In Dr. Malik Simba’s excellent essay, “What Is the Liberal Agenda?,” published in the June edition of the Community Alliance newspaper, he states that “the new Democratic Party not only embraced the changing multicultural America but also the class question and how public policy should be used to protect and serve working-class women and men or, to cite the U.S. Constitution, ‘promote the general welfare.’
“This embrace attained its clearest expression when President Harry S. Truman supported the Democratic platform of 1948, ‘to secure these rights’ for America’s racial minorities.
“In response, the southern wing of the Democratic Party bolted and formed its own party, the Dixiecrats, which was a synonym for the Ku Klux Klan. Upon the collapse of this party, its members moved to the White supremacist party of George Wallace and his American Independent Party in 1968, and eventually to today’s conservative and right-wing Republican Party.”
I would argue that Dr. Simba should have extended his analysis to include the Republican Party transforming into the more racist and White nationalist party that it is today.
He left out the Tea Party, which was an anti-minority party that wanted to limit additional social, economic and political rights to racial minorities, in particular, Black people.
Then came the Birther movement, an anti-Black and racist movement that falsely asserted that Barack Obama was ineligible to run for the presidency because he was not born on American soil. At the front of the movement was Donald J. Trump, who could not accept that a Black man could be this intelligent and accomplished.
So, Trump created his first of many lies and false accusations against Obama and racial minorities. I would say that birtherism was Trump’s initial Big Lie that gathered national acceptance by Republican Party members.
Then came the creation of the Make America Great Again movement, or MAGA. This movement can also be labeled the Make America White Again movement. At the root of their racist political desire is to stop the browning of America.
Again, Trump and the goal of his movement is to take rights away from minorities, or people of color, and people with particular gender identifications and deny women’s reproductive rights.
President Biden clearly sees that the MAGA movement has morphed and now is ultra-MAGA.
Ultra-MAGA is a term originally used by President Joe Biden in reference to a subset of “extreme” Republicans.
This ultra-MAGA movement now has as its political philosophy that of Trumpism: Trumpism is a term for the political ideologies, social emotions, style of governance, political movement and set of mechanisms for acquiring and keeping control of power associated with Donald Trump and his political base.
This ultra-MAGA movement will outlive Trump, and he will no longer be needed physically. Another fascist will soon replace him.
With the establishment of the ultra-MAGA Party, we now have an authoritarian, anti-Black, fascist, anti-democratic, anti-women, anti-browning of America and anti–gender equality movement.
We can read from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion that the ultra-MAGA members of this Party would like to reconsider and take away the right to contraception, the right to consensual same-sex intercourse, the right to have same-sex marriages and, by implication, the nullification of mixed-race marriages.
“In a concurring opinion in Dobbs, Justice Thomas urged the overruling of decisions that protected constitutional rights to purchase and use contraceptives, to engage in private consensual same-sex activity and to have same-sex marriages.” (Fresno Bee, July 8)
The real threat of the ultra-MAGA movement is to have some privacy rights not permitted at the federal level and to have states decide which of these rights will be permitted or prohibited in their states.
Hence, Republicans have now come full circle back to some of the goals and objectives of the racist White nationalist and White supremacist Dixiecrat Party,
Based on my readings, 30% of Republicans are MAGA and ultra-MAGA, 50% are conservatives who just want to win and maintain their economic and political status and 20% are never Trumpers, who realize Trump’s threat to our democracy. A large number of conservatives are Trump sycophants, cowards and unpatriotic in that they will not challenge Trump.
Trumpism is now the MAGA movement’s ideology and is at the foundation of their attack on American democracy. Their primary reason to support Trump is greed and political power. The ancient Greeks would identify Trump sycophants as kleptocrats and they would identify Trump as a kakistocrat.
Vote blue and stop the MAGA Republican Party from further transforming into a truly fascist, racist, White supremacist, misogynistic and anti-democracy party.
