Will Right-Wing Americans Finally Get Their Ethnoreligious State?

For the US, one could say, 2024 is a reminder of 1924. Yes, the nation held an election a century ago—and yes, it was a Republican who won the presidency. That was Calvin Coolidge, and like Trump, in an odd twist, he’d already served as the president. The circumstances were different.

Chosen as Warren Harding’s vice president in 2020, Coolidge took over after Harding died of a heart attack in 1923. Also worth noting, given Trump’s ominous plans for his second term, is the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act), which Coolidge signed into law that year. It favoured Western and Northern Europeans, limited immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, and banned immigration from Asia. This exclusion lasted four decades. 

But then there were big changes in the mid-1960s and the early 1990s, giving rise to the right-wing rage that has found fruition in Trump’s triumphant return to power. One could also mention the Forever Wars, especially the Iraq War, and the 2007-2008 financial meltdown—which led to the Great Recession—as catalysts that paved the way for a populist, demagogic strongman.  

Besides winning the White House, the GOP has reclaimed the Senate and is all-but-certain to retain the House. As for the current Supreme Court, which leans right, most of the justices were appointed by Republican presidents. This total control of the US government has been a long-coveted goal of the conservative movement—or more accurately, the MAGA movement.  

In the wake of Kamala Harris’s admittedly humiliating defeat, she’s been castigated for running a flawed campaign. Needless to say, if the Democrats had won, she’d been praised for being a flawless campaigner! She’s been accused of talking down to voters, talking past voters, not talking to the right voters, talking to the wrong voters, and so on. Some said she didn’t separate herself enough from the Biden administration, while others thought she was a flip-flopper who wasn’t believable. She was too soft on issues for some, but others found her harsh.

Depending on what was at stake, commentators thought she was too progressive or not progressive enough, too far to the left or too close to the centre. She sounded authentic, but she also seemed inauthentic!   

Am I being a little cynical? Perhaps. But we can’t deny that Trump’s hate-filled, often bizarre campaign—which would have been catastrophic for any other candidate—is no longer seen as a liability. Nothing succeeds like success. It’s cool now to be a convicted felon and an insurgent who tried to overturn an election. Being an “outlaw” is popular, as a top-selling T-shirt reveals.  

In a way, Trump won the election even before he formally accepted the nomination. His campaign’s high point came when, just days before the Republican National Convention, he miraculously escaped death or serious injury from a would-be assassin’s bullet. Already a cult figure, he was now unassailable no matter what he said or did. The clip of a bloodied Trump, as he pumped his fist defiantly and shouted, “Fight, fight, fight,” became the 2024 election’s defining image. In retrospect, there was no way he could have lost after that incident. Trump was a messiah, or a would-be monarch whose coronation was preordained. The second assassination attempt came as a confirmation for millions of his followers.  

Were there missteps and miscalculations on the part of the Harris campaign? Certainly, but there were no serious mistakes, considering the hand Harris was dealt, with the migrant crisis being her Achilles’ heel. As an incumbent, she was at a disadvantage among voters experiencing economic pain. On the whole, however, Harris ran a tight, effective campaign.

Unfortunately for her, Trump had become untouchable. Not to forget, as a biracial woman and the child of non-European immigrants, Harris’s path to the White House had been steep from the start. Misogyny, racism, and xenophobia are obstacles that can’t be easily overcome. The Trump campaign’s negative ads, which used age-old tactics to instil fear of the ‘other’, worked; or, at the very least, they didn’t backfire. After all, he has never been shy about crudely denigrating his opponents.  

And there’s a backstory to explain Trump’s rise, as noted. The sweeping changes of the mid-1960s, which saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Immigration and Naturalisation Act, and the Voting Rights Act, took on white dominance—or white supremacy, to put it bluntly.  

What it also did, though the impact wasn’t felt until the 1990s, was bring about demographic change, threatening the power equation. The white-dominated GOP of the 1980s was so secure that it looked as if the Reagan era would never end. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 489 electoral votes (out of 538) and lost only three states (out of 50); in 1984, astonishingly, he picked up 524 electoral votes and lost only one state (Minnesota, the home state of Walter Mondale, Reagan’s Democratic opponent).

This kind of success is unthinkable today.  

The GOP continued to be a force when Reagan’s vice president and successor, George HW Bush, won 426 electoral votes in 1988. Then the Cold War ended, and the ’90s ushered in globalisation and brought the Democrats and Bill Clinton to power. It was a tectonic shift, with the populist revolt beginning even before the 1992 election. Independent candidate Ross Perot, a billionaire businessman from Texas, emerged as an early opponent of globalisation. An economic populist who appealed to the working class, he won almost 20 million votes in that election.  

Meanwhile, not unlike some Christian conservatives, Republican firebrand Pat Buchanan, who took on cultural and social issues, sounded the alarm on a changing America with his blood-and-soil rhetoric. Newt Gingrich, a GOP speaker of the House, was another ‘destructionist’, to use Dana Milbank’s term. Gingrich claimed that ‘classic Americans’ were being replaced by immigrants, thanks to the left (i.e., the Democrats).

These destructionists were harbingers, and their turn on the stage was the opening act before Trump’s arrival. His inner circle now has people, including the influential Stephen Miller, who embrace this Great Replacement theory. 

What about George W Bush, whose reign was troubled from the start? If it hadn’t been for a controversial decision by a right-leaning Supreme Court, Al Gore (who won the popular vote) would have succeeded Clinton. But it was Bush Jr. who became the president in the 2000 election, and he led the country during 9/11, the wars that followed, and the disastrous crash that came at the end of his second term. It brought the Democrats back to power, with Barack Obama becoming the nation’s first non-white president in 2008. That was indeed a historic moment. 

Looking back, it seemed to have triggered a backlash that we’re still dealing with. Trump’s ascendancy, then, can also be seen as a reaction to Bush’s failure and Obama’s rise. And now that the right-wingers finally have their man firmly in power, it seems safe to say that their dream of building an ethnoreligious state—just as Victor Orbán, whom Trump admires, did in Hungary—is within reach. They no longer have to think about forcibly overturning an election.

(Murali Kamma is a managing editor and writer based in Atlanta, Georgia. Views are personal.)