Shock and Awe, the White Supremacy Version

The Trump administration wants to roll back the clock to before the civil rights movement.

Appearing on a podcast this week, Vice President JD Vance explained why Americans are so mad when people from “a totally different culture” move in next to them, and why that displeasure should drive a policy of allowing almost no immigrants to come into America. “It is totally reasonable and acceptable,” Vance said, “for American citizens to look at their next-door-neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers.’”

Because he is a bigot and a liar, just before the part clipped there, Vance repeated the lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating cats and dogs. In any case, Vance is arguing not just against immigration, but against fair housing laws, in particular the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited landlords from refusing to rent or sell homes to someone because of their race, religion, or national origin. As historian Kevin Kruse (who wrote a book about white flight) pointed out, “This is exactly the same argument — and, in parts, even the same language — that segregationists advanced to argue that white people had a ‘right’ not to live next to people who were different from them.” At this point it would not be that much of a surprise if the 2028 GOP platform advocates a return to redlining.

In a variety of ways, the Trump administration and the movement the president leads have become explicitly white supremacist, as much as is possible without saying the word “white.” They may still be workshopping the language they use, but the message is clear: America, in their view, ought to be a country of, by, and for white people. In the service of that goal, they are essentially trying to turn back the clock — both legally and culturally — to before the civil rights movement.

The masks are off

President Trump may be widely unpopular among the public, but one of the things that gives him and his movement power is their willingness to blow right past laws, rules, and norms, often creating a new reality before anyone has a chance to object. Send in the demolition crew to raze the East Wing of the White House, and the haters can complain, but the deed is done.

But it’s not always about timing. In many cases, Trump and his allies say and do things that, if you asked about it before it happened, many people would say, “Well of course they won’t go that far.” But then they do. They essentially shut down the refugee system through which America has long welcomed those fleeing war and oppression — for everyone except white South Africans. They put up a statue to celebrate a white supremacist traitor and key figure in the early KKK. Their young operatives keep getting caught letting their Nazi flags fly. The Supreme Court is about to gut the Voting Rights Act, and in response, Republican states are preparing new district maps that could eliminate almost all congressional representation for Blacks in the South.

Then there’s the extraordinary case of the Department of Homeland Security social media feeds, which have come to bear a disturbing similarity to Nazi propaganda, full of a combination of intense and sometimes violent militarism juxtaposed against happy white families and entreaties to “Protect your homeland, defend your culture.” What precisely does that “culture” consist of? They never say explicitly, but they don’t have to.

In July, the DHS posted this to its social media:

The 1872 painting portrays westward expansion, with an angelic fair-skinned white woman drifting over the landscape as white settlers drive buffalo and Native Americans before them. The criticism the department got for it clearly energized them to do even more; they’ve been posting oil paintings of old-timey scenes of white people doing wholesome things:

Not to be outdone, the Department of Labor is going hard on both the 50s-era paintings (like the one in the tweet at the top of this post, which comes from its X feed) and the Aryan imagery:

And here’s one of my favorites:

For most people that image evokes the 1950s, even though a little internet sleuthing suggests that the Ford Bronco in the picture is probably from the 1967 model year (the Bronco was introduced a year before, but the 1967 version had models with that chrome trim). Put that together with the glass Coke bottle and the scene is supposed to evoke nostalgia for that allegedly more innocent time, with the audacious message “We can return.”

One of the things that makes Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan so effective is that it doesn’t specify when America was supposedly great; it can be whenever you want (though the answer is usually “When I was young”). But if you took a poll of Republicans and asked them when America was great, the top-scoring answer would probably be the 1950s, when economic growth was strong, the country was moving into a hegemonic position in the world, and optimism was everywhere.

Liberals sometimes respond to that description by saying, “Sure, but it wasn’t so great for Blacks or women or gay people or pretty much anyone who wasn’t white and male.” It has become clear that for Republicans, that’s exactly the point. In fact, the growth and opportunity and optimism of that period are almost irrelevant. The reason to roll back the clock to the 50s is that it was the moment before the civil rights movement came along and wrecked everything.

Is the administration just trolling? To a degree, certainly. Trolling has been woven into the political modus operandi of the right; they believe that your version of public debate is weak and ineffectual if it does not shock and offend your enemies. But shock is strategic. The phrase “shock and awe” comes from the Iraq War (though the strategy was formulated a few years before); the point is that with a sufficiently dramatic and alarming incursion, you can paralyze your enemies, which allows you to rapidly win ground.

This is exactly what Trump and the Republicans intend by embracing this kind of full-spectrum white supremacy, in rhetoric, policy, and aesthetics. It is meant to overwhelm liberals and redefine the possible.

There is some hope in the fact that it has already produced a backlash, one that makes it likely Democrats will prevail in the 2026 and 2028 elections. But an awful lot of liberals had assumed that the arc of history bends toward justice and doesn’t bend back. We might argue about policies like affirmative action, but surely the progress of the last 60 or 70 years couldn’t just be undone. We couldn’t go back to a time when it was acceptable for mainstream political figures — let alone an entire party — to advocate explicitly for white supremacy and the dismantling of all our major civil rights laws.

To that, Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the rest of the GOP say, “Oh yeah? Just watch us.”

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