Trying to maintain the narrative — but losing control of it

It appears that the political populist right is terrified. It thought that it had found its messiah in Donald Trump, but he stumbled out of the gate and is now in free-fall due to his not only mishandling the responsibilities of the White House but also criminal activity. Some folks are even arguing that the response to COVID-19 combined with the Black Lives Matter protests represent a liberal/media conspiracy to besmirch and eventually remove him, not to mention divide the country.

That sentiment is not only ridiculous on its face but also terrifying in the long run.

For openers, the country is already divided and has been for the better part of 60 years — and it was the conservatives, not the “liberals,” who did it for the sake of power. From the “Southern Strategy” of Richard Nixon, whose then-aide Pat Buchanan helped shepherd it through; to the late-1970s rise of Newt Gingrich, who discouraged other Republicans from fraternizing with Democrats on weekends and referring to Democrats as, among other things, “sick”; to the era of Ronald Reagan, who courted Southern racists in 1980s, leading to the endorsement by a leader in the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia; to the smears against Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, they have no authority to complain about anyone else. And that doesn’t even take into account the “religious right” and the rise of right-wing talk radio laced with outlandish conspiracy theories.

That leads to the problem at hand, which is that the right has always sought to impose its views on American society, Rush Limbaugh admitting that he wanted to “control the language.”

The vast majority of us African-Americans Christians understand this, which is why we’ll never be on board. We’re not listening to the denunciations of BLM as Marxist, since the same charge was made against Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil-rights movement. We turned a deaf ear to the same charge against the African National Congress, which did have Marxists in it but only because the ANC and the South African Communist Party were officially underground entities in South Africa under apartheid — and today, the SACP is virtually nowhere to be found. And to this day, the political right has never apologized for its support of the white-minority government.

More to the point, however, we don’t accept that the current crises stem from anything but Trump’s criminal incompetence in dealing with the pandemic and overt racism. Doubling down on rhetoric thus doesn’t help the cause, nor does it solve any problems.

In other words, what the right wants everyone to believe we don’t accept as true, and that’s increasingly the case around the country. It’s why the right, and the Republican Party it controls, is in trouble across the country.