From The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry OUP, 2022 Page 175 Jim Crow 2.0 The more probable outcome, should Trump and his allies return to power, is what the South African sociologist Pierre Van Den Bergh calls Herrenvolk democracy, which he defines as "a parliamentary regime in which the exercise of power and suffrage is restricted, de facto and often de jure, to the dominant group," which understands itself as a superior race or culture, and in which other races and subcultures are subjected to varying degrees of legal discrimination and violent subjugation.32 Let's call it Jim Crow 2.0. Like the original Jim Crow, it would be regionally concentrated in MAGA states. There, subordinate groups and political dissidents would be subjected to various forms of legal discrimination, public humiliation, and vigilante
violence. The harshest treatment would likely be reserved for non-white, undocumented immigrants, who might be subjected to mass deportations on an unprecedented scale. In Jim Crow 2.0, Brown could become the new Black. Such a regime would be widely resisted in anti-MAGA states, of course, and effectively so. The MAGA regime would certainly try to use the powers of the federal government and judiciary to force the "blue states" into line. It might deny federal money to "sanctuary cities" that refused to cooperate with its policies of mass deportation, for example, or it might deny research dollars to universities that continued to mandate diversity training or teach critical race theory, the right's latest bugaboo. But the deep blue states of the West Coast and the Northeast would have enough power and resources to resist such attempts at coercion. If the MAGA regime endured for two decades or more-and most authoritarian regimes do-existing trends toward self-sorting along ideological lines would likely continue or even accelerate. MAGA-minded whites might follow libertarian-leaning "tech bros" and "finance bros" from California and New York to Texas and
Florida. College-educated white professionals might migrate in the other direction, leaving suburban Dallas and Orlando for suburban Chicago and Seattle. At this point in the process, argues Never Trump conservative David French, secession scenarios and even civil war would start to become live possibilities.33 The result could be the dissolution of the Union. Like the original Jim Crow, Herrenvolk democracy would only ever really be finally dislodged via a prolonged and costly campaign of civil disobedience, mass protest, and economic boycotts that significantly disrupted life in the MAGA states. Like the first and second civil rights movements, it could last several decades and might require multiple attempts. The odds are that a second Trump presidency would evolve into a longer-lived Trump Dynasty, with power eventually passing to one of Trump's children. Trumpist America would not be Hitler's Germany. But it would not be so far removed from Putin's Russia either. And like this and other populist and kleptocratic regimes, it would be characterized by governmental incompetence accompanied by gradual economic decline. Ironically, a serious attempt to "make America great again" would probably end up making it chaotic and poor.
Herrenvolk Democracy
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