The Origins of White, Christian Supremacy: Can 15th-century doctrine explain today's culture wars? by David R. Brockman, Texas Observer, September 21, 2023

Today is David R. Brockman day. Here is another piece by him that explores the origins of White Christian nationalism, a focus of mine these days, as well. 

-Angela Valenzuela

The Origins of White, Christian Supremacy: Can 15th-century doctrine explain today's culture wars?

by David R. Brockman, Texas Observer, September 21, 2023, 11:11 AM, CDT

America is undergoing an identity crisis, author Robert P. Jones writes. As revealed in recent studies by Jones’s research organization, Public Religion Research Institute, dramatic demographic shifts have rendered once-dominant white Christians a minority; the nation is more ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse. So it’s no surprise we find ourselves embroiled in bitter debates over who we truly are.

Many in Texas still insist (despite historical evidence) that we’re a Christian nation, founded by godly (white) men. Countering this mythos, the 1619 Project locates the nation’s genesis in the year Africans were first brought against their will to Great Britain’s American colonies, framing our subsequent history as one of stubbornly systemic racism.

In the new book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, Jones offers an intriguing alternative, which analyzes our racist and violent past and suggests a path to a more pluralistic democracy.

The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and
the Path to a Shared American Future
Robert P. Jones, Simon & Schuster,
September 2023

Though he applauds the 1619 Project, Jones argues that it neglects Europeans’ prior violence toward Indigenous peoples and “obscures the headwaters” of European colonialism. Jones locates those headwaters in the late 1400s, in the so-called Doctrine of Discovery. Promulgated in papal edicts, this doctrine proclaimed the superiority of Christian civilization and authorized Europeans to claim ownership of any newly “discovered” lands inhabited by non-Christians. The doctrine became part of U.S. law in an 1823 Supreme Court ruling that held the U.S. government had “an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy.”

Jones views the doctrine as a “Rosetta Stone” for understanding the “sense of divine entitlement, of European Christian chosenness, [that] has shaped the worldview of most white Americans.”

To show how whites’ sense of entitlement has played out in America, Hidden Roots examines three localities, each the site of white outrages against African-Americans: the Mississippi Delta, site of the 1955 murder of Emmitt Till; Duluth, Minnesota, where in 1920 a mob of more 10,000 whites lynched three Black men; and Tulsa, Oklahoma, where in 1921, whites descended on the prosperous Black district of Greenwood, burning homes and businesses and killing between 100 and 300 people. In each case, the whites responsible faced little or no punishment.

These atrocities were foreshadowed by earlier white violence in those areas toward Native Americans. A century before Till’s murder, the U.S. government forcibly removed the Choctaw people from the Mississippi Delta, clearing the land for white settlement and a plantation economy exploiting Black slave labor. Jones then shares tales of white depredations against Native Americans in Minnesota and Oklahoma. In 1862, some Dakota people in Minnesota rebelled against white mistreatment and treaty violations. At the end of the five-week uprising, the U.S. government hanged 38 Dakota men after sham military trials, most lasting “only a minute or two,” Jones notes, in the largest mass execution in U.S. history. 

Author Robert P. Jones (Noah Willman)

As for Oklahoma, Jones writes poignantly of the Osage people, who suffered forced assimilation, violence at the hands of white mobs hungry for their land, and then, after oil was discovered, a “Reign of Terror” in which whites systematically swindled and murdered them.


Yet Hidden Roots speaks of hope as well as horror.

Interracial groups in all three areas are taking steps to confront the legacy of white violence. Thanks to the work of the interracial Emmitt Till Memorial Commission, the Mississippi Delta has seen what Jones—a Mississippi native who previously authored The End of White Christian America—calls “an explosion of cultural memory work” around Till’s legacy. Duluth and Tulsa have seen similar efforts of truth-telling and reconciliation.

Though Hidden Roots doesn’t directly address the Lone Star State, Jones notes that “[e]very U.S. state contains similar legacies of white racial violence, because every … state was built on the same foundation … the conviction that America was divinely ordained to be a new promised land for European Christians.”

How did Christianity, which purports to proclaim God’s loving-kindness to all humanity, end up legitimizing racism and violence?

That’s certainly the case with Texas. Consider, for instance, the Battle of Village Creek, which took place just six miles from my Fort Worth home, not long after the removal of the Choctaw from Mississippi and for much the same reason: white hunger for Native American lands. In 1841, a company of Texan volunteers under General Edward Tarrant attacked an extensive settlement of Caddos, Cherokees, and Tonkawas; burned down huts; then engaged in a running gunfight, killing 12 Native Americans and wounding many more. In the wake of the attack, the tribes were forced to desert the settlement.

Four years before the 1920 Duluth lynchings, Waco saw its own gruesome act of white mob violence when Black teenager Jesse Washington “was beaten, stabbed, mutilated, hanged and burned to death” before thousands of “screaming, cheering spectators.” Viewed through Jones’s historical and religious lens, these Texas atrocities are not isolated acts, but part of a broader legacy of racism with religious underpinnings.

While Hidden Roots explores white supremacy’s origins, it begs another question: How did Christianity, which purports to proclaim God’s loving-kindness to all humanity, end up legitimizing racism and violence?

My book No Longer the Same traces this hypocrisy to Christianity’s long theological tradition of regarding non-Christians as largely ignorant of divine truth. Christianity’s confidence that it alone has “the way, the truth, and the life” has too often resulted in the exclusion and mistreatment of religious others. But such theological questions lie beyond the frame of Hidden Roots.

Instead, Jones’s religio-political perspective offers a compelling picture of who Americans are and where we came from. Thought-provoking, solidly researched, and skillfully written, Hidden Roots is a clear-eyed indictment of white supremacy and its religious foundations, one that can help us make sense of our troubled past and envision possibilities for remembrance and renewal.


David R. Brockman, Ph.D., is an author, Christian theologian, and nonresident scholar in the Religion and Public Policy Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute. He teaches at Texas Christian University.

When Faith Becomes Power: The Long History Behind Today’s Religious Politics of Controlling Culture in Texas, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 When Faith Becomes Power: The Long History Behind Today’s Religious Politics of Controlling 

Culture in Texas

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

May 3, 2026

Before you read further, take a few minutes to watch this chilling snapshot of Texas history narrated by Drew McCoy on his Youtube channel, "Genetically Modified Skeptic." What it documents is not just “interesting history.” It is a chilling and largely buried account of state-sanctioned and vigilante violence in Texas—targeting German immigrants whose only real crime was thinking differently.

Many of these settlers were freethinkers, abolitionists, and skeptics of organized religion. For that, they were surveilled, harassed, and in some cases murdered. Their communities were policed not just for political loyalty, but for ideological and religious conformity. This is Texas history—but not the version that makes it into textbooks.

We should be asking why.

Because what this video reveals is not an anomaly. It is a pattern.

There’s a moment in the video where the past collapses into the present. What initially appears to be a critique of religion opens into something far more consequential: a genealogy of power. This is not simply about belief systems. It is about how dominant religious ideologies—particularly forms of conservative Protestantism—have historically aligned themselves with political authority to discipline populations, define belonging, and consolidate control over public life.

What begins as theology becomes governance. And what cannot be controlled becomes a threat—in this case, German “freethinkers,” white people stripped of belonging—exposed as not white enough when they refused ideological conformity.

At its core, the video underscores a critical truth: the modern religious right—also known today as “Christian nationalists”—did not emerge out of nowhere. It is the product of long-term, strategic organizing rooted in earlier histories of exclusion, enforcement, and at times, outright violence. From the suppression of dissenting religious communities to contemporary campaigns around “family values,” education, and national identity, the throughline is clear—power is maintained by controlling culture.

And culture is controlled, in large part, through education.

If that sounds abstract, consider what is happening right now in Texas.

At the K–12 level, battles over the State Board of Education’s social studies TEKS standards have become proxy wars over history itself—what counts as legitimate knowledge, whose stories are centered, and which truths are softened, distorted, or erased. The same impulse that once targeted German freethinkers now operates through curricular gatekeeping—policing how young people come to understand democracy, race, religion, and dissent.

At the university level, the struggle over Ethnic Studies—and more recently, the passage and implementation of SB 17 and SB 37—extends this project. Programs, scholarship, and entire fields that interrogate power, colonialism, and racial hierarchy are cast as threats to the state. Faculty governance is restructured. Academic freedom is narrowed. Knowledge itself is disciplined.

The tactics are strikingly familiar:

The manufacturing of moral panic.

 The targeting of educators, intellectuals, and marginalized communities.

The insistence that dominant norms are under siege.

These are not new strategies. They are recycled technologies of power.
And they work.

This is why the video matters now. Because the battles we are witnessing across Texas—over curriculum, DEI, academic freedom, and even the right to teach truthful histories—are not isolated skirmishes. They are the latest expression of a much longer project: the regulation of knowledge in the service of ideology.

In this light, policies like SB 17 and SB 37 do not stand alone. They are part of a broader architecture of governance that seeks to narrow what can be known, said, and taught. This is not simply policy—it is the institutionalization of a worldview.

A worldview that has always required enemies.

What Drew McCoy ultimately offers is not just historical recovery, but a warning. Movements built over generations do not disappear when challenged. They adapt. They rebrand. They relocate their battles—from churches to school boards, from pulpits to legislatures, from doctrine to policy.

And they continue.

So the question is not whether this history is relevant.

It is whether we are willing to confront what it reveals about the present.

Because once you recognize the pattern—the suppression of dissent, the policing of thought, the fusion of faith and state power—it becomes impossible to dismiss what is happening now as accidental or benign.

This is not new.

It is simply returning in a different form.

If this history troubles you, it should. And it should move you—not just to reflection, but to action. The next battleground is already set. The Texas State Board of Education will meet June 22–26, 2026, where proposed, deeply reactionary social studies standards will be debated—standards that will shape what millions of Texas students are allowed to know about their own history. 

Show up. Testify. Bear witness. Refuse the erasure. And stay connected to those organizing on the ground by following Social Studies Advocate on Instagram. The struggle over knowledge is not abstract. It is happening now—and it requires all of us.

“Affirmative Action for Conservatives”: The New Architecture of Academic Capture, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. April 6, 2026

“Affirmative Action for Conservatives”: The New Architecture of Academic Capture

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

April 6, 2026

I’ve been watching this unfold with a mix of disbelief and recognition—not because it is new, but because it is becoming normalized. At University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a newly created School of Civic Life and Leadership promises “civil discourse” and “ideological diversity.” On its face, that sounds like the very essence of higher education. Who could object to a project that claims to broaden debate, to welcome disagreement, to cultivate thoughtful citizenship?

But as is increasingly the case in this moment, the language obscures more than it reveals. What is taking shape is not a neutral expansion of perspectives, but a re-engineering of the university—one that substitutes one form of ideological gatekeeping for another while insisting it is restoring balance.

The most telling evidence comes not from critics on the outside, but from participants within. Even some of the program’s early conservative supporters have begun to raise alarms. One faculty member described the hiring practices as “affirmative action for conservatives.” The phrase is striking, not simply for its irony, but for its clarity. 

For years, affirmative action has been cast by the right as the ultimate symbol of unfairness—evidence of ideological distortion in higher education. And yet here we have a parallel structure, by their own account, designed to privilege a particular political orientation in hiring. This is not intellectual diversity. It is ideological substitution.

What we are witnessing is not simply hypocrisy. It is a pattern—one that can be understood as discursive inversion. Efforts toward equity and inclusion are first reframed as coercive, exclusionary, even dangerous. Then, under the banner of restoring neutrality, new systems of control are introduced—systems that are themselves deeply ideological, but now shielded by the language of “freedom,” “balance,” and “viewpoint diversity.” 

In this case, reports indicate that hiring decisions have sidelined candidates for perceived ideological deviations, including something as basic as a land acknowledgment in a syllabus. So much for open inquiry. The issue is not the removal of litmus tests, but their reconfiguration.

If this were an isolated case, it would still be troubling. But it is not. Across the country, similar centers are being established, often through direct legislative mandate or donor pressure, or both. They are framed as correctives to so-called “leftist capture,” yet they arrive with substantial financial backing, preferential hiring pipelines, and built-in student recruitment incentives. At UNC, students are offered thousands of dollars in scholarships and residential perks to participate. Faculty critics have called it inducement. Others might call it strategic recruitment. Either way, it signals something deeper: this is not incidental. This is infrastructure.

And that distinction matters. Because policy today does not operate only through prohibition—through what is banned or dismantled. It operates just as powerfully through construction—through what is funded, incentivized, and scaled. At the very moment when programs in ethnic studies, gender studies, and related fields are being defunded, merged, or eliminated across states like Texas and Florida, these new centers are experiencing a windfall. State appropriations, private philanthropy, and even federal funding streams are being mobilized to build them out quickly. This is not a coincidence. It is a reordering.

If you are in Texas, none of this should feel distant. We have already seen how legislative interventions—SB 17, SB 37, and related measures—reshape the terrain of higher education by dismantling DEI infrastructures, weakening faculty governance, and narrowing the scope of permissible inquiry. What follows is not a vacuum, but a replacement. North Carolina offers a glimpse of that replacement in action. 

The pattern is strikingly consistent: universities are declared ideologically “captured,” programs associated with equity and critical inquiry are dismantled, new centers framed around “civics” and “free speech” are installed, resourced heavily, staffed selectively, and used to attract students through targeted incentives. All the while, the project is framed as a restoration of neutrality.

But neutrality does not require ideological engineering.

Perhaps the most consequential effects are not the most visible ones. They show up in the subtle recalibrations of academic life: faculty second-guessing their syllabi, departments narrowing course offerings, scholars avoiding topics that may trigger scrutiny, students navigating an increasingly politicized curriculum landscape. This is governance through anticipation. 

No formal ban is needed when the conditions for self-censorship are firmly in place. And when hiring itself becomes ideologically inflected, the long-term consequences deepen. Academic fields do not disappear overnight. They are slowly starved, restructured, and repopulated.

This is why the phrase “affirmative action for conservatives” matters so much. It is not just a critique; it is a diagnostic. It reveals that the project is not merely about opening space for conservative ideas—something that a genuinely pluralistic university should welcome—but about constructing an institutional apparatus that ensures those ideas are privileged, protected, and reproduced. In other words, it is about power. And like all durable forms of power, it is being built not only through rhetoric, but through policy, funding, hiring, and governance.

The stakes are not abstract. They are visible in who gets hired and who does not, in what gets taught and what quietly disappears, in which students are drawn into particular intellectual pathways and why, and in how universities define their public mission. At issue is whether higher education remains a site of genuine inquiry or becomes an arena of managed discourse.

We are often told that these interventions are necessary to save the university. But we should ask: save it from what—and for whom? When efforts to expand inclusion are recast as ideological capture, and when that framing is used to justify new forms of institutional control, we are no longer in the realm of reform. We are in the realm of reconstruction.

The irony is hard to miss. In seeking to dismantle what is described as politicized education, these initiatives risk entrenching a new form of it—one that is no less ideological, but far less willing to name itself as such. The question is not whether universities should host disagreement. They must. The question is whether that disagreement will remain genuinely open—or whether it will be curated, incentivized, and quietly constrained under the banner of “freedom.”

Because when “diversity” becomes selective, when “balance” becomes engineered, and when “freedom” becomes a governing script rather than a lived practice, we should recognize the shift for what it is.

Not a correction.

A capture.

How a Civics School With a Conservative Bent Divided Its Supporters

A University of North Carolina program was intended to promote civil discourse and ideological diversity. Some of its early conservative supporters say it is doing the opposite.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill opened a new school focused on civics two years ago.
It has drawn controversy almost since the beginning.Credit...Cornell Watson for The New York Times

By Stephanie Saul Photographs by Cornell Watson

Stephanie Saul reported from the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

March 30, 2026

The syllabus for SCLL 230-001, also known as “Men and Women,” describes requirements different from the typical college course. Students in the class, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, must go on a date, plan their own weddings and organize a ball (a group project).

Guest speakers last fall included Chloe Cole, an activist against gender treatment for minors; Dr. William B. Hurlbut, a former White House bioethics adviser who warned about the dangers of premarital sex; and several married couples, one with a baby who was passed around to students.

The class reading list includes ideas from both the right and left, and the course is billed as a chance to openly debate issues affecting the genders in the age of a “masculinity crisis in the modern West.” But some students who took the class said it tilted toward promoting traditional gender roles in dating, marriage and family life.

The class is among the offerings at the U.N.C. School of Civic Life and Leadership, one of more than 40 academic programs that have sprung up across the country as part of a movement among conservatives to combat what they see as excessive leftism on college campuses. While the centers vary in curriculum, they emphasize Western thought, America’s founders and civil discourse.

The centers have built excitement — and drawn big-ticket donors — among those looking for a counterweight to classes on feminism, social justice and systemic oppression. Nine state legislatures in red-leaning states have passed laws requiring the opening of similar programs. In announcing the creation of a center at Ohio State University, lawmakers attacked “a monopoly of left-wing ideology” on campuses.

But the centers have also drawn controversy and criticism, including from some initial supporters. Shiri Spitz Siddiqi, chief researcher for the nonprofit group Heterodox Academy, which released a report on the programs last year, said the centers had generated “a lot of distrust among mainstream academics.”


The School of Civic Life and Leadership building at U.N.C. In several Republican-led states, legislatures have required universities to open similar programs.

At U.N.C., some conservative faculty members say the program has been hypocritical. The school, they argue, is mimicking the same problems that conservatives have said are endemic to left-leaning campuses, such as applying ideological litmus tests in hiring to keep out professors who don’t fit a certain political profile.

Jonathan Williams, a U.N.C. professor of economics who was appointed chief economist for the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission in January, supported the school at first. He noted that he had worked for a decade to fight “wokeness” on campus.

But last year, he called the school an “unmitigated disaster” in an email resigning from its advisory board, accusing the school of ignoring hiring protocols that are important to professors. The board did not respond to a request for comment.

Jed Atkins, the school’s dean, declined to be interviewed for this article. But in a written statement, he said that the school did not apply “political or religious litmus tests” to hiring.
‘Affirmative Action’ for Conservatives

The idea for the U.N.C. program predated the start of President Trump’s second term, which supercharged a movement to overhaul college campuses. In 2023, the state legislature pledged $4 million over two years and ordered the hiring of up to 20 faculty members for the new school.

But it faced controversy almost from its start. Dr. Atkins, a Greek and Roman scholar who came from Duke University, has clashed with faculty and advisers over how professors have been hired and what some believe is a set of courses too narrowly focused on the American story and religion.

Several of his hires are theology experts, including the professor who teaches “Men and Women,” John Rose, who has a Ph.D. in theology and who also came from Duke. He also teaches a course called “The Christian Story,” which examines the life of Jesus and what it means to be human, among other things, according to the syllabus.

Other professors teach classes with Christian themes, including a course about C.S. Lewis, the Christian author, and another called “Pursuing the Good Life,” in which readings include the Bible. The course ponders questions such as, “How should I live?” and “Whom and how should I love?”


Jed Atkins, dean of the School of Civic Life and Leadership, clashed with professors over hiring.

Faculty expertise includes Greek and Roman political theory; Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures and thought; and American history and literature, Dr. Atkins said in a statement.

The school “educates citizens and leaders for constitutional self-government through free inquiry and civil discourse,” he added, “equipping students with the knowledge, judgment and habits to lead wisely, deliberate across differences and live with purpose in a pluralistic American democracy.”

Among the school’s first hires was David Decosimo, an opponent of diversity, equity and inclusion programs who had been recruited from Boston University. Within a year, though, he clashed with Dr. Atkins over hiring decisions, suggesting the school was applying “affirmative action” for conservatives.

“Schools devoted to civil discourse must exemplify it, starting at the top,” he posted in a long thread online. “They must welcome disagreement, not punish it.”

He remains a professor at U.N.C. but has been fired as associate dean.

One contentious point, several professors said, involved an Ohio State University historian, Sean Anthony, who had been recruited to apply. He complained that he’d been eliminated because his syllabus included a “land acknowledgment” recognizing that O.S.U. occupied the former home of Native Americans.

“I was rejected because of an ideological litmus test,” Dr. Anthony, a professor of Near Eastern and South Asian cultures, wrote in a letter of complaint to U.N.C. officials obtained by The New York Times.

Several administrators criticized the hiring process, including the university’s provost, Christopher Clemens, an avowed conservative who helped set up the program. He was forced out as provost after ordering a pause in hiring at the school, a decision that was ultimately overturned.

“A hiring process that relies on ideology would provide an excuse and even an incentive for the rest of the faculty to isolate, neglect, or even actively undermine the center’s efforts,” Dr. Clemens, an astrophysicist, wrote in a soon-to-be-published book chapter.

Tension over hiring came to a head during a vitriolic meeting in February 2025, when faculty members complained that the hiring committee’s recommendations were being overruled, according to meeting records obtained by The New York Times.

“I was supportive of the school,” Dr. Williams, who was on an advisory panel, told Dr. Atkins during the meeting. “I was openly mocked for supporting it. And if this process is not squeaky clean, our reputations are ruined on campus.”

The university ordered an outside investigation into the school. This month, the university said the findings of the 400-page report, which cost more than $1 million, would not be disclosed.

In a statement, the university’s chancellor, Lee H. Roberts, issued a vote of confidence in Dr. Atkins, noting his resolve and the fact that he had secured a major donation.
A Deal for Students

Some of the centers have had difficulty recruiting students. But the U.N.C. school says it has grown, from 84 students in the fall of 2024 to 487 this semester.

The curriculum attracted Devin Duncan, the student body president-elect, who said he decided to minor in the school after taking a course on the Federalist Papers. He said it posed “really large questions” such as: “What is the American experiment? What makes a good leader and what makes for a bad one?”

Other students have been skeptical. A progressive U.N.C. group called TransparUNCy called for a boycott of the school. One of the group’s leaders, Toby Posel, called it a “key element of Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda.”

Some of the classes are nearly at capacity, according to enrollment information obtained by The New York Times. But classes like “Seeking a Just Society” and “Classics of Civic Thought” filled fewer than half their seats. (The school did not respond to questions about enrollment for specific classes.)

Some students have been drawn to the school because of special financial offers. Students who pursue minors are eligible for the Libertas Scholarship, valued at $12,000 over four years. Tuition at U.N.C. is about $7,000 a year for in-state students and about $43,000 for out-of-state students.

Before freshmen arrived on campus last fall, the school had offered another deal for them, even if they hadn’t signed up for the minor.

“Students: we offer a $3,000 scholarship, transformational programming (including a tech-free retreat in the NC mountains), and superb faculty leadership,” the promotion read. To receive the money, students had to live in a residential “civil discourse” community — called Civ-Comm — connected to the school.



Clockwise from top left, Toby Posel, Noa Roxborough, Emma Serrano, Christina Huang and Pragya Upreti are members of TransparUNCy, a progressive U.N.C. group that called for a boycott of the civics school.Credit...Cornell Watson for The New York Times


Erik Gellman, a history professor, calls the offers bribery. “If you join us in this school, we will throw money at you,” said Dr. Gellman, a leader of the American Association of University Professors chapter on campus.

A spokesman for U.N.C. said similar scholarships had been offered at other schools.

Kirstin Crump lives in the residential community, has taken two courses and also applied for the scholarship for those declaring minors. “I’ve had a really positive experience with the courses themselves,” she said. But she said she was concerned by allegations circulated on campus that the school was created to push specific ideologies.

“It’s probably just going to come down to financial considerations,” she said. “It’s a lot of money.”

The offers come during a period when U.N.C., one of the nation’s most prestigious public universities, is facing millions of dollars in cutbacks.

The School of Civic Life and Leadership has seen a windfall, however, with funding from the state, private donations, an Education Department grant of nearly $1 million, and more than $10 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund “a world-class civics faculty.”

Dr. Hurlbut, a Stanford medical doctor who spoke to Dr. Rose’s class last semester about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, said the school’s professors were steering their students through important debates.

“I think John Rose is trying to get students to really talk to one another so they can find common ground,” said Dr. Hurlbut, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics.


The U.N.C. civics school has grown quickly. Some students were drawn to enroll by financial incentives.

Dr. Rose said in a statement that he was introducing diverse perspectives to encourage healthy discourse. During one class, students heard both from Simone and Malcolm Collins, an activist couple who promote having more babies, and from Amy Glaser, a North Carolina State University professor who founded an L.G.B.T.Q. organization.

Outside the Civ-Comm residential community, Sasha Widman, an aspiring nurse, said she had accepted the $3,000 residence scholarship, enticed by what she believed would be vibrant, organized discussions.

Still, she does not plan to declare a minor.

“I don’t think that’s necessarily where I want our society to go, or where I want my education to go,” Ms. Widman said.


Stephanie Saul reports on colleges and universities, with a recent focus on the dramatic changes in college admissions and the debate around diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.

Whose Truths Are Told: From Canada's Parliament Hill to Texas Classrooms

This exchange with reporters happened on June 29, 2017. It was part of a four-day “reoccupation” protest around Canada Day that takes place annually on the first day of July, Canada's independence day. As you view the video that I share, it is important to understand the context.

First, this exchange unfolded after Indigenous demonstrators erected a teepee on Parliament Hill—and, even more importantly, in the shadow of an ongoing national tragedy: the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls whose cases remain unresolved, their families’ pleas too often ignored by authorities. This crisis, rooted in the intergenerational trauma of the boarding school era and the broader legacy of colonial violence, has been extensively documented not only in Canada but across the United States, as well.

A reporter expresses why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is to blame for this, incensing the women who then accuse the media of disrespect and demanding that the reporter asking the question leave the room.

Without a doubt, their anger was more than a reaction to one reporter's disrespect. It was a lesson on white privilege and white fragility. That act of refusal is not hostility—it’s sovereignty. It's also inescapably about the agonizing loss of their loved ones. It insists that Indigenous peoples control their own stories, their own truths.

In the larger scheme of things, it means naming genocide and dispossession, and restoring not only land but decision-making power. Journalists and educators alike must ask: do our institutions create space for Indigenous truth, or do we stage reconciliation as a feel-good narrative like Thanksgiving itself that leaves power untouched?

From Parliament Hill to Texas classrooms, the struggle is shared: whose histories are told, whose truths are silenced, and whose comfort determines the limits of justice. In case you're interested and available, the Texas State Board of Education is addressing Social Studies standard this Wednesday as follows:

 

Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Time: 9:30am – 11:00am

Location: William B. Travis building located at 1601 N. Congress, Austin,  TX, 78751

Room Assignment:  Ground floor room G-100B

Registration:  Social Studies TEKS Review: Information Session Registration.

 

**Due to construction in the lobby of the building, it will be necessary to enter from the back entrance located on Brazos St. Parking information will be provided to registered participants prior to the meeting.

As educators, advocates, and community members, we have an obligation to stand where truth is being told—even when it unsettles. Our task is to insist that our schools, our histories, and our public institutions reflect the full truth of who we are.

With respect and solidarity,

-Angela Valenzuela

Reference

Vice News. (2024, February 17). Why Are Indigenous Women Disappearing Across Canada?

Indigenous demonstrators accuse media of being disrespectful in heated exchange with reporters (on June 29, 2017).

Indigenous demonstrators who led a protest and erected a teepee on Parliament Hill on Wednesday held a press conference this morning, in which they accused media of being disrespectful, rejected Justin Trudeau's reconciliation efforts with indigenous communities, and called for the UN to prosecute federal leaders

No Kings: A Radical Democracy in Defense of the Founders’ Vision

Friends;

Today, millions marched in cities across the nation—myself included—under the banner “No Kings,” a simple, defiant affirmation of the Founders’ vision of liberty and equality. On the South Steps of the Texas Capitol alone, organizers announced 20,000 in attendance—a radical democracy, as it were. Their message could not be more urgent.

Written in April, 2024, Robert Kagan’s brilliant essay, “We Have a Radical Democracy. Will Trump Voters Destroy It?” published in The Washington Post, gets to the heart of the matter. With clarity and historical depth, Kagan reminds us that the anti-liberal backlash we are witnessing is not new—it is the latest chapter in America’s long struggle between the egalitarian promise of the Declaration of Independence and those who would replace it with an ethnoreligious order the Founders explicitly rejected.

Those who call for a “Christian America” seek not renewal but regime change—an overthrow of the liberal democracy that guarantees freedom of conscience for all. The Founders knew this danger well. They built a republic on reason, rights, and pluralism, not on divine hierarchy or bloodline.

The millions who marched today are, in that sense, heirs to the revolution itself—reminding us that democracy survives only when people defend it both in the streets and at the ballot box. 

I loved seeing the handmade signs—clever, fierce, and full of conviction—and the many children and young people marching alongside their families. Their presence was a living testament to hope: that the spirit of democracy is not fading, but rising anew in a generation determined to carry forward the Founders’ promise of liberty, equality, and justice for all. 

Treat yourself to Robert Kagan’s brilliant essay. It’s a reminder that democracy itself is a radical proposition—one that must be renewed, defended, and lived into every single day.

— Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Opinion 

We have a radical democracy. Will Trump

voters destroy it?

by Robert Kagan, editor at large | April 24, 2024 | Washington Post

Sam Green / Washington Post

For some time, it was possible to believe that many voters could not see the threat Donald Trump poses to America’s liberal democracy, and many still profess not to see it. But now, a little more than six months from Election Day, it’s hard to believe they don’t. The warning signs are clear enough. Trump himself offers a new reason for concern almost every day. People may choose to ignore the warnings or persuade themselves not to worry, but they can see what we all see, and that should be enough.

How to explain their willingness to support Trump despite the risk he poses to our system of government? The answer is not rapidly changing technology, widening inequality, unsuccessful foreign policies or unrest on university campuses but something much deeper and more fundamental. It is what the Founders worried about and Abraham Lincoln warned about: a decline in what they called public virtue. They feared it would be hard to sustain popular support for the revolutionary liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence, and they worried that the virtuous love of liberty and equality would in time give way to narrow, selfish interest. 

Although James Madison and his colleagues hoped to establish a government on the solid foundation of self-interest, even Madison acknowledged that no government by the people could be sustained if the people themselves did not have sufficient dedication to the liberal ideals of the Declaration. The people had to love liberty, not just for themselves but as an abstract ideal for all humans.

Americans are going down this route today because too many no longer care enough whether the system the Founders created survives and are ceding the ground to those, led by Trump, who actively seek to overthrow what so many of them call “the regime.” This “regime” they are referring to is the unique political system established by the Founders based on the principles of universal equality and natural rights. That, plain and simple, is what this election is about. “A republic if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin allegedly said of the government created by the Constitutional Convention in 1787. This is the year we may choose not to keep it.

A healthy republic would not be debating whether Trump and his followers seek the overthrow of the Founders’ system of liberal democracy. What more do people need to see than his well-documented attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power with the storming of the U.S. Capitol, the elaborate scheme to create false electoral slates in key states, the clear evidence that he bullied officials in some states to “find” more votes, and to persuade Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the legitimate results? What more do they need to know than that Trump continues to insist he won that election and celebrates as heroes and “patriots” the people who invaded the U.S. Capitol and smashed policemen’s faces with the stated aim of forcing Congress to negate the election results? As one 56-year-old Michigan woman present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”

Trump not only acknowledges his goals, past and present; he promises to do it again if he loses this year. For the third straight election, he is claiming that if he loses, then the vote will have been fraudulent. He has warned of uprisings, of “bedlam” and a “bloodbath,” and he has made clear that he will again be the promoter of this violence, just as he was on Jan. 6. Trump explicitly warned in 2020 that he would not accept the election results if he lost, and he didn’t. This year he is saying it again. Were there no other charges against him, no other reason to be concerned about his return to the presidency, this alone would be sufficient to oppose him. He does not respect and has never pledged to abide by the democratic processes established by the Constitution. On the contrary, he has explicitly promised to violate the Constitution when he deems it necessary. That by itself makes him a unique candidate in American history and should be disqualifying.

This kind of open challenge to our democracy was never meant to be addressed by the courts. As the Founders well understood, you don’t serve a subpoena to a would-be tyrant and tell him to lawyer up. Nor was it meant to be addressed by the normal processes of democratic elections. They knew, and feared, that a demagogue could capture the allegiance of enough voters to overthrow the system. That was why they gave Congress, and particularly the Senate, supposedly more immune from popular pressures, the power to impeach and remove presidents and to deny them the opportunity to run again — and not simply because they violated some law but because they posed a clear and present danger to the republic. After Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government in 2020, Congress had a chance to use the method prescribed by the Founders in precisely the circumstances they envisioned. But Senate Republicans, out of a combination of ambition and cowardice, refused to play the vital role the Founders envisioned for them. The result is that the nightmare feared by the Founders is one election away from becoming reality.

Sam Green /Washington Post


The problem with Trump is not that he has some carefully thought-out plan for seizing power, much less an elaborate ideological justification for doing so. (Others do have such plans and such justifications, including many of those who will populate his administration — more on that in a moment.) With Trump, everything is about him and his immediate needs. He will run roughshod over the laws and Constitution simply to get what he wants for himself, his family and his business interests. Americans know that if he is elected, he would abuse the justice system to go after his opponents. They know this because he says so. “I am your retribution!” he declares, and by “your” he means “my.” Americans know he would use his power as president to try to solve his financial problems. He did it as president and is doing it now as a presidential candidate. They know he would not respect the results of fair elections if he loses, which is the very definition of a tyrant.

So, why will so many vote for him anyway? For a significant segment of the Republican electorate, the white-hot core of the Trump movement, it is because they want to see the system overthrown. This should not come as a shock, for it is not a new phenomenon. On the contrary, it is as old as the republic. Historians have written about the “liberal tradition” in America, but there has from the beginning also been an anti-liberal tradition: large numbers of Americans determined to preserve preliberal traditions, hierarchies and beliefs against the secular liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. The Founders based the republic on a radical set of principles and assertions about government: that all human beings were created equal in their possession of certain “natural rights” that government was bound to respect and to safeguard. These rights did not derive from religious belief but were “self-evident.” They were not granted by the Christian God, by the crown or even by the Constitution. They were inherent in what it meant to be human.

This is the central tenet of liberalism. Before the American Revolution no government had ever been founded on liberal principles, and the vast majority of human beings had never believed in these natural rights — certainly not the Christian church in either its Protestant or Roman Catholic versions nor Islam nor Judaism nor Hinduism nor Buddhism. People might be equal in the eyes of their god, but no government or religious institution had ever been based on the principle of equal rights. Not even the English system was based on this principle but rather on monarchy, a ruling aristocracy, and a contract between crown and subjects that was modified over the centuries but was not based on the principle of universal “natural” rights.

The Founders knew these ideas were radical, that they were inaugurating, in their own words, a novus ordo seclorum — a new order of the ages — that required a new way of thinking and acting. They knew, as well, that their own practices and those of 18th-century American society did not conform to their new revolutionary doctrines. They knew that slavery was contrary to the Declaration’s principles, though they permitted slavery to continue, hoping it would die a natural death. They knew that established churches were contrary to those principles because they impinged on that most important of rights, “freedom of conscience,” which was vital to the preservation of liberty, yet a number of states in the 18th and 19th centuries retained all kinds of religious tests for office. In short, they knew that a great many Americans did not in fact believe in the liberal principles of the Revolution. As Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, put it, “We have changed our forms of government, but it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions and manners so as to accommodate them to the forms of government we have adopted.” They did not insist that citizens believe in those principles. One could be an American citizen whether one believed in the Declaration or not.

And a great many did not. Leaders of the slaveholding South called the Declaration “a most pernicious falsehood.” South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun called the very idea of equal rights a “false doctrine.” They believed in democracy, but only if it was an exclusively White democracy. When democracy turned against them in 1860, they rebelled and sought an exit from the system. That rebellion never ended. It has been weakened, suppressed — sometimes by force — and driven underground, but it has never gone away. Although the South was militarily defeated and deprived of its special advantages in the Constitution, its hostility to the Founders’ liberalism did not abate. As Southern writer W.J. Cash observed in 1941, if the war had “smashed the southern world,” it had nevertheless “left the essential southern mind and will … entirely unshaken” and Southerners themselves determined “to hold fast to their own, to maintain their divergences, to remain what they had been and were.” In 1956, almost a century after the Civil War, a fifth of Congress, almost all Democrats — signed the “Southern Manifesto” calling on states to refuse to obey the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to end segregation in public schools. Nothing had changed. Are we so surprised that for many Americans, nothing has changed even today?

Nor has anti-liberalism only been about race. For more than a century after the Revolution, many if not most White Anglo-Saxon Protestants insisted that America was a Protestant nation. They did not believe Catholics possessed equal rights or should be treated as equals. The influential “second” Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish as well as anti-Black, which was why, unlike the original Klan, it flourished outside the South. Many regard today’s Christian nationalism as a fringe movement, but it has been a powerful and often dominant force throughout America’s history.

For two centuries, many White Americans have felt under siege by the Founders’ liberalism. They have been defeated in war and suppressed by threats of force, but more than that, they have been continually oppressed by a system designed by the Founders to preserve and strengthen liberalism against competing beliefs and hierarchies. Since World War II, the courts and the political system have pursued the Founders’ liberal goals with greater and greater fidelity, ending official segregation, driving religion from public schools, recognizing and defending the rights of women and minorities hitherto deprived of their “natural rights” because of religious, racial and ethnic discrimination. The hegemony of liberalism has expanded, just as Lincoln hoped it would, “constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of colors everywhere.” Anti-liberal political scientist Patrick Deneen calls it “liberal totalitarianism,” and, apart from the hyperbole, he is right that liberalism has been steadily deepening and expanding under presidents of both parties since the 1940s.

The fury on the anti-liberal right against what is today called “wokeness” is nothing new. Anti-liberal movements in America, whether in defense of the White race or Christianity, and more often both together, have always claimed to be suffering under the expanding hegemony of liberalism. They have always claimed that a liberal government and society were depriving them of their “freedom” to live a life according to Christian teachings and were favoring various minority groups, especially Black people, at their expense. In the 1970s, influential theologian R.J. Rushdoony complained that the Christian in America had “no right to his identity” but was forced to recognize “all others and their ‘rights.’” And he was correct if a Christian’s “rights” included the right not only to lead a Christian life oneself but to impose that life on the entire society, or if a White person’s “freedom” included the freedom to preserve white primacy in society. In the 19th century, enslavers insisted they were deprived of their “freedom” to hold human beings as property; Southerners in the post-Reconstruction era insisted on their “freedom” to oppress Black citizens in their states.

Today, anti-liberals in American society are indeed deprived of their “freedom” to impose their religious and racial views on society, on public schools, on the public square and on the laws of the nation. What Christian nationalists call “liberal totalitarianism,” the Founders called “freedom of conscience.”

Six decades ago, people like Rushdoony were responding not to “woke” corporations or Black Lives Matter but to civil rights legislation. Today, anti-liberal conservatives complain about school curriculums that acknowledge the racism that has shaped America’s history, but even five decades ago, before the invention of “critical race theory,” anti-liberal White people such as Rushdoony insisted that the “white man” was being “systematically indoctrinated into believing he is guilty of enslaving and abusing the Negro.” Nor is it new that many White people feel that the demands of minority groups for both rights and respect have “gone too far” and it is they, the White people of America, who are suffering the worst discrimination. In the 1960s, surveys taken by the New York Times showed that majorities of White people believed even then that the civil rights movement had “gone too far,” that Blacks were receiving “everything on a silver platter” and the government was practicing “reverse discrimination” against White people. Liberalism is always going too far for many Americans — and certainly for anti-liberals. Anti-liberals these days complain about wokeness, therefore, but it is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the Founders, and the accompanying egalitarian spirit, that they are really objecting to, just as anti-liberals have since the founding of the nation. Many of Trump’s core supporters insist they are patriots, but whether they realize it or not, their allegiance is not to the Founders’ America but to an ethnoreligious definition of the nation that the Founders explicitly rejected.


Sam Green / Washington Post

Some do realize it. The smartest and most honest of them know that if people truly want a “Christian America,” it can only come through “regime change,” by which they mean the “regime” created by the Founders. The Founders’ legacy is a “dead end,” writes Glenn Ellmers, a scholar at the Claremont Institute. The Constitution is a “Potemkin village.” According to Deneen and Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule, the system established by the Founders to protect individual rights needs to be replaced with an alternative form of government. What they have in mind is a Christian commonwealth: a “culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions,” with legislation to “promote public morality, and forbid its intentional corruption,” a “forthright acknowledgment and renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization,” “public opportunities for prayers,” and a “revitalization of our public spaces to reflect a deeper belief that we are called to erect imitations of the beauty that awaits us in another Kingdom.”

These anti-liberal conservatives know that bringing such a commonwealth into being means jettisoning the Founders’ obsession with individual rights. The influential advocate of “conservative nationalism,” Yoram Hazony, wants Americans to abandon the Declaration in favor of a nationhood built on Protestantism and the Bible. America is a “revolutionary nation,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) insists, not because of the principles of the Declaration and not even because of the American Revolution itself, but “because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible” that began with “the founding of the nation of Israel.” There could hardly be a statement more at odds with the American Founders’ liberal, ecumenical vision.

Expressing a belief in God is no threat to the Founders’ system, but reshaping society in accord with Christian teachings is. To build the nation Hawley and Hazony imagine would require jettisoning not only the Declaration but also the Constitution, which was designed to protect the Declaration’s principles. The Christian commonwealth would not and could not be a democracy because the majority of people can’t be trusted to choose correctly. According to the Claremont Institute’s Ellmers, “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They are a “zombie” or “human rodent” who lives “a shadow-life of timid conformity.” Only “the 75 million people who voted in the last election” for Trump are true Americans. Instead of trying to compete with Democrats in elections that don’t reflect the will of the people, Ellmers writes, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” The “only road forward” is “overturning the existing post-American order.”

For these intellectuals, Trump is an imperfect if essential vehicle for the counterrevolution. A “deeply flawed narcissist” suffering from a “bombastic vanity,” as Deneen and Ellmers note, he has “lacked the discipline to target his creative/destructive tendencies effectively.” But this can be remedied. If Trump failed to accomplish the desired overthrow in his first term, Deneen argues, it was because he lacked “a capable leadership class.” Things will be different in his next term. What is needed, according to Deneen, is a “self-conscious aristoi,” a class of thinkers who understand “both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure,” who know how to turn populist “resentments into sustained policy.” Members of Deneen’s would-be new elite will, like Vladimir Lenin, place themselves at the vanguard of a populist revolution, acting “on behalf of the broad working class” while raising the consciousness of the “untutored” masses. Indeed, according to Harvard’s Vermeule, it will be necessary to impose the common good even against the people’s “own perceptions of what is best for them” — a most Leninist concept indeed.

The Christian commonwealth, then, would require a powerful executive freed from the Constitution’s liberal and democratic constraints. The new state, Vermeule wrote, with its “robust executive,” would “sear the liberal faith with hot irons,” wielding the “authority to curb the social and economic pretensions of the urban-gentry liberals.” The whiff of violence and oppression in such statements is intentional. The anti-liberal intellectuals understand that changing the liberal system will require far more than an election and a few legislative reforms.

Deneen and Vermeule are often dismissed as mere intellectual provocateurs, but their writings stand out because they have the courage to acknowledge that what they seek is incompatible with the Founders’ liberal system. While others conceal their views under a phony fidelity to American liberal principles or claim that what they want accords with the Founders’ true intent, Deneen, Vermeule and other anti-liberals acknowledge that the country they want, a country subservient to the Christian God, a country whose laws are based on the Bible, cannot be created absent the overthrow of the Founders’ liberal and defiantly secular system. Even a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil M. Gorsuch, speaks of the “so-called separation of church and state.” Anti-liberalism at the Supreme Court is nothing new, either.

And the anti-liberals know as well that this year may be their last chance to effect their counterrevolution. The percentage of the population made up of White people (let alone White Protestants) is steadily shrinking. Just as the anti-liberal conservatives of the pre-World War II years closed the immigration gates too late and were overwhelmed by a tide of non-Nordic peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe, so the immigration wave of largely non-White people since 1965 has brought the nation to the cusp of a non-White majority. The anti-liberals thus face the task of engineering the revolution with only a minority of the electorate committed to “regime change.”

Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party makes this possible. Trump is not a unique figure in American history. In each generation, anti-liberal forces have turned to the same breed of demagogue, the flouter of norms, the boorish trampler of liberal nostrums. William Buckley noted that the very “uncouthness” of George Wallace seemed to “account for his general popularity.” James Burnham marveled at how Joseph McCarthy’s “inept acts and ignorant words” had a “charismatic” quality that well expressed the fears and angers of his devoted followers.

What their critics saw as boorishness and malevolence, however, their followers saw as strength and defiance against a liberal system stacked against them. They were rebellious opponents of the system, “wreckers,” unabashedly anti-liberal in both thought and manner, and that is precisely what made them popular among a broad swath of White Americans who felt themselves losing ground in the culture and society — to Black people, Catholics, Jews and immigrants from non-Nordic countries. Today, exactly a century after the most overtly racist immigration restriction in American history, Trump once again calls for more immigrants from “nice” European countries, such as Denmark, Switzerland and Norway.

Trump did not just stumble into leadership of this movement of White rebellion. He summoned it. He made his debut as presidential aspirant on an unabashed white supremacist platform, championing the birther conspiracy that America’s first Black president was not in fact an American. Riding that issue alone, he catapulted to the front of the Republican pack, according to polls in 2011, before bowing out to continue his hit show, “The Apprentice.” Whether his debut as a white supremacist was opportunism or sprang from conviction hardly matters — it certainly has not mattered to his followers. The fact is, white supremacy has been his calling card, and millions have responded to it to the point where white nationalists have become the core of his movement. Many Christian nationalists already see him as a suffering Christ, and in this bizarre sense it is true that the prosecutions have “helped” him: The more adversity he faces, the more court battles he must wage, the more allegations that are slung at him, the more devoted they are to him.

No other group can be counted on for such absolute loyalty. While some Republicans wobble when asked if they would support Trump if convicted of a crime, White Christian Evangelicals overwhelmingly say they will support him no matter what. Trump needs that unshakable loyalty because he is fighting for his life. The thought that he might end up in jail has given him every reason to hew as closely as possible to the people who will stick with him even if he is convicted. These are also the people he will need to back him unconditionally in challenging the results of the election should he lose. If he wins, he will need them in what are sure to be titanic fights with Democrats and the legal system and to keep the Republican Party in line.

This is one reason Trump has so far shown no inclination to reach out beyond his base, to Nikki Haley voters, to more moderate suburban Republicans, to those who are made uncomfortable by his statements and actions. He may show flexibility on the important issue of abortion to secure his own election, but since clinching the nomination, he has only hardened his Christian nationalist message. His “poisoning the blood” campaign, his “dictator-for-a-day” comments, his release of the Trump Bible, his claim that, upon taking office, he will create “a new federal task force” to fight “anti-Christian bias to be led by a fully reformed Department of Justice,” are all aimed directly at his white Christian nationalist base without much concern for how millions of other Republican voters feel about it. Christians are “under siege,” he claims in hawking his Bible. “We must make America pray again.”

Besides, his hard tack toward white supremacy and Christian nationalism has cost him little among the broader Republican electorate.

Sam Green / The Washington Post

Why not? Why is there so little resistance to Trump even as he commits ever more deeply to a Christian nationalist program for undoing the Founders’ liberal project?

For many, the answer is simply narrow self-interest, either a positive interest in supporting him or a negative interest in not opposing him or being seen to oppose him. This seems to be the answer for corporate America. Having first followed marketing data to appeal to the broadest cross-section of Americans by embracing communities only recently enjoying more of the full panoply of rights, businesses learned the hard way that Trump and his movement will not tolerate this and have mostly retreated to silence and neutrality. But they have also gone further, making clear as much as possible that they will not be a problem for him — either before he is elected or after.

This was the message JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon sent, from Davos, Switzerland, of all places, early this year when he declared that Trump was “kind of right about NATO, kind of right about immigration,” that he “grew the economy quite well.” There is no reason to doubt that he spoke for many of the richest Americans and for other corporate leaders. There was no outcry among them that anyone could hear. The truth is, they have no financial reason to oppose Trump. They know that Trump’s White working-class followers don’t have to be paid off economically because most care chiefly about the culture wars. Trump can still cut taxes and reduce federal regulations and other obstacles to corporate profit. The rich and powerful will always have some purchase in a Trump administration if only because he needs and respects money and will want to make deals for himself and his family, as he did in a first term. Whatever moral or political qualms business leaders may have about Trump, the bottom line dictates that they get along with him, and if that means turning a blind eye to his unconstitutional actions — Dimon’s favorable recounting of Trump’s first term notably ignored his attempt to overthrow the government — then so be it.

We already know that little or no opposition will come from the Republican Party ecosystem. Among elected officials, the few willing to stand up to Trump have either been driven out of the party or are retiring so fast that they cannot even bear to finish out their terms. Those who remain have accepted Trump’s iron rule and therefore now have an interest in his success.

But what about the average Republican voter, the “normal” Republicans who happily voted for George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney? Do they not see the difference between those Republicans and Trump — or do they not care? They, too, may feel their narrow interests are served by a Trump victory, and although they may not be Christian nationalists themselves, their views as White Americans make them sympathetic to the complaints of the anti-liberals. They, too, may feel they — or their children — are at a disadvantage in a system dedicated to diversity and wokeness. Their annoyance with a liberalism that has “gone too far” makes them susceptible to Trump’s appeal, and, more importantly, unconcerned about the threat he poses. Left to their own devices, they would not be interested in overthrowing the regime. But neither are they inclined to stand in the way of those who are.

Are these voters and GOP power players right to believe that they, like Dimon, will be just fine in a system no longer faithful to the Founders’ liberal ideals? Perhaps so. They will not be the first to suffer from a shift back toward a 1920s America. White Americans tolerated the systematic oppression of Black people for a century after the Civil War. They tolerated violence in the South, injustice in the courtrooms, a Supreme Court that refused to recognize the equal rights of Black people, women and various minorities. Will they rise up against a second Trump term infused by Christian and white nationalism, or will they acquiesce in the gradual dismantling of the liberal gains of the past eight decades?

The shame is that many White people today seem to have conveniently forgotten how much they and their forebears have depended on the Founders’ liberalism to gain their present status as fully equal members of American society and to enjoy the freedoms that they take for granted.

Most White Republicans, after all, do not have the “legacy European” lineage that Tucker Carlson praises. They do not have ancestors who stepped off the Mayflower or fought in the Revolution. The ancestors of the great majority of “White” Americans today were not considered “White” when they first set foot on American shores. Irish Americans may no longer remember that the Thomas Nast cartoons of the late 19th century depicted the Irish as apelike creatures. Many Italian Americans may not recall that a riot made up of “New Orleans’ finest” lynched and murdered 11 Sicilian immigrants and were never charged.

Many Catholics seem to have forgotten that they were once the most despised group in America, such that one of the Founders, John Jay, wanted them excluded from citizenship altogether. Most White Americans were at one time members of despised immigrant groups. They were the victims of the very anti-liberalism they are now voting back into power. They climbed to equality using liberalism as their ladder, and now that they have reached their destination they would pull away the ladder and abandon liberalism. Having obtained their equality using the laws and institutions of liberalism, their passion for liberalism has faded.

The Founders understood, and feared, that the fervor for rights and liberalism that animated the Revolution might not last. Writing in 1781, two years before the end of the war, Thomas Jefferson predicted that once the war ended, “we shall be going down hill.” The people would return to their quotidian lives, forgetting their passionate concern for rights, intent only on “making money.” They might never again come together “to effect a due respect for their rights,” and so their government would stop being solicitous of their rights. Over a half-century later, Lincoln, in his famous Lyceum address, lamented that the original spirit of the Revolution had dissipated with time, leaving Americans with only the normal selfishness of human beings. The original “pillars of the temple of liberty” had “crumbled away.” A little over two decades later, the nation fell into civil war.

If the American system of government fails this year, it will not be because the institutions established by the Founders failed. It will not be because of new technologies or flaws in the Constitution. No system of government can protect against a determined tyrant. Only the people can. This year we will learn if they will.