wealth gap would penalize the economy by 4 to 6% of projected GDP. That’s about 1 to 1.5 Trillion dollars over the course of 9 years.
To give you an idea of the magnitude of that number, the United States budgets about $1 trillion for Social Security per year, making it one of the largest federal programs in terms of spending. What rational person would forego that much money flowing into our economy in order to keep black and brown people from economically benefiting? That trillion dollars is just the wealth gap; it does not reflect the racial trauma, disparate health outcomes, the moral bankruptcy and all the other lost potential of our nation.
Conclusion:
As I unravel the layers of the MAGA/Anti-Woke movement, I am disturbed to uncover the echoes of the underlying enslaver mindset that lies at its cruel and vicious heart. By being clear-eyed and unflinching in recognizing this “code” and the purpose of the “dog whistles” in acting as a signal, we can better work towards dismantling this heinous legacy in all its seemingly paradoxical forms.
Here are some actions you can take right now:
- Learn your history so that you can decode the coded dog-whistles.
- Register and vote in local, state and federal elections only for candidates who are committed to the rule of law.
- Donate to organizations that fight for civil rights.
- Volunteer your time to get out the vote.
