Jonathan P. Baird

I expect that for the next one hundred years historians of all stripes will be analyzing and debating our last presidential election. It was pivotal and it marks a turning point where a plurality of voters decided to move the nation backwards.

While there are many lens through which to view the last election, I wanted to look at the election through the lens of sexual politics. One question that has jumped out: how could so many Americans ignore the reality that the Republican candidate had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct by over two dozen women?

A jury held against Donald Trump in the E. Jean Carroll case both for committing sexual assault and defamation. In a second New York case, he was convicted of 34 felonies, paying hush money to a porn star to cover up an extra-marital affair. Then after winning the presidency for a second time, he nominated others for high office who also faced allegations of sexual impropriety. Having sexual abuse allegations against you appears to be a Trump job qualification. Why didn’t voters care about any of that?

Let me offer an answer: sexism. Sexism is not just an ideology of male supremacy. Historically, it is an institutional practice embedded in laws, business, government and religion. Neither men nor many women want to face the fact of sexist violence against women. It is deeply rooted in sex roles and male supremacy where, until recently, men did not have to answer for piggish or criminal conduct.

The term “domestic violence” (which is an inadequate description for the phenomena) is a relatively recent naming. Before that it was wife-beating. Much violence against women was tolerated and viewed as a private affair, not subject to law. In 1970, marital rape was legal in all fifty states. It was not until 1993 that all states withdrew the spousal exception to rape laws.

The women’s liberation movement had a profound consciousness-raising impact as did #MeToo but in the last few years, #MeToo has receded.

Trump’s behavior reflects the prevailing misogyny that has minimized the importance of violence against women. As he said on the Access Hollywood tape:

“You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful…I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”

He has long thought he has the prerogative and can take unwanted and uninvited sexual initiatives and mostly he has gotten away with it.

If you view the allegations of many of the women who have complained about Trump’s sexual harassment, there is a sameness about the charges. They are catalogued in an article by Mariel Padilla in the 19th. Forcibly reaching under skirts, groping breasts and butts, pushing women up against the wall while grasping for erogenous zones, trying to force his tongue down throats and kissing on the lips without consent were the most common forms of assault.

Of course Trump has said all his accusers are “horrible horrible liars” but the Access Hollywood tape is an unrefuted expose. Trump has also said very revealing things. As the owner of beauty pageants he had a practice of unexpectedly walking into contestants’ dressing rooms when they were changing. He would be the only man in the room while women were standing there with no clothes. In a 2005 interview on the Howard Stern show he said, “I sort of get away with things like that”.

Voters may have had other priorities but they gave a pass. They did not see the women victimized as equivalent to their mothers, wives, daughters or sisters. If their family member was a victim, maybe they would have felt differently. Even women, particularly white women voters, let Trump off the hook for his sexual offenses. Psychiatry professor Judith L. Herman has observed:

“Most women do not in fact recognize the degree of male hostility towards them, preferring to view the relations of the sexes as more benign than they are in fact. Similarly women like to believe that they have greater freedom and higher status than they do in reality.”

Domestic violence remains a major public health problem. In the United States, women experience 4.8 million incidents of physical or sexual assault annually. However, the true prevalence of domestic violence is unknown because many victims are afraid to disclose their personal experience of violence. Many abusers get over in perpetrating because of the challenges in holding them accountable and because of fear on the part of the victim in speaking up.

Beyond the ingrained societal sexism which enabled Trump, there is a deeper factor. The Christian right treated this serial sexual harasser and multiply alleged adulterer like he is a deity. They are also promoting a male supremacist world view with the man as the head of the household. The job of the woman is to be a submissive wife, passive and obedient. These women do not leave their abusers, no matter how violent. They learn to swallow their anger.

A part of the reason for why Trump’s history of sexual abuse was overlooked and forgiven is that the religious sector of his base can justify it. Men who are abusers escape accountability. Even worse, the abuse actually gets a nod of religious approval like it is somehow blessed. There is an allowance for men to abuse. Trump is an example of that.

After the election, the phrase “your body, my choice” appeared online and surged across the internet. The slogan was coined by a little Nazi Incel. It was meant to mock the phrase from the women’s movement “my body, my choice”. It has been followed by posts calling for repeal of the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote. We are talking a cave man mentality.

For women, Making America Great Again is recreating a 1950’s Stepford Wife movie. Turning the clock back serves neither women nor men. The fact that voters overlooked sexism is not a positive statement about America. It is saying women don’t matter. Predatory behavior like Trump’s should not be excused or rewarded. It will only encourage more of the same.

As people sort through election results, one thread that has commonly emerged is the idea that Trump won because he was the “change” candidate. He was the disrupter, who was anti-establishment. This supposedly enabled him to corner the market on voters who wanted to blow up the status quo.

There are a number of variants on that theme. Trump was allegedly authentic because he told it like it was. He was unlike other politicians, more plainspoken. He intended to drain the swamp and purge the Deep State. Trump’s minion, Steve Bannon, said he would deconstruct the administrative state. He appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and is friendly with Dana White and UFC fighters.

Trump’s misogyny and his archaic notion of masculinity are held up as a form of rebellion. The ridiculous memes of blubbery Trump as a highly muscled Rambo figure appeared all over social media. Trump’s history of repeated sexual assault is passed over and is not seen as disqualifying. Instead, his machismo is held up as a virtue. He nominates others accused of sexual impropriety to high office. This is about change as anti-feminism and about silencing women.

Being a soulless entrepreneur who makes millions and is surrounded by beautiful women is what now passes for rebellion. It is a sad perversion of the honorable role of anti-establishment rebel and there is nothing that is in the slightest rebellious about it. It is more like an archetype of the capitalist robber baron. To be more specific, Trump fits the archetype of the huckster and con man who preys on the weak.

Whatever the efforts to repackage Trump and his MAGA movement as “rebellious”, they are, in fact, a movement of, by, and for the billionaire class which spared no expense to see him elected. These billionaires were buying the politician who would feather their nests and not interfere with their private pursuit of endless billions, mansions, mega-yachts, island hideaways and even space odysseys. Trump was the “greed is good” candidate.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, gave Trump’s campaign over $130 million. Timothy Mellon, heir to the Mellon family, donated as least $115 million to the campaign. A laundry list of other billionaires including Peter Thiel, Miriam Adelson, Howard Lutnick, Linda McMahon, Vivek Ramaswamy, Bill Ackman, Diane Hendricks, John Paulson, Scott Bessent, Woody Johnson and Marc Andreessen went all in. The circle of billionaires supporting Trump is similar to the oligarchs around Putin.

The fact that Trump won many working class voters means nothing about the trajectory of his administration. His advisors told Axios that on day one he is going to push “a business-friendly agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and expanded energy production” and “will fill his top ranks with billionaires, former CEOs’, tech leaders and loyalists”. The veneer that the GOP was for workers will be quickly stripped away.

As someone who lived through the 1960’s, I know something about what it means to be anti-establishment. It is not about posturing a fake image of cool. The American ruling class has created a society of vast economic inequality where grossly disproportionate wealth goes to the top 1%. Today the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 92%. We don’t guarantee health care. We fail to recognize the urgency of the climate crisis. The economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote:

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of motives, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.”

Being anti-establishment is about fighting the distorted priorities of unfettered capitalism. 60% of us live paycheck to paycheck. One survey found 63% of workers were unable to pay a $500 emergency expense. On the other hand, things have never been better for billionaires. They have more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes.

I would suggest my own definition of being anti-establishment and it is not about having tattoos. It is caring about the pain and suffering of the millions of working class Americans who have been screwed by the system. The labor leader Eugene V. Debs put it best:

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”

Being anti-establishment is not about getting rich, unjustified hatred against immigrants, indifference to others, being sexist, racist or homophobic or being opposed to science. Change comes in different varieties and the shaking up the status quo Trump offers is an illusion.

As distraught Democrats consider the reasons for Trump’s gains and their electoral losses, I would counsel against despair. Democrats can certainly come back. It is important that there is wide debate about the reasons for the Democrats’ poor performance but some things are clear and they have been best articulated by Sen. Bernie Sanders. To quote him:

“There was no appreciation – no appreciation – of the struggling and suffering of millions and millions of working-class people. And unless you recognize that reality, and have a vision of how you get out of that, I think you’re not going to be going very far as a political party.”

In the last election, the Democrats failed to recognize peoples’ anger or their suffering. Saying the economy was good when it was hurting so many was inexcusable.

We can do so much better. Democrats have the great example of FDR. While certainly not a flawless figure, his example of uniting a broad majority still provides a model for how Democrats can rebound. It is only a matter of time before Trump and his administration are more widely despised. Many people seem to like authoritarians but they will soon be dissatisfied with outcomes. That is entirely predictable.

I admit to a fascination with the holes in American history. That is, the time periods outside our blockbuster events like the Revolution, the Civil War and the 20th century world wars. There are periods where historical memory has failed and our collective past is lost.

One such period is the time after the betrayal of Reconstruction in the 1890’s. What is remembered, if at all, might be the name of a President or a Supreme Court decision. President-elect Trump cited President William McKinley who served from 1897 to 1901 to promote his tariff ideas. Lawyers remember Plessy v Ferguson, the separate but equal decision. The narrative thread about the 1890’s is non-existent. It is a black hole.

I was reading an article by Sherillyn Ifill, the civil rights activist, who quoted a historian who had called the period after the end of Reconstruction “the nadir”. She mentions lynching, convict leasing and sharecropping as aspects of that era. It was a period of racial fascism in the South and it was a time when white supremacy ruled the country as a whole. Protest against racism, certainly as reflected in the two major political parties, was at a low ebb.

However, contrary to the shreds of history we have inherited, there was more opposition to the prevailing order than Is now remembered. When I was down South in September, I learned about the 1895 anti-racist struggle in South Carolina. The story has been sidelined but it is important to remember because it contradicts the misleading impression that people didn’t fight back.

After the Civil War and during Reconstruction in 1868, South Carolina passed a new progressive state constitution that gave rights to all. For over 30 years, blacks ran for and were elected to high political office in South Carolina. Under the 1868 constitution, South Carolina removed discrimination and allowed voting rights for black men. An effort to extend suffrage for women was defeated.

The Reconstruction government in South Carolina created a public school system. Nothing like that existed before. It was the first law passed in the South to desegregate public schools. For the first time, black and white students attended public school together.

It would be hard to overstate the racist reaction engendered by the desegregation effort. Following the example of Mississippi, South Carolina’s Governor, “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, organized a constitutional convention designed to strip black citizens of the right to vote even though the Fifteenth Amendment of the U.S.Constitution had been passed to prevent exactly efforts like this.

Tillman had a long history stirring up racial hatred. He was part of a mob that massacred blacks in 1876 at Hamburg, South Carolina and he bragged about murdering black South Carolinians during Reconstruction. Later as a U.S. Senator, he defended lynching on the floor of the Senate. He ran on a goal of eliminating black political power.

In the 1890’s, civil rights, particularly voting rights, had deteriorated so much that on August 29, 1892, this notice appeared in the Charleston News and Courier:

“A separate list of all Negro voters must be kept and returned with the poll list. Every Negro applying to vote must produce a written statement by ten white men who will swear that they know of their own knowledge that such voters voted for [Governor Wade] Hampton in 1876 and have voted the Democratic ticket continuously ever since. This statement must be placed in the ballot box by the managers.”

On July 10, 1895, several months before Tillman’s convention was to take place, 60 black leaders convened in Columbia. Six black delegates were elected to attend the constitutional convention. These included Robert Smalls, a Civil War hero and later a Congressman and William J. Whipper, a lawyer. Both had played a role in drafting the progressive 1868 state constitution. Smalls had been the architect of the amendment creating public schools in South Carolina.

Both Smalls and Whipper had distinguished records. Smalls smuggled his family out of slavery when he commandeered a Confederate transport ship in Charleston Harbor in 1862. He piloted the ship to a Union-controlled area. He became famous for that and his example helped to persuade President Lincoln to accept black soldiers into the Union army. Smalls went on to a political career serving in the Louisiana State House and Senate and then Congress.

Whipper was an abolitionist, a state legislator, a circuit court judge and an outstanding trial lawyer. He was one of the first black lawyers practicing before a legal tribunal in South Carolina. In the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention Whipper made a motion, ultimately unsuccessful, to extend the right to vote to women.

In the face of racist insults and ridicule, the six black leaders eloquently made the case for universal suffrage. They contended with white delegates voicing racist slurs and with a vicious press campaign accusing blacks of incompetence, criminality and corruption.
A number of the most powerful speeches are quoted in a book by Damon L. Fordham, The 1895 Segregation Fight in South Carolina. Fordham cites Whipper’s speech in response to Tillman’s allegations of black corruption:

“The car of Negro progress is coming, and instead of allowing it to come on, you wish to stop it. You may just as well make up your minds that the Negro will rise. He will not be crushed. The Negro will rise, sooner or later, crush us as you may.”

The final vote on the Convention was 116-7 in favor of Tillman’s constitution. The black delegates refused to sign the completed constitution. Smalls said he would rather “walk home” to Beaufort before signing such a document. Not only were black voting rights curtailed but under the new constitution schools and public facilities were segregated again.

Tillman’s constitution didn’t explicitly say blacks couldn’t vote to avoid a Fifteenth Amendment violation but it included a requirement of owning $300 in property and a literacy requirement targeted at blacks. The requirements effectively precluded black voting. Fordham writes that the literacy test allowed registrars to allow illiterate white voters while denying most literate black voters. Tillman and his allies stacked the deck.

The bravery of the black leaders in the context of that nadir exposed the barbarism of South Carolina’s power structure. They resisted nobly and inspired those who learned about their speeches and actions. We are now in a new nadir. We can learn about the imperative of courage and resistance from those who faced a far more difficult situation than what we face today.

Outside New Orleans, there is a historical site, the Whitney Plantation, dedicated to showing the history of slavery. It is an indoor and outdoor museum. For many years, the place operated as a sugar, indigo and rice plantation. There are a series of exhibits on the property showing slave trade maritime routes, a memorial honoring the over 350 enslaved people who worked the plantation between 1752-1865 and markers describing local historical events.

One striking exhibit on the walk path outside was a garden full of sculpted heads on poles commemorating leaders of the 1811 German Coast Uprising. Although it is little known, the German Coast Uprising in an area near New Orleans was the largest slave revolt in the history of the United States. The story is well told in American Uprising, a book by Daniel Rasmussen.

The uprising began on January 8, 1811 on the plantation of Colonel Manuel Andry, who was a commander of the local militia. Over a period of months prior to the uprising, enslaved people secretly organized cells at a number of plantations over a 40 mile range. They planned an audacious scheme to capture New Orleans, free all the people enslaved there and emancipate themselves. They knew failure meant death.

On the evening of January 8, 25 insurgents broke into the Andry mansion, killed Andry’s son and they took muskets and ammunition from the armory. From that plantation it was a 41 mile march to New Orleans. On the march, the insurgents burned several plantation houses, killed two planters and picked up many recruits. The number of enslaved who joined the rebellion swelled to between 200 and 500.

A number of “maroons” (enslaved people who had escaped slavery and lived in the woods) joined the march along the way. The white planters, finding out about the revolt and being massively outnumbered, deserted their plantations and fled with their families to New Orleans.

The leader of the revolt was Charles Deslondes, a Creole mulatto, who had been a plantation overseer. That position allowed him more freedom to move and surreptitiously organize. It was a position of trust from the planters but Deslondes had his own agenda. He, along with a small group of co-conspirators, meticulously planned the uprising.

Contrary to any mythology about contented slaves and benevolent masters, the chattel slavery system in Louisiana was known for brutal conditions. A sugar plantation was run like a military camp and Deslondes had operated like a general. He inflicted punishments like whipping for any infraction of the behavioral code.

Death and inhuman torture were endemic to slavery. 40% of those captured in Africa died before boarding slave ships. 10% died in the Middle Passage or shortly after arrival. Only 30% of slaves captured in Africa survived past the third or fourth year of laboring as slaves. The plantation work was grueling and the hours were long. Once harvest began, slaves worked 16 hours or more a day, 7 days a week.

One significant problem in the German Coast Uprising was the enslaveds’ inability to obtain enough weapons and ammunition. Only one half of the slave army were armed with bullets and fusils. Many had to rely on sabers, machetes, axes, and cane knives.

On January 10 and 11, the planters’ militia counter-attacked. They had a great military advantage with their weaponry. They drove the insurgents into the woods. Many enslaved people were killed in battle and others fled into the swamps.

Charles Deslondes was among the slaves driven into the woods. The slaveholders used bloodhounds to track the rebels and Deslondes was caught. The militia men chopped off Deslondes’ hands, broke his thighs and shot him. They then roasted his remains on a pile of straw.

The reprisals against the insurgents were savage and unrelenting. The militia cut off heads of the slave corpses and put them on display. By the end of January, around 100 dismembered bodies appeared on pikes in the center of New Orleans. The garden at Whitney Plantation is intended to remember this atrocity.

A special tribunal presided over by prominent planters ordered summary executions. The insurgents were referred to as “brigands”. Beheadings were the prime method for injecting fear and terror in the oppressed and for putting down slave revolts. Rasmussen writes:

“The public destruction of the rebels was, in slaveholders’ minds, a necessary precondition for the safety of the plantation regime and the prevention of a ferocious revolt along the lines of Haiti.”

There can be little doubt the Haitian revolution, the first successful slave insurrection led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and fought between 1791-1804, had a profound effect on enslaved people living in the American South. The story got around and it offered inspiration that slavery could be overcome and defeated. Haiti declared its independence in 1804 after defeating three European armies, including Napoleon’s powerful military. Haiti was the first nation to permanently ban slavery.

The slaveholders did not respond to the uprising with any reconsideration of slavery. They doubled down. The Louisiana legislature compensated the slaveholders $300 (a very significant sum in those days) for each and every slave killed in the insurrection. Money was also appropriated by the state to pay the slaveholders’ damages for the mansions burnt by the enslaved.

You have to ask: why has this story been disappeared? It was the largest slave revolt in American history. I see it as a cover-up, part of the effort to minimize slavery’s history and pretend racism was not central to America’s story. The German Coast Uprising shows both the evil of slavery and the ferocious opposition it engendered. Conditions were so intolerable that the enslaved opted for violent revolution rather than the living death of slavery.

The slaveholders saw their slaves as no better than cattle. Heads on pikes was their response.

Teaching American history honestly means ending unforgivable silences around events like the German Coast Uprising. It is not a divisive concept to tell this story. It Is not about making white people feel uncomfortable. Intellectual integrity demands we know about it.

On US Highway 80, in the middle of a 54 mile stretch between Selma and Montgomery, there is a small unmarked memorial on the hillside near the road. It is a rectangular, fenced-in space dedicated to the memory of civil rights activist, Viola Liuzzo. The location is near the spot Liuzzo died.

I have now seen it twice and there is an aura of loneliness about this very deserted stop. No Alabama highway signs announce the destination. Driving by, it can be easily missed.

Viola Liuzzo was the only white woman killed down South during the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. Her story has largely been forgotten but she was a true hero who demonstrated courage and dedication to social justice. Both times I have viewed the marker, I left feeling the gravity of her actions. She stepped up bravely in a most dangerous situation. It is wrong that she has not been recognized and honored by Alabama and the nation.

Like millions of others, Liuzzo watched the events of Bloody Sunday unfold on TV. It was March 7, 1965. The nation was transfixed watching 600 civil rights marchers led by 25 year old John Lewis get brutally beaten by Alabama state troopers.

For months, efforts in Selma to register black voters had been stalled. Just 156 of Selma’s 15,000 blacks of voting age were on the voting rolls. Tensions had increased dramatically after Alabama state troopers murdered Jimmy Lee Jackson in the nearby town of Marion in February.

After the police violence prevented the Bloody Sunday march, Dr. King asked people who believe in justice to come to Selma. 25,000 people responded, including Liuzzo, who was inspired to make the trek. She had cried watching Bloody Sunday. She tried to get others to accompany her without success. She drove alone from her home in Detroit to Selma.

Liuzzo’s husband, Jim Liuzzo, was not happy his wife was going to Alabama but he could not dissuade her. The Liuzzos had five children. They both knew it was dangerous. Viola knew the South well. As a younger person she had lived in Jim Crow Georgia and in Tennessee but she was determined to go.

After that first attempted march on Bloody Sunday, activists obtained a court order that permitted a new protest and march. It occurred March 21-25, 1965. During her time in Selma, Liuzzo marched the first day. Then she worked at a hospitality desk welcoming and registering volunteers. Later she worked at a first aid station. She allowed her car to be used to ferry marchers to locations they needed to go.

After the march, she was planning to go home the next day. She spent her last day driving people back and forth between Selma and Montgomery. She and a 19 year old black man, Leroy Moton, were on their last run back to Montgomery when they were followed by a car full of Klansmen.

It is possible the Klansmen noticed her Michigan plates and it is also possible they saw a black man and a white woman in the car together. Southern whites of that era hated outside agitators (especially from the North) and race-mixing. Whether what happened was spontaneous or planned remains a subject of controversy.

To this day, the details of the attack are disputed but the prevailing story was that after a high speed chase, Liuzzo, who was the driver, was shot and murdered by one of the Klan members who shot from a car racing alongside. Liuzzo’s car went off the road, crashing into a fence. Moton survived but Liuzzo died instantly from the gunshots to her head.

The case was quickly solved because among the four Klansmen in the car was an undercover FBI informant, Gary Tommy Rowe. Rowe reported to the FBI about the events of the evening. He had a reputation for violence both because he boasted about it and also because he had previously beaten Freedom Riders. The other Klansmen in the car fingered Rowe as the trigger man. Many questions arose about Rowe’s conduct and why he had not acted to save Liuzzo.

The FBI and its Director, J. Edgar Hoover, played a despicable role in these events. Hoover opposed the civil rights movement as a threat to civil order. In an effort to deflect attention from the FBI’s negligence, Hoover conducted a smear campaign against Liuzzo. I believe it was this smear campaign, similar to what they conducted against Dr. King, that erased Liuzzo from our history.

The smear campaign was vicious. Hoover leaked rumors to the press that Liuzzo was a drug addict, that she was having an affair with Leroy Moton, that she was emotionally unstable and that she had abandoned her children. Hoover scapegoated Liuzzo to hide the FBI’s disgraceful role, especially the fact a key FBI informant was in the car with the Klansmen.

The Liuzzo family suffered greatly. Local Detroit racists burnt a cross on their lawn, fired bullets into their home.and dumped garbage on their lawn. The Liuzzo children were called “n—er lovers” and actually had rocks thrown at them on their way to school. Hate mail and obscene phone calls were relentless. It got so bad Jim Liuzzo had to hire an armed security guard to protect his home. The emotional stress on the family was enormous.

After a hung jury in the first state court murder trial, the Klansmen charged in Liuzzo’s murder were acquitted by an all-white male jury. The racism in those proceedings was off-the-charts. In open court, Matt Murphy, lead defense counsel for the Klansmen, called Liuzzo “ a white n—er who turned her car over to a black n—er for the purpose of hauling n——ers and communists back and forth”. That vignette captures the flavor of the trial.

The Klansmen in the car, with the exception of Rowe were later convicted in federal court on the charge of conspiracy to violate Liuzzo’s civil rights. They received 10 year sentences. Rowe was also subsequently indicted for murder but that case failed. The court said Rowe had immunity from prosecution because of a deal he made for testifying against the other Klansmen.

In 1983, 18 years after her murder, in a civil case in federal court, the Liuzzo family sued the FBI for its responsibility in Viola’s death. The Court rejected the Liuzzos’ suit, unbelievably saying that the plaintiffs failed to show the FBI had been negligent in directing their agent. To add insult to injury, the Court ordered the Liuzzos to pay the government’s court costs of $80,000. After the TV show 20/20 aired a segment, the Justice Department dropped the court cost claim.

The Liuzzo marker on US Highway 80 has been repeatedly desecrated and defaced. In 1997, vandals painted a large Confederate flag across the face of the stone. This seems symbolic of the ugly effort to slander and discredit Viola Liuzzo. She deserves so much better. She died at age 39. She stands in the best tradition of Americans who selflessly fought white supremacy, racism, and segregation.

Her death added much impetus to President Johnson’s effort to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Maybe someday America will have a different take on who its real heroes are.

Almost nine years ago, I started writing about Donald Trump and fascism. Then I raised the question whether Trump and his MAGA movement were fascist. My Jewish, anti-fascist antenna were buzzing.

At that time, many political observers dismissed the idea. They typically pointed out the differences between classical German and Italian fascism and what was going on in the United States. They didn’t engage the possibility that fascism might take new forms in different historical periods.

In 2024, the verdict is in. Trump and his MAGA movement can be accurately classified as fascist. Of course, the American variant of fascism is not a duplicate of past models but the word still fits. Because the word remains a political football used by both sides, I will make the case for why the label is appropriate for Trump.

Fascism requires an us and a them. In Germany it was the Nazi Aryans and the Jews. In America, Trump is demonizing immigrants (who are largely people of color) and he is setting them against white Christians. Back in 2015, it started with him talking about Mexico sending rapists. He later objected to immigrants from “shithole countries”. Now he falsely claims Haitians are eating pets. He refers to immigrants as “vermin”.

Trump has strung together a horrifying pack of lies designed to dehumanize and create a hated other. He makes unsupported wild assertions about foreign insane asylums and prisons being emptied with those inhabitants coming to America. He says immigrants commit horrendous crimes because “it’s in their genes” and “they are poisoning the blood of our country”. This is straight-up Hitler-talk out of Mein Kampf.

Trump has been talking about “the enemy within”, invoking the idea that the military should be used against protesting Americans. He says America is “an occupied country” awaiting its liberation from migrant criminals who are “the most violent people on earth”. The talk has no relationship to what is actually going on in America. Trump’s hellscape does not exist. As Ashley Parker wrote in the Washington Post:

“In Donald Trump’s imaginary world, Americans can’t venture out to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged or raped.”

Fascists sell fear of the other and as the election gets closer, the rhetoric has ramped up. Aaron Rupar writes:

“Trump’s closing message is a full-blown hate campaign against black and brown people. Historians will look back in astonishment that this terrifying reality wasn’t the subject of wall to wall coverage and commentary in weeks leading up to the election. He’s not hiding anything.”

During the Republican National Convention we all saw the signs “Mass Deportation Now”. Trump and his advisors plan a vast 21st century version of concentration camps designed for mass detention prior to mass expulsions. They plan to begin in January 2025.

Such drastic action requires a more compliant press that will not get in the way. Contrary to the First Amendment, Trump has called for the broadcast licenses of CBS and ABC to be revoked because he believes they have been unfair to him. He has said MSNBC should be investigated for “treason”. He has called for revising libel laws so it would be easier to sue reporters and media outlets for critical coverage.

Part of the road to authoritarianism is the emasculation of a free press. Government action against journalists is highly chilling. Trump wants a cowed media afraid to criticize him because of possible consequences. A weak press devoted to propaganda praising the Great Leader is the fascist norm.

Timothy Snyder has said fascism is about a cult of the will. MAGA is a cult of personality and reason takes a back seat to emotion. Fascists have no use for the rule of law or constitutions. Violence and lies are central to the fascist project.

Trump is an embodiment of the Big Lie. He pushes conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and he clings to the utterly discredited mythology he won. All who care about democracy must be vigilant about the Trump team’s efforts after the 2024 election and before the new president is inaugurated. They were bumbling in the aftermath of the 2020 election. They have had four years to plan for this upcoming moment.

Fascists want power at all costs. If Trump is successful, do not be surprised to see him fire the entire senior staff of the DOJ, FBI, and top military staff in all branches. Loyalty to Trump will be the overriding job qualification. If Trump loses, expect many state-level election challenges and expect him to float the narrative of widespread non-citizen voting. He has raised the spectre of hordes of illegals crossing the border to somehow mysteriously vote. This fits in neatly with the far right’s Great Replacement Theory.

It should not be surprising that the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Army Gen. Mark Milley , has called Trump “a total fascist”. He saw enough.

The historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat says that since 2015 Trump has been taking Americans and his followers on a journey conditioning them step by step instilling hatred in a group, then escalating. Trump has gotten way too much of a pass on his absurd verbiage. I worry that as a society we have become dulled and anesthetized to the danger.

An earlier generation of Americans had a noble history of opposing fascism in World War 2. Now it is our turn.

We have just witnessed two, back-to-back monster hurricanes, Helene and Milton. The storms were supercharged by climate change. The storms passed over ultra-warm temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. The heated waters acted like a fuel, intensifying the hurricanes and making them far more powerful than they might otherwise have been.

A new study by researchers with the World Weather Attribution, an international network of scientists who conduct rapid studies to assess the impact of climate change in major weather events found climate change made Hurricane Helene stronger and wetter. Ben Clarke, an author of the report called climate change “a total game changer” for hurricanes like Helene and he said:

“We found that essentially all aspects of [Hurricane Helene] were amplified by climate change to different degrees, and we’ll see more of the same as the world continues to warm.”

Clarke explained that it is not the frequency of hurricanes which has changed. It is the intensification of storms. The study found that rainfall from Hurricane Helene was about 10% heavier due to human-caused climate change and winds were intensified 11%. There is no mystery about what is behind the climate change. There is a scientific consensus: burning fossil fuels adds heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere which causes both air and water temperatures to rise.

The summer of 2024 was the hottest on record and this year is likely to be the warmest ever measured. Up until this year, 2023 was the warmest year on record. The warming trend is beyond dispute. In his book, The Heat Will Kill You First, Jeff Goodell writes:

“Right now we are more than halfway to 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) from preindustrial temperatures, which scientists have long warned is the threshold for dangerous climate change. The reports of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are full of harrowing details of what might happen to our world with 3.6 degrees of warming, from collapsing ice sheets to crop-killing drought.”

I have been struck by how in spite of increasing and repeated climate disasters, politicians on both sides fail to put the superstorms in context and sideline the subject of climate change. They minimize the gravity of the amplified heat. There is a tendency to see each storm in isolation like they are unrelated and to miss the pattern in how our world has changed.

This has been reflected in the failure of both parties to situate climate change as a central issue in the presidential campaign. Undeniably though, the position of the Republicans has been far worse. Trump calls the science of climate change a ”scam” and a “hoax”. He mindlessly promises to “drill, baby, drill”. He wants to do away with new pollution standards for vehicles and power plants. And it is hard to think he is kidding: in his first term, he rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations.

Republican climate denialism is so extreme that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law requiring that climate change will not be considered when crafting energy policy. His legislation literally removed the words “climate change” from many state laws. This is turning science denial into state policy. Considering its recent hurricane history, Florida should make the ostrich the state bird.

As for the Democrats, at least Vice-President Harris calls climate change “an existential threat” and says the United States needs to act urgently to address it. She is not a climate change denier. She wants to expand the government’s role fighting climate change by regulating fossil fuels and by incentivizing the use of renewable energy.

At the same time, Harris has not made climate change policy a central pillar of her campaign. She doesn’t talk about it much. She has backed away from Green New Deal rhetoric and has cast herself as a pro-business pragmatist. She has bragged about America’s level of oil production during her tenure as Vice-President and she reversed her position on fracking.

So we have one entirely retrograde party that will do the bidding of fossil fuel executives and the other party taking an ambiguous pro-environment position. At least the Biden-Harris administration set a goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030.

What is missing is any sense of urgency around climate. Extreme heat is remaking our planet and the clock is ticking. How much time do we have before the climate becomes unbearable or uninhabitable for life? Greta Thunberg has written:

“The climate crisis is about time. If you leave out the aspect of time, then it is just one topic among other topics. If you take away the countdown, then a collapsing glacier, a forest fire or a record heatwave is nothing more than three independent news events – a series of isolated natural disasters. If you fail to include the aspect of time, the climate crisis is not a crisis.”

The human response to climate change matters tremendously. An effective response could lessen the collective harm of unregulated greenhouse gas emissions. We can effect the speed and extent of the rising heat. That alone could save millions of lives and allow for the survival of more biodiversity.

Part of the climate denialism we are seeing now is the retreat into conspiracy theories and misinformation. Twitter/X is full of absurd postings about globalist cabals geoengineering the weather.

Climate denialism endangers all humanity and all life on earth. As humans, we have an amazing ability to be diverted by distractions. I am reminded of that book title Amusing Ourselves to Death. In this election we must vote like climate matters because it does.

There is a quote from the writer, Edward Abbey, that I have always liked:

“…there are plenty of heroes and heroines everywhere you look. They are not famous people. They are generally obscure and modest people doing useful work, keeping their families together and taking an active part in the health of their communities, opposing what is evil (in one way or another) and defending what is good.”

Those words could describe the Alabama lawyer, Fred Gray. On my recent trip South organized by the Nation Magazine, our group had an opportunity to meet with Attorney Gray in Tuskegee. He is now 93. He became a lawyer back in the 1950’s when there were hardly any African Americans able to be in that role. Back then it was very dangerous to be a Black lawyer in the South, especially one devoted to civil rights.

Gray has had a remarkable career. He grew up in segregation, opened his law office in 1954 and his early goal was “to destroy everything segregated I could find”.

Dr. King once called Gray “chief counsel of the protest movement”. For years, he was counsel to both Dr King and Rosa Parks whenever they needed legal help. Along with a university professor, Jo Ann Robinson, Gray planned the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He became a lawyer for 15 year old Claudette Colvin and for Rosa Parks. Both were arrested for refusing to obey a bus driver’s orders to relinquish their bus seat.

Gray had been looking for a chance to challenge the constitutionality of Montgomery’s segregation ordinances and Alabama’s segregation statutes. In the case of Browder v Gayle, Gray challenged the laws that required segregation of the races on city buses in Montgomery.

Gray worked closely with a number of lawyers from the NAACP including Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter as well as a white lawyer, Clifford Durr. There was much personal retaliation directed against Gray by local racists and by the Alabama power structure. He received bomb threats, crank phone calls, hate mail and experienced an attempted stabbing.

After filing Browder v Gayle, he received a draft notice that he was re-classified 1-A. He had had 4-D draft status because he was also minister in a church. Gray was a preacher in the Church of Christ. The head of Selective Service, Lewis Hershey had to intervene the night before Gray was going to be made to ship out for military service. Hershey stopped it. Gray later found out that the Montgomery County and Alabama state bar association had wanted him re-classified and drafted into service.

In June 1956, the federal court in Alabama ruled in the Browder case that city ordinances and the state statute requiring segregation were unconstitutional. The case was appealed up to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court upheld the Alabama decision and found city and state law violated both the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. This was the first case to establish such a precedent.

In the course of the Montgomery bus boycott, Gray developed a close working relationship with Dr. King. He and Jo Ann Robinson had picked King to be the public spokesman for the bus protest. Gray also became Ralph Abernathy’s lawyer. Abernathy told him, “Fred, you keep me out of jail and I will keep you out of hell”. Abernathy, in addition to being frequently arrested for civil rights activism, was also a Baptist minister.

As is the case now with voter suppression, back in 1957 the White Citizens Councils of Alabama devised a gerrymandering plan to nullify the potential African American vote in Tuskegee. They changed the city boundaries from a square to what Gray called a “25-sided sea dragon”. Lines were drawn to exclude substantially all African Americans while retaining all white votes.

In the case Gomillion v Lightfoot, Gray litigated against the racial gerrymandering being perpetrated by Alabama. The case also went up to the Supreme Court and Gray argued it. He had prevailed on the plaintiffs’ attorneys to argue that Alabama was violating the Fifteenth Amendment right to vote. Surprisingly, in a 9-0 opinion authored by Justice Felix Frankfurter, the Court wrote:

“When a legislature thus singles out a readily isolated segment of a racial minority for special discriminatory treatment, it violates the Fifteenth Amendment.”

Justice Frankfurter saw racial gerrymandering more clearly than the Supreme Court does today. Witness the 2024 South Carolina decision in Alexander v South Carolina that diminished the influence of Black voters through redistricting. In an interesting reversal after the Gomillion case was resolved, the city of Tuskegee asked Gray to become city counsel and he agreed. The Gomillion case was the first racial gerrymandering case that the Supreme Court ever considered.

I also need to mention the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the Pollard et al v United States case. Beginning in 1932 and continuing for 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service committed a massive fraud against 623 African American men. The men were misled into participating in a study of untreated syphilis sponsored by the government. The Public Health Service failed to disclose to the men both that they had syphilis and that treatment was available.

The Public Health Service led the men to think they were being properly treated for whatever diseases they had when they were not being treated at all. The Study was racially motivated and it discriminated against African Americans in that no whites were selected to participate in the Study. Only those who were poor, uneducated, rural and African American were recruited.

The Public Health Service failed to obtain the participants’ written consent to be part of the Study. There were no rules and regulations governing the Study.

Gray was counsel in the class action against the government. The U.S. government had to admit to wrongdoing and had to compensate the aggrieved parties.

In Gray’s varied and effective efforts to end segregation, it must be noted he was lawyer for the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers on Bloody Sunday in 1965. The publicity from that march led directly to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Gray also successfully litigated the systematic exclusion of blacks from jury service and his cases ended up integrating all state institutions of higher learning in Alabama. On July 7, 2022, President Biden awarded Fred Gray the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

At a time when we are moving backwards on civil rights, it was inspiring to meet a man who has accomplished so much and who was still very much in the fight.

This October marks 15 years since my sister, Lisa Baird, died. The above photo is a favorite of mine. Lisa was spending the summer working at the Northern Cheyenne Indian reservation in Lame Deer , Montana. I wanted to offer a few quotes that evoke Lisa:

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul.” John Keats

“I like unhappy people. I understand them. Suffering creates character and human feeling. Cheerful, happy people seem like idiots to me. They seem to fly over the surface of life and never to know its meaning. They are not close to the heart of humanity but are remote and isolated. Perhaps that is why they can remain cheerful.” Nym Wales

“Unrelenting revolutionary activity coupled with boundless humanity – that alone is the real life-giving force of socialism. A world must be overturned, but every tear that has flowed and might have been wiped away is an indictment; and a man hurrying to perform a great deed who steps on even a worm out of unfeeling carelessness commits a crime.” Rosa Luxemburg

“The Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal will take care of themselves. Look after the courts of the poor, who stand most in need of justice. The security of the republic will be found in the treatment of the poor and the ignorant. In indifference to their misery and helplessness lies disaster.” Charles Evans Hughes

“Walk tall as the trees; live strong as the mountains; be gentle as the Spring winds; keep the warmth of Summer in your heart and the Great Spirit will always be with you.” Native American chant