Looking at the vast crowds gathering to hear the thrice-indicted, insurrectionist Donald J. Trump, a former President,. observers say they can’t understand how people can still support him.

Yet there’s no great mystery in it. The above photo was taken in South Carolina, the State where Secession in 1860 began; and where, after crushing defeat by the Union and our armies, generations of residents continued to honpor Jeff Davis, who had led Secession, and even to name places and counties (!!) after him; and not only Davis. For 100 years and more after defeat, most of the South honored Davis’s Oath-keeper generals, his Proud Boy cavalry, and his ordinary soldiers — the Civil War equivalent of the January 6th mob that wreaked war upon the Capitol of our nation and Congress.

Indeed, the cause is almost the same. The men of 1860 did Secesh for the sake of slavery. Today;s Trump mob wars upon the Constitution in the name of “:our way of life” — a never world, almost completely white, in which “diversity” — the idea that everyone, no matter his skin color or her sexual orientation or gender, is a fully righted citizen — must never be allowed. The folks gathering in South Carolina may or may not admit it, but they have choices; they are free to NOT follow Trump, and, indeed, some are now following Governor Ron DeSantis instead; and DeSantis is running the most blatantly racist, bigoted campaign since the days of George Wallace or even long before that. Yet if many opponents of “diversity” have gone to the DeSantis lane,. far more continue to support Trump, because even though it’s hard to identfy much in Trump’s rants that’s specific, his entire game is to oppose, insult, attack the Constitution and the “deep State” — i.e., the men and women of our Federal government, who all take an oath to defend an oath to support and defend said Constitution.

The above analysis, however, is not my main point. The theme of this essay. is the persistence, over 100 years and more, of political racism in America — in the South primariuy but by no means only there. This persistence is unique to the United States. There’s scarcely any remnant, in Europe, of the poliotics of 1850, or even of 1940. Monarchists there are fewer than few; fascists more numerous but in most cases far, far from power. (Such footing as present European fascism has is fueled by Russian money and espionage and serves Russian interests, often a feature (“ost-politik”) of mainland European oppositionists.) Yet here in America the piolitics of 1850, even of 1780, continue central to our arrangements. I’ve noted many times already how the current division into urban politics and rural mirrors almost exactly the divisions in the 1787 Ratification conventions that debated whether or not to adopt the Cionstitution. Slavery cut across that division : the rural North became agggressively abolitionist when the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was adopted; farnmers in New England and points west wanted nothing to do with being slave hunters. But today much of the rural North has reverted to its ancestral anti-Constitution position.

Here, evangelical religion seems the chief cause. Religion hadn’t mjuch to do with the 1787 division, or with Secession, but the evangelicals who today form the most virulent cadres of Trump Secession have in many cases atken up the political racism argument, giving it a Jesus covering and stoking its fury. After all, if “diversioty” is the devil’;s work and :our way of life; is Biblically ordained, a true believer goes all in.

Yet ket us not carelessly accept the religious veneer of the Trump phenomenon. His supporters may talk a lot about Jesus, etc., but they have choices. They can oppose full voting rights for Black Americans and health care for LGBT people, or they can grant these. They can oppose legislative interference with women’s bodies, or they can leave women alone. And they can choose to accept the urban world, its vast numbers of people, its multiplex culture, its hurly-burly of innovation, controversy, trade and debate: or they can oppose them as works of Satan. It is a choice.

The religion comes afterward. It makes them a useful excuse ; “well, the Bible says…” I think most know that this is horse effluent, but it soundzs sweet to say it.

The Trump folks can choose to enter the urban, diverse, hurly-burly lists. No one is stopping them. Yet they don’t. They choose to be offended by city ways. They choose not to join a union and earn better money. Or they choose not to abide by Federal laws that impose standards on “muh freedom.” Thus they oppose the same urban economic powerhouse, with its free laborers and anything-goes capitalists, and yes, its vaccinations against disease, that their political forebears have opposed sincebefore the United States was fully constituted.

In America, the beat goes on. It is never quashed. Nothing is ever finally adjudicated, no mattrer how evil.

Trump will surely be efeated, but it won’t make a difference to our bedrock political division, its racism included.

It’s our blessing and also our shame, our paradoxical destiny.

—- Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere