From Multiracial Democracy to White Christian Ethnostate. This is the Plan for America.

The plan will fail. The War on Blackness and the Rights of All of Us will not succeed.

Yesterday’s emotional gathering in Alabama of so many defenders of civil rights and democracy, and the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, honored a central event in the 1960s civil rights movement. The resolute 1965 march brought out White rage, hatred, and fear in state troopers socialized to be the embodiments of institutionalized racism. Their violent response to peaceful protest, as captured on national news, led to presidential action and the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Marchers on May 16, 2026. Courtesy of Joyce Vance.

Joyce Vance was in Alabama. You can read her analysis of the two marches here:

Selma Rejects Jim Crow 2.0

From Multiracial Democracy to White Christian Ethnostate

Here I want to broaden the lens and see today’s attacks on the Voting Rights Act as part of a longer and broader systematic attempt by Trump and MAGA to wreck our multiracial democracy and replace it with a White Christian ethnostate.

Here is one big-picture take, by civil rights lawyer and advocate Sherrilyn Ifill, of White supremacy as an anti-democratic movement:

White Supremacy Is an Antidemocracy Movement

I have always seen Donald Trump as creating a big-tent movement for all kinds of American racists, from Lost Cause apologists and those nostalgic for the Jim Crow era, to neo-Nazis, to people who hate non-Whites and non-Christians, whether these were born here or are immigrants.

This is what demagogues do: they create a home for people who feel that Others advancing in society are a threat to their well-being and prosperity. They spin convincing narratives about The End of Everything due to impending White annihilation (the Great Replacement Theory version) or Communist/radical Left takeover.

Like other far-right strongmen, Trump has brought the racial and political threats together, conjuring the nightmare of a complete “civilizational erasure,” a telling phrase used in the new White House National Security Strategy document.

Here is my February 2026 essay on how this mission of achieving White Christian hegemony is now the central plank of the Trump administration:

When White Racial Rescue Becomes a Foreign Policy and National Security Priority

As a historian of Fascism, it was clear to me from the start that this would be the goal. Just after the November 2016 election, I wrote a CNN op-ed, “Why Bannon’s White Nationalism Should Scare America” to warn the public that the plan was to use the “power of racism” to build out the MAGA movement, with the goal of “turning back the clock to a time when white men supposedly ruled supreme.”

I went much deeper in my book Strongmen, which was written during the first Trump administration and situated the unfolding White Christian MAGA crusade in history. As I commented:

The intensity of the Trump administration’s efforts to undo decades of advances for women, people of color, and LGBQT+ communities recalls earlier authoritarian counter-revolutions…The administration has redefined “civil rights,” traditionally linked to the struggle of African-Americans for legal equality, as the protection of Christian “freedoms of religion and expression.” An anti-abortion rights and anti-LGBTQ+ Catholic activist lawyer, Roger Severino, runs the Office for Civil Rights, created by the Trump administration inside the Department of Health and Human Services.

The War on Blackness

During the Joe Biden years, Trump’s army of MAGA acolytes waged an informational, psychological and policy war on Blackness, as then-Congressional Black Caucus Chair Rep. Steven Horsford and I put it in an important 2023 MSNBC interview. Erasing the history of the toll of anti-Black violence and discrimination by banning the teaching of racism in schools, attacking scholars and others who documented the costs of institutionalized racism, and continuing to gerrymander and use other electoral tricks to make it harder for Black people to express themselves via elections were some of the ways this war manifested.

In short, MAGA used their time out of office efficiently to shift the culture in preparation for the triumph of the White ethnostate. So when Trump returned to office, they were ready (thanks to Project 2025) to transform the leadership of American governance to remove Blacks, women, and others from view, increase propaganda against non-Whites, and use immigration as an excuse to build a new infrastructure of repression and redefine who is a patriot and who is a criminal.

As individuals who have been subject to harassment for Driving While Black, Coming Home at Night While Black, Standing on the Street Waiting for a Friend While Black, and myriad other daily affronts know, being Black already made you a suspect, and it was this background mentality that made Black collective mobilizations, most recently during the Black Lives Matter protests, a threat sufficient to fuel additional support for MAGA.

The war on Blackness could not be complete without a top-down, federal attack on voting rights. Thanks to a Supreme Court that now acts as a group of far-right operatives working for Trump’s causes, the Voting Rights Act was weakened in ways that contribute to Black disenfranchisement.

Here is Ifill explaining the import of the Callais decision on The Daily Show:

MAGA Actions Create a Messaging Opportunity

As observed above, demagogues, Trump included, have always mobilized people around the threat of losing something: social status, male privilege, jobs, whatever is menaced by the advance of women and non-Whites.

It is our turn to make this messaging strategy our own, by pointing out that we are losing something we had, the right to express ourselves and directly influence the constitution of our government through our votes. Our vote is our voice, and we are being silenced. We are losing the power we had. The silencing of some of us affects all of us. Our identity as a multiracial democracy is threatened.

We can also support those who are eloquently speaking out, reminding the public about the history of the civil rights movement and the courage and valor of those who preceded us. Rep. Justin Jones (D-TN) has been key in these communications that locate us in a tradition as we fight for rights today.

As he wrote from the Alabama protests yesterday:

“Our ancestors have carried us too far, our martyrs sacrifice too much, our movement grown too large to stop now. We stand in a legacy of liberation, a legacy of good trouble, a legacy of elders who trained us for this moment. No Jim Crow. No New Confederacy. No Going Back.”