MAGA’s last stand: a duel between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in diametrically opposed Americas

The the 2024 presidential election it is one of the most important—if not the most important—in the country’s history. Today, the American people will decide whether to surrender their power Donald Trumpa man who admires Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler and has promised to be the country’s first dictator, or if they elect vice president instead Kamala Harrisa defender of democracy and a believer in American greatness.

If enough lost Americans and an outdated electoral college put Trump and his MAGA movement back in the White House, it will be the signed death certificate of American democracy. The stakes are so high. These are not normal times in America. These anomalous times have made Trump and Harris more than “just” politicians.

As I’ve repeatedly warned here at Salon for more than eight years, Trump has long been more of a symbol than a man. Trump is the country’s first white president. In this 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 provide white “Christian” men as a group (and rich white men in particular) with virtually unlimited. power over every aspect of American society.

Trump’s symbolic power is also religious: his MAGA followers and other cultists increasingly see him as a god or prophet, an instrument of destiny who is divine and may even have supernatural powers.

Trump’s symbolic power is also violent. He gives permission to his MAGA followers and other Americans to be increasingly violent and engage in other anti-social behavior. Trump himself has repeatedly and publicly threatened his enemies and those of the MAGA movement and the “left” and the “enemy within” with prison and/or death. Trump, like other “conservatives” and Republicans, has tried—and mostly succeeded—to monopolize the great symbolic power of the American flag, guns, and the Christian cross.

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 clash of symbols and their meaning at this historical moment is one of the main reasons why the 2024 election is so inflammable.

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 convicted; 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’s persona, body, and life experience as a black woman hold the specific weight of history, oppression, violence, and yes, struggle and triumph. Trump as a white man also possesses great significance and power in the symbolism and historical significance 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 origins, history, and meaning.

Harris is a child and heir to the Black Freedom Struggle and the long civil rights movement. She is the country’s first black vice president. He graduated from a historically black college and university (HBCU), an educational institution created during Reconstruction that continues to be a central part of the black public sphere and civil society. On election night, Harris will be at Howard University, his alma mater. Harris would be too the first president-elect to celebrate his victory at a historically black college or university.

Trump, the MAGA movement, and the larger white right and neo-fascist cause see the votes of people of color 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 great white right see non-white immigrants as “poison” in the “blood” of the nation. Furthermore, Trump and other fascists and racial authoritarians believe that the United States is a “trash” because of non-white immigrants like Harris’ parents.

Trump and the MAGA people believe in the anti-Semitic white supremacist conspiracy theory – the lie that “globalists” and “elites” and other “enemies within” are “importing” non-white immigrants to “replace” white people.

To “protect” White America, Trump and other MAGAfied Republicans, “conservatives” and the greater white right want to change the United States Constitution to end birthright citizenship as a way to ensure that whites are the greatest demographic group. One of their main goals is to restore such laws as tThe Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act) which de facto banned immigration from “non-white” countries.. Had Johnson-Reed still been 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 the Supreme Court established in the infamous Ozawa and Thind cases.

Harris is married to Douglas Emhoff, a white Jew. The MAGA movement and the larger white right want to return the country to an era when “interracial” marriage was illegal. Trump has also repeatedly made anti-Semitic comments, suggesting that American Jews 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 called Imhoff a “bad Jew.”

Harris’s opportunities, career, and rise to power were made possible by the women’s rights and feminist movement(s). Specifically, by black and brown women and their white allies who worked against the white supremacist elements of those social movements.

In all, Harris’s body, identity, personhood, and the meaning of those identities in American society are both racialized and gendered. To see Harris’s identity as primarily that of a woman—which is a major error in much of the writing and analysis of the 2024 election by the news media and her largely white commentary—is to ignore the very experience specific and unique, and Harris’s struggles specifically as a black woman and as a black woman more broadly (Harris is black and South Asian).

As many experts have pointed out, the experiences and struggles of white women, particularly 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.

Until then, in the landmark volume, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherríe L. Moraga Gloria Anzaldua speaks this truth: “We challenge white feminists to be accountable for their racism, because at the core it still we want to believe that they really want freedom for all of us.”

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The 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement, many of whose contributors also had the essays and other writing featured in This Bridge Called My Back, provided this still much-needed intervention:

We believe that the politics of sexuality under patriarchy are as pervasive in the lives of women of color as the politics of class and race. Also, it is often difficult for us to separate race, class, and sexual oppression, because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is racial-sexual oppression that is neither exclusively racial nor exclusively sexual, for example, the history of the rape of black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.

Political scientists and other experts have shown that Trumpism and MAGAfied Republicans and the larger “conservative” movement are fueled by hostile sexism and misogyny. One of their main political goals is to eliminate women’s reproductive rights and freedoms. The end of Roe v. Wade is just the beginning of the right’s plans to make women second-class citizens and a type of inheritance and property of their husbands, fathers, and the other men in their lives. Men’s dominance and control over women and over 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 MSNBCauthor and journalist Isabel Wilkerson explained the weight and symbolic significance—and stakes—of the 2024 election and questions of national identity this way:

When we look at it, when people look at it as a choice or just a choice, then it doesn’t make sense. When you look at this as an existential crisis of what the country will be, then it starts to make sense. People don’t vote against their own interests; they vote for the interests that matter most to them. And for many, many Americans, as we saw on January 6th, that means maintaining their position at the top of the American hierarchy and (and) at the top of the American caste system, with all the rights and privileges that come with it. (A) it’s not something that maybe is in the best interest of the planet or the country, but it’s the best interest of the people as they see it for themselves.

Wilkerson, citing WEB Du Bois’s famous analysis of what he called the “psychological wages of whiteness,” then explains why poor and working-class white Americans would support public policies that would cause them financial, economic, and other harm nature:

What unites them is that they both vote for their caste in this society… Caste is an arbitrary ranking of human worth in society and is what determines rights and privileges (and) who will be protected by the authorities and who will be attacked by authority. (A) his system has been in place for 248 years.

We were made in revolution and civil war. We should not be the least bit surprised by the enduring divisions we now see. And that’s growing in part because of the demographic shift we’re facing as a country… The 2020 Census found that, for the first time in American history, the historic majority in this country, white Americans, that group is the only group whose number fell for the first time in American history…

The existential crisis we face as a country and what we need to do is find a way to imagine what we could be as a nation, even if the demographics are not the same. (It’s) this sense of dread, the sense of dread that drives so much of what we see.

On Election Day, the American people make a choice between two candidates who represent radically divergent possibilities and futures for American society. With Trump, they can cherry pick 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 necessary to renew and immunize our democracy against authoritarianism and the systemic, institutional, and cultural failures that have spilled so undemocratic and fake populist. energy. The 2024 election and the choice between candidates and symbols, Trump and Harris, is also a test of the morality and character of the American people. What kind of people and nation are we? Most importantly, what kind of nation and people do we want to be? We will find out soon.