SOUTH NEWFANE — For many, many people, their first reaction to the election in the United States of America, even as it was happening, was shock and revulsion that the U.S. people did not repudiate Donald Trump with a stronger margin of victory for Joseph Biden.
After four years, everyone knows what Trump stands for: open white supremacy, authoritarianism, misogyny, white resentment, calls to violence, cruelty, and so on.
That he nevertheless received 72 million votes is a clear statement of the sickness and madness of this racist, settler-colonial monstrosity called the USA.
Let us be very clear: 72 million Americans chose white supremacy and authoritarianism - or, at the least, those qualities did not bother them.
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At the founding of this country, the Southern slave-owning class was given power disproportionate to their small numbers. They ruled as a minority. When their rule was challenged by the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, they seceded, and we had civil war.
The brief period of Reconstruction after the war, when Black people had political power and organized along with poor whites under protection of Federal troops, was betrayed in 1877. Former slaves were again denied the vote and were terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings for another hundred years.
Then the civil rights movement was betrayed as well, with many of its leaders murdered by 1968. This culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan, who by no accident started his campaign in the small town in Mississippi where three civil rights workers were murdered by the KKK.
And now, after the Black Lives Matter movement, and a Black president (never mind his politics), white USA has once again betrayed the words of the Declaration of Independence. They voted to Make America Great Again - that is, make America white and patriarchal again. A clear call to white supremacy.
White America has clearly proclaimed they prefer autocracy, if democracy is to be multi-racial. This country will never change.
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Donald Trump has lost the election, but Trumpism is stronger than ever.
He has created a powerful cult of personality. His disputed defeat serves him almost as well as victory. He continues to stir the white resentment and hatred, the alternate reality in which his followers live, fueled by Fox News and Internet conspiracies.
When 100,000 of his supporters marched in Washington 12 days after the election (which Biden won by seven million votes), they claimed that Trump had won and that they were being cheated of their natural due as white Americans.
The election has settled nothing. The militias will now be a permanent part of any protest - they are not going away.
Trump did not have the support of the military for his coup, but he has strong support in all the militarily-armed police departments across the country, in the Border Patrol, in the Federal Department of Homeland Security, and in the prison guards, all of whom are highly organized and have fascistic unions.
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Here is the reality: 14 heavily armed militia men were arrested by the FBI for planning to kidnap the governor of the state of Michigan, to try her for treason, and to hang her - because she is a woman, she is a Democrat, and she ordered the wearing of face masks to reduce the spread of COVID-19.
And neither Trump not any Republican politician has denounced these men, or their plans - no, in fact, they continue to attack her and call for rebellion against her!
But this is the USA today: The land that assassinated John F. Kennedy; his brother, Robert; Martin Luther King Jr., et al. So, should I not be surprised?
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I think it was a mistake for those of us who were prepared to defend the vote not to come out in the streets in a show of force, even if an actual coup did not happen.
Millions were ready to respond to organized calls to defend the vote, but the calls never came.
The first day of the vote, the Republicans did not seem to support Trump's lies about victory - maybe they were afraid of mayhem in the streets if they tried anything?
But as we stayed home, the Republican Party became emboldened and came to support all of Trump's lies and attempts to impede the vote count. They could do nothing only because the Biden margin of victory - seven million votes - was too clear.
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The Republican Party is now clearly the party of the whites. When President Lyndon Johnson, pushed by the massive civil rights movement, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1965, he said that with that action he would cause the Democrats to lose the South for a generation.
He was right, and then some: it's been more than a generation.
In 2008, Obama received 42 percent of the white vote; in 2012, 39 percent. He won the white vote only in the same states that had voted for Abraham Lincoln. The Civil War was won on the battlefield, but the South won the peace.
The Republican Party is a minority party. But white supremacy ruled the South as a minority for hundreds of years. Republicans know how to enforce minority rule, and that is what Trump has emboldened them to do, openly, in daylight.
A minority party must move to authoritarianism if it intends to rule. So we now have one centrist, capitalist party and one openly authoritarian party. We have not even had a truly functioning bourgeois democracy because of the distortion caused by slavery, segregation, and racism. We are still fighting just to have a right to vote!
Trump's presidency was very much a response to a Black president and to Black Lives Matter in the streets. The psychology of caste, of identity and fear of losing status, is much larger than any political or class questions with his voters.
When the Left says that white workers are voting against their own (economic) interests, they do not realize that these workers have their own way of seeing things, and they see the wages of whiteness as in their long-term interest, even if they sacrifice health care or other immediate interests.
Their place in the dominant caste is more important than anything to them, and they love Trump ferociously, as he reflects their white narcissism back onto them.
They are very clear: they do not want health care or any social programs if it means that Black people will also benefit. This racism is the secret behind the fact that the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that does not have national health care.
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I think that more police killings of Black men started under Barack Obama, precisely because white supremacy felt threatened by a Black man who “did not know his place,” and such individuals felt they had to shoot Black people to “keep them in their place," as was done with lynching before.
Police killings are the new lynching. Prisons are the new plantation. What has changed?
Black Lives Matter also rose up in those years, to challenge this. As the whole empire, and capitalist system, continues to crumble, and with the rapidly increasing climate disasters, can we at least prevent lynchings and civil war?
Can we build communities of resistance, of egalitarian sharing, while we try to prevent the worst as capitalism, in fact civilization, collapses?
Can we remain human, and help each other?
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What of Black Lives Matter? Now that the people leading this movement have inspired us all and have gotten rid of Trump, are they to be abandoned and betrayed again?
The young people will have a lot to say.
And Biden? We know what he is: a return to business as usual, a stable hand for an empire in decline. Yes, the young climate protestors, the women, the Black Lives protestors, the Indigenous fighting pipelines and protecting water: all of us will try to push Biden as hard as we can.
I would like to see a massive show of force in Washington on Jan. 20, when the new president will be inaugurated. He needs to be greeted with massive protests, as massive as would have been there had Trump won.
If we stay home, we will gain nothing from this “victory.” We have gained a moment to breathe, to fight again, by getting the KKK out of the White House for at least a brief time.
That was necessary for all the struggles.
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But Trumpism is strong, and the neo-liberal Biden will solve nothing.
To paraphrase Eddie S. Glaude Jr. in his magnificent book Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, we are faced once again in our history with the question: How do we begin again, faced with another cowardly betrayal by white America, who have again chosen whiteness over democracy, privilege over decency?
What do you do when you have given up on your country but you must still take up your responsibilities - to live, to fight, to help the new generations?