Credit where due

I try to know as much history as I can study, but Kevin M. Levin has just taught me there's a lot I've missed about how the Union won the Civil War. 

By Committee of Ladies of Philadelphia via Wikipedia

Roughly 75 percent of free born African American men of military age in the North volunteered to serve in the Union army during the Civil War. No other demographic group in American history has mobilized for war at anything close to that rate.

These men enlisted knowing they would receive unequal pay until Congress relented in 1864, that they would serve under white officers and be denied commissions, and that capture might mean enslavement or execution rather than a prison camp. Finally, they served not knowing whether that service would translate into citizenship.

Roughly 180,000 Black men ultimately served in the United States Colored Troops, nearly a tenth of the Union army by the war’s end. They were joined by hundreds of thousands of enslaved men and women who fled to Union lines and forced emancipation onto the war’s agenda before Washington had decided what the war was about.

Frederick Douglass understood precisely what this service meant, which is why he threw himself into recruitment. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.,” he declared in 1863, “let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.” 

Apparently civilians in Union cities knew who was defending them. I feel pretty certain that Donald Trump and his merry band of vandals who are busily trying to cover up what we should learn in US history doesn't know this. And they'd only work harder to push lies if they were taught it. But we can do better.

How to live in a nation that hates you?

I'm not unusual in being moved by this 250th US anniversary to think about the present through the lens of Centennials Past.  Princeton University scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. has offered his reflections in America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries.  A scholar of James Baldwin, he is not into pretty pictures of the past; this is not that kind of nation. 

And so Glaude begins:

I do not love America, and never have, especially now.

From there, he's more than ready to tell us why that is:

... Desperately afraid of being exposed, particularly to themselves, most white Americans have been led by that fear, and continue to be led, into a kind of delirium that erupts, repeatedly, in unimaginable violence and draconian policies. They lash out. They destroy or render entire populations invisible, lock them away in prisons, push them to the edges of our communities, or deport them in order to keep the country, or their idea of the country, from being torn asunder.

... Trump’s reelection in 2024 signaled that a large swath of white America was unwilling to struggle any longer over race matters. Instead, he reasserted the fantasy of a white Republic. ... 

The burden of white America is a lot to carry. But here Glaude is -- and here we all are.

Glaude takes up various bits of our history and white America's shame in the light of the five great commemorative anniversaries. Particular horrors bubble to the top of this stew for deeper examination. 

For example, launching off the fact that Frederick Douglass's home place was western New York state in the years before the Civil War, Glaude dissects the Tops Market hate massacre in Buffalo in 2021. This one got to me, because Buffalo also was my home place, and I do not want to forget...

... Well over a century after Douglass delivered his speech in Corinthian Hall and Garnet announced in Buffalo that pharaohs were on both sides of the Red Sea, Payton Gendron, an eighteen-year-old white male from Conklin, New York, drove over two hundred miles to east Buffalo, exited his car with a semiautomatic rifle with the word Nigger scrawled on its barrel, and opened fire at the Tops Friendly Market. He was dressed in tactical gear and live-streamed his killing spree on Twitch. [Ten shoppers died.]

Gendron purposefully chose this area because of its high concentration of Black residents. Buffalo is the sixth most segregated city in the country and the third poorest city in the nation. Thirty-five percent of African Americans and 40 percent of Black children in Buffalo live below the poverty line. In 2021, African American unemployment in the city stood at 11 percent. Masten Park on the East Side, where the Tops grocery store is located, is like most Black neighborhoods in poor cities teeming with Black people trying to make ends meet. Severe residential segregation has drawn a hard line between Black and white residents in the city. One reporter likened Main Street to the Berlin Wall, a divide, like railroad tracks in small Southern towns, that separates Black and white neighborhoods. 

Before the horror on May 14, Black people lived in a city that fundamentally devalued and disregarded them, no matter which political party governed. They lived and died by a thousand daily cuts in “the city of good neighbors. ...

Glaude goes on to recount the testimony of the survivors and the relatives of the murdered. These are people who do not have the option of ignoring the reality that too much of their own country discounts their humanity. 

How to live in a nation that hates you? Glaude takes this as his problem and his text:

... We are forced to live with the idea that, because of the color of our skin and because of the color of yours, somehow that says something about our value, our worth. ... 

... There is this palpable sense throughout the country that everything is collapsing around us—that hatred has overrun basic values and that greed has trumped decency. Hope for a racially just society seems like a fool’s desire, because so many white folks—those who can’t imagine themselves as anything but white—have lost their damn minds. 

But love breaks through. Not some sentimentalized love of country that can easily slip into a kind of idolatry that makes one monstrous, but the love of people close to the ground, who give this place meaning and purpose. The love that motivated slaves to imagine a future as a free people when nothing about their experience suggested that such a future could be possible; the love that announces hatred must never have the last word. ...

... Your country? Your history? No. It is ours. Our sweat and tears have shaped this land. You feel us in the music; our sound rolls off your tongue. Our presence fills your classic literature. Our wails and moans, our joys and laughter, make this place swing. Your country? No. The bars of music that begin each chapter of this book suggest otherwise. And no matter your efforts to make us invisible or to deny the history of the country that unravels your myths and legends, we know America would not be America without us. 

The reality is what it is. The country has given us Donald Trump, and we have to deal with this madness again. The pounding in the skull returns as we struggle to beat back the “intolerable bitterness of spirit,” because these people have done this shit again in the 250th year of America, U.S.A., a semiquincentennial blues.

Glaude would never deny he's a kind of preacher. 

Takes one to know too many

Panic about newcomers to the United States seems to be a hardy perennial in the American experience. 

Because my parents were unusually old when they reproduced, closer to 40 than 25 when they had a child, I carry a memory of coming up with people who had come of age during the immigration restriction panic of the 1920s. Even in the 1950s, they saw nothing amiss in reflexive "soft" prejudice against people who came from what they saw as "shithole" countries; in their world, that would be people of Italian or, even worse, Polish ancestry. The great patriotic coalition of World War II had sanded some ugly edges off this for them and this disdain didn't extend either to European Jews or American-born Blacks. But during the restricted phase of legal immigration that extended to 1965, they were just normies with normie attitudes. 

My generation were more open to new experiences and newcomers; we call that the Sixties. We were beyond shocking and very controversial to previous generations.

And then, like many Americans, my parents became more and more open to the different sort of Americans who came among us when we opened legal immigration doors a crack. 

The dwindling white base of the current Republican Party desperately wants the past and their entitled bigotry back. The Supreme Court's too small majority affirming birthright citizenship does not mean the end of the fight; it merely signals a new phase in the never finished struggle over who is a real American.

Air Force vet and former Republican Congresscritter Adam Kinzinger speaks to this moment; he knows the worst of his former constituents.  

Why Trump Won't Stop Until He Ends Birthright Citizenship 

Who is an American isn’t a difficult question. Despite what four politicians in black robes tried to tell us ..., the 14th Amendment is incredibly clear, written in language anybody can read and comprehend: “Any persons born or naturalized in the United States.” It’s simple: If you’re born here, you’re an American, and entitled to all our country’s blessings. And it used to be pretty widely agreed upon that this was an asset that this set our country above other nations as a beacon of freedom.

When I swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, I knew this was part of the deal. And I served in uniform alongside people that would have proudly given their life for their country, even if their parents were born somewhere else.

... Let’s be very clear about this: Trump and his allies are not going to stop trying to end Birthright Citizenship, and whoever succeeds him will pick up that mantle. Deciding “who is an American” is central to the MAGA project; it is among the very first steps in their playbook. 

If you think this is an overstatement, just look at one response yesterday from a prominent MAGA stooge—the CEO of the right-wing magazine The Federalist: 

click to enlarge

I'm reproducing this deranged screed here because most of us don't see the stuff our right wingers stew in. "Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners." "Deny entry to all female foreigners." "Require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry." These people are scared stupid!

Kinzinger goes on: 

What makes America exceptional is the idea that citizenship isn’t about bloodlines or tribal membership—it’s about our shared commitment to a set of principles. It is a big, sprawling, living and breathing Democracy. This is what sets us apart from nations that define citizenship by ethnicity or religion. A Shining City on a Hill isn’t meant to be admired in the distance, it is an actual place with people, industry, traditions and faith.

And that gets us to the core of MAGA. The movement to end birthright citizenship isn’t trying to make America stronger. It’s trying to make America smaller, more fearful, more divided. It’s trying to turn the Constitution into a weapon against the very people it was designed to protect. Ultimately, Trump wants a smaller citizenry, a smaller democracy and a smaller America—in every sense of the word.

This is an existential fight for [Stephen Miller], for Trump and for the sociopaths they’ve got running the government right now. It is the skeleton key to the fascist takeover so many of them pray for each night. So the fight continues because they will never stop. 

America, as they know it, cannot exist with birthright citizenship in place because they believe it diminishes them. And, to me, that’s what makes the MAGA movement so weak and pathetic. They want to make being born here a curse, when the rest of us know it is an immense privilege. ...

What happened at the Supreme Court is not just another move in an ongoing MAGA v. Dems chess match. This is our existential fight.

Yet more on the Juneteenth holiday: against forgetting

Kevin Young self-describes as a post-evangelical pastor. Also a white guy and "a lifter." Not my instinctive go-to for theological or other insight. 

Yet, as belatedly and arduously the Juneteenth holdiay becomes more internalized as a national holiday, as well as a Black remembrance, he offers a perspective that I find compelling. He writes:

... The Hebrew scriptures are obsessed—I mean absolutely OBSESSED—with memory. 

The command to remember appears over 200 times in the Old Testament alone. “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt,” says Deuteronomy 5:15. God did not issue that command as a footnote but as the foundation of Israel’s entire ethical framework.

You were oppressed. 
You know what oppression feels like. 
Therefore, you do not oppress.
Remember!

To forget is not simply to be careless. In the theology of the Hebrew Bible, to forget is to sin.

When white people dismantle the legal protections of Black voters, erase Black history from classrooms, defund the celebrations of Black freedom, and quietly remove the holidays that honor Black lives from our national calendar, we are not just making administrative, fiscal, or even political decisions. 

No.

We are committing an act of spiritual forgetting. We are sinning against memory, and we are willfully sinning against the image-bearers we have chosen to forget. 

The alternative to forgetting is both pain admitting to horrors and joy in human liberation -- joy at the defeat of our particular American slavery, but also joy in in the possibility of wider community and a better future. This is a choice. "Let us march on til victory is won!"

All hands out for democracy!

The Movement Voter Project passes along this graphic which illustrates a blunt truth: if you really want to help a candidate or campaign by donating money, the earlier you give, the more your contribution helps. 

Our money, even tiny sums, does much more for candidates and causes we support when we give in June than when we join the last minute rush in October. 

Oh, they'll keep asking all the way until election day in November. But, once primary elections are completed, this is the time when our cash enables campaigns to turn a trickle of interest into a torrent of support.  

If you are going to give any candidate cash for their campaign, do it now!

And then, when we get to the fall, do more later. Those of us whose small donations may feel like nothing can help campaigns directly with voter contact, whether in person or on phones. 

Democracy is not a spectator sport. 

• • •

Here's an assessment of where US democracy stands since the Supremes did their bit to break the coming elections. From Democratic Party stalwart Simon Rosenberg:

... what the Rs have found is a way to steal more Congressional seats, giving them a brief respite from the unrelenting bad news and terrible polling data; but the overall political landscape has gotten far worse for them in recent weeks. 

Trump’s war has failed, and he and America are far weaker today; his tariffs were declared illegal (again); the new inflation data was much worse than expected, and the chance of inflation returning to a comfortable place before the election has become very, very unlikely; the damage from their health care cuts are starting to be felt far more acutely; their close, vital ally Orban fell, and Magyar has become a new potent global symbol of democracy; like Trump’s war Putin’s war is failing too, further weakening the Putin-Trump-MAGA political project...

Trump’s poll numbers keep dropping, we keep winning elections and overperforming everywhere; and we could very well flip two Supreme Court seats in Georgia on Tuesday, something that will be rightly seen as a powerful rebuke of the corruption of the courts by Trump, Roberts and their allies.

It is also critical that we see the right’s spasm of racist gerrymandering as a sign of weakness, desperation, and fear, not strength and confidence. They are scared of the American people and of us.

As they should be, for these MAGAs have done more harm to the country and to our democracy than perhaps any other political leaders in our history, and the American people are right to be pissed, highly motivated to vote and throw them out of office.

Despite their illicit gaming of our electoral system Democrats are still favored to win the House, perhaps by not the same margins, and the Senate is still very much in play.

 We knew taking power away from Trump and the Rs this year would be hard so what is happening now is nothing new. We must stay resolute and determined, and keep working as hard as we can. 

This remains a year of extraordinary opportunity for us, one where we can expand our maps and win in red places and red states where we have not been regularly competitive in many, many years….

My emphasis. I think this is more than spin, though watching southern racist whites crow about getting rid of the Black members in Congress is rage inducing. It's  on all of us to work harder. We know we can have a better country if we make it.

A call to action, especially to white Americans

Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill's newsletter makes a clear call to us all. Republicans seek to drive the diverse majority which we are on the way to becoming out of public life. That's what the current redistricting push to make southern congressional delegations all white amounts to. Voters will lose their options and their power. It all starts with disenfranchising Black Americans, as it always has.

When Trump decided to name his movement “Make America Great Again,” many of us immediately understood the nature of the appeal. White supremacy in this country has always been a nostalgic ideology built on the premise of a great past when Black people knew their place, when white people were assured the guarantee of prominence in public life, and could count on being the beneficiaries of the spoils of government policies and programs. 

What white supremacy promises its adherents is a life without challenge - the right to be free of competition and judgment, the right to be shielded from new ways of thinking, to be insulated from diverse cultural practices that challenge their hegemony. White supremacy offers the false narrative of superiority. You see it in every facial tick, every desperate boast and sad outburst of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose fast-talking insults and tirades are designed to distract from his incompetence. His purge of Black and women leaders in the military is a textbook white supremacy move. The field of competition must be artificially restricted to keep competition narrow and culturally constrained, so that whiteness itself can become proof of competence. 

The myth of white supremacy can only flourish when Black achievement is out of sight and out of mind. ... 

But the deal offered by white supremacy has always been at the cost of democracy in this country. 

... No democracy can survive if tens of millions of its citizens refuse to fight to protect it because they “don’t do politics.” 

If you think that the Republican plan to strip Black voters in the South of congressional representation is not your problem because you are white, or because you don’t live in the South, then you have accepted the end of democracy in this country. Are you really prepared to watch as your fellow citizens are disenfranchised in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama? 

... Whatever (non-violent) actions you can undertake, now is the time to engage. This is not happening to someone else, to some other community, to some other Americans. This is happening ot all of us. They have made their goals clear. Now it’s time for us to be as clear and unequivocal about ours while we still can. 

Read the whole thing.  And vote. And let's harass our electeds to make whatever structural reforms to the system that are required to make democracy work for all of us ... 

On enforced ignorance of history

It should probably not come as a surprise that this very cogent denunciation of the Republican Supreme Court's murder of a pillar of racial justice under law should come from a writer whose experience is in studying and teaching the American Civil War to school groups and other ordinary citizens.

Kevin M. Levin pulls no punches about the Callais decision: 

Jim Crow Didn't Die. It Went to Law School. 

... The Voting Rights Act was written in blood following years of sacrifice and bloodshed. It came directly after Selma. After the clubs and the fire hoses were unleashed on African Americans trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965.

Alabama police assault John Lewis, Selma, Alabama, 1965

It came after centuries during which Black Americans were systematically oppressed and for decades following the end of Reconstruction, when they were legally stripped of the franchise. The Act was the hard-won answer to a hard, ugly question: will this country actually mean what it says?

For sixty years, imperfectly but meaningfully, it tried to. Today, that answer is being rolled back. 

But this ruling does not exist in isolation. It sits inside a broader campaign of manipulation and erasure.

Look at the push to return Confederate monuments to public property—statues of men who took up arms against the United States to preserve the institution of slavery and white supremacy. The argument made for these monuments is almost always framed as “heritage” or “history.” But heritage is a choice. 

We choose what to honor. Returning these statues to pedestals of prominence is not a neutral act of preservation. It is a statement about whose history matters, and whose suffering can be brushed aside in the name of regional pride.

Look at the Trump administration’s assault on how Black history is taught and remembered. Federal pressure on universities and schools, the gutting of diversity programs, the reframing of civil rights history as divisive “ideology” rather than documented fact. These are not random culture-war skirmishes. They are part of a systematic effort to make the full truth of American history inaccessible, uncomfortable, or simply illegal to teach.

It’s a cliche, but true. You cannot understand where you are going if you are not allowed to honestly reckon with where you have been.

Self serving, exploitative lies about the full humanity of all people, and enshrining those lies in an economic system and laws, got us a Civil War once. It seems all too likely that the philosopher George Santayana's aphorism will be proved out again: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Little as the MAGAs might understand this, an important way to avert more civil conflict is to fight back against their attempt to erase accurate history. Oddly enough, truthful history can make possible a path forward.

Truths told

 

Julie Le, a lawyer who was representing the Trump administration in court in Minneapolis and had worked for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement before the current ICE invasion, had a lot that was inflammatory to say when she appeared before a federal judge. She came close to begging to be held in contempt just so she could get 24 hours respite from dealing with the deluge of habeas corpus petitions she was supposed to fight on behalf of ICE.

 

But what else she told the Black federal judge before whom she was appearing chills to the bone:

I share the same concern with you, Your Honor. I am not white, as you can see. And my family’s at risk as any other people that might get picked up too, so I share the same concern, and I took that concern to heart. But, again, fixing a system, a broken system, I don’t have a magic button to do it. I don’t have the power or the voice to do it. I only can do it within the ability and the capacity that I have.

You will not be surprised to learn that Le is no longer in that job -- and perhaps on her way out of government work.

MAGA sells a fiction of unearned ease and familiarity to its people

I genuinely don't understand why liberals/progressives/Democrats run away from defending what's called D.E.I. Diversity, equity and inclusion make this a more livable and interesting country. There are a lot of us; we're not all the same historically and culturally. We have different habits and customs. Lots of these are probably not to your taste or mine. 

But, as Rodney King asked after the L.A. riots touched off in 1992 by the police beating him to a pulp: "Can't we all get along?"

Okay, so I get it that bureaucracies can be stupid and ham-handed in the creation and implementation of policies thought to encourage D.E.I. I get that a society affirming diversity asks adjustments from all of us to accommodate our neighbors. But come on, we're grown ups -- mostly. And ALL our ethical and religious traditions say, at least more often than not, just get over yourself!

When we're taught to act stupidly and against our interests in getting along with neighbors, it's worth asking "who benefits?" Yes, I do see an entire MAGA party encouraging white people, especially men, to get all hot about other people getting the inclusion that they want too. Of course that distracts from real problems. But come on ...

The feminist journalist Jill Filipovic takes a swing at all this which I find convincing: 

... The Trump administration and his MAGA supporters want to do away with the very thing that has made our country exceptional that because they feel uncomfortable around people who aren’t like them. That’s it. They just don’t like people who are different. They don’t like the feeling of being cognitively or emotionally stretched. They don’t want the kind of friction that comes from having to share space with people who don’t think, speak, and live like them.

Conservatives have long mocked liberals for being snowflakes. But being unable to emotionally cope because your neighbors speak a different language is about as fragile as it gets.

“Life should be hard” is not a very good rallying cry. And to be clear, I don’t think that life should be hard. But I think life should be interesting. I don’t think an interesting life is built by engineering the world around you to feel easy and familiar and always in immediate service of your desires.

I think a good life requires trying at things, learning things, taking risks, facing fear, pushing through discomfort, getting hurt, feeling really fucking frustrated. It requires caring for other people even when they make themselves hard to care for, and accepting care even when it doesn’t come in its ideal form. 

As a culture, we are running away from the discomfort friction causes, which means we are running away from deep connection, from cognitive expansion, from the discipline that builds devotion, from creative spark, and from the invisible and painful work of effort and failure and abrasion and confrontation that all make room for that spark to light. 

I'm not ready to give up on trying for her idea of a "good life" because too many people are insecure. We can do better. 

• • •

And some folks are doing better. USA Today reports: 

Costco’s board of directors voted unanimously to recommend shareholders reject an anti-DEI measure, arguing that diverse employees and suppliers fuel innovation in the merchandise it stocks and the services it offers.

More than 98% of Costco shareholders voted down the investor proposal that called for management to investigate the business risks of its diversity initiatives. 

That wasn't so hard, was it? 

 

She cries out against a corrupted faith

She's not pulling any punches. Anthea Butler chairs the Religious Studies department of the University of Pennsylvania. She begins her history and jeremiad White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America with this uncompromising declaration:

Evangelicals, you have a problem. That problem is racism. 

... why do people who identify as as evangelicals vote over and over again for political figures who in speech and deed do not evince the Christian qualities that evangelicalism espouses? 

My answer is that evangelicalism is not a simply religious group at all. Rather, it is a nationalistic political movement whose purpose is to support the hegemony of white Christian men over and against the flourishing of others. 

... evangelicalism is an Americanized Christianity born in the context of white Christian slaveholders. ... Racism in evangelicalism is not only about individual sin. It is about corporate sins of a religious movement that continues to believe itself good and that good is predicated on whiteness and the proximity to power. 

... As an African American woman who once trained in an evangelical seminary, I don't say these thing lightly... Whether ignoring race or hiding behind race, the evangelical whitewashing of race and racism does not work anymore.

This little book recounts the history which led to the evangelical "problem."

From the time that the first Africans were kidnapped to this country as slaves, enslavers sought to ensure the parts of the Christian bible to which they were exposed emphasized obedience to masters. 

... there was even a slave Bible produced in England that omitted passages about freedom.

In the 19th century abolitionists led by Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison repudiated and also reshaped American Christianity; after the Civil War freed the slaves, many Christian denominations split into northern and southern fractions over the continuing challenge of freed Black people in "their" society. The South got the KKK; in the immediate post war period, northern denominations aided education for the freed people. 

But by the early 20th century, Jim Crow segregation and repression were the rule most everywhere. White fundamentalists and Pentecostals created an extensive infrastructure in the interwar era; in the 1950s, Billy Graham became the archetypal white evangelist. Butler describes his uneven outreach to Christian formations of color. By the last decades of the 20th century, white evangelicals had become the base of the current right wing Republican party, organized by the Christian Coalition against abortion, feminism, desegregation of evangelical colleges, and gays. They were ripe for the picking by Donald Trump and MAGA.

Growing up Christian in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s, Anthea Butler thought she was part of this movement -- until she discovered she wasn't.

Once upon a time, I was an evangelical. A Pentecostal, to be exact. I was happily ensconced in the Church on the Way and preparing to start Fuller Seminary in the fall of 1992. That spring, the Rodney King verdict came down and the riots happened. I had a front row seat to one of the ways that evangelicals decided to deal with this traumatic event. Evangelical churches decided to come together under the aegis of Church on the Way's Pastor Hayford to hold what they called a "Love LA" service ... It was to be a healing celebration, a chance for racial reconciliation.  

For me, it was the moment I found out that despite my frenetic activity and full-steam participation in the church, I was invisible. For the service, I was sitting by Hayford's mother, who knew me from several other events. She turned to me at the greeting time and said, 'Welcome to Church on the Way.' At that moment, I knew that no matter how much I had worked or served or prayed with people, I was simply a Black person visiting the Church on the Way. Much like many evangelicals of color, I was just a Black person in this white woman's space. I was welcome due to the situation, but I could not possibly be a member of the church she belonged to. That moment encapsulated for me what evangelical attempts at interracial cooperation accomplished. Invisibility.

Butler goes on to ask, what went wrong in the evangelical movement?

... This is a movement that could have and should have moved on from its roots in nineteenth-century racism and slavery revealed in this book. Yet it has not. And that is due to the choices made by leaders and followers within the evangelical movement. 

Why have evangelicals and their leadership made choices over and over again to embrace racism? Because it is what has allowed them to attain and hold political power. ... 

... When evangelicals married their educational and religious institutions to nationalism and political power starting in the 1950s, they gained a foothold that has now become a stronghold. Evangelicals became well educated, and they shaped their historical narrative more around theology and esoteric boundaries, mostly white cultural boundaries, ignoring their social and historical connections to broader American life. ... Trump isn't the reason why evangelicals turned to racism. They were racist all along. 

... class and wealth have encouraged evangelicals to hold onto racism tightly as part of their belief about capitalism, God, and nation. ... 

... Access to power made evangelicalism brittle, and unforgiving. Ideology trumped the gospel. Loving your neighbor turned into loving only those who believe as you do. As a result, evangelicals live in silos to keep themselves pure. ... And, as a result, evangelicals are regarded with disdain by the broader public. Evangelicals wear this as a badge of honor and as a sign of persecution of Christians. Evangelicals are not being persecuted in America. They are being called to account.

Butler speaks directly to others with whom she has shared an evangelical Christian commitment:

... Ask yourself, What are you leaving as the posterity of American evangelicalism? What are the organizations you support leaving behind? Can you see past the individual sin of racism and understand that your votes, your choices, your actions participated in white supremacy and racist policies and policing? ... 

If you asked such questions, you would probably lose friends, and you might even lose your church. Yes, I am asking a lot of you. To step out of the comfortable place you reside in while the world burns is difficult. It is, however, worth it. If you feel one ounce of conviction, then there is hope for you. There may even be hope for our nation. 

I hope these words find root in you. I hope they trouble you. I hope they sear your soul. I hope they make you change. There is only a little time left, but there is time. The time is now.

When Donald Trump won a second term with evangelical acclamation, Butler wrote a preface to a second edition of her book -- a plea that is anguished but determined:

In this dangerous moment for American democracy, White Evangelical Racism continues to provide a concise history of the motivations and goals of evangelicals who seek to create a white Christian nation, where everyone, no matter what race, ethnicity, or creed, will have to live with their leadership and laws. It is not enough for them to have influence with politicians and legislatures, or schools teaching Christian texts. They want Jesus -- or more precisely their view of Jesus -- and by association themselves, to be the center and leaders of civic life in America. Their oft vaunted appeals to the founding of America as a Christian nation are not only a distortion of the nation's history. They are evangelicals' claim to rule and reign in the here and now. 

As you engage this history, think abut what will happen if the United States becomes a theocracy. Consider if you want to live with people who believe that whiteness is the framework, culture should be only "Anglo-Saxon," and religious freedom is only for people who think and believe as they do. 

These are the stakes.

MAGA's nihilism of grievance has been defeated before

It's almost a throwaway line in a post by European political scientist Thomas Zimmer, a post mostly calling out the failings of the New York Times. But I think it's critically important for understanding much of the behavior of much of MAGA:

Key to understanding [Office of Budget and Management director Russell] Vought’s worldview is the idea that the constitutional order - and with it the “natural” order itself - has been destroyed: The revolution has already happened, “the Left” won. Therefore, conservatives categorically err when they try to preserve what is no more.

Vought is correct, to a substantial extent. Twentieth century America undermined, eroded, and finally largely tore down the unchallenged power of white supremacy and patriarchy (of which homophobia and gender absolutism are features.) Much of MAGA hates the America the majority of us have made. So they call us "the Left." Some of us may identify with some "Left"; but most of us are just ordinary Americans who have moved on from habitual white supremacy and woman hatred. The country is not perfected, but it has moved on from MAGA's cultural grievances. 

And Trumpism is wildly unpopular and getting more so with every price increase and raid on Black and brown neighbors.

So, because MAGA lost the culture, its supporters lost hope for the future. To replace an imperfect democracy, they think they've found their king. MAGA attracts losers, whose only unifying idea is to tear it all down. 

Paul Krugman catches this reality when he digs into the material and consequential stupidity of MAGA's war on science:

... Rather than acknowledging that the US is in danger of being permanently overtaken by China’s technological and economic prowess, the Trump administration is slashing support for scientific research and attacking education. In the name of defeating the bogeymen of “wokeness” and the “deep state”, this administration is actively opposing progress in critical sectors while giving grifters like the crypto industry everything that they want. ... A powerful faction in America has become deeply hostile to science and to expertise in general. ... 

... Does this mean that the U.S. is losing the race with China for global leadership? No, I think that race is essentially over.

Historian of fascism John Ganz calls out MAGA as embodying the nationalism of losers. 

... MAGA’s base of support comes from those parts of the country and those social classes and regions that actually did lose out or never gained from the international system. Its bourgeoisie is mostly from the heartland, not from the coasts.  

Its intellectual class, or clerisy, is drawn from those who could not achieve the first rank under the old “meritocratic” system, who couldn’t fully enter the cosmopolitan elite, or decided to defect from its ranks opportunistically to gain pride of place in the new movement. ... 

This fear, hatred, and envy of the cosmopolitan elite, this anti-Atlanticist, anti-globalist current, sometimes called “isolationism,” but more correctly called sovereigntism or even just nationalism, is a longstanding constellation of ideas in American politics ...

Dorothy Thompson recognized these second-raters in her classic 1941 essay, Who Goes Nazi? 

For that matter, so did my mother, who, though a Republican housewife, recognized and participated in warning against European fascism during its rise in the mid-1930s.

This country has always attracted the world's desperate who hoped to become winners. Are we going to let the MAGA losers kill off that hope? NO KINGS! 

Reality animates fury ...

Erudite Partner's latest article for TomDispatch is online today.

Going Backwards on Rights with Trump
Or Just Around in Circles? 

Warning: dangers in the mirror are often closer than they may appear. In other words, the next few paragraphs may seem to be hyperbole but are, in fact, expressions of reality (animated by a cold fury).

On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court did its best to murder what’s left of civil rights in this country. As Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported, in an unsigned 6-3 ruling, it overturned a lower court’s order forbidding ICE and the Border Patrol in Los Angeles from stopping, interrogating, and detaining people based on any of four factors: “apparent race or ethnicity; the fact that they speak English with an accent or speak Spanish; their presence at particular locations like farms or pickup sites for day laborers; and the type of work they do.”

Those six conservative justices might as well have stood in front of the court and set fire to the 1964 Civil Rights Act ...

Martin Luther King looks on as President Lyndon Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

At one point in her youth, the E.P. thought about becoming a lawyer. She decided she had better things to do with her life, but she did, much later, become a genuine expert on the development of the international law which outlaws torture. And she knows whereof she speaks when she eviscerates the lawlessness of the Trump regime. 

Read it all here.  

Sanitizing white history

If MAGA won't display this, I will. At the behest of the Trump administration, this photo of the back of an American slave has been removed from a National Park site.  After liberation, this survivor rose to the rank of sergeant in the Union army during the Civil War.

 

By way of David Kurtz, TPM. 

The time to act is NOW

 

Every day, web sites I read throw me videos, chats, short films. And every day I ignore them. I hate the turn to video -- it's slow and it seldom uses the medium particularly imaginatively. 

 

I'm a fossil; I like good writing and will put in the effort to read it.

 

Yet today I'm posting a powerful nine minute video from historian Heather Cox Richardson. She insists "We Cannot Wait for the Ballot Box in November 2026 | Explainer." 

... The administration is trying desperately to rig the 2026 elections so they don't have to face voters any more. ...

 

... it seems pretty clear that Trump is not in good shape ... these Epstein files that have come out are going to make Republicans look worse and worse ...

 

... As Trump increasingly weakens, you are going to see more and more frenzy to lock up the country because they think that we who believe in democracy don't really have a say in it ... they think we are polluting the country. ...

 

... We have the majority and we feel very strongly about it and we have on our side the great thinkers of the United States ... not the great thinkers of the Nazis [that] they are following ... we have James Madison, and we have Abraham Lincoln, and we have Fanny Lou Hamer ... [these Americans'] principles are very much more the principles of the majority than that a few rich guys ought to rule. ...

 

... It is not a question of waiting until November 2026 to cast a vote. By then the die will be cast. We will know what the future looks like ...

 

... The time to speak up is NOW. ... the time to make sure your neighbors understand what is going on is NOW. ...

 

... NOW is the time as Trump is weak and Republicans recognize that he is weakening to make sure they understand how profoundly unpopular this is ... 

 

... What this is going to look like on the other side, I don't know. Another generation is coming. But we won't have that generation unless we save it NOW. ...

 

... The thing to do is throw your weight in at the local level, the state level, the national lever, talking to people, making sure that individuals truly recognize what is going on ...

 

... The more noise people can make NOW, the better our chances of safeguarding the election in 2026  ... for all the anxiety that people are feeling, turn that anxiety into some kind of action, because sitting around worrying about what is going to come is not going to help you or anybody ... Find a friend ... find something to do ..

 

Trump is not popular ... he's crashing the economy ... think Herbert Hoover, not Mussolini.

 

... Trump only punches down ... the more we can stand up to him and his minions, the more likely they are to back down.

 

... if you can see what is happening, then you can see the pressure points to change what is happening ...

... If this is the world we got, we've got to find out ways to make it better and to preserve our democracy for the people who come after us. ...

The historian has become an organizer. I seldom offer a higher compliment. The moment demands that we all, in our own ways, become organizers for democracy.

Supreme Court legalizes racial profiling. What Constitution is this?

According to the NY Times:

The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a federal judge’s order prohibiting government agents from making indiscriminate immigration-related stops in the Los Angeles area ... The court’s brief order was unsigned and gave no reasons. ...

The court’s three liberal members dissented.

“We should not have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish and appears to work a low wage job,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost,” Justice Sotomayor added, “I dissent.”

... Civil rights groups and several individuals filed suit, accusing the administration of unconstitutional sweeps in which thousands of people had been arrested. They described the encounters in the suit as “indiscriminate immigration operations” that had swept up thousands of day laborers, carwash workers, farmworkers, caregivers and others.

“Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force,” the complaint said, “and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from,” violating the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.

There will be further litigation, but it seems abundantly clear that this Supreme Court recognizes no constitutional rights for Brown people and people who don't speak English.

This country has been here before. In 1857, a Supreme Court captured by slave-holding interests, declared that African-descended persons did not enjoy the protection of the law.

Chief Justice  Roger Taney:  such persons "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect..."

That time around, the breach of the national legal system led to violence within the states and, soon, the bloody Civil War been the free Union and the enslaving South. The modern court has adopted the same standard. We can only hope we can come out of this without so much violence. If this is really the meaning of the US Constitution, we, the people of these United States, probably cannot come out with that document intact.

Sherrilyn Ifill, one of the nation's leading civil rights lawyers and former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, responded to Justice Kavanaugh's airy defense of the Court:

Kavanaugh’s description [of ICE raids] reads as though it were downloaded from the Department of Homeland Security’s website. Almost every word of this is preposterous. “Brief investigative stops” at places where undocumented immigrants are likely to work? What we have seen repeatedly are not “stops.” They are grabs and kidnapping. Most often, no questions are asked. Even when colleagues have insisted that the person targeted by ICE agents are here legally, or that they are citizens, ICE agents proceed to tackle, beat, cuff, and spirit away individuals they have targeted. And we have seen migrants detained and forcibly taken into custody as often in courthouses after immigration hearings, or in neighborhoods cutting lawns as at Home Depot. 

That Kavanaugh could so haplessly could make this statement just days after South Korean nationals authorized to work as engineers at a Georgia EV battery plant were arrested, shackled and taken into custody by ICE after an immigration raid in what has become an international incident, demonstrates how utterly out of touch he is.

Kavanaugh assures us that it is no problem to be apprehended, taken to a facility – perhaps several states away – until you can prove that you are a legal resident or citizen. This is his idea of democracy – a country in which citizens and legal residents who are Black, Latino or Asian, and who happen to work in “locations where people are hired for day jobs” must carry proof of citizenship (their “freedom papers,” if you will) or risk apprehension by masked thugs who will hold them perhaps for months.

The fantasy world Kavanaugh describes is the kind of world in which clueless white men (or deliberately obtuse white men) in positions of power were permitted to languish before the Civil Rights Movement brought the reality of life for marginalized people into American living rooms in technicolor. ...

When a Court legalizes thuggish racist violence, normalizes this, the national rule of law is truly in the toilet. Will the rest of us just carry on silently?

Trump comes after Black women when he attacks economic stability

Paul Krugman, who is a Nobel prize winner unlike one Orange-tinted pretender, knows the score. It's hard to manage an enormous economy well. Krugman explains this requires a smart balancing act. That's why we have (had?) an independent  Federal Reserve Board, to make economic decisions as impartially as any democratic political system allows.

When the inflation rate is low but the unemployment rate is high, as it was during the Great Recession in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed should cut the federal funds rate. By lowering the fed funds rate, the Fed makes it cheaper for banks to lend. This boosts the spending and investing activity in the economy and brings unemployment down.

When inflation is high but unemployment is low – that is, when the economy is at risk of overheating -- as it was in 2022, the Fed should raise the fed funds rate. This slows down spending and investing and brings inflation down.

But when the unemployment rate and the inflation rate are both too high — what economists call “stagflation” — the Fed faces a dilemma. Cut the fed funds rate rates to support employment and you risk worsening inflation. Raise the fed funds rate to fight inflation and you risk raising unemployment. With stagflation, there are no easy answers, just a tradeoff of risks.

And this dilemma looks very relevant right now: many economic indicators suggest that the United States will soon undergo at least mild stagflation. ...

Not a moment when you want more buffoons in charge. But here we are with the Orange Madman in the White House.

Most likely, if Trump gets his way with the Fed, the country will drift into an economic doom loop which will be bad for ordinary folks as prices rise and jobs disappear -- and  Donald Trump isn't interested in any of this. He's got a bunch of crackpot ideas which defy the experience of over 100 years of advanced capitalist economies. And he wants unlimited power over the Fed to force it to implement his notions.

Lisa Cook

It should be no surprise that Trump has fixated on a Black woman as the impediment to his economic fantasies. Lisa Cook is an experienced, accomplished economist. And she's the first Black woman ever appointed to the Federal Reserve Board. So Trump's corrupt Department of Justice is accusing her of unproven mortgage malfeasance. Cook properly refuses to resign just because Trump has trumped up a complaint. She's forcing Trump to go to court to try to fire her. Guess sometime down the line we'll get yet another chance to see just how far Trump's supine Supremes will go to please Daddy.

Meanwhile, the Trump economy and especially federal workforce cuts are already disproportionately kicking Black women to the curb.

Erica Green describes the carnage:

... The most recent labor statistics show that nationwide, Black women lost 319,000 jobs in the public and private sectors between February and July of this year, the only major female demographic to experience significant job losses during this five-month period,...

Experts attribute those job losses, in large part, to Mr. Trump’s cuts to federal agencies where Black women are highly concentrated. 

White women saw a job increase of 142,000, and Hispanic women of 176,000, over the same time period. White men saw the largest increase among groups, 365,000, over the same time period. 

Ms. Roy said that with the exception of the pandemic, Black women have never seen such staggering losses in employment. And over the last decade, the experiences of that population have consistently signaled what is to come for others. 

“Black women are the canaries in the coal mine, the exclusion happens to them first,” Ms. Roy said. “And if any other cohort thinks it’s not coming for them, they’re wrong. This is a warning, and it’s a stark one.” 

... a report published by the National Women’s Law Center, which compiled and analyzed the now-deleted O.P.M. [the federal Office of Personnel Management] data, showed that government agencies that were targeted for the deepest cuts had employed the highest percentages of women and people of color. ...

He's coming for all of us who can't pay him off -- but he's coming first for Black women. That's how it works in this country.

White normalcy in Trump's America

Data journalist and sharp observer Philip Bump took a buy-out from the shrinking, Bezos-trashed Washington Post -- and did the smart thing: he took his family on a road trip in Canada. He wondered if the experience of coming home might be a hassle. Donald Trump's border cops are enjoying a new freedom to lord it over us all; would they come after him?

I was curious what would happen when we tried to reenter the country. I am not an important person, but I am someone who has been at odds with the administration and the Department of Homeland Security particularly. Depending on the extent of the government’s pettiness, some difficulty or delays didn’t seem impossible.

Here, too, I imagined a much worse scenario than would manifest. We pulled up to a checkpoint on a rural road south of Montreal and had a pleasant conversation with the agent in the booth. ... The agent welcomed us back to the U.S. and sent us on our way.

I can identify with that anxiety as I am sure quite a few Americans can. It's not new to many people of color; most of us who are white have never felt it. (Though I did sometimes, when on George W. Bush's no fly list.)

But Bump's reflections really encapsulate the anomalous position that comfortable white Americans can find ourselves in these days -- at least those of us not living in cities where Trump has brought in "his" troops.

Is normalcy the norm or the exception? Are exceptional events exceptions or the emerging norm? Are my dreams and fears a reflection of my own derangements or of rational consideration of what’s happening?

Or are they just a function of me? We can draw a clear line between what’s happening to me and people like me — primarily meaning White people — and what’s happening to others. ...

My sons have a Mexican great-grandparent and a Native American great-grandparent; if they and I looked more like my wife’s grandmother would our return to the U.S. have been different? It seems clear that our day to day lives would be.

It seems almost certain that this era will substantially shift America’s measurement of its population. 

When the government that’s hyperactively rounding up Hispanic people in particular knocks on your door and asks someone their race, there will be a natural tendency for more people to self-identify as White. 

America had gotten better about recognizing the malleability of these designators. The second Trump era will probably reverse that trend dramatically.

For other Americans, normalcy will remain the norm, helping them maintain sense of distance from what’s happening everywhere else. .... Other people will be separated from their kids by people not wearing any badges at all. 

America is both of those things now, a place where the vacation is ongoing and a place where it has suddenly ended. 

If Trump succeeds in crashing the economy through erratic and crackpot gyrations, more of us will notice that. 

Bump concludes that more regular citizens who can pass as White will see advantage in doing so. (Black people don't get to play, as usual; I bet Trump still thinks DC is Chocolate City, though that is no longer demographically true.) 

But there's another vision of what it means to be an American -- the one about the aspiration for liberty and justice for all -- and that is what we must strive for, if we're to come out of this terrible time.

Our history of racial terrorism cannot be wished or washed away

Next month, Colbert I. King will retire from the Washington Post. He's 85 years old and has seen the District of Columbia change, suffer, and revitalize. 

Educated in the DC public schools, he graduated from Howard University and served in the military. He then "worked as special officer for the United States Department of State through 1970, eventually leaving over objections to the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO)." (COINTELPRO was a covert FBI program under J. Edgar Hoover, which spied on and disrupted insurgent political activists, including civil rights and anti-Vietnam war leaders.) King then held a series of government posts culminating in an appointment to the World Bank under Jimmy Carter. After a stint in banking, he joined the Post in 1990. (Bio via Wikipedia)

In a city where the federal government often overshadows the lives and struggles of the residents, King frequently has written of and for his city.

King's response to the Trump regime's military occupation of DC was published in the WaPo over last weekend. (gift article)

The spirit of Old Dixie rises in D.C.
“The South will rise again” was not just the wistful rallying cry of the defeated Confederacy. It was also the South’s declaration that the day would come when rules would be restored to the liking of militarily vanquished White people left smoldering below the Mason-Dixon Line.

That day might have arrived this week when National Guard troops from Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee were deployed to D.C. as part of President Donald Trump’s takeover of law enforcement in our nation’s capital. ...

King knows what he's seeing in his city.

... the District is a bit player in a larger and more pernicious Trump-led movement: namely, to snuff out efforts to achieve racial equality, to silence talk about race, to show disrespect for Black leadership, and to pretend that America is now, henceforth and forevermore, deemed a color-blind but unmistakenly White-dominated country.

Trump is bent on suppressing the reality of America’s legacy of racial discrimination and well-documented, intergenerational transmission of present-day inequality.

He proclaims himself sick and tired of the Smithsonian’s focus on, as he put it on Truth Social, “how bad Slavery was.” ...  But to appreciate this critical juncture — to come to grips with the retrograde, self-defeating course we are now on — Americans must revisit critical chapters in our history. No matter how painful that is. 

Moreover, racism still shapes lives in the District.

Trump might declare race irrelevant. But that will not make it so in life in the District of Columbia — or elsewhere in America.

Race shows up in the experiences of D.C. residents having to endure the restoration of Confederate statues honoring men who fought to preserve slavery. It reeks out of the mouth of a president who denounces their hometown as a hotbed of “savagery, filth and scum.” Race rears its head when a president pretends that race-linked gaps don’t exist in society due to race-related historical and present-day events.

The Confederacy was crushed, but its spirit exists. It should be captured and displayed as part of our nation’s story.

My Union ancestors who fought the Confederacy called it "The Rebellion." The South's shameful legacy is what Trump wants to revive. King concludes with a question:

Trump’s path is no secret. What is ours?

On MMMWA: Making the Male Military White Again for dear leader

 

A few years ago, this was a US Army recruiting poster. While I'm not much of a fan of armies, I kind of liked it when I passed it on the street.

 

Fintan O'Toole, an Irish journalist writing in the New York Review of Books, offers some insights into the role of the military cosplay and reality in the Trump regime. 

... For now at least, the primary goal of Trump’s deployment of troops on the streets of Los Angeles is not the violent suppression of dissent. It is the remaking of the army itself. Trump is instructing the troops on how they must think of themselves and of the nature of the country they are pledged to defend. 

 

[The TV-jabberer who Trump installed as Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth writes in his best seller The War on Warriors (2024) that he “didn’t want this Army anymore.” This army is the one that actually exists: of its 1.3 million active-duty troops, 230,000 are women, and more than 350,000 are Black. 

Trump appointed Hegseth to make many of these soldiers invisible. The War on Warriors is subtitled Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. It offers “to recover a true vision of the value of strong men.” These are “red-blooded American men,” men who “respect other strong, skilled, dedicated men” and not “men who are pretending to be women, or vice versa.” ...

Strange posturing from a guy who installed a makeup studio at the Pentagon to prep for his TV appearances, but there we are.

The Trumpian reimagining of the US Army has nothing to do with fighting foreign wars. It is all about reasserting the innately white and male nature of America. According to Hegseth, the military’s “key constituency is normal men”: “Normal dudes have always fought, and won, our wars.” His vision, as he explains it, is to restore not just the value of strong men but also “the importance of normality.” ...

In this regard, putting troops on the streets of Los Angeles is a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation. Soldiers are being retrained for loyalty to the president rather than the Constitution. They are meanwhile becoming accustomed to confronting that deviant and anomalous America. ... Getting soldiers used to following illegal orders and to disregarding their “duty to disobey” is a big step toward autocracy.

O'Toole sees Trump as a would-be dictator trapped in a contradiction. 

As his dithering over whether to bomb Iran showed, Trump has a problem: fascism bends inexorably toward war, but much of his appeal lies in his promise to end America’s foreign conflicts. 

Part of the solution is to mount one-off spectaculars: B-2 stealth bombers dropping 30,000-pound bunker busters. 

The other part is to repatriate the idea of boots on the ground. Like iPhones and pharmaceuticals, that kind of war will no longer be made abroad. It will be manufactured all over America. 

Let's try to get rid of our tinpot Mussolini before he blows all of us up. His Iranian adventure was bad enough. We face a test.

Is this what really inspires MAGA?

 

When this unprepossessing graph floated by in my media feed, I had an aha-moment. Apparently white American men's fraction of the income pie was highest in 1960 -- and ever since their segment of our economic prosperity has been declining. That doesn't mean white guys are earning or owning less in real terms. Most everybody is doing a lot better than in 1960 in a much larger economy that has seen repeated bouts of goods-inflation (troublesome) and higher wages (all positive). But relative portions taken home by different segments have changed.

 

So even though white men in this country, in general, are doing just fine, in the last 60 years changes in society have meant they've had to share their prosperity with white women and everyone else.

 

The chart is from a Medium post by Joe Francis.  Here's some of what he has to say about it, slightly edited:

White men’s position in the class structure has diminished considerably.

According to the census and the American Communities Survey (ACS), the median income of white men aged 18 and above fell from a peak of 264 percent of the national level in 1960 to 143 percent in 2023.

White men’s share of national income has similarly fallen dramatically. Figure 1 shows their share falling from 70 percent in 1960 to 43 percent in 2020, and it fell further to 41 percent in 2023.

There has thus been a historic shift in the income distribution away from white men toward non-white and female Americans. …

Non-college educated white men, meanwhile, are being left behind. ... the era of white male egalitarianism is long a thing of the past.

... inequality has surged for white men, even as the overall level has remained largely unchanged.  ...

As a class, [white men] have seen their privileges diminish due to the prohibition of racism and sexism, although the college-educated have prospered thanks to the greater education premium.

By 2045, even if Trump succeeds in throwing out millions of immigrants, the majority of Americans will not be what we currently describe as "white". (Racial categories can be mutable, subject to income, prejudice, and fashion, but that's another post.) He can't turn back the clock. The era of white America is over. We already live that in California; Texas and Florida do too, but haven't adjusted yet. MAGA diehards will eventually live in reality; Americans have survived such shifts before.

Ran across this paper thanks to Adam Tooze.