Liberalism is the human face of white supremacy by Joseph Massad
The
white US
liberal intelligentsia has been constantly frustrated since the election of
President Donald Trump in 2016.
The
more attacks the white and corporate-controlled liberal US media outlets launch
against the business-supported Trump, the more popular he becomes.
As
white liberals feign concern over Trump’s continued dismantlement of the
welfare state and restoration of an unapologetic white supremacist system, his
many supporters celebrate these achievements and demand more.
What
is it that makes Trump so much more persuasive to so many Americans than the
liberal media and its pundits?
Uniting against the communist threat
To
comprehend how US
political culture understands the welfare state and the dismantlement of
institutional white supremacy, we must go back and understand how they came
about in the first place.
When
amid the Great Depression, then US President Franklin Roosevelt opted for the New Deal to transform the country into a welfare state
beginning in the 1930s (expanded by his successors through the 1960s), he did
so to save US capitalism from the impending communist threat while maintaining
white supremacy, and not because of any socialist leanings.
US liberal journalism,
mortgaged to big corporations and their crusade against communism, celebrated
these transformations
The
Russian Revolution was institutionalising itself by the mid-1920s as an example
for the world to follow, and by the 1930s the US Communist Party's influence on
American workers became a veritable threat to the capitalist order.
Indeed,
with the major triumph of the Soviet Union
over Nazi Germany, the threat of communism had become so great by the end of
WWII that the white capitalist powers opted to stop their competition and unite
against the communist threat.
Anti-Soviet
propaganda began in earnest after the war, as the Americans launched a
religious war against the Soviets, condemning them as secular and Godless
atheists. Former President Dwight Eisenhower decided to get baptised in office and brought
the fanatical reverend Billy Graham in as a spiritual adviser to the White
House.
Eisenhower
began the tradition of the “National Prayer Breakfast” and started his cabinet
meetings with a moment of silent prayer. The Pledge
of Allegiance was transformed in 1954 by Eisenhower from “I pledge allegiance
to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it
stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”, to pledging
allegiance to one nation “under God”.
In
1956, Congress enacted a law signed by Eisenhower that introduced the phrase “In God We Trust” to be printed on American paper currency,
replacing the erstwhile phrase “E pluribus unum” (out of many, one), in use
since 1776.
Two
years later, Congress enacted a law introducing the phrase “In God We Trust” as the national motto of the US.
Institutional white supremacy
US liberal journalism,
mortgaged to big corporations and their crusade against communism, celebrated
these transformations. It was the Eisenhower administration that enlisted religion and invented anti-communist Islamist jihadism as a weapon against Soviet
communism and Third World socialism, with Saudi Arabia subcontracted for the
role soon after.
As
a result of Eisenhower’s Protestant Christian institutionalisation, the
proportion of religious Americans rose from 49 percent in 1940 to 69 percent in 1960.
These
transformations took place when the US South was run by a white supremacist,
racial segregationist system, while racist institutions and structures
dominated the north and the federal government.
Federal
laws created white-only towns called “the suburbs”, enforced by racially
restrictive “covenants” for home ownership, while the 1944 GI bill made benefits in housing and education available
only to white people.
In
the context of an institutionally white supremacist US,
American journalists and intellectuals sang the glories of US democracy
against Godless communism.
But
if the welfare state was able to pull the rug out from under the communists,
white supremacy made the US
vulnerable to anti-racists, communist or otherwise, around the world. This was
especially grave for US
imperialism, as recently decolonised countries around the world, who had
just rid themselves of the European colonial racist yoke, looked to the
Soviets as an anti-racist, socialist example with which to ally, rather than
the white supremacist US.
Just
as the welfare state put a human face on capitalism, there was a need for a
human face to be placed on US white supremacy. The 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown
v Board of Education began the dismantling of the racist apartheid
educational system. This was mainly done not as a concession to African
Americans, but as part of the imperialist strategy to attract Third World countries
repulsed by US
white supremacy.
Emboldening the new right
But
the momentum of the black struggle to end white supremacy within the US could not be stopped, and it proceeded apace
in the 1960s, with increasing white liberal concessions from the state and its
judicial system - especially as the dismantlement of formal white supremacist
structures seemed to beautify the ugly reality of US white supremacy.
US liberal journalism and the liberal white intelligentsia again
celebrated the state’s achievements - while simultaneously targeting black
“radical” civil libertarians with racist propaganda campaigns - as proof of the
glories of US
democracy against “totalitarian” communism.
This,
however, did not appeal to the massive white racist political culture,
especially as racist depictions of non-whites in US culture continued on liberal
white-dominated television screens and in the culture at large.
Horrified
by these concessions that weakened formal white supremacy, the new right,
emboldened by white liberal anti-communism, racism, and Eisenhower’s
institutionalised religion, began to organise in the late 1960s, demanding the
reinstatement of white supremacy and the dismantling of the welfare
state.
The
New Jim Crow system was
instituted in the 1970s and has intensified since the 1980s to keep African
Americans “in their place”, while former President Ronald Reagan and his
successors heeded corporate demands to get rid of the Soviets once and for
all so that the New Deal could be safely dismantled.
Once
the Soviets were gone, presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama intensified the
destruction of the welfare state, while putting a lovable human face on US
neoliberalism and white supremacy. This is why Obama,
especially, was and remains the best thing that ever happened to white
liberals.
Racial tokenism
With
the fall of the communist threat, the liberal discourse of US democracy
deployed since the 1960s lost its efficacy. Liberal notions of “multiculturalism”
and “diversity”, which had not improved the lives of the majority of blacks,
Latinos or Native Americans, whose poverty and oppression persist, as is the
case with poor whites (and the majority of the poor in the US are indeed
white), were quickly understood as neoliberal and liberal ruses of white
supremacist racial tokenism.
The
liberal US
corporate media never laid blame for the poverty of Americans on the white
owners of big business, having itself been part of the white supremacist
corporate attacks on the welfare state since the 1970s as a system of privilege
for “lazy” non-white Americans at the expense of “hard-working” white
Americans.
As
a result, the majority of the white poor became ingrained with the idea that
their real and only identity was white, not poor, and that their enemy was not
the white owners of the corporations that impoverished them, but the victimised
poor non-whites and immigrants.
When
Trump arrived on the scene, he did not tell poor white Americans anything that
they had not been taught by US
culture, media, and evangelical Protestantism
When
Trump arrived on the scene, he did not tell poor white Americans anything that
they had not been taught by US
culture, media, and evangelical Protestantism since Billy Graham.
Trump’s
strategy, like that of the white supremacist right of which he is a part, was
to tell the white poor that as white people, he was on their side, and that
their enemy was not only what remains of the US welfare state, but also (the
pretend) US “multicultural democracy” that white liberalism has used to cover
up US white supremacy since the 1970s.
Yet what
Trump promises poor white Americans who lack white and class privilege - and whom white liberals, such as Hillary Clinton, find “deplorable” - is a restoration of formal
white supremacy, which they mistake for an amelioration of their poverty.
Corporate aspirations
As
there is no longer a communist threat, and Third World neoliberal elites have
been converted since the 1970s into the biggest fans of the US (now that they
can be inducted into the one percent through “diversity” and “multiculturalism”
programmes), conservative US white supremacists correctly realised that they
could come out of the closet and demand the reversal of all the concessions the
liberal white supremacists had instituted during the communist threat
years.
Trump's vision of what makes America great:
Hegemonic state violence
Trump
represents these corporate aspirations, which have been pushed by the US
liberal media and culture for decades. Indeed, Trump is a creation of white
American liberalism’s own trajectory, not a contradiction to it.
This
is why when hypocritical US liberal journalists and pundits question Trump
during press conferences - most evident during the recent coronavirus
crisis - or debate his appeal on liberal television networks, he shows them up
easily for the hypocrites they are.
What
accounts for this achievement is Trump’s sincere commitment to the restoration
of an unabashed, unapologetic US white supremacy and runaway capitalism that
easily withstands the wishy-washiness of white US liberalism and its
continued commitment to white supremacy with a human face, whether a white
one or in blackface.
Joseph Massad is Professor of Modern Arab Politics
and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New
York. He is the author of many books and academic and
journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of
National Identity in Jordan,
Desiring Arabs, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism
and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and
articles have been translated to a dozen languages.
