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“There is nothing scarier than scared white
people,” Omaha poet and civic activist Michelle Troxclair was quoted
last week in an NPR report about a questionable “self-defense”
shooting of a black man, James Scurlock, in North Omaha. And nothing
has been more profitable – politically and financially – for Donald
Trump than scared white people. He rode a wave of resentment and
fear to the White House four years ago by aggregating them into a
self-aware personal constituency.
The gratuitous and protracted killing of George
Floyd by Minneapolis police on Memorial Day spurred an unprecedented
outpouring of black American demands for police accountability and
systemic change – beginning in Minneapolis, with some high
visibility instances of property destruction, looting, and violence.
But in the main, nationwide protests have been peaceful. They also
exhibit hitherto unseen transracial and societal solidarity, well
outside the urban areas where protest began. This is a rapidly
developing constituency with the potential to drive a major
recalibration of American society.
Much remains uncertain. But the breadth of the
perception gap builds on an already stunning polarization in
American society as the November elections approach – and the
prevalence of firearms (and their centrality in the identity, in
particular, among Trump’s constituency) makes this a particularly
volatile moment. What became abundantly clear with Trump’s attempt
to militarize responses to protests and unrest, as well as having
Lafayette Square cleared of peaceful protesters for his photo op at
St. John’s Church, was that there are no limits to his efforts to
drive polarization. It is not incidental to his agenda. It is
essential.
The political dynamics playing out at present
emerge organically from the soil of America’s four centuries of
racial oppression and inequity. But the Black Lives Matter Movement
and demonstrations nationwide gained a global resonance and
solidarity, spurring societal reflections and calls for justice.
These are both closely related to the abuse of power which generated
the popular outrage – systemic police brutality, but also local
issues of systemic unfairness and lack of reckoning with the past.
So while this historical moment emerged with specific American
contours, it is a global one.
Some parallels can be made from quarters not
typically high in the US public consciousness. Trump’s operating
system is strongly reminiscent of those which have played out from
the late 1980s to date in the former Yugoslavia. The resemblance is
so strong that I have called Trump “our first Balkan president.”
Inated States of America
Trump’s initial and continuing appeal to his
constituency has been reaction to and fear of societal change, as
well as resentment at its perceived prime movers and beneficiaries.
In what became the waning days of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević
appealed to Serbs, first in Kosovo where they felt outnumbered and
displaced from a rightful dominance by the majority ethnic
Albanians, but then throughout Yugoslavia, playing on their sense of
having been cheated in the multinational Yugoslav federation. A
potent element in his – and other nationalists’ – repertoire was
inat (Ee-not), a word brought via Ottoman Turkish usually translated
as “spite,” but closer in meaning to German schadenfreude, requiring
a longer explanation in English. It connotes in four letters “this
is going to hurt me, but it’s going to hurt you more – and I am
going to enjoy that you are suffering.” While English has no snappy
equivalent, it is clearly felt here and has become pandemic. “Owning
the libs,” “rolling coal,” and “triggering” are all evidence of this
trend. Donald Trump’s harnessing a deep seam of untapped inat made
him president. His administration has been a breeder reactor of it
ever since.
The fear of a reckoning for past wrongdoing can be
a strong bonding agent for communities and societies. This was
evident in Nazi Germany in 1945, as Allied armies advanced from east
and west. Germans flocked westward, fearing the revenge of a ravaged
Soviet Union. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnian Serb separatist
leader Milorad Dodik has often said the country was untenable
because of Bosniak desire for “revenge,” while continuing to deny
that genocide had been committed against them by Bosnian Serb forces
in the war – a legally established fact. His rationale was clearly
to frighten Bosnian Serbs to cleave to his leadership, for fear of
being overwhelmed. Demographic fear of being outnumbered by Muslim
fellow citizens proved of great utility as a mobilizing tool among
Serbs in particular; a “green transversal” theory was touted – and
remains in circulation. Genocidal policies and acts from the wars of
the 1990s have provided inspiration for white identity nationalist
violence worldwide, most vividly in Anders Breivik’s 2011 Utoya
massacre in Norway and in the Christchurch shootings in 2019. The
“great replacement” theory – that whites and Christians will be
outnumbered and dominated by migrants and non-Christian minorities –
gained traction in Europe and the wider West, despite the evidence
contradicting the apocalyptic Clash of Civilizations visions.
While the demographics at play in the United
States are very different – African Americans are 13% of the
population – the fears of the waning of white dominance in the US
have been central to Trump’s appeal to “Make America Great Again.”
But the direction of travel toward whites ceasing to be the majority
in just a generation, provides an ambient fear environment
undergirding the entire Trump agenda. Trump’s referring to white
nationalist demonstrators at a “Unite the Right” rally in
Charlottesville as “very fine people” was widely seen as validation.
(The rally featured a Nuremberg-style torchlit march in which
participants chanted “you will not replace us! Jews will not replace
us!” and one antifascist demonstrator, Heather Heyer, was killed and
several more critically injured in a deliberate car attack.) The
fact that Trump advisor Stephen Miller, behind the Muslim ban and
institutional brutality toward asylum seekers, is reputed to be
writing an upcoming Trump speech on race, is indicative of the
likely content. The timing and venue of that speech – initially
scheduled to be delivered on June 19th in Tulsa, Oklahoma – seems as
calculated and egregious an expression on inat politics as any in
the Trump presidency. June 19, “Juneteenth,” is the day American
blacks celebrate the end of slavery; Tulsa was the scene of a
particularly devastating racial pogrom against the black community
in 1921. The fact that the rally has been shifted a day has done
nothing to dull the initial message sent that black lives do not
matter, but rather only provides (im)plausible deniability.
Such calculated polarization to maintain power
remains endemic in post-Yugoslav politics. A Catholic mass in
Sarajevo, sponsored by the parliament of Croatia, to commemorate
victims of the summary executions by Tito’s partisans of Croat and
other collaborationists (including civilians) fleeing Yugoslavia in
Bleiburg in 1945 was the most recent such example of spectacles
designed specifically to inflame and divide. The backlash in
Sarajevo against the mass was predictable, though its scale
surprised many during the current pandemic.
Now that a much more pronounced demand for an end
to police brutality against blacks has been made, and the
disproportionate harm the coronavirus has wreaked upon the black
population in particular (and people of color more broadly) has come
into focus, demands for a more thorough recalibration of the
American social contract and order are being heard. While it
precipitated palpable angst, particularly in exurban and rural white
Trump strongholds, in large part due to disinformation. Yet in that
same terrain, less predictably, unprecedented solidarity
demonstrations continue. Polling conducted on June 9-10 shows
overwhelming support for peaceful protests, with even a 59 percent
majority of Republican respondents in favor – 82 percent for banning
police chokeholds. This is a tectonic shift.
Trump’s call on governors to “dominate” the
protests, employing overwhelming force, as well as insistence on the
theatrical deployment of National Guard and militarized,
unidentified federal agents, demonstrates a clear desire to play to
those fears and escalate a sense of crisis. It is likely that he
wanted to seize the initiative to precipitate more confrontation and
violence, to give both a pretext for the harsh crackdown he desired
and to scare white voters who might have thought of gravitating to
Biden or sitting the election out into voting for him. In essence,
by escalating radically, he aimed to force them to choose between
fear and a sense of justice or fairness. The greater the perception
of chaos, the more likely they would vote for him.
Efforts to escalate deep social divides for
political gain were seen recently in another part of the former
Yugoslavia – North Macedonia – twice in two years. In both cases – a
still murky firefight between security forces and ethnic Albanian
militants in the town of Kumanovo in May 2015 and a “spontaneous”
nationalist attack on opposition lawmakers to prevent the formation
of a government in April 2017 – the evident aim was to stoke fears
of renewed ethnic conflict (or even actual violence) to justify a
clampdown and Nikola Greuvski remaining in control (in 2015 as prime
minister; in 2017 as the clear power behind a caretaker government).
In neither case did it have the desired effect. Gruevski is now a
political asylee in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
Trump’s Phantom Paramilitary Boogeymen
Dominance of media isn’t feasible as before – but
it doesn’t need to be once society is so polarized that the
information space is effectively politically segregated. In this
world – in broadcast, online, and social media – Antifa, a loose
self-organized agglomeration of leftist streetfighters who sometimes
appear at demonstrations and engage in violence, has been amplified
from the fringe phenomenon it truly is into a fearsome paramilitary
army in the Trumpworld imaginary. But this has already had real
world consequences, with peaceful multiracial Black Lives Matter
marchers having to pass a long lineup of heavily armed residents in
northeast Indiana – in sight of police – being just one of many
examples of the potential confrontations set up trough manufactured
fear.
In the past week, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson has
provided a perfect window into this dynamic, showing a number of
Yugoslav-era parallels. In his monologue, Carlson acts deliberately
as a white fear agitator and amplifier – both to Fox’s
overwhelmingly white, right-wing viewership, but at least as
importantly to President Trump himself, playing to his most
authoritarian and repressive instincts. It is, in effect, an
admonition not to “go wobbly,” but rather to radicalize, as
demonstrated in Lafayette Square. He spoke of “the mob” swarming
“like hornets,” calling on those in government to “protect your
people.” Carlson in particular among major media commentators is
promoting what might be called a “black scare,” stoking an ambient
fear of chaos which can only be met with repression, both from the
government, but also from militia types. The fact that such messages
continue long after any significant incidence of property damage or
violence from demonstrators is telling. In a recent episode, he
argued that any engagement with the Black Lives Matter movement was
a slippery slope. Maintaining group homogenization – and segregation
– is a staple of top-down Balkan politics.
This is a typical post-Yugoslav technique. Bosnian
Serb political leader Milorad Dodik, for example, could have
scripted this immediate grasp for the lever of fear. In response to
demonstrations at poverty and lack of accountability which erupted
in Bosnia and Herzegovina in early 2014, Dodik spoke darkly of the
threat to the Republika Srpska from the neighboring Federation half
of the state, illegally establishing checkpoints, as well. But he
was simply the best positioned to act with coercive power on the
fears he stoked; other politicians in the country had parallel
instincts to ethnicize the protests to deflect public anger away
from themselves. The fact that this failed to gain traction was not
lost on citizens throughout the country. Four years later, following
the still murky murder of a Banja Luka youth, David Dragičević,
demonstrations began, led by his father, Dragan, against widely
suspected police misconduct and perhaps involvement. The deep public
distrust of the official version from Dodik’s authorities helped the
movement grow – and gain palpable solidarity across ethnic lines,
merging with demonstrations in Sarajevo against authorities for the
killing of local youth Damir Memić – also with high suspicion of
official malfeasance. The fathers of the young men became allies and
friends – and struck fear into the static political establishment
like no bottom-up effort since the war. Violent suppression of
demonstrations in Banja Luka in late 2018 broke the momentum. But
the demonstrated popular solidarity challenged the dark soul of the
country’s corrupt power-sharing machine, showing the limits to the
effectiveness of the old divisive toolkit. In another parallel, the
Covid-19 crisis has given established political leaders the ability
to direct public resources in blatantly self-dealing ways – or
without any transparency at all. This phenomenon was observed
ludicrously in Bosnia, where an SDA-connected raspberry farmer was
able to get a concession for ventilators at an absurd markup – a
fact exposed through investigative journalism. In the US, Trump’s
Treasury Department refuses to disclose the distribution of $500
billion in aid to businesses, with Treasury Secretary Stephen
Mnuchin stating that the information concerning this public money
was “proprietary.” In both cases, fear of accountability is
evidently absent, as patronage is surely present.
The movement’s rapid growth, wide reach, and wider
pool of sympathy may, counterintuitively, stiffen resistance and its
recalcitrance. The very diversity of participation in the growing
demonstrations, as well as their broad reach, is likely an amplifier
of angst for a certain segment of the white population. If my
children, grandchildren, friends or neighbors don’t evidently share
my fears, at least I know Trump does – and he has my back.
Over the course of the Trump presidency, much has
been made of his erratic nature, that he seems to lack a governing
strategy. But in a land without strategic opponents, the intuitive
tactician is king. Trump has a thin playbook (the very term is
antithetical to his ethos), but the plays in it are tried and true.
General James Mattis correctly observed he hasn’t even tried to
unite the American people. This is by design. He never could to
begin with; his goal is to keep his own constituency galvanized
behind him and to keep his opponents divided or otherwise
neutralized. The noxious, caustic atmosphere of division,
resentment, fear, and enemies is the only air that he can breathe to
survive politically.
His trip to the White House bunker was therefore
metaphorically perfect, as well as a reflection of genuine fear –
leading to his performance of authoritarianism in “the battle of
Lafayette Square.” The broadening of a popular movement for change
against police brutality, which he has advocated and supported, does
not bode well for him. The terms of the political discourse in
America have already changed radically as a result first of a global
pandemic, and now a concurrent movement demanding equality and
justice. That changes the atmospheric composition to one upon which
Trump cannot survive.
Social movement research demonstrates that
developing breadth in a movement – and cutting into support bases of
the regime – dramatically increases the possibility of success. And
this is precisely what Trump fears. Furthermore, the loyalty of
security forces is also essential. The unwillingness of the (rump)
Yugoslav Army and much of the police to violently disperse crowds in
Belgrade after Slobodan Milošević’s attempt to steal an early
presidential election put paid to his regime – and ultimately landed
him in the dock to face war crimes charges. The statements by former
Secretary of Defense James Mattis and several other secretaries of
defense, chiefs of staff, and defense officials are clearly aimed at
encouraging those in uniform to not obey an illegal order. The June
11th statement by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley
that his appearance with the president in his photo op had been “a
mistake” which made the military appear political, amplified this.
We may never know what went through Trump’s mind
as he heard chanting crowds outside the White House and hurried
downstairs. But his phone call to governors and photo op soon after
seemed an attempt to calm himself, to “take back control.” But like
the Wizard of Oz, his machinery failed him. Unfortunately, he is not
the only one afraid. And we can count on the fact that he will do
his utmost to amplify and capitalize on those fears. There’s nothing
scarier than scared white people.
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