As I never tire of saying, if you aren’t reading Adam Serwer’s political dispatches at The Atlantic these days, you’re unnecessarily denying yourself essential grounding for understanding the age of Trump. His column in the wake of the president’s “go back to your own countries” tweet minces no words in identifying the fundamental import of Trump’s words: “He was stating his ideological belief that American citizenship is fundamentally racial, that only white people can truly be citizens, and that people of color, immigrants in particular, are only conditionally American.” Serwer continues:
This is a cornerstone of white nationalism, and one of the president’s few closely held ideological beliefs. It is a moral conviction, not a statement of fact. If these women could all trace their family line back to 1776, it would not make them more American than Trump, a descendant of German immigrants whose ancestors arrived relatively recently, because he is white and they are not.
Particularly compelling is that Serwer demonstrates how such beliefs, and their conflict with American ideals, run clear back to the founding of the U.S.; in this, he reminds us, as well we need, that Trump is hardly an anomalous figure, but rather channels some of the oldest and foulest strains of American politics, with this basic denigration of non-white citizenship reflected in a variety of Trump administration policies, from ending DACA to the reign of sadism on the southern border. As Serwer writes:
We can see a battle over the fundamental nature of American citizenship that has been waged since the founding. Was America founded as a fundamentally white and Christian country? Or as a land of opportunity, where anyone of any background could come, thrive, and contribute? Neither faction is truly wrong, and neither is truly right, and neither has ever won anything resembling a permanent victory—and perhaps neither ever will.
Serwer is clearly on the side of America as a land of opportunity, and ends by endorsing a more inclusive strain of American nationalism, articulated by figures like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. But that last line above about neither faction being truly right or wrong, and that it’s possible neither may win out permanently — which one might read to be despairing or cynical — actually drives home the fact that what we are living through now is a work in progress; a dialectic between long-established tensions in the American project; and that things are far from settled, both for good and for bad.
In the face of the president’s essential declaration that he intends to make the incitement of white racist hatred and white nationalism the cornerstone of his 2020 campaign, I’d argue that articles like Serwer’s are a big part of the way that we can defeat this bigotry. I wrote last week about the urgent need to provide context for the actions of the president and the GOP, and Serwer’s piece is perhaps a textbook case for how to embody this. Trump’s behavior is fit into the larger American story; he may be a uniquely horrid person, but what he articulates did not come out of nowhere. In fact, understanding this history helps us get a clearer understanding of what Trump is doing now.
This also means that when Serwer says that we are experiencing something new in the country, we should sit up and take notice. In his most recent column, addressing the North Carolina rally at which Trump supporters chanted “Send her back” in reference to Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, Serwer asserts that “America has not been here before”:
[W]e have never seen an American president make a U.S. representative, a refugee, an American citizen, a woman of color, and a religious minority an object of hate for the political masses, in a deliberate attempt to turn the country against his fellow Americans who share any of those traits. Trump is assailing the moral foundations of the multiracial democracy Americans have struggled to bring into existence since 1965, and unless Trumpism is defeated, that fragile project will fail.
[. . .] To attack Omar is to attack a symbol of the demographic change that is eroding white cultural and political hegemony, the defense of which is Trumpism’s only sincere political purpose [. . .] To defend the remarks as politically shrewd is to confess that the president is deliberately campaigning on the claim that only white people can truly, irrevocably be American.
Serwer’s most recent piece explains the stakes of this latest dark twist in our American story; and it ends with an indictment of Democratic fumbling and fecklessness in the face of this Trumpist assault that’s both chilling (for its no-holds-barred truth-telling) and necessary (because the Democrats must be roused to action if we are to avoid slipping into a white nationalist hellscape). Among other things, he zeroes in on the increasing craziness of the party holding back from direct confrontation with Trump’s white nationalism based on the dubious premise of winning over working-class white votes, which I think is going to emerge as perhaps the central tension of Democratic strategizing and the presidential primary contest in the coming months.