President Donald J. Trump created a firestorm yesterday when he said that the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, located mostly in Washington, D.C., focuses too much on “how bad slavery was.” But his objection to recognizing the horrors of human enslavement is not simply white supremacy. It is the logical outcome of the political ideology that created MAGA. It is the same ideology that leads him and his loyalists to try to rig the nation’s voting system to create a one-party state. That ideology took shape in the years immediately after the Civil War, when Black men and poor white men in the South voted for leaders who promised to rebuild their shattered region, provide schools and hospitals (as well as desperately needed prosthetics for veterans), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to work hard and rise. Former Confederates, committed to the idea of both their racial superiority and their right to control the government, loathed the idea of Black men voting. But their opposition to Black voting on racial grounds ran headlong into the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which, after it was ratified in 1870, gave the U.S. government the power to make sure that no state denied any man the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” When white former Confederates nonetheless tried to force their Black neighbors from the polls, Congress in 1870 created the Department of Justice, which began to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan members who had been terrorizing the South. With racial discrimination now a federal offense, elite white southerners changed their approach. They insisted that they objected to Black voting not on racial grounds, but because Black men were voting for programs that redistributed wealth from hardworking white people to Black people, since hospitals and roads would cost tax dollars and white people were the only ones with taxable property in the Reconstruction South. Poor Black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, “Socialism in South Carolina.” In contrast to what they insisted was the federal government’s turn toward socialism, former Confederates celebrated the American cowboys who were moving cattle from Texas to railheads first in Missouri and then northward across the plains, mythologizing them as true Americans. Although the American West depended on the federal government more than any other region of the country, southern Democrats claimed the cowboy wanted nothing but for the government to leave him alone so he could earn prosperity through his own hard work with other men in a land where they dominated Indigenous Americans, Mexicans, and women. That image faded during the Great Depression and World War II as southerners turned with relief to federal aid and investment. Like them, the vast majority of Americans—Democrats, Independents, and Republicans—turned to the federal government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and support a rules-based international order. This way of thinking became known as the “liberal consensus.” But some businessmen, furious at the idea of regulation and taxes, set out to destroy the liberal consensus that they believed stopped them from accumulating as much money as they deserved. They made little headway until the Supreme Court in 1954 unanimously decided that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Three years later, Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and mobilized the 101st Airborne Division to protect the Black students at Little Rock Central High School. The use of tax dollars to protect Black rights gave those determined to destroy the liberal consensus an opening to reach back and rally supporters with the racism of Reconstruction. Federal protection of equal rights was a form of socialism, they insisted, and just as their predecessors had done in the 1870s, they turned to the image of the cowboy as the true American. When Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who boasted of his western roots and wore a white cowboy hat, won the Republican nomination for president in 1964, convention organizers chose to make sure that it was the delegation from South Carolina—the heart of the Confederacy—that put his candidacy over the top. The 1965 Voting Rights Act protected Black and Brown voting, giving the political parties the choice of courting either those voters or their reactionary opponents. President Richard Nixon cast the die for the Republicans when he chose to court the same southern white supremacists that backed Goldwater to give him the win in 1968. As his popularity slid because of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia and the May 1970 Kent State shooting, Nixon began to demonize “women’s libbers” as well as Black Americans and people of color. With his determination to roll back the New Deal, Ronald Reagan doubled down on the idea that racial minorities and women were turning the U.S. into a socialist country: his “welfare queen” was a Black woman who lived large by scamming government services. After 1980, women and racial minorities voted for Democrats over Republicans, and as they did so, talk radio and, later, personalities on the Fox News Channel hammered on the idea that these voters were ushering socialism into the United States. After the Democrats passed the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, often called the “Motor Voter Act,” to make registering to vote in federal elections easier, Republicans began to insist that Democrats could win elections only through voter fraud. Increasingly, Republicans treated Democratic victories as illegitimate and worked to prevent them. In 2000, Republican operatives rioted to shut down a recount in Florida that might have given Democrat Al Gore the presidency. Then, when voters elected Democratic president Barack Obama in 2008, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP—Republican Redistricting Majority Project—to take control of statehouses before the 2010 census and gerrymander states to keep control of the House of Representatives and prevent the Democrats from passing legislation. In that same year, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court reversed a century of campaign finance restrictions to permit corporations and other groups from outside the electoral region to spend unlimited money on elections. Three years after the Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act that protected minority voting. Despite the Republican thumb on the scale of American elections by the time he ran in 2016, Trump made his political career on the idea that Democrats were trying to cheat him of victory. Before the 2016 election, Trump’s associate Roger Stone launched a “Stop the Steal” website asking for donations of $10,000 because, he said, “If this election is close, THEY WILL STEAL IT.” “Donald Trump thinks Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are going to steal the next election,” the website said. A federal judge had to bar Stone and his Stop the Steal colleagues from intimidating voters at the polls in what they claimed was their search for election fraud. In 2020, of course, Trump turned that rhetoric into a weapon designed to overturn the results of a presidential election. Just today, newly unredacted filings in the lawsuit Smartmatic brought against Fox News included text messages showing that Fox News Channel personalities knew the election wasn’t stolen. But Jesse Watters mused to Greg Gutfield, “Think about how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL.” Jeanine Pirro, now the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, boasted of how hard she was working for Trump and the Republicans. In forty years, Republicans went from opposing Democrats’ policies, to insisting that Democrats were socialists who had no right to govern, to the idea that Republicans have a right to rig the system to keep voters from being able to elect Democrats to office. Now they appear to have gone to the next logical step: that democracy itself must be destroyed to create permanent Republican rule in order to make sure the government cannot be used for the government programs Americans want. Trump is working to erase women and minorities from the public sphere while openly calling for a system that makes it impossible for voters to elect his opponents. The new Texas maps show how these two plans work together: people of color make up 60% of the population of Texas, but the new maps would put white voters in charge of at least 26 of the state’s 38 districts. According to Texas state representative Vince Perez, it will take about 445,000 white residents to secure a member of Congress, but about 1.4 million Latino residents or 2 million Black residents to elect one. In order to put those maps in place, the Republican Texas House speaker has assigned state troopers to police the Democratic members to make sure they show up and give the Republicans enough lawmakers present to conduct business. Today that police custody translated to Texas representative Nicole Collier being threatened with felony charges for talking on the phone, from a bathroom, to Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom. Republicans have taken away the liberty, and now the voice, of a Black woman elected by voters to represent them in the government. This is a crisis far bigger than Texas. When Trump says that our history focuses too much on how bad slavery was, he is not simply downplaying the realities of human enslavement: he is advocating a world in which Black people, people of color, poor people, and women should let elite white men lead, and be grateful for that paternalism. It is the same argument elite enslavers made before the Civil War to defend their destruction of the idea of democracy to create an oligarchy. When Trump urges Republicans to slash voting rights to stop socialism and keep him in power, he makes the same argument former Confederates made after the war to keep those who would use the government for the public good from voting. Led by Donald Trump, MAGA Republicans are trying to take the country back to the past, rewriting history by imposing the ideology of the Confederacy on the United States of America. But that effort depends on Republicans buying into the idea that only women and minorities want government programs. That narrative is falling apart as cuts to the government slash programs on which all Americans depend and older white Americans take to the streets. Today, with the chants of those protesting Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C., echoing in the background, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters: “We’re not going to let the communists destroy a great American city…. [T]hese stupid white hippies…all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old, and we’re gonna get back to the business of protecting the American people and the citizens of Washington, D.C.” — Notes: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/us/politics/trump-smithsonian-slavery.html https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/13/business/stop-the-steal-disinformation-campaign-invs “Socialism in South Carolina,” The Nation, April 16, 1874, pp. 247–248. https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-hosts-private-texts-revealed-lawsuit-bombshells-2116299 https://time.com/7310875/texass-map-racial-division/ https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/ohio-injunction-trump-roger-stone-polls-230754 Bluesky: You’re currently a free subscriber to Letters from an American. If you need help receiving Letters, changing your email address, or unsubscribing, please visit our Support FAQ. 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August 20, 2025
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