2 weeks Ago By Chauncey DeVega
-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email The 2024 presidential election is one of the most important — if not the most important — in the country’s history. Today the American people will decide if they will surrender their power to Donald Trump , a man who admires Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler and has promised to be the country’s first dictator, or if they will instead choose Vice President Kamala Harris , a defender of democracy and believer in American greatness. If enough lost Americans and an antiquated Electoral College put Trump and his MAGA movement back in the White House, tit will be the signed death certificate of America democracy.
The stakes are that high. These are not normal times in America. These abnormal times have made Trump and Harris not “just” politicians.
As I have repeatedly warned here at Salon for more than eight years, Trump has long been a symbol more than he is a man. Trump is the country’s first White President. In that role, Trump is and continues to be the leader, figurehead and symbol of a decades and centuries-long White male power restoration project that seeks to give White “Christian” men as a group (and rich white men specifically) de facto unlimited power over every aspect of American society.
Trump’s symbolic power is also religious: his MAGA followers and other cultists increasingly view him as some god or prophet, a tool of destiny, who is divine and may even have supernatural powers. Trump has long been a symbol more than he is a man. Trump’s symbolic power is also violent.
He gives permission to his MAGA followers and other Americans to be increasingly violent and to engage in other antisocial behavior. Trump himself has repeatedly, and publicly, threatened his and the MAGA movement’s enemies and “the left” and “enemy within” with prison and/or death. Trump, like other “conservatives” and Republicans, has also attempted — and mostly succeeded — in monopolizing the great symbolic power of the American flag, guns and the Christian cross.
Related The last temptation of Donald Trump: How he lured evangelicals to follow Satan As a symbol (and human being and candidate), Vice President Harris is almost the exact opposite and antithesis of Trump and his MAGA movement. This collision of symbols and their meaning in this historic moment is one of the main reasons why the 2024 election is so combustible. Trump is 78 years old; Harris is 60 years old.
Trump is a man; Harris is a woman. Harris is Black and South Asian; Trump is a White man. Trump is the first sitting or former president to be a convicted felon; Harris is a former prosecutor and attorney general.
Trump is an authoritarian and a fascist; Harris is a fierce defender of America’s democratic institutions. But there is much more going on in this duel of symbolic power. Harris’ personhood, body and life experience as a Black woman holds the specific weight of history, oppression, violence, and yes, struggle and triumph.
Trump, as a White man, also possesses great meaning and power in the symbolism and historical meaning of his body and power. “White” and “male” are not the universal “I” or the baseline of “humanity” and “normal.” These are specific group identities that have an origin, history and meaning.
Harris is a child of and heir to the Black Freedom Struggle and the long civil rights movement. She is the country’s first Black Vice President. She graduated from an Historically Black College and University (HBCU), an educational institutions created during Reconstruction and that continue to be a central part of the Black public sphere and civil society.
On election night, Harris will be at Howard University, her alma mater. Harris would also be the first president-elect to celebrate their victory at a historically Black college or university . Trump, the MAGA movement and the larger white right and neofascist cause view Black people’s votes and equal citizenship rights and multiracial democracy more broadly, as illegitimate and fraudulent.
Harris is an American citizen. Her parents immigrated to the United States from Jamaica and India. Trump and the MAGA movement and the large white right view nonwhite immigrants as “poison” in the “blood” of the nation.
Moreover, Trump and the other fascists and racial authoritarians believe that the United States is a “garbage can” because of nonwhite immigrants like Harris’ parents. We need your help to stay independent Subscribe today to support Salon's progressive journalism Trump and the MAGA people believe in the White supremacist anti-Semitic conspiracy theory-lie that “globalists” and “elites” and other “enemies within” are “importing” nonwhite immigrants to “replace” white people. To “protect” White America, Trump and the other MAGAfied Republicans, “conservatives,” and the larger white right want to change the United States Constitution in order to end birthright citizenship as a way of ensuring that white people are the largest demographic group.
One of their main goals is restoring such laws as t he Immigration Act of 1924 (The J ohnson-Reed Act) that de facto prohibited immigration from “nonwhite” countries . If Johnson-Reed was still in place Harris’ parents would not have been able to immigrate to the United States. Part of this white supremacist racial project involves making “whiteness” a prerequisite for citizenship and national belonging as established by the Supreme Court in the infamous Ozawa and Thind cases .
Harris is married to Douglas Emhoff, a white Jewish man. The MAGA movement and the larger white right want to return the country to an era when “interracial” marriage was illegal. Trump has also made repeatedly antisemitic comments suggesting that Jewish Americans who do not support him are traitors who will be collectively punished by his regime for their “disloyalty.
” During a recent interview, Trump agreed with a right-wing radio host who said that Imhoff is a “bad Jew.” Harris’ opportunities, career and rise to power were made possible by the Women’s rights and feminist movement(s). Specifically, by the Black and brown women and their white allies who worked against the white supremacist elements in those social movements.
In total, Harris’ body, identity, personhood and the meaning of those identities in American society are both racialized and gendered. To view Harris’ identity as primarily being that of a woman — which is a great error in much of the writing and analysis of the 2024 election by the mainstream news media and its largely white commentariat — is to ignore the very specific and unique experience and struggles of Harris specifically as a Black woman and as a woman of color more broadly (Harris is a Black and South Asian). As many experts have emphasized, the experiences and struggles of white women, especially white middle and upper-class white women, are not universal to all women.
Womanism, Third World, Queer and other forms of feminism are an attempt to intervene against the centrality of whiteness in the (white) American and Western feminist project. To that point, in the landmark volume, “This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color,” Cherríe L. Moraga Gloria Anzaldua speaks this truth: “We are challenging white feminists to be accountable for their racism because at the base we still want to believe that they really want freedom for all of us.
” Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter , Crash Course. The Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977, several of whose contributors would also have their essays and other writing featured in “This Bridge Called My Back,” offered this still much-needed intervention: We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.
We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.
Political scientists and other experts have shown that Trumpism and the MAGAfied Republicans and the larger “conservative” movement are fueled by hostile sexism and misogyny. One of their main policy goals is to take away the reproductive rights and freedoms of women. Ending Roe v.
Wade is just the beginning of the right-wing’s plans to make women second-class citizens and a type of chattel and the property of their husbands, fathers and the other men in their lives. Men’s domination and control over women and their bodies and agency is a defining feature of fascism and other forms of authoritarianism such as the MAGA movement. During an excellent interview last week with Lawrence O’Donnell on his MSNBC show , author and journalist Isabel Wilkerson explained the great symbolic weight and meaning — and stakes — of the 2024 election and questions of national identity in the following way: When we look at this when people look at this as an election or only as an election, then it doesn't make sense.
When you look at this as an existential crisis over what the country will be, then it begins to make sense. People are not voting against their own interests; they're voting for the interests that matter most to them. And for many, many Americans as we saw on January 6th, this means maintaining their position at the very top of the American hierarchy, [and] at the top of the American caste system with all the rights and privileges that accrue to that.
[T]hat is not something that maybe is in the best interest of the planet or the country, but that is the best interest of the people as they ascertain it for themselves. Wilkerson, summoning W.E.
B. Du Bois’ famous analysis of what he termed “the psychological wages of whiteness,” then explains why poor and working-class white Americans would support public policies that would cause them financial and economic and other harm: [W]hat unites them is that they are both voting for their caste in this society..
.. Caste is an arbitrary graded ranking of human value in society, and it's what determines the rights and privileges [and] who will be protected by the authorities and who will be attacked by the authorities.
[T]his system has been in place for 248 years. We were forged in revolution and in civil war. We should not be the least bit surprised at the enduring divisions that we are seeing right now.
And this is rising up in part because of the demographic shift that we are facing as a country...
. The 2020 census found that for the first time in American history, the historical majority in this country, white Americans, that group is the only group whose numbers fell for the first time in American history..
.. The existential crisis that we're facing as a country and what we are tasked with having to do is to figure out a way to imagine what we could be as a nation even if the demographics are not the same.
[It is] this sense of dread, the sense of fear is what's driving so much of what we are seeing. On Election Day, the American people are making a choice between two candidates who represent radically divergent possibilities and futures for American society. With Trump, they can choose some of the worst parts of the country’s past and his MAGA threat to make America white again.
Or the American people can choose a better present and future by supporting Vice President Kamala Harris and doing what will be the hard work required to renew and immunize our democracy against authoritarianism and the systemic, institutional and cultural failures that vomited out such antidemocratic and fake populist energy. The 2024 election and the choice between the candidates and symbols, Trump and Harris, is also a test of the American people’s morality and character. What type of people and nation are we? Most importantly, what type of nation and people do we want to be? We will soon find out.
Read more about this topic Don't laugh off Donald Trump's blue state strategy Why Donald Trump is obsessed with Kamala Harris' IQ Donald Trump was never qualified to be president — or anything else By Chauncey DeVega Chauncey DeVega is a senior politics writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com .
He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show . Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook . MORE FROM Chauncey DeVega Related Topics ------------------------------------------ Black Freedom Struggle Commentary Democracy Crisis Democratic Party Donald Trump Election Fascism Feminism Gender Kamala Harris Maga Misogyny Race Racism Republican Party Sex Sexism White Supremacy Whiteness Related Articles Advertisement:.
