WHAT HAPPENS AFTER 20 JANUARY 2025?

     A question to be asked on Presidents’ Day.  When an issue was resolved or a problem solved in episodes of The West Wing, President Jed Bartlett would ask, “what’s next?”  Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict, leaders of neighboring states, some European countries, and the United States have been planning for what happens after hostilities end.  With four trials and an election approaching, all involving former-president Donald Trump, no one is asking what happens after the inauguration.

    Trump could be acquitted or convicted of some or all of the 91 federal and state charges against him.  He could be sent to jail or not.  He could be re-elected or not.  A cheeseburger and a Diet Coke could kill him before the election or, if elected, before his inauguration.  No combination of outcomes changes the answer to the question “then what?”  Whatever happens will augment for decades the degree and the kind of damage which he has done to the country.  To consider that future, we must consider the past. 

Both history and philosophy are written and read by those whom today we call the elite.  The Preamble to the Declaration of Independence states what our Founding Fathers believed to be “self-evident” truths.  But the first such truth, “all men are created equal,” was not “self-evident “to most colonialists, who believed themselves intellectually and morally superior to blacks, whether they owned slaves or not.  When the colonies declared their independence from England, many more than the third of the population who remained loyal to the crown disliked or disregarded this truly revolutionary proposition.  The conservative position was the inequality of man; America was racist.

 

But the tides of intellectual thought and social policy were slowly beginning to erode, if not racism, at least slavery.  The North slowly abandoned it as commerce and industry showed that free workers were more productive than slaves.  The South increasingly relied on slavery because a cotton-based economy required cheap labor.  The South justified one person’s ownership of another person as a piece of property on the assumption that whites were superior to blacks.  The notion of the inequality of man was as much a part of the “Southern way of life” as corn pone, pecan pie, or mint juleps.

 

The Civil War ended Southern succession and, in theory, the structures of racism endemic in the South.  But Reconstruction under Northern military rule, terminated after twenty years, failed to effect a radical reorientation of Southern life.  Indeed, under it, former rebel officers and soldiers formed the Ku Klux Klan in 1865 to keep former slaves in their subservient place in society and the economy.  When Reconstruction ended, Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws, which, though outlawed a hundred years later, continued to operate in many places many years later.  (In Odessa, TX, memorialized in Friday Night Lights, schools remained officially segregated until 1982.)

 

Before and after the Civil War, emigres from Southern states populated the area between the hundredth meridian and the eastern side of the Pacific Coast ranges.  They took their racism and their resistance to the federal government with them.  The embodiment of these propensities was the invariably white cowboy, the hero of movies and TV serials with enormous audiences in the 1950s and 1960s.  (In The Olympics’s 1958 hit “Western Movies,” the singer complains that he cannot get a date with his girl because she watches so many western shows.)

 

The modern Republican Party, once the party of Lincoln and emancipation, became a racist party with the nomination of Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the election of Richard Nixon in 1968.  Exploiting the racist reaction to Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation, Nixon’s “Southern strategy” changed the South from a racist, anti-Republican, Democratic stronghold into today’s racist, anti-Democratic, Republican stronghold.  The dog-whistles of Republican politicians prove that racism abides in the character profile of millions of Americans.  Racism is as American as apple pie.

 

Until the advent of Donald Trump, those millions remained mostly silent and sullen.  His racism and his appeal to this disgruntled and resentful “base” have enabled their emergence into public, their noise, their anger, and their violence.  Nothing new here, just more of the same, only more apparent and widespread than before.  Their attacks on public officials, election workers, protesters, teachers, and the FBI—not state and local police, many of whom sympathize with the base (and might endanger the rest of us one day)—are like the attacks on people since Reconstruction who have fought for legal and political equality for themselves or for others, with “liberty and justice for all.”  The difference is that Trump has increased the degree and deployment of bigoted animosity.

 

But he has also effected a change in kind.  Trump has focused the base’s grievances with the ascent of blacks (and others of color and women) on government efforts to reduce disparities and enable their rise in employment and education.  He has led Republicans to redouble familiar efforts to bias elections by gerrymandering, limiting the franchise, and making voting more difficult for some groups.  But his change in kind has been to lead the base in new directions, to challenge the legitimacy of elections which they lose (or expect to lose) as “fixed,” and by attacking the courts and the rule of law itself.  The difference in kind is his attack on institutions, norms, laws, and systems.

 

The aftermath of Trump’s attack on democratic practices, principles, and values—among the latter, decency, respect, honesty, truth, reason—will remain corrosive.  Like the “lost cause” of Southern rebels, the “lost cause” of his base, perhaps with Trump as a convicted and incarcerated martyr, will survive as a continuing threat to American democracy, with the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other such groups as a latter-day Ku Klux Klan.  No doubt, Trump’s disgruntled and resentful base, like their predecessors, will abide and scheme, rather than admit a mistaken loyalty to a man hostile and a cause alien to the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence, with its assertion of equality.

 

What happens after Inauguration Day depends on those who support democracy.  They must resolve to live by advice dubiously attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”  Which means that, every day, in every way, all little-d democrats must work for equality and justice at every opportunity, not just at elections.  My corollary: Do not think that a battle won—say, Trump’s defeat on 5 November 2025—means victory in the war.  Of course, a Trump victory will make resistance to autocracy and recovery from its ravages even longer and harder.