In 1871, a white abolitionist made a prediction. “I hope and expect to see the day,” he declared, “when a woman will be president of the United States; yes, when a Negro woman is president; and I won’t be satisfied unless she is at the same time married to a white man.” Theodore Tilton’s prophecy enraged the Confederate South, where it was denounced as a “radical doctrine”. It would take another 50 years before black women won the vote, and another century before the US would face the real possibility of electing a black woman to the highest office – one who is, indeed, married to a white man.
The response to Kamala Harris’s historic 2024 candidacy – predictably steeped in overt racism and misogyny – unfolds against a deeper history of American fascism. Donald Trump’s campaign event at Madison Square Garden (MSG) on 27 October evoked similar right-wing events held there in the 1930s, including pro-Nazi fascist rallies in 1934, 1935, and 1939.
During that time, Dorothy Thompson, a pioneering journalist who observed European fascism firsthand, began reporting on how far-right groups in the US were aligning under a distorted patriotism, weaponising democratic freedoms to further authoritarianism. She warned that American fascism would always present itself as “true Americanism”. In 1936, Thompson published a column titled “It Can Happen Here”. “Whom do they hate?” she asked. “Life, which has treated them badly. Who is to blame? Some scapegoat is to blame.” These groups were determined “to exterminate anarchists, communists, Catholics, Negroes, and Jews; to restrict immigration and deport all undesirable aliens; to support and participate in lynch law; to arm its members for civil war… and eventually to establish a dictatorship in America.”
I have written here before of the mirror Trump’s politics hold to the American fascism of the interwar period, their shared support of Christian nationalism, racial hierarchy, authoritarian rule. Trump has since promised to “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… Our threat is from within.”
At Trump’s MSG event, speakers called Puerto Ricans “garbage”, insulted black Americans, Palestinians and Jewish people, and labelled Harris the “Antichrist”. Elon Musk attended wearing a black Maga hat evocative of Fraktur, a font popular with Nazi Germany, while Stephen Miller quoted one of the KKK’s 1920s slogans, declaring that “America is for Americans only”. The Trump campaign also reportedly played a verse of “Dixie”, the popular anthem of the slaveholding Confederacy. Observers noted the parallels between the 1939 rally and the 2024 rally. Thompson, who attended the 1939 rally, observed that Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here had foreseen it “almost exactly”, including the “Storm Troopers” poised to suppress “unruly elements” – including “you and me”.
This election presents a choice between two visions of America. One continues the nation’s painful journey toward a pluralistic, multiracial democracy. The other returns to a “herrenvolk democracy” – where democratic rights are restricted to the “master race”, who like whistling “Dixie”. The election of the first black woman president would signify a powerful rejection of Trump’s cult of patriarchal masculinism, glorified violence, scapegoated minorities, dismissal of the rule of law and insistence on loyalty over truth. Harris’s loss could further establish an exclusionary power structure rooted in white male dominance.
The vision of America that Trump espouses reflects the transactional logic of slavery, judging people’s rights by economic worth, treating them as assets or liabilities, reducing democracy – per equality, justice, agency – to economic calculations. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission ruling entrenched this logic: granting citizenship rights to corporations, it turned profit-making entities into individuals, just as slavery stripped people of citizenship rights, turning individuals into profit-making entities. The pouring of dark money into American politics since that ruling has fundamentally reshaped it: approximately $2.4bn (£1.9bn) was spent by undisclosed groups in the 2020 election alone across both parties.
By contrast, Kamala Harris, born in California to Jamaican and Indian immigrant parents, embodies the plural democracy Trump seeks to erase. She represents a direct challenge to the nostalgic view of power as the exclusive domain of white Christian men. Harris’s decision not to foreground her race or gender in her campaign may be strategic, yet her symbolic significance is unavoidable.
A government dominated by white men – who comprise around 30 per cent of the population but control 60 per cent of elected positions in the US – grows ever more incompatible with the richly diverse nation Harris embodies. “We’re not going back,” enormous crowds roar at her rallies. The phrase encompasses many refusals, including a return to Trump’s chaotic administration, but also to the power limits of the past – limited bodily rights, limited political rights, limited citizenship rights and the brutal violence that all too often enforced those exclusions. While Trump claims to offer disruptive change, he represents a regression to the mean, in every sense.
Much has been written since 2016 about the anger driving Trump voters – over economic loss, cultural grievances, political disaffectedness. But now their anger is matched by outrage among the millions Trump has never represented: black voters facing renewed suppression, LGBTQ+ communities seeing their rights unravel and those across the political spectrum demanding the security of free and fair elections.
Above all, it is women’s fury at the assault on their reproductive freedoms that may well shape the 2024 outcome. Since 2022, the backlash against overturning abortion rights has led to Democratic wins every time it has been on the ballot. Many young women are voting for the first time, and suburban ageing women of all races are organising to get out the vote. Observers point to the optimism of Harris’s rallies, but a righteous anger has also mobilised many. Women are the electoral majority, but they have never before voted as a bloc.
This election may see the largest gender voting divide in US history. Women are already voting in record-breaking numbers, with early voter turnout at historic highs, and women (so far) casting ballots in greater numbers than men in key states including Georgia. Millions of men are yet to vote, but if Harris wins, few doubt it will be thanks to a surge of women – Democrats but also many Republicans – committed to restoring their rights. This surge reflects broader anger among those who are determined to reclaim a ground of evidence-based policy and rule of law – elements eroded by Trump’s rejection of facts in favour of his will to power.
“Whatever else the Hitler revolution may or may not be,” as Dorothy Thompson said, “it is an enormous mass flight from reality.” For millions, Harris represents a return to rational choices about reality, including bodily realities – a choice that may become, for many women, the difference between life and death.
In a nation that historically confined power to white men, black women have consistently led the fight for full democracy, pushing back against exclusion and authoritarianism. That struggle continues.
Just 25 women, a handful of whom were women of colour, have run significant presidential campaigns in the US. Victoria Woodhull was the first, a white woman who ran in 1872, although women did not yet have the vote. Belva Lockwood followed in the 1880s. Almost a century later, Republican Margaret Chase Smith became the first woman to seek a major party nomination in 1964, 20 years before Democrat Geraldine Ferraro was the first woman to gain one, when she ran for vice-president alongside Walter Mondale.
Shirley Chisholm made history in 1972 as the first black woman to seek the Democratic nomination, with the slogan “Unbought and Unbossed”. Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first Asian-American woman elected to Congress, also ran as a third-party candidate in 1972. Carol Moseley Braun, the first black woman elected to the US Senate, ran in 2004. Lenora Fulani ran as an independent candidate in 1988 and 1992, becoming the first African American woman, and the first woman, to appear on the ballot in all 50 states.
After that, more women started pushing through, including Elizabeth Dole, Sarah Palin, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Nikki Haley, and of course Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote against Trump in 2016. Trump’s rallies at the time featured chants like “Trump That Bitch”. When Clinton announced her campaign in 2015, searches for the term “bitch” reached a 20-year high in the US, spiking again during the election. Kamala Harris’s nomination also prompted a surge in searches for “bitch” alongside her name, which increased over 1000 per cent in the month leading up to the Democratic National Convention. During Trump’s MSG rally, Elon Musk’s PAC shared an ad declaring “Kamala Harris is a C-Word”, adding: “America really can’t afford a ‘C-Word’ in the White House right now.”
After Clinton’s loss, the image of women smashing cracks in the glass ceiling became a familiar political trope. Over 150 years earlier, Sojourner Truth, the pioneering black women’s rights advocate, had used a similar metaphor when she said in 1867, two years after the 13th Amendment ended slavery: “I want to keep the thing stirring, now that the ice is cracked.”
Many believe the US has been an inclusive democracy since abolishing slavery in 1865, but this is untrue. Nor has it steadily progressed steadily from exclusion toward plurality. Many states initially gave the franchise to free blacks and women in the early years of the republic, only to rescind it. New Jersey’s 1776 Constitution used the gender-neutral “they” in its voting laws and in 1790 made explicit that “he or she” could vote, without racial restrictions, before limiting the vote to white males in 1807. Free black men and women had limited citizenship in states including Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, while black men with property could vote in much of New England, as well as New York, Maryland and North Carolina. These rights were gradually stripped away. Exclusion of women and free black Americans was not foundational to US politics but rather a backlash against their growing power.
Over the course of the next two centuries, women and black Americans fought back – with black women often leading the charge. Sojourner Truth’s successors, leaders like Ida B Wells and Mary Church Terrell, continued to fight for suffrage, even in the face of exclusion from white women’s campaigns. The struggle for national women’s suffrage intersected with the broader fight for multiracial democracy. After the Civil War, Southern states denied black men the vote, which was guaranteed by the 15th Amendment, through restrictive measures including poll taxes and literacy tests. Women’s suffrage thus faced intense opposition from white supremacists, who feared it would undermine decades of voter suppression in the south.
Many Southern white suffragists responded, explicitly, that enfranchising white women would strengthen white supremacy. Black women continued to organise all the same. In 1913, Ida B Wells defied segregation by joining the white Illinois delegation in a national women’s march after being told to march at the back, highlighting the hypocrisy of a movement that marginalised women of colour. For decades, popular histories of women’s suffrage also told a story that put white women at the front, sidelining African American women historically just as they had once been physically sidelined.
Getting the vote in 1920 did not end black women’s struggle for rights, especially in the South. The first woman senator, Georgia’s Rebecca Latimer Felton, seated in 1922, was a former slaveholder and aggressive defender of lynching. Her appointment was more about placating reactionary forces in the South than advancing women’s rights.
As the 1920s Klan was followed by an outgrowth of self-styled fascist movements in the 1930s, it became clear to many that an American version of fascism had built itself upon the foundations of anti-black racism. “Fascism cannot be imported,” warned a white Wisconsin professor in 1937, paraphrasing Mussolini; fascism must, by definition, appeal to the society for which it claims to speak. Logically, then, “the anti-Negro program” would provide a “rallying cry for American fascists”, just as anti-Semitism had for Germans.
Prominent black writers during the interwar period, including Langston Hughes, Joel Augustus Rogers and Kelly Miller, angrily pointed out the striking analogies between the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany and African Americans in the US, including not only racialised violence but also the denial of citizenship rights, residential and educational segregation, prohibitions on intermarriage and travel and racially targeted mass incarceration. In 1936, the Jamaican-born Rogers observed that Hitler appeared to have “copied” the Nuremberg Laws directly from America’s racial codes. As historians would show, that is just what happened.
At the same time, black women journalists were continuing the pioneering work of Wells, as women like Marvel Cooke, Alice Allison Dunnigan, and Ethel L Payne highlighted the intersecting injustices of voter suppression, civil rights abuses and misogyny. Reporting on black disenfranchisement and emphasising the compounded struggles of black women, they helped push for a civil rights movement addressing both racial and gendered oppression. Twenty years later, civil rights leaders such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Septima Clark fought voter suppression by bringing attention to the violent and systemic barriers impeding black enfranchisement.
The Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 was a pivotal victory. Banning discriminatory practices such as literacy tests and instituting federal oversight in areas with histories of voter suppression, it gradually dismantled the barriers that had long denied African Americans the ability to vote. But in 2013, the Supreme Court abruptly weakened the VRA in the landmark decision Shelby County vs Holder, ruling that states with histories of discrimination no longer needed federal approval to change voting laws. The Court argued that oversight was outdated since voter suppression had decreased. But voter suppression had decreased because of the VRA; removing those protections was like claiming we should get rid of seatbelts because they have successfully reduced traffic deaths.
Since then, many states have enacted measures that disproportionately affect minority voters. Texas, Georgia and Alabama closed hundreds of polling places in black and Latino areas; Texas alone closed 750 by 2019. Georgia purged more than 100,000 voters in 2018, mainly impacting black communities. But black women continue to fight voter suppression: after her narrow 2018 gubernatorial loss amid suppression claims, Stacey Abrams registered hundreds of thousands of voters in Georgia, crucially contributing to the state’s 2020 Democratic victories.
The strength of any democracy is measured by the rights of its least powerful citizens. As James Baldwin observed in 1963: “The future of the Negro in this country… is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people.”
During the 1930s, as Americans struggled to understand the rise of Hitler alongside the threats of self-styled homegrown fascist groups, journalists sometimes explained the similarity through political analogies. In 1933, a Kansas City paper told its readers to imagine if the KKK, led by a powerful Louisiana orator, were to rise to power during an economic crisis. The Klan gradually wins more seats in Congress, and ultimately elects their leader as president. A fire at the Capitol soon leads to the arrest of a Cuban, accused of inciting a communist uprising. The Klan arrests communists and democratic leaders, winning the next election under an anti-communist banner. They detain officials, and replace all public office holders – from ministers to mail carriers – with loyal Klan members. Within weeks, a new constitution establishes a Klan dictatorship, criminalising all opposition and replacing the US flag with a Klan banner. “Would that be a revolution?” the column demanded. “It is what has happened in Germany.”
In 1933 it was a frightening thought experiment. In 2024 it is what Trump and his transition planners have said they hope to achieve. In the last year, Trump and his supporters have suggested suspending the Constitution, criminalising opposition, replacing non-partisan civil servants with loyalists and setting the military on US citizens. Asked at a Fox News townhall if he would be a dictator, Trump replied “no, other than day one”. The day after the Supreme Court shocked the nation this summer with its decision granting unprecedented immunities to the president, Kevin Roberts, the head of the Trump-supporting think tank The Heritage Foundation, announced that the “second American revolution has begun”, adding it would only remain “bloodless” if the left allowed it to be.
There is a reason why Donald Trump decided to stage his rally at Madison Square Garden while playing “Dixie” in the background. They have been very clear about their intentions: it would be a revolution. What happens next, as James Baldwin said, is entirely up to the American people.
[See also: Has Kamala Harris blown it?]
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This article appears in the 30 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, American Horror Story