The New Redeemers

• Publication year: 2021

The New Redeemers

Anthony M. Kreis
Georgia State University College of Law

[Page 1483]

THE NEW REDEEMERS

Anthony Michael Kreis^*

This Article is about the long arc of a Second Redemption. A new life to the politics of racial grievance surfaced in the wake of a diversifying polity, a decline of rural power, and a Black man's rise to the American presidency. And that reinvigorated force was the linchpin of Donald Trump's ascendency to power. Trump was a part of a broader conservative governing coalition, which held its center of gravity in rural, white America. Leading members of that coalition feverishly eroded democratic norms to entrench minoritarian power. They justified their pernicious work by claiming to be the true heirs to the American project and constructed a vision of citizenship closely tethered to whiteness. To claim their inheritance, conservative coalition leaders availed themselves of every opportunity to delegitimize Black engagement in participatory democracy—from voting rights to self-governance to public demonstrations. This campaign was singularly focused on standing athwart the United States' coming of age as a truly multiracial democracy.

This virulent strain of antidemocratic ideology fomented a violent attempted coup on January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol, where members of Congress objected to the bona fide state results from the 2020 presidential election. The objectors proffered that their refusal to acknowledge President-Elect Joseph Biden's victory—which was made possible by a multiracial coalition of voters—was borne out of a constitutional duty. Their resistance to multiracial democracy had dire consequences, encouraging a crowd of insurrectionists to storm the U.S. Capitol with the goal of blocking the Electoral College's certification. The patina of constitutional fidelity wore off, and the basest politics of racial grievance—a Redemption

[Page 1484]

redux—was all that remained. The New Redeemers' ideology was laid bare for all to see now.

The "New Redeemers" is a fitting namesake considering that the common denominator between their worldview and the Redeemers of old is that white political power is a good unto itself. It is a mistake to view the Capitol insurrection or the repudiation of the 2020 presidential election results as isolated affairs. Instead, they were outgrowths of a sustained effort that long predated November 2020. This Article examines the march toward upending democracy and argues that the insurrection on January 6 was the encapsulation of a lengthy crusade against multiracial democracy.

[Page 1485]

Table of Contents

I. Introduction..................................................................1486

II. The Long Shadows of Illegitimacy...........................1489

A. THE HARBINGER THAT WAS BIRTHERISM................. 1489
B. WHITENESS AND DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY............ 1490

1. The Electoral College Versus the Popular Vote ........................................................................1490
2. Rural Minoritarianism and Power as a Matter of Right..............................................................1493
3. Where the "Real People" Are: Racism and D.C. Statehood.......................................................1498

III. Social Change and the Delegitimization of Participatory Democracy.........................................1500

A. LOST CAUSE VALOR AND THE DIMINUTION OF BLACK POLITICAL POWER.................................................. 1500
B. ANTI-RACISM, RESPECTABLE CITIZENSHIP, AND A RECONSTRUCTIVE COALITION................................. 1507

1. Attacking the Competence of Black Leadership ........................................................................ 1507
2. Black Involvement, Participatory Democracy, and Otherness.........................................................1509

IV. Redemption Redux......................................................1516

A. BLACK VOTING AS FRAUD........................................ 1517
B. THE FEAR OF A LOST NATIONAL IDENTITY............... 1519
C. RURALITY AND THE POLITICS OF REDEMPTION....... 1520

V. Conclusion....................................................................1526

[Page 1486]

I. Introduction

In moments of national adversity, it is not unusual to hear the phrase "this is not who we are." It is the reflex hammer in the American political crisis toolbox when something—perhaps anything—needs to be said after an event that shocks the public conscience. The expression provides the veneer of contemplation without actual introspection, resulting in an easy absolution. After the insurrection to block the Electoral College certification at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021,¹ the following hours provided another ripe opportunity to reach for the tried-and-true response.² Politicians seized the moment, but were they speaking the truth?

Violence in the wake of elections is anathema to a healthy democratic society. Such events are generally unheard of in modern American politics.³ Nevertheless, far from being foreign to the

[Page 1487]

American experiment, dangerous antidemocratic impulses have fomented insurrectionist mobs on multiple occasions. In the midst of the Civil War, Louisiana held promise for a lasting reconstruction because moneyed interests aligned with the North more than the rest of the South, and it had a racially diverse population and an urban center under Union control.⁴ A multiracial coalition could succeed there. That prospect, however, motivated Louisiana Democrats to roadblock Black voters' access to the polls in Louisiana's 1872 statewide elections.⁵ The contentious and disputed election spurred numerous acts of political violence to assert white supremacy, including the Colfax Massacre in 1873 and the Battle of Liberty Place in 1874.⁶ Louisiana was perhaps the first hope, but North Carolina was the South's last hope for biracial democracy when a Republican and Populist fusionist coalition enjoyed brief success.⁷ So too there, a white mob launched a murderous coup against Wilmington, North Carolina's biracial local government in 1898.⁸ The violent suppression of fusionist politics ushered in

[Page 1488]

decades of Black disenfranchisement in the Tar Heel State.⁹ The story of Louisiana and North Carolina repeated itself across the South after Reconstruction. White Southern Democrats, known as Redeemers, worked to wrestle control of Southern statehouses from biracial governments through violence, intimidation, and other methods of voter suppression.¹⁰

The incited crowd that ransacked Congress's halls in 2021 was not fueled by some new American political phenomenon but by a festering Lost Cause ideology.¹¹ That ideology, like its nineteenth-century progenitor, equates whiteness with respectable citizenship and was reinvigorated in the Trump Era through multiple streams of public discourse.¹² After four years, the American right's full-throated embrace of grievance politics at the behest of Donald

[Page 1489]

Trump created a tinderbox.¹³ This period was nothing short of a slow burning Second Redemption.¹⁴ Capitol insurrectionists were motivated by a fear of their diminishing political power and disbelief that a multiracial coalition could garner sufficient political strength to unseat a conservative administration without widespread fraud. A careful reading of history reveals that the riot was not exceptional to the American experience, though it was fueled by principles antithetical to American ideals.

II. The Long Shadows of Illegitimacy

A. THE HARBINGER THAT WAS BIRTHERISM

For decades, Donald Trump flirted with national political office before he secured the Republican nomination for president in 2016. In the late 1980s, he teased a presidential run on national television,¹⁵ and in 2000 he briefly pursued the Reform Party nomination.¹⁶ Though Trump had a long-standing presence in American cultural life, as Jamelle Bouie explained, "his first appearance in the Obama era was in the context of anti-black racism."¹⁷ Trump's vault to national political prominence in the years before his successful presidential bid foreshadowed a major ideological tenet of his politics: the use of whiteness as citizenship to delegitimize democratic processes.

[Page 1490]

In 2011, Donald Trump became, as some political scientists have described him, the "spokesperson for the 'birther' movement."¹⁸ Adam Serwer described birtherism as "the baseless conjecture that [President Barack Obama] not only was born abroad and was therefore ineligible for the presidency, but also was a secret Muslim planning to undermine America from within."¹⁹ Despite evidence that Barack Obama was a natural born citizen, Donald Trump's claim to political fame was the delegitimization of the Obama presidency through racist theories of belonging.²⁰ At the core of the Birther Movement was the idea that respectable citizenship and legitimate participation in the democratic process are tightly associated with race and whiteness.²¹ Any person who deviates from that construction of citizenship by appearance or name should be viewed with skepticism. Thus, Donald Trump's claim to fame in the Obama Era hung on the idea that the validity of democracy hinges upon its participants' identity.

B. WHITENESS AND DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY

1. The Electoral College Versus the Popular Vote. When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, he did so by the slimmest of margins. Hillary Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by a total of 79,646 votes across the three states, throwing an Electoral College victory to Donald Trump.²² Trump's success did not translate to the popular vote, which he lost by just under 2.9 million votes to Hillary Clinton.²³ In the aftermath of

[Page 1491]

November 2016's results, a debate about the democratic legitimacy of the Electoral College system unfolded.²⁴ Liberals objected to how the Electoral College weights some votes to have greater influence than others...