Trump and the Rise of the Multiracial Right

But he’s also just the tip of the iceberg of a broader phenomenon on the far Right: the coexistence of extreme racism with appropriated anti-racist tropes in systematic efforts to appeal to voters of color. Before November, commentators debated the increasing attraction of voters of color to Trump and MAGA Republicanism, accompanied by no shortage of hand-wringing over the defection of ​“natural” Democratic constituencies. After the election, debate has continued about the increased support for Trump among voters of color. But in truth, this is a phenomenon that’s been building for many years. 

Few scholars have explored these issues as deeply as Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes, coauthors of Producers, Parasites, Patriots, a 2019 book that grappled with the Trump coalition’s ability to mobilize constituencies of color and challenged Left and liberal critics to move beyond simply decrying MAGA’s revival of white supremacy. Elsewhere, Lowndes and HoSang have explored multiple facets of the U.S. Right’s historical relationship to race, from the South’s role in the genesis of modern conservatism to the rollback of civil rights in California, and from the illusions of ​“colorblindness” to how the ideology of ​“producerism” has shaped the Right’s rhetoric around race. 

In the aftermath of Trump’s reelection and the blitzkrieg of post-inauguration measures, HoSang and Lowndes spoke with In These Times about the politics of the multiracial Right and what progressives and Leftists must relearn in response.

Alberto Toscano: What has the presidential election and its aftermath revealed about the politics of the multiracial Right? 

Daniel Martinez HoSang: We’re witnessing the cumulative impact of much deeper developments that have been underway for longer than a decade. The deep ambivalence with institutional politics and institutions themselves, across the political spectrum, is at the heart of this. I’ve recently been doing interviews with conservatives of color, and there’s little sense right now of buyers’ remorse. Instead, the alienation and sheer disgust with what they perceive as the stasis of contemporary politics is so sharp that they’re alongside much of the hardcore MAGA base in being quite willing to watch things get dismantled and attacked. 

In the conference we recently organized on the multiracial Right, we tracked the many inroads this is happening through — religion, gender, militarism, immigration enforcement, appeals to entrepreneurship and frustrations over public institutions. There’s not one story that accounts for the turn of many people of color toward the Right.

There are also larger questions here about why the very rapid ascension of a hard nationalist and nativist agenda has not yet elicited more of a response. It’s not just about fear of the regime or threats of authoritarianism. There’s a deeper ambivalence we need to get our heads around to understand this moment.

Joseph Lowndes: I agree. This has been a long time coming and there are deep, longstanding crises in American institutions and the economy, which date back to the Reagan era or before, but which have become much more intense in the last couple decades. 

Republicans actually have a long track record of trying to appeal to groups of color. George W. Bush’s speeches were peppered with creedal appeals to Black and Latino Americans, while the head of the RNC during the Bush years apologized for the ​“Southern Strategy.” What Bush called ​“compassionate conservatism” was not about being more liberal but about a more universalistic positioning for conservatism that differed from what his father, Reagan, Nixon or Goldwater had done. 

More recently, the Right has built out an extraordinary infrastructure — comprising think tanks, talk radio, Fox News, digital media, big money foundations, party organizing and social movement organizing — to which there’s no real counterpart on the Left. Under those conditions, you can draw all kinds of people into right-wing politics. 

You have different reasons why someone who’s Vietnamese American might be a Trump supporter — that they or their parents left Vietnam after the Communist win, or that they’re Catholics who have a strong stance against abortion. There are just as many possibilities for Southeast Asians, South Asians, East Asians, Latinos from all over Latin America and the Caribbean, Black Americans, Black Africans, Black Caribbeans to be drawn into authoritarian or right-wing politics. 

And the thing is, there’s places for people to go to be organized, and that’s really at the heart of what Dan and I tried to talk about in Producers, Parasites, Patriots. People can be drawn into different narratives or politics, and that’s the work of organizing. That’s the work of politics. And that’s what the Right has done so extraordinarily well.

It’s not just that they have the institutional or organizational power, nor that they have been able to deftly capitalize on all the crises of American capitalism. They have learned how to be flexible and creative and expand political identities in capacious ways that that make room for people to come in and not just feel at home, but build out their own Black or Latino American right-wing identity. The Right has become a truly big tent in that way.

Now that some months have passed since the election, how do you think these realignments contributed to Trump’s victory? 

HoSang: First, we have to remember that the election was quite close. It’s folly to suggest there’s one demographic that’s culpable in the shift, and the notion of a realignment doesn’t seem right either. Neither of us is persuaded by arguments that these voters are inherently conservative or reacting to some Democratic Left overreach. But I am struck by a clear trend that supports the interpretation that what we witnessed is a dealignment. The hemorrhaging of votes from all these blocs not just in the presidential election but down ballot is significant.

Take Miami, which in 2016 went something like 60% for Hillary Clinton, and now, for the first time in a generation, is solidly Republican. That happened up and down the ballot, in many other localities. Many conservatives of color I’ve talked to from these places point out that they have no real connection to the Democratic Party. The local party apparatuses have not been building relationships with voters, while the Right and the GOP have been very willing to put resources into trying different things, to create identity and affinity groups.

At the Turning Point USA conference, we met people that talked about being drawn to Bernie [Sanders] or other projects in the past. And now, they feel like this is a space to go to if you want to feel energetic and dynamic but also like you’re a dissident. The Right and the GOP have really shifted their identity from protectors of a failing political order to insurgents who speak with clarity about the system’s problems. At Turning Point, I constantly heard, ​“This is the place where they’re talking real about what’s happening, meanwhile the Democrats simply mouth lines about some small things that are not going to affect me.”

Lowndes: The people at Turning Point are not necessarily representative of people of color who voted for Trump generally, but they’re very important because they’re the connective tissue. They’re like Gramsci’s organic intellectuals: a layer between those who run things and the people at the bottom who can reframe, interpret and inspire. That matters a lot, and now there’s this fairly deep bench of right-wing organizers of color from various communities that can do this kind of work. 

Since the inauguration, with the blitz of executive orders, Trump’s cabinet choices, the anti-DEI platform, the racist dog-whistling around the recent plane crashes — not to mention the executive order about the imaginary plight of Afrikaner ​“refugees” and Musk’s Nazi salute — it seems like they’re doubling down on the white-nationalist aspects of MAGA. Beyond ​“owning the libs,” this seems like a deliberate sidelining of the Black and Brown conservatives you’ve written about. 

Lowndes: This administration will be consequential for what happens to the multiracial Right. There are the trends that we’ve been describing, which have been around for a long while. But what’s happening at the top is quite extraordinary. Take the attack on DEI. Trump talked about it continually on the campaign trail but as a kind of superficial, corporate DEI: programs on college campuses, affecting middle management in offices, and so on. But now they’re going all the way back to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They want to eliminate everything since Johnson. This will have broad-based effects not just on elites of color but on working-class people. There’s a ton of wreckage that’s going to come out of this.

Of course, some of this has always been there. Think of Bill Buckley, who was an ardent lover of South Africa and Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique and Angola. For him that was tied to a vision of capitalism, of anti-democracy, which has been a kernel of the American conservative movement since the late 1950s.

But the South African thing, with the open pro-Afrikaner language, also brings home the loss of an international anti-racist or anti-colonial movement. If this had happened in the ​‘80s during the anti-apartheid movement, there would have been hostility in Black communities and everywhere else. The absence of any response marks how far we’ve come from the era of anti-colonial solidarity.

Also, the way liberals talk about the MAGA movement’s racism is always about its populist elements, but it’s actually coming from the techno-capitalist libertarian side. And when it comes to the executive order against South Africa, it’s the DOGE side, it’s the oligarchs, really pushing this stuff the hardest.

I found that striking too. Both amid the pre-inauguration skirmish between the tech Right and the economic nationalists over H-1B visas, and even more so in his New York Times comments, Bannon has presented himself as a paladin for the multiracial Right’s struggle against Silicon Valley’s ​“apartheid state.”

Lowndes: Bannon understands how you could fashion a multiracial right-wing nationalism. But deep down, the two things that really mark Trump politically are vicious racism and vicious misogyny, which Bannon doesn’t quite share. I think with Musk, Trump is willing to go all out on that stuff and there’s very few people in the party who dare challenge it.

HoSang: To pick up on what Joe said, about the Right’s understanding of the demobilization of social movements, they know you can say the most extreme things and there’ll be very little political price to pay. You can signal that the shadows of an ethno-nationalist project are still with us, without producing opposition. The same is true for dismantling DEI programs and even longstanding anti-discrimination protections. 

We don’t have large numbers of people with immediate material experiences that lead them to say: ​“Lay off those programs, I need them, they benefit me.” A few years ago, there was a measure to bring back affirmative action in California that could not muster a majority, in part because people don’t have that material experience. A couple of days ago, I interviewed a Black conservative from Milwaukee. He told me, ​“They can have the DEI stuff. It has nothing to do with my community.” Some of this language he’s parroting. But had there been a more robust connection to people’s everyday lives, you would see more people rising up to defend them. 

You’ve made a compelling point about the need for progressives to not treat racial identities as static, and to be attentive to how the Right and even the far Right can be quite adept at handling the plasticity of race. How should we recalibrate our responses to that and towards building, as you write, ​“solidarity amid difference”? 

HoSang: Social identity and even experience don’t guarantee a political analysis. A large proportion of progressive politics assumed that people of color, identifying as minoritized, would automatically align to certain sets of politics — an interventionist economy, certain policies around immigration, gender and sexuality — and you don’t have to actually do the work of consciousness-building in schools, organizations and unions.

That position came from thinking, ​“Well, look how racist and misogynist the Right is. They don’t want you. That’s the all the politicization you need.” But if we recognize the frayed connections of people of color to all those institutional spaces around which consciousness was forged — unions, the Civil Rights movement and other political organizations — we realize that the imperative now is to do much more of that work. 

Twenty years ago, the idea that large numbers of Latinos and other recent immigrant families would be recruited into supporting mass deportation was unthinkable. But there are large numbers of Latinos who openly support mass deportations. The question is: how might their politics be reoriented, and what other policies, frameworks and ideologies could engage them?

These attacks on the social safety net, including dismantling Medicaid and public education, are hitting broadly across all kinds of race, class and geographic positions. And again the question is: what are our interpretive frameworks? 

The Left needs to offer explanations of what’s happening, what the dislocation is and what can be done about it. And I think the perpetual demonization of Trump individually, and the deployment of ​“Don’t you see he’s a fascist?” doesn’t allow people to make connections to what’s happening to them. I’ll go to union meetings and hear really skilled, committed, working-class union leaders suggesting they’re now sympathetic to Trumpism. How did that come to be? Part of it is that there was very little work done within those unions to help people sort out what’s happening.

Lowndes: We’re in a situation where we have dysfunctional or non-functional national political institutions. Congress doesn’t operate as it was set up to. The Supreme Court is obviously discredited. What you’re left with is the executive branch as a battering ram which, elected every 4 years, can try to push through the sclerosis to meet certain problems, or fulfill certain fantasies. And all this takes place in an era of radical wealth inequality, so there’s an oligarchic class that runs national politics in both parties anyway. We have an almost unfixable situation, especially once we add an ecological crisis that is visiting natural disaster after natural disaster of epic proportions four or five times a year. 

Now that parts of the federal bureaucracy and executive are being quickly dismantled you have a perfect recipe for a caesarist, authoritarian politics. People want somebody to take care of them under conditions of increasingly intense vulnerability. And when you’ve got a media ecosystem which can so profoundly and powerfully tell stories that work for the Right, it’s really difficult to figure out how to combat that. 

We have to go back to the basics. Any idea that we’re going to defend this crumbling edifice of the liberal state is no longer credible to almost anybody. So we’re thrown into a situation where we have to develop solidarity around shared needs, shared suffering, shared vulnerability. And then the possibility of building shared power becomes available. 

The thing about race is that it can be articulated in any direction, particularly in the absence of social movements. Last year there was a big poster in the ​“Blexit” (“Black Exit”) booth at Turning Point USA: Bob Marley’s face with the words, ​“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.” In its own little bubble, this was a robust Black nationalist commitment to far-right politics. In that context, it made complete sense.

Not that some of that wasn’t already there. There’s no pure politics. In Black liberation movements across U.S. history there’ve been elements of conservatism, patriarchy, pro-market and repressive state ideologies along with liberatory, radical, democratic, anti-authoritarian, emancipatory politics. If we wish to mobilize a politics in which anti-racism means anti-Trumpism, this has to be re-articulated. 

Take this anti-DEI stuff. It’s a way of smashing any democratic control over state power. It’s also asset-stripping public goods for the oligarchs. And for people like Trump, it’s an assault on ideologies and identities he’s hostile to. What this offers us is the possibility of building. But we have to be able to say that this form of anti-DEI racism is aimed at everybody. That racist movements in the United States have always disempowered everyone. 

If you want to develop an anti-racist, progressive politics, it has to be socialist. It has to take on property, domination and hierarchy. That’s an anti-racist project, but it has to be articulated as such, not as liberal symbolism.

HoSang: The Right is saturated with references to identity. When I talked to Blexit activists at Turning Point, they called their events ​“liberation tables.” At the inauguration, there was a Black conservative foundation gala ball and a Hispanic gala ball. They’re attentive that identity and multiculturalism continue to be the currency of U.S. politics.

There’s been significant investment on the Left in thinking that cultural, linguistic, representational shifts would inure us from reactionary authoritarian politics. And I think that what the Right has shown is they can inhabit it, they can retool it, and they can make it work for their ends. 

Lowndes: But we should also not overstate the power of the Right. They screw up too and the Trump administration is gonna screw up too, and that might make openings for things to happen. It may be that splitting the DOGE stuff from Trump himself might expose the relationship between oligarchy and white supremacy that Musk embodies. 

Dan and I have been pointing this out for a decade now and many people didn’t want to hear that there’s a multiracial Right. That made it almost impossible to have worthwhile conversations. Finally, over the last year, it’s become a subject that can’t be ignored. People are trying to wrestle with what this means now, because there’s no avoiding it. And that opens the possibility to imagine doing the political formation that is necessary to do something different.