We watched the angry, white mob of Republicans storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, while waving their Confederate flags and trying to restore Donald Trump as president. These were some of the last desperate gasps of white racism as a political force in the United States. The raw truth is, Republicans are losing, and they know it.

Republicans were shocked in 2018 when voters repudiated Donald Trump’s presidency and gave Democrats a majority in the House of Representatives. Things got much worse in 2020 when Trump was thrown out of office and Democrats took over the Senate.

For Republicans, seeing their living god defeated was more than they could handle. Rather than blaming Trump’s presidential incompetence, they decided the vote was rigged. Trump fanned this fantasy over the last three years without having a shred of evidence.

Since then, Republicans have broken away from democracy even more. Republicans didn’t like the Wisconsin Supreme Court justice voters elected in a landslide. So, Republicans in the Assembly and Senate threaten to impeach her if she doesn’t vote the way they want her to. After Republicans got thumped again in November 2023 elections, former Republican Senator Rick Santorum echoed Republican views that, “Pure democracies aren’t how to run a country.”

What has made Republicans so crazy now?

Along with losing elections, systemic racism, the Republican party’s foundation, is collapsing right in front of them. For Republicans, in 2016, this was no time for same-old, same-old. They needed a fire-breathing, true believing, bigoted, racist for president. Who cares if he is dim-witted, has no respect for laws, has no morals and is only concerned about himself?

Desperate times call for desperate actions. Here are some of the reasons Republicans are so desperate that they nominated Trump in 2016 and are sticking with him now:

• White Republicans watched helplessly as a Black man was elected president twice. He fixed the disastrous economy G.W. Bush left him.  Obama left a strong and growing economy and  the lowest deficit in 10 years for Trump to destroy. Obama also won   the Nobel Peace Prize.  He left office with a 59 percent approval rating, compared to the 34 percent for the white presidents that preceded and succeeded him. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/final-presidential-job-approval-ratings
• Republicans were shattered when a white police officer was convicted of murder in the death of a Black man (George Floyd). This goes to the core of threatening the Republican perception of a thin blue line that protects white people from Black mayhem and criminality.
• According to Republicans, liberal district attorneys and judges are preventing the police from doing their jobs (killing unarmed Black people). Currently, an Austin, Texas a police officer is accused of murdering an unarmed Black man, three policemen in Tacoma, Washington are charged with second degree murder and manslaughter in the death of a Black man. Five former police officers (all Black) in Memphis, Tennessee are charged with murdering a Black man. These are some of the ongoing cases.
• Police forces are reckoning with their racism.  Citizens with cell phone video cameras are recording police brutality to Black people. To the horror of  Republicans, police systemic racism is being challenged.
• A major part of the systemic racism Black people endured is getting longer prison sentences than white people with similar records, committing the same crime. This is changing.
• Another major part of the systemic racism Black people lived with is that Black lives have always been less valuable than white lives. However, the conviction of three white men for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in southern Georgia by a jury of 11 white people and one Black man shattered that foundational belief. All three defendants received life sentences. Arbery was a Black man jogging in a white neighborhood. Years ago, the white defendant’s  defense that they were preventing theft because the Black man obviously was casing homes for a robbery would have saved them. Not anymore. To Republican terror, Black lives do matter.
• Another sign of the weakening of white privilege that scares Republicans witless is that federal courts are changing. So far in Joe Biden’s term, 67 percent of his confirmed judicial appointees are non-white (34 percent are Black), and 68 percent are women. Back in the good-old-days, less than 4 percent of Trump’s judicial appointees are Black. Biden’s Supreme Court appointee is a Black woman.
• Kamala Harris is the first non-white vice president in US history and the first woman vice president in US history.
• The real power in federal courts are the lawyers that are federal prosecutors. Forty-eight percent of Biden’s appointees to these posts are Black. Back when Trump was president, of the 93 federal prosecutors, two were Black.
• Another core part of systemic white racism is making sure people of color are prevented from moving into white neighborhoods. Over the years, exclusionary zoning, title restrictions preventing people of “Ethiopian descent” from buying houses in some neighborhoods along with bank “red lining” have all been outlawed. Horror of horrors to Republicans, people of color are moving into white suburbs. Even more horrific to racists, white people are finding out their new neighbors are not all drug dealing, murderous rapists and are just like white people in most ways. Consequently, suburbs are becoming less racist and are voting for Democrats. This break down of white privilege and systemic racism terrifies Republicans.
• A major part of systemic racism is keeping Black people from voting. Republicans just know that Black people are inherently lazy. Requiring a picture ID,  having fewer polling stations in Black neighborhoods and  making it illegal to offer water to voters waiting in longer lines were supposed to cut down the number of Black people voting. Add a few white cops outside of polling stations to intimidate Black people and for sure Black voters will stay home. Unfortunately, these processes made Black people angry and backfired. In 2020, Black people turned out in record numbers in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia that made voting more difficult and voted for Democrats.
• Schools are starting to teach real history. Real history includes the truth about slavery. About how Black men listened helplessly while white slave masters raped their daughters and wives in the next room. How families were broken up when a slave owner decided to sell some family members at auction. Real history also includes post Civil War Reconstruction and how Black office holders were lynched by white Klu Klux Klansmen after federal troops were pulled out of the South in 1877. Systemic racism depersonalizes Black people. White kids understanding what Black people have gone through, especially when shown through the perspective of Black people that lived through this horror, enables white kids to understand a and relate to Black people. The worst fear of racists is that their kids don’t grow up hating Black people.
• Other symbolic chips in systemic racism that are intolerable to Republicans are tearing down and melting monuments to treasonous Confederate Civil War generals. These Republican heroes broke their oaths to defend the US Constitution and instead defended slavery. Along the same lines, Republicans failed to keep military bases named for the same Civil War seditionists. Adding insult upon insult for racist Republicans, both the US Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff are Black.
• For Republicans, Black football players kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality to Black people was an affront to all white people and a direct assault on white privilege. Systemic racism is all about Black people needing to know their place and interrupting a football game for their silly grievances was a step too far. Also, Super Bowl performances dominated by Black people and Latinos shows how far elitists have gone to destroy white culture.
• Sticking this all in Republican faces is the “Black Lives Matter” movement. White people actually joined the BLM protestors.
• After decades of fighting to keep white people’s taxes from supplementing under-funded Black schools , Republicans lost another major battle. In large part, thanks to the hated Education Department, “Average expenditures are very similar for the average Black and average White student, though sources of funding differ, with Black students receiving more federal funds and White students more local funds.” https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synopses/2022/02/16/school-district-expenditures-and-race
• Republicans convinced themselves that “replacement theory” is real. Democrats are supposedly importing brown skinned people to the US that will vote for Democrats in future elections. However, the reality is, migrants are leaving the US at the same rate as those arriving.  According to Econofact, “Reductions in net immigration to the U.S. began prior to the pandemic, declining in every year since 2016, when net migration exceeded one million. Net migration is the number of people coming to the US (legally and illegally) minus the number of people leaving”. https://econofact.org/the-decline-in-u-s-net-migration
• Perhaps the worst sign of an upside down world for Republicans is their living god, Donald Trump, is being prosecuted by a Black man in Manhattan. Worse, Black women are leading Trump prosecutions in New York and Atlanta. All these Black prosecutors are elected officials. Trump will be forced to sit in judgement in front of a Black judge in New York and answer questions put to him by Black prosecutors. Considering the trial locations, we can expect Trump’s fate will be determined by juries that include people of color.

Other areas where Republicans are losing…

• The forced birth movement is failing. Even in Republican states, whenever voters are given a opportunity, they vote to make abortion legal. Abortion to Republican elected officials is equivalent to a sharpened wooden cross  to vampires.
• On top of all this, schools are teaching real biology and how sexual orientation is determined. Unfortunately for Republicans, people’s sexual orientation has nothing to do with grooming or what books kids may read. And, voters are catching-on. “Youngkin’s Disastrous Night Shows the Culture War Has Fizzled”.  Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/08/glenn-youngkin-democrats-virginia-elections-culture-wars/
• Republicans are completely incapable of grasping the reality that transgender people are real and not faking it. Again, how can the Republican Party survive if Republicans’ kids understand that being Gay, lesbian or transgender is not a choice? What happens to the Republican Party if kids grow up not hating people with a different sexual orientation?
• Same sex marriage is supported by 71 percent of US citizens. https://news.gallup.com/poll/506636/sex-marriage-support-holds-high.aspx
• Republicans proclaim the US is a Christian nation. It is impossible to defend this argument given the dramatic drop in the number of people in the US that consider themselves Christian and the rise in the number of people who are “religiously unaffiliated”. 

What happens next?

In the last nine presidential elections, Republicans lost the popular vote in eight of those elections. Yet, because of the Electoral College, Republicans have held the presidency for 16 years versus 18 years for Democrats in that time period. Republicans also hold a six to three majority on the Supreme Court. In the US Senate, less populated Republican states like Wyoming get the same number of senators as California. In addition, Republicans have a built in advantage in representation in Congress because of their strength in less populated rural areas. Republicans have also taken gerrymandering to the next level in states they control.

Republicans should be happy to keep the present form of democracy going. But, as illustrated above, there are problems.

Rural areas are depopulating. Formerly reliably Republican suburbs are growing by adding better educated voters of all colors and consequently becoming more Democratic. Older Republicans are dying and are being replaced by younger, better educated voters interested in fighting climate change and unregulated gun sales. Worse, some Supreme Court Republicans are ruling against extreme Republican gerrymandering.

Republicans abandoned democracy on January 6, 2021 and they affirm their abandonment by racing headlong to nominate their wannabe dictator, Donald Trump,  for president in 2024. Trump has made no secret of wanting to suspend the Constitution, executing military leaders that don’t kowtowel to him and make the Justice Department and FBI subservient to him. I don’t know anything else he can say that defines his plans to make himself a dictator.

Trump recognizes how racist the Republican Party is and is appealing to voters in the party center. He has announced his plans to Make America White Again.

According to the New York Times, “Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.

He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year. To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings.

To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states. To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/us/politics/trump-2025-immigration-agenda.html

Maybe, we need to rethink this dictatorship thing?

Whitey Holm was a diminutive guy. Before World War II, he was raised on a small farm in Central Wisconsin. After the war, he took advantage of the GI Bill and became a world renowned horticulturist. He was a neighbor in Madison, Wisconsin who passed away a few years ago and was one of the most interesting people I ever met.

During the war, he was an  Army infantryman that came ashore at Normandy two weeks after the D-Day landing. He fought all the way across France, the Battle of the Bulge, liberated concentration camps and into Germany, until VE Day.

Whitey was adamant that the people that wrote the books and screenplay for Private Ryan, Band of Brothers and other supposedly realistic movies weren’t actually there. His jaw would tighten up and he would say that anyone who actually fought there could never talk about it. It was so awful, they couldn’t possibly describe what it was like.

For me, I think about the godawful sacrifice Whitey and millions of other GI’s made. I also think about the over 400,000 that made the ultimate sacrifice to protect our democracy from Hitler and Hirohito. They didn’t question the need to preserve our democracy and keep us free from racist demigods like Adolf Hitler and Japan’s Emperor Hirohito. They just did it.

Our ancestors made horrific sacrifices to establish and defend our republic. It makes me sick that Republicans would just hand our democracy to Donald Trump, today’s power hungry, wannabe, racist, dictator. Sadly, Republicans are willing to give up our democracy just to satiate their hatred of people with black, brown, yellow and red skin, Gays, lesbians, transgender people, Jews, Muslims and strong, powerful women. And, don’t believe the lies that Donald Trump will bring more effective government The first Trump presidency was an economic, health and debt disaster. https://www.frugalron.com/the-trump-disaster/

Wrapping-up

Make no mistake, if Donald Trump wins the presidency in 2024, he will setup a dictatorship and make our democracy a memory. If you don’t believe this, believe Donald Trump (for once). https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/us/politics/trump-plans-2025.html   

Not only will Trump create a dictatorship, it will be evil, based on re-establishing white supremacy and destroying the multi-cultural society we have now.

It is time to put another nail in the coffin of Republican racism. In 2024, every racist in the US will turn out and vote for Trump. For the rest of us, Joe Biden (or whoever runs for the Democrats a year from now)  certainly isn’t perfect. But staying home or wasting your vote on a third party candidacy that doesn’t stand a chance of winning will get us a Donald Trump dictatorship. Bottom line, vote for democracy and competence – vote for Democrats.