Loaded for Bear: The US right’s war with the 1860s and 1960s is about to reach fever pitch as Gilead looms

4 Nov 2024

This is what Maga represents — a grievance-filled crusade against secularisation and the hard-fought rights of women, minorities and the LGBTQI+ community. It has been baked into its historical DNA since the South lost the Civil War.

The US right has long been at war with two decades a century apart: the 1960s and the 1860s. It wants to stuff the genies of freedom unleashed by those decades back into the bottle, and D-Day for this conflict is Tuesday’s presidential election.

“Both sides in the American Civil War professed to be fighting for freedom,” is how the historian James McPherson opens his dazzling 1988 study of this seminal event in American history, Battle Cry of Freedom.

Almost 160 years after the war ended, these sentiments echo today before what is the most important presidential election in US history since Abraham Lincoln won the White House as a Republican in 1860.

In Tuesday’s contest, both the Democratic Party of Kamala Harris and the Republican Party of Donald Trump claim to be fighting for freedom.

But in this uncivil war, the Democratic Party is carrying the legacy of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. Donald Trump and his Maga Republican cult are the political descendants of the Confederacy, their treason forever etched on 6 January 2021.

When it comes to Donald Trump and his movement, the F-words are entirely appropriate and I don’t mean freedom. They are fascists, finish and klaar, and the stars and bars of the Confederacy are their true banner alongside the Nazi swastika.

The Maga movement is rooted in grievance and backlash, and its initial wave in the wake of the Civil War included campaigns of terror involving the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) against the emancipated slaves of the South and the rollback of the political rights they briefly enjoyed under Reconstruction.

By the 1870s, white supremacy and racial segregation — called apartheid in these parts — was firmly reasserted in the South. The Democratic Party at that time was the party of backlash and white terror, but its late 19th century variant is the true political ancestor of the current Republican Party.

And the KKK was a prototype of the fascist movements that were to come, including Maga, with their “... obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood” in the words of Robert Paxton, the foremost scholar on fascism.

Nightmare decade

A century later, the 1960s became the nightmare decade for the US far right — there is a reason Trump has a thing for the 1950s.

That tumultuous decade saw the rise of the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, a new wave of feminism, and far more activist environmental campaigns. Alongside these progressive movements the anti-Vietnam War protests erupted as well as the counter-culture’s defiance of authority laced with sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

The political progeny of the Confederacy found all of this alarming, and one of the upshots was the rise of the religious right as a key base of the Republican Party. Its holy grail was the overturning of the 1973 Roe v Wade decision by the US Supreme Court which ruled that a woman’s right to have an abortion was consistent with the Constitution.

From 2006 to 2011, I was based in Dallas and the religious right was a big part of my beat. I interviewed Jerry Falwell shortly before he died and many other leading religious righters such as James Dobson, and slaying Roe v Wade was their biggest policy goal by a country mile.

This was achieved in 2022 with the overturning of Roe v Wade by a US Supreme Court that included three justices appointed by Trump during his White House term. This is why many US evangelicals astonishingly regard Trump as an agent of God. Quietly, many probably view him simply as a useful idiot to advance their agenda of creating a Christian nationalist theocracy ruled by white men.

This, in a nutshell, is what Maga represents — a grievance-filled crusade against secularisation and the hard-fought rights of women, minorities and the LGBT community. It has been baked into its DNA since the South lost the Civil War, and the culture wars that emerged from the 1960s have fuelled the blazing flames of right-wing resentment into fully fledged fascism under the guidance of Dear Leader Trump.

Gilead looms

Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood captured the zeitgeist of this backlash brilliantly in her 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale, a stark dystopian depiction of America after a fundamentalist Christian revolution has transformed the country into the theocracy of Gilead.

The 2019 sequel The Testaments and the Showmax series based on both books timeously emerged as this seething cultural conflict was heating up in the Trumpocene.

Read more: Return to Gilead – even more gripping this time around

Its climax will be reached in this election, which remains a coin toss according to most polls.

Maga also has more recent roots in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, which took heavy tolls on the livelihoods of white male blue-collar workers in the US Rust Belt states. The “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin crumbled as a result in 2016, handing Trump his shock victory over Hillary Clinton.

But Trump really has nothing to offer white working-class male voters beyond ginning up the frustration many feel at their loss of status as wages stagnate and decline, leaving them worse off than their parents and grandparents in a reversal of the sharp rise in living standards that took place after World War 2.

It’s all fertile ground for fascism.

The US left and the Democratic Party, it must be said, have often dropped the ball and can come across as “woke” and condescending. If your father and grandfather had good factory or coal mining jobs and you are a white male who is now working as a Walmart greeter and can barely afford the rent on your mobile home, you may find the concept of “white privilege” perplexing.

This US election will either set the stage for Gilead, or it will deliver a blow to the forces of reaction and resentment. Even conservatives should shudder at Trump’s bonkers obsession with tariffs, his threats of retribution, his fables about a stolen election and the racist, theocratic and misogynistic undercurrents he represents.

Backlash

One thing about a backlash though: it can trigger a counter-backlash. Roe v Wade has been struck down and red states such as Texas have been imposing draconian anti-abortion laws. But voters in red states such as Kansas have since defeated ballot initiatives aimed at curbing abortion rights.

A recent NBC news poll found Harris leading Trump among female voters by an eye-popping 16-point margin, 57% to 41%. Men favour Trump by 18 points for a net gender chasm of 34 points.

But there are more female than male voters, and abortion could prove to be the decisive issue that swings the election in favour of Harris, who has a 20-point lead over Trump on the issue of abortion.

Regardless of the outcome, this election is haunted by the 1860s and the 1960s and the right's reaction to what it sees as the demons those decades let loose. That backlash has now morphed into a fascist movement, and Trump’s return to the White House would be the biggest political prize in fascism’s loathsome history.

This election is also haunted by the spectre of Gilead. That is what is at stake as the US heads to the polls on Tuesday. DM

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Nightmare decade

Gilead looms

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