Confederate Heritage Month 2021, April 28: Nullification fever in Arkansas

"Look, it’s pretty basic. A large proportion of America’s rural white folks lost it over Barack Obama, and they ain’t come back yet. They thought Trump was going to return America to 1954, but now he’s gone, and they’re still hiding out in the woods."

So writes Gene Lyons in a column about the state of Arkansas' current effort to return to the Jim Crow era of white supremacy, Arkansas keeps trying to return to 1954 Chicago Sun-Times 04/16/2021

The column is in particular about legislation against transgender children. But he also cites a March anti-abortion bill and also an outright nullification bill against federal gun laws.

While none of those three actions have directly to do with race, they are actions aimed at challenging the authority of the federal government to protect the civil rights of people in the US from states violating them, and legislating a Christian fundamentalist version of so-called traditional values. But all of those are efforts to validate the same kind of abuse of state power to suppress African-Americans from voting and acting that were part of the original Jim Crow segregation system. And every Arkansas legislator and pretty much all their constituents know that.

As Austin Bailey wrote of one of the gun nullification bills as it was making its way through the legislature, "Anyone who has ever taken a United States civics class will recognize the unconstitutionality of the bill." (Arkansas senators declare federal gun laws null and void within state borders Arkansas Times 03/31/2021)

And he elaborates, "[this] audacious bill is a huge F.U. to the federal government, practically a declaration of secession. Its message essentially is that the guys in D.C. can take their laws and shove it."

Gene Lyons diagnosis of the nullification fad:

Arkansas legislators also have declared all federal gun laws null and void within the state, a direct challenge to the Constitution’s supremacy clause that is absolutely certain to fail. Serious gun nuts don’t care. They don’t expect to win. They just want their collective amygdala massaged — the fight-or-flight organ buried deep in the limbic brain.

Pretty much the reason they’re gun nuts to begin with.

See also: Andrew DeMillo, Arkansas lawmakers OK reworked bill that nullifies gun laws AP 04/28/2021;

Bunker Boy Chaos

Is this a man who will submit to a free and fair election?

Not if he can help it.

Indeed, Trump appears to have no interest in being president in the traditional sense. He’s king of the white people in the red states. Anybody who voted against him is an enemy.

To the extent that MAGA means anything, it means restoring the social conditions of the Deep South in the 1950s, an impossible delusion. [my emphasis]

That's Gene Lyons in 2020 is bad, and it’s not half over Chicago Sun-Times 06/04/2020.

He also explains some basic facts about President Bunker Boy:

Chaos is Trump’s only talent. Empowered by false bravado and Daddy’s (and/or Russian mob) money, Trump blunders into something he does not and cannot understand — the casino business, airlines, professional football, now the U.S. government. He listens to nobody, makes one foolhardy blunder after another, bankrupts or otherwise destroys the enterprise, betrays everyone who trusted him, and blames everybody but himself for the disaster.

However, Trump impersonated a business tycoon on a TV show. Millions bought the con. It’s taken him three years and a viral pandemic to bring America to a state of near breakdown, but he’s finally got us there.

So now this most godless of men has taken to posing in front of religious shrines with a Bible. [my emphasis]

Joe Conason notes, "Under ordinary circumstances, open dissent from high-ranking military officials against the actions of civilian political leaders would signal a danger familiar to other countries." (A Timely Warning From The Generals National Memo 06/05/2020)

But in the recent case of former senior military officers issuing serious warning about the illegal use of the military inside the United States:

Speaking out in defense of constitutional order, these retired officers articulated a fundamental principle: Unlawful orders to fire on fellow Americans are not to be obeyed. We live in a republic, not a dictatorship. And should Trump or his cohort harbor any militaristic fantasies about the upcoming election — which he appears likely to lose — well, this uplifting episode marked a line that they shouldn't dare cross.

Wesley Clark talks about the issue in this CNN clip: Retired general: Mattis' statement does two powerful things 06/04/2020. This is an additional clip from the same day from Clark on Sen. Tom Cotton couldn't be more wrong.

Will Trump fans go back to grumbling rather than howling after he's ousted?

Gene Lyons did a recent column called t’s Trump himself, not his supporters, who should scare us Chicago Sun-Times 12/05/2019:

Trump, however, continues to draw adoring crowds to his professional wrestling-style extravaganzas. Like a WWE spectacle, it’s staged as an apocalyptic contest between good and evil: Donald J. Balboa versus Evil Adam Schiff. ...

His removal, Trump predicts, “will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” ..

Ho-hum. At a recent rally in Sunrise, Florida, the president warned that “the same maniacs are pushing that deranged … impeachment. A witch hunt. And a lot of bad things are happening to them. You see what’s happening in the polls? Everybody said: that’s really bull***t.”

The crowd roared happily when Trump said the naughty word. Because that’s what they love about him. He’s rude, crude and he talks like Uncle Otis down at the body shop. Woo-hoo!

But it’s all just part of the show. As for civil war, almost everybody understands that Trump’s a world-class bull****ter. That’s a big part of the fun.

Sure, soreheads overreact. They also get all worked up when WWE champ Brock Lesnar battles The Fiend. Or when Auburn plays Alabama. But everybody’s back at work come Monday morning.

I like Gene Lyons' professional wrestling analogy is a good one. The fans howling for him at his Nuremburg rallies so far haven't gone out afterward and started burning buildings in minority areas or the like.

He also suggests that the comparison some people make of today to the pre-Civil War days is less appropriate than the white South after integration. I agree that the Deep South of the Massive Resistance against integation is more of a parallel to today than pre-1860. After all, in the 1850s there had already been a mini-civil-war in Kansas, a real shooting war with opposing guerrilla groups fighting each other. We haven't hit Bleeding Kansas politically yet.

I was still attending my rural Mississippi high school when it was first fully integrated, and it went remarkably smoothly. It did make a big impression on me that something that the white adults had been saying my whole life would be a horrible disaster obviously turned to not be. I even had a journalism class my senior year in which the teacher and all the other students were black. The teacher had a master's degree from UCLA, which may have made her the best-credentialed teacher in the county at the time, and she had some great stories about the intrigingly weird people in California.

But I'm not quite so optimistic about the prospects for Trump's followers. Post-intregration, there was still a thriving segregtionist-minded subculture in the Deep South, and not always entirely "sub". And an important difference from now is that the liberal-conservative/segregationist-integrationist split was genuinely bipartisan then. Now we have one continually self-radicalizing national party that's operating on a white nationalist ideology. Also, there was no equivalent of FOX News back then.

And the period between Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to the integration of Southern schools nearly 20 years later did contain a lot of ugliness, and not all it coming from the mouths of George Wallace and Ross Barnett and similar leaders. Including grassroots violence and killing in all too many instances.

He also refers to a piece by Anne Applebaum, How America Ends The Atlantic Dec 2019 and specifically to this argument of hers:

Within the living memory of most Americans, a majority of the country’s residents were white Christians. That is no longer the case, and voters are not insensate to the change - nearly a third of conservatives say they face “a lot” of discrimination for their beliefs, as do more than half of white evangelicals. But more epochal than the change that has already happened is the change that is yet to come: Sometime in the next quarter century or so, depending on immigration rates and the vagaries of ethnic and racial identification, nonwhites will become a majority in the U.S. For some Americans, that change will be cause for celebration; for others, it may pass unnoticed. But the transition is already producing a sharp political backlash, exploited and exacerbated by the president. In 2016, white working-class voters who said that discrimination against whites is a serious problem, or who said they felt like strangers in their own country, were almost twice as likely to vote for Trump as those who did not. Two-thirds of Trump voters agreed that “the 2016 election represented the last chance to stop America’s decline.” In Trump, they’d found a defender.

I share the reservation Gene Lyons expresses about that argument. It actually sounds like a version of the diner visits a lot of the press like to do and then inform us that old white people don't feel "listened to" and express vague, more-or-less polite gripes about strange people showing up around town. These kinds of white-people-are-the-real-victims argument coming from white Repbulicans call for some critical thinking, not just taking that pitch as face value. Because, yes, corporate press reporters, racist white people have been known to lie about their racism.

I do think there's a lot to be said for there being an authoritarian core of a third or so of the US population, a lot of whom are genuinely racist white people. But that makes more sense to me as a general framework for why Trump's fans respond to the issues they do and react that way at his public hate fests.