Fellow Democrats,
We don’t know how much damage he will do on his way out, but someday Donald Trump will be gone. It could be this November 6, it could be January 21, 2029, it could be another date, but eventually he will be gone. What happens then?
On August 23, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. His closing question was:
One of the great tragedies for me for this Trump period is not just what it has done to our politics and what it has done to policy in America, but also the division it has driven in America between people. One of the things Lincoln said in the Second Inaugural was talking about “the better angels of our nature.” Basically, he talked about what are we going to do when this is all over? How are we going to come back together? Do you have hope that we can heal the divisions in America right now, which might take humility from both sides to understand? How hopeful are you that this can happen?
She replied:
I do. I find it interesting that you raise Lincoln because so many of the wounds that we have today come from the unfinished business of Reconstruction and come from this time where we endured a great Civil War. We never fully went through the processes of depth of Reconstruction and healing on a systemic level. So I think, I do have hope in the present day that we will heal and that we will move forward. It is cultural work that we’re going to have to do, it’s connecting work we need to have to do over a kitchen table, and it’s also really deep work when it has to do with criminal justice, and health care, and our laws in our states, and our courts.
AOC brilliantly reframed Colbert’s question, deconstructing his reflexive “both sides” frame by historicizing it. Not only is Trumpism a result of “the unfinished business of Reconstruction” but moving beyond it will require restorative justice work on civic and interpersonal levels.
In her 2020 book How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, Heather Cox Richardson argues that Trumpism grows out of a fundamental contradiction in the beliefs of the American Founders. On one hand, they believed in democracy, that every citizen (a category assumed at the time to be exclusively white and male) should have an equal political voice. On the other, they also believed that people were inherently unequal, going beyond meritocracy to aristocracy: not merely that those who are best at a job should do it, but that people are born to a specific caste.
Richardson traces the American version of this foundational lie to colonial Virginia. At the end of the 17th century it became clear that their agricultural workforce mixing Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans in various states of free, indentured, and enslaved labor presented a constant threat of rebellion against the landowners. The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 remedied this by establishing a racial caste system that elevated the status of all white people, even the indigent, and treated African-Americans as property.
Richardson emphasizes a metaphor from a speech South Carolina Senator Wade Hampton II gave in 1858, defending slavery. Hampton explained that civilization is a house built in a swamp, held up by posts called “mudsills.” Literally and metaphorically dirty work supports civilization, and the South has both found an “inferior race” to do it and prevented them from having a political voice, while the North degrades white people by making them do the lowest jobs and endangers society by letting them vote. In the South, all white people get to live in the house and have a shared interest in maintaining the social order, but in the North some white people are forced into the mud in place of slaves and don’t have a stake in the house.
Fast forward to September 10, 2024. Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance was on a podcast discussing the virtues of the “Southern Bourbons.” He wasn’t talking about liquor, but about the plantation aristocracy romanticized in Culver City’s own Gone with the Wind. Richardson draws a straight line from the 1705 Virginia legislature through Senator Hampton to Trump and Vance, defined by the contradiction between democracy and what she calls “oligarchy.”
Oligarchy usually means “rule by the rich.” We are accustomed to hearing the Russian elite under Yeltsin and Putin called oligarchs, and Bernie Sanders has increasingly applied the label to American billionaires, including in his speech at our Chicago convention. However, what Richardson means by “oligarchy” is not simply the fact of rule by the rich, or that the rich deserve to rule because of their inherent superiority (as revealed by their material wealth), but the faith that this rule is actually good for everyone. This is where the line to contemporary right wing thought becomes clear. Those at the top are there because they are the best, therefore their work benefits society. They create jobs, products that make our lives longer, more comfortable, and more fun, and use their assets and talents to solve social problems. Anything which interferes with their accumulation of power and resources, such as regulation or taxation, inhibits their ability to make these contributions. Is it better to tax Bill Gates to fund an anti-malaria program run by civil servants and established NGOs, or to stay out of his way while he starts and runs his own, using the skills that got him where he is?
Democracy threatens this order because the rich will always be outnumbered and, if the masses organize, they will vote to seize the assets of the rich, which they will squander. If people had the skills to solve social problems, they would have the skills to acquire the resources to solve them. This ideology also explains why the right wing has no respect for academics and other researchers. Rather than earning a moderate income studying the environment, the economy, urban planning, sociology, etc, then expecting others to study your results, people should acquire the power and resources to affect the world and, if they can’t, that’s on them. If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?
I see three pressing elements of what AOC called “the unfinished business of Reconstruction” in our national recovery from Trumpism. First, there is the historical work of talking clearly and honestly about what got us here. Richardson’s book is an important contribution, and there is more and better information available now than there ever has been. At the same time, the backlash is also stronger than ever. I’m writing this during the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, and they report attempts to remove materials from public and school libraries have increased by almost two thirds over last year, driven by organized right wing campaigns against books promoting racial justice and acceptance of LGBTQ+ identities.
This work probably requires a truth and reconciliation commission. These have helped other countries reckon with their histories and have been used in the US to address the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, where white supremacists shot at a Communist rally, killing five people and injuring ten more while police who had infiltrated the Klan and Nazi groups did not try to warn targets or prevent the shooting, and the treatment of Native American children by Maine’s social services system. Before we turn the page on Donald Trump, we need to look closely at the currents in our nation’s history and ideology which created and enabled him.
Second, there is the material work of reparations. During the summer of 2020 I heard people talk about three Reconstruction periods: after the Civil War, during the Civil Rights Movement, and presently, with the election of Barack Obama and serious consideration of reparations and the transformation of the justice system. Each of these moments was dashed by the forces of oligarchy. Insurrectionist racists quickly returned to positions of power after the Civil War. Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, aided by the Democratic Party’s uncertainty on Vietnam, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, his campaign’s sabotage of the Paris peace talks, and the Republican Southern Strategy of catering to Southern Democrats by invoking both the oligarchic worldview and more-or-less overt racism. The First Reconstruction was prevented from redistributing enslavers’ wealth to those whose stolen labor and lives had built it, and the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws established a legal basis for racial oligarchic rule after Emancipation. Similarly, the Second Reconstruction was stopped at theoretical equality rather than material justice. As Dr. King said: “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?”
The fate of the Third Reconstruction is yet to be seen, but oligarchic forces at every level of government have fought the systemic change AOC mentioned. In 2022 in Culver City, with 28,000 registered voters, billionaire landlord/developer Michael Hackman spent over $600,000 to elect Dan O’Brien to the City Council, creating the conservative majority that has discarded the work done by the General Plan Advisory Committee subgroup on policing and censored the historical context study created to inform the City’s reparations plan. In Los Angeles, the threat that renters might use their democratic power to resist the oligarchic predation of landlords has driven even worse electoral shenanigans. At the State Capitol, our Assembly Member Isaac Bryan has been able to pass a bill making public the titles of books banned from prison libraries and our State Senator Lola Smallwood-Cuevas passed one requiring grocery stores and pharmacies in underserved areas to give extra advance notice if they are going to close, but many core elements of the legislative Black Caucus’ reparations package, including simply establishing a State office to help people verify their ancestry and apply for benefits when they are available, have been blocked for now.
Finally, there is the interpersonal element, across the “kitchen table,” as AOC described it. At our June 2 City Council candidate forum, we asked the four candidates who participated to recommend books on history, urban planning, and social issues. Bubba Fish chose Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law. Nancy Barba gave three: Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us, Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism, and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Mayor Yasmine-Imani McMorrin also named three: Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America, Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, and Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. These books all contribute to the national reckoning, even Butler’s 1993 science fiction novel. Jeannine Wisnosky-Stehlin said she was reading a novel which she didn’t want to mention and that she enjoys dipping into The Book of Gutsy Women: Female Stories of Courage and Resilience, by Hilary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, but spoke mostly about I Never Thought of it That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, by Mónica Guzmán. Inspired by her own relationship with her Trump-supporting parents, Guzmán facilitates “cross-party conversations.” Her organization, Better Angels, takes its name from the same Lincoln speech Stephen Colbert cited.
I wondered if any Trump supporters were buying books like Guzmán’s. For an unscientific test, I Googled “how to talk to your liberal kids.” The first result was a booklet from Better Angels: How to Talk to a Difficult Liberal: A Guide for Conservatives, and yes, the mirror version exists. Both advise the reader to abandon the expectation “that facts will be agreed on and logic followed consistently.” This may be useful advice for getting through a family gathering in relative peace, but it is no way to run a democracy. If everything means less than zero, we are in the land of Jewish space lasers, Haitians eating cats, and Democratic leaders pimping out children from the basement of a DC pizzeria that doesn’t even have a basement. Sartre and Orwell each wrote about how fascism is not the replacement of one truth by another but the erasure of the possibility of truth: the replacement of observed reality by what those in power dictate. Embracing relativism is not neutrality; it’s surrender to the right.
Guzmán and Better Angels are not interested in a recovery from Trumpism but in learning to live with it. In We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, whose title refers both to Obama’s Presidency and the period of Reconstruction during which African-Americans were fairly represented in southern state governments, Ta-Nehisi Coates describes Woodrow Wilson’s speech at the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg: “Wilson, when he addressed the crowd, did not mention slavery, but asserted that the war’s meaning could be found in ‘the splendid valor, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against each other, now grasping hands and smiling into each other’s eyes.’” (75).
Whatever the outcome, everyone shakes hands and relaxes until next time, as if it was a soccer match. This is how the business stays unfinished.
Rather than thinking of Trumpism as the nation’s weird uncle, who can be scary but generally just needs to be humored or avoided, we need to look at it as an unrepentant abuser whose readmission to the family will require some serious atonement, amends, and therapy.
Change is possible. It is daunting, but what is the alternative?
In 2013 I was in Little Rock to give a conference paper and was struck by this commemorative plaque:
The “iron-clad oath” required Federal officials and employees to swear they had never engaged in or supported war against the United States. Its strongest advocate was Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, an American hero who was beaten nearly to death on the floor of the Senate in 1856 by a pro-slavery Congressmember from South Carolina, took three years to recover, then returned to fight even harder for abolition and outlived his younger assailant.
Augustus Garland was a moderate, for a traitor. He had opposed secession and advocated for the rule of law rather than vigilante violence within the Confederacy. President Andrew Johnson pardoned him for his service to the enemy government, which meant he was not barred by the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause, but Garland could not take the iron-clad oath, so he challenged it in court and won. In 1866, just one year after the end of the Civil War, attorneys who had taken up arms against the United States were permitted to re-enter its highest court. Garland had helped lead a war against the United States to defend slavery, then was not only readmitted to its courts but was elected Governor of his state, served in the Senate of the nation he had taken arms against, and was appointed Attorney General: the top law enforcement officer of the government he had tried to overthrow. That’s the alternative.