For over ten years my colleague and friend Paul Yandle and I have been comparing southern history and contemporary politics. Unlike me, he is a southerner, and unlike me, his research has focused on southern politics after the Civil War, with special attention to issues of race and voting rights. He is an expert in how southern politics functioned in the wake of emancipation. So this month I asked him to be a guest writer on my blog, and to highlight for my readers some of the connections he sees between late nineteenth-century southern politics and contemporary politics. This is long, but thought provoking. Definitely worth your time.
My impression from the times I have read Anxious Bench is that it is designed to offer readers something related to the writer’s faith and professional background. That makes my role here a little scary, because for the past several decades I’ve been examining the intersection between politics and violence in the establishment of a one-party, Solid South in the late nineteenth century. My goal with my research and with this post is not simply to do a head count of right wing versus left wing perpetrators. Instead, I’m interested in observing who has gained political power, how they have gotten it, what they’ve done with it, and how they plan to maintain it. I’m focusing on the right wing because it’s the faction that has the lion’s share of political power in the United States and it’s the faction that, according to polls, white American evangelicals tend to support. People who lean conservative are increasingly clearly being told by right wing media that evil people are conspiring to bring down the nation.
I gave no thought to researching politics in the South before my senior year as an undergrad, when I ran into a friend near the student union at my university the first week of fall semester and he showed me his textbook for a History of the Old South class in which he had enrolled. The book looked pretty interesting, so I added the course to my schedule. For my senior capstone project for another professor that spring, I chose Plessy v. Ferguson as a topic. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
For my M.A. I chose a relatively small school in North Carolina, and for my first-semester seminar paper I ended up with a North Carolina topic based in the same general period as the Plessy decision: the state’s notorious White Supremacy Election of 1898 and the Wilmington coup that followed the election. Today, the events of 1898 in North Carolina are well known in the scholarly world, and in 2021 a book about the events won a Pulitzer Prize. Back in the 80s, though, when I was doing my M.A., the election and coup still lay largely hidden below carefully calculated historical amnesia and had received only a bare fraction of the coverage that they have received since the late 1990s.
After my Plessy and 1898 papers, my course was pretty much set. Over the next few decades, through an M.A. thesis and a Ph.D. dissertation, I dug back farther and began to find out a pretty large amount about Reconstruction and the post-Reconstruction disfranchisement of African Americans and poor whites not only in North Carolina but also throughout the South.
Through it all, I had yet to learn how constant the presence of the politics of hatred and obstruction had been throughout U.S. history. Ensconsed in microfilm rooms and archives for years as my friends were doing other things (like building lives), I had lost years of the political and social context taking place in the nation in my own time just outside of the exits of the libraries I haunted. I entered the twenty-first century under the illusion that the ugly episodes about which I was writing constituted a past beyond which the nation had moved.
That misconception began to fall apart in 2012, when I got my first permanent academic job and could stop giving myself nervous breakdowns pretending I was a Type A person in order to remain in the academic marketplace. I resurfaced in the world to find myself in upstate South Carolina, where Thompson had hired me to join the history department at North Greenville University. The year 2012 is when the horrific shootings in a movie theatre in Colorado were followed by, if possible, even worse carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The National Rifle Association responded by calling for the arming of teachers. Several months later, in April 2013, I got the news while sitting in my office that the Senate had voted against a bipartisan bill calling for the expansion of federal background checks for gun-show and Internet gun purchases. I was livid.
By some time in 2013, it also began to occur to me that the scripts playing out in my little corner of Facebook seemed increasingly hysterical as well as plagiarized from Lost Cause apologists and Klan vigilantes. We were living under “tyranny,” friends of friends posted, and we needed guns to protect ourselves. Over time, in various portions of the nation, the presence of armed people “protecting” military recruitment centers and other venues became increasingly noticeable.
Meanwhile, other, seemingly unrelated events took place. In the summer of 2013, about two months after the background-check bill died, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Shelby County v. Holder, explaining to the nation that since racism was, apparently, no longer a major problem, it was striking down Section Four of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Section Four was the portion that provided guidelines for Section Five pre-clearance requirements. Suddenly, the Voting Rights Act was all but a dead letter.
States affected by pre-clearance were poised with legislation ready to go. Between 2013 and 2016, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, some 17 states passed laws making it harder to vote. Texas enacted a Voter ID law the same day the Supreme Court handed down the Shelby decision. Some of these laws did not survive federal court challenges, at least in their original forms. By and large, however, most remained even if they were somewhat altered. So did myths about voter fraud. After the 2020 election, armed men posted themselves at locations where officials were counting votes in Maricopa County, Arizona. And, of course, in 2021, a violent mob convinced that the presidential election had been stolen from Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the election.
The real explosion of disfranchisement laws came between 2021 and 2024. By 2024, more than half of the states in the U.S. had made it harder to vote than it had been in 2020. In my home state, North Carolina, mail-in ballots postmarked by the election deadline were discounted if they arrived after election day. Georgia passed a law drastically cutting the number of drop boxes available for voters, and both Florida and Georgia made it easier for citizens to challenge the ballots of other voters.
Chapter 5 of White Rage explains in detail the
disfranchisement strategy employed since 2008
These changes came despite the fact that voter fraud has been shown time and again to be next to nonexistent. Nonetheless, voters have been treated to a barrage of increasingly hysterical misinformation about noncitizens and ineligible people voting. The 2024 election cycle was particularly noteworthy for its incendiary rhetoric. In November 2023, then-presidential candidate Trump compared his political rivals to subhuman pests. “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump promised one of his rally audiences. “They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.” People supporting the GOP ticket in 2024 including Elon Musk and J.D. Vance accused the Kamala Harris campaign of bringing immigrants across the U.S. border in order to vote illegally. After Harris’s entry into the contest, Trump asserted that Harris “has imported criminal migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions from all around the world, from Venezuela to the Congo.” Fortunately, the 2024 elections were largely peaceful. That may have been because, by and large, MAGA Republicans got their way.
During my dissertation-research days, I thought that while writing about Reconstruction I needed to give equal weight to news reports from newspapers which, at the time, were unabashedly partisan. Who was I to try to pick which explanation of an event was “right” and which was “wrong”? Eventually, though, I read enough of these papers in tandem with letters written by a variety of people from the period, including politicians, newspaper editors, and private citizens worried about political violence, that I was able to discern which stories were more reflective of the truth than others. Often, the editors who were propagandizing tended to justify violence or the threat of it in principle, but deny or downplay violence or the possible role of their political allies in it after it actually took place. They also showed a greater tendency of dehumanize their opponents.
The rhetoric I’ve heard from the right wing over the past twelve years has been scarily familiar. I’m far from the first to observe that in order to keep a potentially violent base, you’re going to have to make people perpetually believe that they’re in the midst of a crisis – that their culture, their liberties their way of life is under threat by people who mean to harm them. Here’s how such fearmongering worked in 1868, after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed U.S. citizen rights to people born in the United States. Hinton Rowan Helper, a North Carolinian famous for his Unionism and his antislavery views on the eve of the Civil War, was also a raging white supremacist. After emancipation, he published a book titled The Negroes in Negroland; Negroes in America, and Negroes Generally. The book, a compilation of quotes selected to make people of African descent appear as barbaric as possible, decried in its introduction Congress’s Reconstruction program as a danger to the future of the nation because it would compromise whiteness as the basis of American culture. In the introduction to the book, Helper asserted:
“The policy of the Radical (not the Republican) party, if carried out to its logical ends, will inevitably result in the forced political, religious, civil, and social equality of the white and black races ; and the direful sequence of that result, so flagrantly unnatural and wrong in itself, can only be reasonably looked for in the ultimate degradation, division, and destruction of the Republic.
Not coincidentally, Ku Klux Klan membership began to soar in 1868, and the Klan was largely a wing of the Democratic Party (then the white supremacist party) poised to use violence and intimidation to regain control of states from Republicans (then the party passing civil rights legislation and writing the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments).
To white supremacists, Klan members were “protectors” of civilization from people who they considered an inferior subset of humanity. Note the childhood recollection of Thomas Dixon Jr., as he watched a group of mounted Klan members riding in formation from his bedroom window. Dixon grew up in Cleveland County, North Carolina, where Klan activity was particularly rampant in the late 1860s and early 1870s. After the turn of the twentieth century he wrote the novels upon which the notorious 1915 film The Birth of a Nation is based:
“Shivering with terror I grasped my mother’s hand and whispered:
‘Do you think they’ll hurt us, ma?’
“With a low laugh she bent and kissed me: “Of course not, silly—they’re our people—they’re guarding us from harm.”
That “protection” involved a hostile takeover of the state government, the gerrymandering of the state, and the disfranchisement of African American citizens. The process was repeated in 1898 after an unexpected third-party challenge, and it led to a Jim Crow regime that lasted some seventy years.
Among the critics of the events of 1898 was the journalist W.J. Cash, famous for his booklength analysis of southern thought and culture titled The Mind of the South. Cash has been controversial ever since his book was published shortly before his untimely death in 1941. He is not someone to whose perspective I often turn (among other things he was racist and a bit of a misanthrope), but he often came up with insightful analysis. Of the Election of 1898, which immediately preceded the Wilmington coup, Cash observes:
“In North Carolina the Red Shirts were riding, a maskless resurrection of the Ku-Klux Klan. The conservative Democratic forces were restoring to wholesale intimidation of the black voter and practicing wholesale fraud; were stealing votes by thousands in the confidence, fixed by Reconstruction, that it was entirely justified by the end; in the cool conviction even, I think it may safely be said,that it was no mere necessary immorality but the very shape and substance of morality itself.”
Increasingly, the Second Amendment is being presented by the right wing as the linchpin of American freedoms. The least I can say is that the historical provenance for that point of view is disturbing. White supremacists at the turn of the twentieth century tended to believe that making a stand with the threat of force was the central freedom upon which all others hinged. In his novel The Leopard’s Spots, which celebrates the 1898 Wilmington coup, Thomas Dixon includes a character that inspires a group of vigilante Red Shirts to rise up and disfranchise African Americans by reminding them of this principle.
“Nations are made by men, not by paper constitutions and paper ballots. We are not free because we have a Constitution. We have a Constitution because our pioneer fathers who cleared the wilderness and dared the might of kings, were freemen.” (Dixon 438)
My educated hunch is that some whites in the South who display the potential for violence don’t see themselves as violent. They see themselves as defenders of freedom who may be forced into violence by agents out to get them. That’s partly because lots of decent, non-vigilante and largely white southerners hold the similar position that their gun ownership borders on a sacred trust to protect those around them.
Take, for instance, David French, the conservative Evangelical who became a pariah among many conservative Evangelicals in part because of his consistent criticisms of Donald Trump. French is not even remotely a vigilante. He’s also not a racist, and he is certainly not a MAGA Republican. He is a vocal critic of the increasingly militant stance some white nationalists are taking in their politics. And, he has consistently supported at least some legislation to curb unfettered access to guns. Back in February 2018, however, he tried to explain the psychology of gun ownership in an article in The Atlantic. “You feel a sense of burning conviction that you, your family, and your community are safer and freer because you own and carry a gun,” French suggested. Later in the article, French continued: “When you carry your weapon, you don’t feel intimidated, you feel empowered. In a way that’s tough to explain, the fact that you’re so much less dependent on the state for your personal security and safety makes you feel more ‘free’ than you’ve ever felt before.”
A month later in the National Review French defended gun ownership further by suggesting that carrying a gun was an act of love: “Gun owners who’ve experienced a threat possess or carry a weapon because they love their families. Teachers who wish to carry a weapon at school do so because they love the kids under their care. These folks know that their responsible gun ownership makes their communities and families safer.”
I should point out that one of the reasons French gave for gun ownership in his family is the number of threats he and his family received from MAGA Republicans and white supremacists, combined with his wife’s multiple experiences with violent attacks. Anyone who has gone through what his family has, often simply for telling the truth as they see it, commands my respect. And I think that the subset of gun owners to whom he was referring really do sense a tremendous responsibility to use discernment in the use of their weapons.
By 2022, however, French had begun revising his remarks as he watched gun culture taking a dark turn with the proliferation of the use of firearms for public intimidation, as a defiant political prop, and for so-called “tactical” training. “The threat to America’s gun culture comes from the gun rights movement itself,” French wrote. “The threat is gun idolatry, a form of gun fetish that’s fundamentally aggressive, grotesquely irresponsible, and potentially destabilizing to American democracy. And it’s become so prevalent that I would not — I could not — write the same piece for The Atlantic again.”
Historically, disfranchisement and violence – often excused as a necessity or a sacred obligation — have gone hand-in-hand in the United States. David French’s warning gives me pause. If he’s concerned, maybe we all should be. Nonetheless, his position as he expressed it in 2018 may explain why many people who voted for Donald Trump and are not white supremacist vigilantes may not seem terribly alarmed by people who are – if they agree with the political positions of the extremists. Along with French, I contend that violence is part of the package that MAGA is offering. But I also believe that there is a fine rhetorical line between the perspective French was presenting in 2018 and the perspective of many MAGA people who do support violence. If you are someone who grew up in a cultural milieu that combined evangelical religion and gun culture, the increasingly vocal and visible fringe of the American right might not sound that unusual. The number of law-abiding people who were willing to support Trump’s presidency in 2024 despite knowing what happened on January 6, 2021 alone suggests this.
In addition, it seems to me that evangelicals have become increasingly mean-spirited. In January 2025, Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Washington, addressed President Trump at Washington National Cathedral after Trump’s second inauguration,
“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President,” she said at the end of her homily. “Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”
Trump, who has repeatedly referred to the presence of undocumented immigrants in the nation as an “invasion,” rejected her words outright, as did many evangelicals, some of whom copied and shared on their social media an open letter to Rev. Budde by a person exegeting Scripture to explain why her plea to the president was “unbiblical” and even strongly implying that it was “demonic.”
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, has taken a similar tack with statements such as “The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” As recently as October 3, on Truth Social Trump referred to the Democratic Party as “THE PARTY OF HATE, EVIL, AND SATAN.”
Despite MAGA concerns about left-wing inspired violence, scholars contend that historically, right wing extremism far outweighs that coming from the left. To make things more complicated, it appears that some of the individuals more recently charged with deadly attacks have been politically ambiguous, reflecting a growing nihilism among a subset of younger people for whom trolling has become a primary means of self-expression. Sadly, many of the experts who could help us navigate the cultural and political trends behind much of the violence have been purged from the federal government or continue to be ignored or vilified. A large majority of Americans across the political spectrum support practical steps to reduce gun violence, but people in power are largely ignoring this fact. Meanwhile, the revival of the attitude that guns equal democracy, combined with efforts to curb the voting rights that provide the real basis for self-government, threatens to lead us toward revisiting the decades-long violence for which people like Thomas Dixon set up the nation more than one hundred years ago.
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