White Supremacy Leads People to Swallow Ridiculous Bullshit

Such as Trump

“How can people vote for this?”

Whenever Trump does something particularly horrific—when he lies that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating pets, or when he stages a campaign stunt dressed as a garbage man and then struggles to get into the truck—people ask the obvious question. Trump is a transparent fraud, a carny, an incompetent bumbling stooge, and a hateful asshole. Why do people want to vote for this?

In that context, I was struck by this passage while reading Charles W. Mills The Racial Contract (1997).

The requirements of “objective” cognition, factual and moral, in a racial polity are in a sense more demanding in that officially sanctioned reality is divergent from actual reality. So here, it could be said, one has an agreement to misinterpret the world. One has to learn to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular.

Thus in effect, on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made…. To a significant extent, then, white signatories will live in an invented delusional world, a racial fantasyland. [italics mine]

Mills argues that the European political tradition is constructed, not on a social contract of reality and inviolable personhood, but on an agreement of whiteness. The United States (as one example) was built on the basic presupposition that white people are entitled to the deference, land, and labor of non white people (indigenous or Black.) Certain people, who look perfectly human, who act human, who care for their children and each other as all humans do—these people, the racial contract says, are not human. And in order to be part of the polity, you have to never consider them human—you have to, for example, like Thomas Jefferson, insist that Black people are vile and unattractive while sleeping with a Black woman and raising Black children.

The racial contract—or to call it by the more familiar name of white supremacy—requires those who embrace it to turn themselves into dunderheads as a prerequisite for turning themselves into monsters. As Mills says, white supremacists have to sign on to an “epistemology of ignorance”; they have to “live in an invented delusional world.” To agree to white supremacy, to accept the idea that you are superior to entire classes of people just because your skin is paler, requires you to take your brain out of your head and jump on it, and then to keep doing that for your entire life. Racism is a system of oppression, but alongside that it is a system of enforced ignorance and delusion. It’s centuries of supposedly brilliant thinkers like Kant and Heidegger opening their skulls and dumping in horseshit.

Trump’s lies and his bizarre crudity (miming a blow job with a microphone this weekend, for example) seem disqualifying. And they should be disqualifying! But for MAGA assholes who believe in white supremacist patriarchy—and who see themselves as genetically superior to Black people, to LGBT people, to women, to immigrants— the lies and the garbage are all just a familiar part of a cognitive landscape of delusion and hate.

Trump lies about Haitians, and his followers eat it up, because they’ve spent their lives believing outrageous falsehoods about nonwhite people. Trump babbles about Hannibal Lecter and claims to be executing a brilliant strategy in public outreach, and his fans nod along, because they’ve spent their entire lives convincing themselves that white people are superior, and that if an avatar of white people paints his face orange and struggles to get into a garbage truck, it’s a sure sign that he’s a member of the master race.

It's easy to jeer, but it’s not like anti Trumpers are always or necessarily immune. Listen to Zionists like Bill Clinton explain why it’s okay to murder tens of thousands of Palestinian children, and you’re right there in the same world of motivated reasoning, mendacious preening, and intellectual flatulence. That’s the racial contract; the insistence that society is formed by excluding certain “barbarians” or “savages;” the argument that we deserve democracy, self-determination and dignity, but that other people over there deserved only despotism, as John Stuart Mill argued in one of his more disgraceful moments.

Anti-MAGA will sometimes accuse MAGA of being uneducated, unintelligent, or will say Trump is in cognitive decline. But John Stuart Mill and Bill Clinton aren’t unintelligent as we usually understand these things. J.D. Vance went to Yale.

The problem isn’t that MAGA has an incapacity for thought. The problem is that the racial contract is a massive cognitive deception—a system for making people embrace a system of lies. And when you embrace a system of lies, you lose touch with reason, not to mention with the real world. (Cut Matrix clip of your choice.)

Of course for Trumpers it makes sense that those people are eating pets. Of course it makes sense for Clinton that you need to sacrifice piles of children to an evanescent “security.” Of course some orange asshole lost in his Silence of the Lambs anecdote is the savior. It all makes perfect sense when you’ve already abandoned all semblance of cognition for the endless white supremacy dopamine hits of empowerment fantasies and sadism.  

It feels like low intelligence and preposterous credulity must be the cause of MAGA. But I think it’s the other way around. Fools don’t fall for white supremacy. Rather, white supremacy creates fools. When you have decided you will believe anything to hold onto power, Donald Trump is what you get.