A growing chorus of voices is warning that our democracy is in grave danger, but there is much less discussion of the exact nature of the threat. Recently, President Biden emphasized the severity of the threat by going to the place where the constitution was signed to give what the White House described as “a speech on the continued battle for the soul of the nation”.
Biden specifically named “Donald Trump and the Maga Republicans” as the ones carrying out the attacks, and that is accurate, on the surface. The deeper, more longstanding threat, however, was articulated by historian Taylor Branch in a 2018 conversation with author Isabel Wilkerson recounted in Wilkerson’s book Caste. As they discussed how the rise of white domestic terrorism under Trump was part of the backlash to the country’s growing racial diversity, Branch noted that, “people said they wouldn’t stand for being a minority in their own country”. He went on to add, “the real question would be if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”
