Racism Isn’t a Distraction

It’s the goal.

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance continue to spread disgusting lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield OH. Their fascist dittoheads have inundated the town with threats and vandalism, leading to closures of schools and cultural festivals.

Democrats (including Kamala Harris) have uniformly condemned the GOP lies. Some have also pushed back in part by suggesting that the gutter racism shouldn’t be the focus of discussion—that it’s a kind of cynical distraction to prevent us from focusing on real issues. Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, for example said that the GOP leaders “stoke and elevate every kind of urban legend from 9/11 trutherism to people eating cats” because they want to keep us from “talking about Trump’s record of tax cuts for the rich, manufacturing job loss, and ending the right to choose.”

Buttigieg isn’t entirely wrong here. Fascists (as numerous leftist theorists have argued) do use racism to try to build power and to undermine class solidarity. Trump and Vance scapegoat immigrants whenever they can; it’s a glib all-purpose answer for any and every problem, from crime to unaffordable housing. Rather than blaming the rich and affluent for keeping wages low and busting unions, you can claim that it’s all the fault of those nefarious immigrants. If you hate unions and love the rich, the appeal of this approach is obvious.

By the same token, voters say that they trust Trump more on immigration than Harris, and much less on abortion. So, as Buttigieg says, Trump may feel it’s to his advantage to focus on Haitian immigrants.

With those caveats, though, I think it’s important to recognize that MAGA’s disgusting racism isn’t just a distraction. Yes, fascists use racism as a tactic. But racism is also a goal in itself. Antisemitism was far from the most popular aspect of Hitler’s program, but he pursued the genocide of Jewish people anyway. Many historians believe that the massive logistical and material requirements of the genocide crucially undermined the German war effort.

In that vein, Trump and Vance have been doubling down on their lies about the Haitian community even though mainstream news coverage has been uniformly very negative, and even though Trump’s humiliating defeat in the debate last week is in no small part linked to the fact that he made racist comments about Haitians from the podium—comments that even most Republicans found offensive. The turn to vicious, explicit racism against Springfield residents has coincided with Trump’s worst polling of the entire campaign. Is this a strategy of distraction? Or is it an expression of Trump’s sincere obsessions, which he can’t convince himself to abandon even when it would be in his best interests to do so?

It doesn’t have to be one or the other, obviously. The point, though, is that racism is more than just a way to change the conversation. The people in Springfield don’t experience it as a distraction when they have acid thrown on their cars or have to pull their kids out of school for fear of terrorist attacks. Nor is the history of racism against Black people and immigrants in this country a distraction from some hypothetical story of American history focused on economic divisions or abortion politics.

On the contrary, racism is the core, central division in American politics, and has been basically forever, as political scientist Zoltan Hajnal has convincingly demonstrated. Trump and Vance spew white supremacist garbage in part because they think (erroneously in this case) that it will help them win. They spew white supremacist garbage in part because they are racist assholes and they can’t help themselves. But the main reason they spew white supremacist garbage is that the GOP’s core commitment is white supremacy. White supremacy is the right’s central animating principle. It is its overarching promise to its voters. It is the reason its coalition is a coalition.

Trump promises his voters white supremacy because that is what he wants and that is what they want. He has other goals—certainly including oligarchy, patriarchy, tax cuts for the rich, and misery for women. But the GOP candidates embrace racism because they are the party of racism, and they want to create a more racist country. The chaos and terror in Springfield is a tactic, but it is also an end in itself. Trump wants to hurt immigrants as a way to win, as a personal preference, and as an important political goal. The America that Trump, Vance, and their voters want is white, it is hateful, and it is violent.