U.S. President Donald Trump waves to supporters as he departs after enjoying golf on the Trump Nationwide Golf Membership in Sterling Va., on Nov. 8, 2020. Trump is refusing to concede the election, a standard tactic of authoritarians. (AP Picture/Steve Helber)

The US presidential election was an excellent spectacle. It was additionally a battle over the nation’s historical past and its future.

As historians will let you know, how we characterize the previous has direct bearing on how we think about doable futures. What’s the imaginative and prescient for a post-Trump America?

In each the lead-up to Nov. three and its aftermath, historical past loomed massive. Greater than 200 students of authoritarianism, fascism and populism signed an Open Letter of Concern in regards to the imminent risk to democratic processes and establishments, drawing on histories of previous regimes which have curtailed democratic rights and freedoms in moments of instability and unrest.

Fascism historians Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Federico Finchelstein warned that Donald Trump’s narcissism is greater than only a character flaw; it’s a clarion name to construct an authoritarian state. Even in defeat, they argued, strongmen and their followers typically proceed to undermine establishments — simply as Trump seems to be doing following the election together with his refusal to simply accept the outcomes. The reply? See by way of the rhetoric, train warning and stay vigilant.

For others, fascism will not be knocking on the door, however the shock of the 2016 election was not undone by the 2020 outcomes. If something, the robust displaying of the Republican get together, regardless of a platform of xenophobia and hatred, uncovered the chasms that divide People by race and sophistication.

Trump is harking back to far-away strongmen like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A superb portion of the citizens like what he’s promoting anyway. That’s a bitter capsule for a rustic that got here of age on pledges of allegiance to basic freedoms.

As historian Adam Tooze put it within the Guardian instantly after the election, Trump supporters love “his aggression, and his gleeful slaughter of liberal sacred cows.” Will the defeat of a single politician silence his thousands and thousands of supporters and alter a system rife with inequality and abuse?

People rejoice the election’s end result outdoors the White Home, in Black Lives Matter Plaza, on Nov. 8, 2020.

(AP Picture/J. Scott Applewhite)

Modified the enjoying area

Even in defeat, Trump has already modified the enjoying area. His linguistic disobedience, various info, lies and media manipulation have given false claims some legitimacy, paving the best way for others to hold the baton ahead in a politics of hate, recriminations and denial of reality.

With out critical social and electoral reform, the following authoritarian to make a play to guide the U.S. could also be rather more succesful. Trump could have been stopped from his “autocratic try,” however the get together he remodeled has but to surrender his politics. Trump misplaced, however Trumpism is alive and properly, together with the circumstances that propelled him to energy within the first place.

Trump supporters protest outdoors the Pennsylvania Conference Middle in Philadelphia on Nov. 8, 2020, a day after the 2020 election was referred to as for Biden.

(AP Picture/Rebecca Blackwell)

At finest, the post-election future is likely to be one in all regrouping and rebuilding; at worst, there will probably be extra challenges to authorized norms and truths by the outgoing president and the Republican Social gathering.

People rose to the problem?

Biden supporters, in the meantime, have tapped into different American pasts. Whereas they acknowledge Trump’s brutalism has been regarding, they noticed People rising to the problem, “taking again the dialog” and putting renewed religion in establishments.

They noticed glimmers of hope within the record-breaking voter turnout, and in efforts to switch Accomplice emblems from state flags and take away racist language from state constitutions.

They revelled in America’s range, praising the herculean efforts of African American and Indigenous activists and voters for defeating Trump. However they did so typically with out recognizing that these identical teams had probably the most to lose from a Republican victory throughout a world pandemic that hit their communities significantly onerous.

Some noticed this election as an extension of Civil Rights motion struggles, going as far as to match Kamala Harris, the vice-president-elect, to Ruby Bridges, the lady who desegregated her Louisiana elementary faculty. It is a damaged democracy, the argument goes, not a defeated one.

But American democracy wasn’t below assault just by the Trump presidency. It has by no means adequately accounted for minority experiences within the first place.

Trump’s on a regular basis racism isn’t an aberration. Though it could be excessive, it’s on the core of America’s historical past.

Tiffany Florvil, a scholar of transnational Black activism, put a wonderful level on it when she echoed the phrases of historian Thomas Holt: In america, “race lives as a result of it’s half and parcel of the technique of dwelling.” Racism is woven into the very material of American life. It’s a function of American democracy, not any authoritarian aberration.

What this implies is the Civil Rights motion isn’t a factor of the previous. It’s an ongoing, unfinished undertaking.

Students of African American historical past and regulation have been saying this for a very long time. America’s establishments, financial system and media are all constructed upon a historical past of what UCLA historian Robin D.G. Kelley has referred to as racial capitalism — a system of exploitation with repercussions into the present day.

As Kimberlé Crenshaw put it in Time journal, referring to Trump’s directive to all federal businesses to cease anti-bias coaching to deal with white privilege:

“It’s an strategy to grappling with a historical past of white supremacy that rejects the idea that what’s up to now is up to now, and that the legal guidelines and methods that develop from that previous are indifferent from it.”

America’s previous — borne of stolen land, slavery, head taxes and segregation — is obvious within the canine whistles of Trump’s rigged election speech, citing Detroit and Philadelphia as notoriously corrupt, and the chatter on the far proper about the necessity to flip the election consequence right into a justification for an additional civil battle.

Nevertheless it additionally surfaces when Democrats too rapidly overlook the struggles racialized populations endure to safeguard a democracy that has not at all times protected them.

Learn extra:

Trump has made America nostalgic once more for a previous that by no means existed

All of those aspects of America’s previous and future are circulating proper now as People ponder Trump’s exit and whether or not he’ll go peacefully.

However the classes drawn from historical past shouldn’t be solely centered on patterns that repeat themselves; they need to additionally information us in shaping coverage and regulation.

Solely an sincere engagement with the total scope of American historical past, together with the crushing function racial inequality has performed for generations, will assist its residents think about another future wherein freedom and equality may certainly be doable.

Jennifer Evans receives funding from the Social Sciences Humanities Analysis Council of Canada and is a Social Knowledge Analysis Fellow with the Social Science Analysis Council in New York.