If you think that the Big Beautiful Bill will come back to haunt the GOP, you've been asleep for the past sixty years.

White Americans would literally die than live in an equitable, diverse, and just society. Go ahead, keep on debating with them.

European White Kultur has given us some great music, drama, and literature, but even those contributions were never created with the idea that they would one day be enjoyed by all of humanity. European White Kultur is fundamentally racist and religiously fanatic. It has given us the slave trade, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the burning of books and witches, fascism, and the Holocaust.

American White Kultur was literally built on the backs of the six million African slaves it forcibly brought to North America. American White Kultur ensured that the Constitution, which was written by slave owners, protected the institution of slavery and included explicitly undemocratic institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College that gave more power to slaveholding states. White Amerikan Kultur slaughtered the Native Americans, caused the Civil War, negated its outcome by establishing Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, embraced child labor, fought women’s suffrage, rewrote our nation’s official history to expunge its sins, and gave us the Red Scare.

The shock of the Great Depression remade the Democratic Party into a formidable coalition of labor unions, blue-collar workers, urban political machines, racial and religious minorities, and white Southerners. Between 1932 and 1952, the Party implemented many programs that the Republican Party labeled as socialism: including Social Security, unemployment insurance, the FDIC, the regulation of banks, government spending as a way to boost the national economy, the G.I. bill, public works programs, a forty-hour work week, and a minimum wage. These programs were so popular with Americans that many Republicans supported them, too.

The postwar era in America also marked a series of unusual defeats for American racism. The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education ended, in theory, separate-but-equal educational systems for Blacks and Whites. President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1958 to forcibly integrate the schools there. President Kennedy mobilized the National Guard to ensure that Black students were allowed to attend the University of Alabama, and shortly thereafter Kennedy announced his commitment to comprehensive, national civil rights legislation. This became a reality in 1964, when President Johnson and Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which forbid discrimination in public housing, employment, and education.

White Americans, especially in the South, responded with determined fury. Cloture and filibuster rules were created for Congress in an attempt to halt the passage of civil rights bills. Ninety-seven Democrats and four Republicans in Congress signed the “Southern Manifesto,” which vowed to fight integration by “all lawful means.” Civil rights workers were beaten and murdered. Martin Luther King was assassinated.

White Americans eventually engineered a seismic shift in American party politics. White Southern Democrats began to desert their party in favor of the GOP, a migration that destroyed the New Deal coalition that the Democrats had leveraged to achieve political dominance for thirty years. The Southern states, which had served as the Democrats’ “Solid South” for decades, became dominated by the Republican Party. Many Southern Democratic political leaders, including Strom Thurmond, John Connally, and Trent Lott, became Republicans. Lee Atwater, a Southerner and a senior political strategist for Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, made racism, and the not-so-subtle coded language used to promote it with voters, a central part of GOP politics. As Atwater (who later apologized personally to the NAACP) described it this way in an interview:

“Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can't say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’

Atwater, who late in life personally apologized to the NAACP, was not only providing here a good summary of how the GOP’s racist campaign tactics and language made the party 85% White, he was also explaining why the near universal support by working-class Whites to New Deal policies has now largely vanished.

The socialistic policies that worked for White Americans in the 1940s and 1950s didn’t become beneficial to Black Americans until the 1950s and 1960s—precisely the time frame during which working-class whites began to spurn them. The public swimming schools opened for Whites during the Roosevelt era were now open for blacks, and Whites responded by filling them with concrete. Labor unions now welcomed Americans of color, so Whites began abandoning them. The wealthy elites who ran the GOP began re-branding nearly all government social programs as socialism just as its new White working-class supporters began to realize that they would benefit all Americans, not just Whites.

And so, for the past sixty years, GOP/Tea Partyy/MAGA and its White voters have opposed them all: Social Security, collective bargaining, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, Medicare expansion, increases in the minimum wage, the expansion of voting rights, abortion rights, veterans programs, supplemental food programs, unemployment benefits, and on and on and on.

Yes, today is the day on which the MAGA fascist Senate passed one of the most horrendous and humanly destructive pieces of legislation ever to clear a Congressional body. But that is in no way unusual. The Big Beautiful Betrayal is only the latest of hundreds of examples over the past half century of American Whites not just voting to hurt themselves economically but voting to literally kill themselves rather than be forced to live in a diverse democracy.

Billions more of taxpayer money to kidnap people of color without a trial and send them to a foreign gulag or to a concentration camp in an alligator-infested swamp?

Most White Americans want this.

Billions of tax cuts for White billionaires?

Most White Americans want this.

Ripping health insurance from twelve million Americans?

Most White Americans want this.

Three trillion dollars added to the federal deficit?

Most White Americans want this.

One trillion dollars cut from Medicaid and food stamps?

Most White Americans want this.

Most White Americans have voted against government programs consistently for over half a century. This long history (and a ton of election data) proves—without a doubt—that the fear of White displacement, and not economic issues, is what drives most American White voters. Trump voters, and the Republican Party, are more than fine with a fascist government if that is what it takes to keep White men in power.

If you think that today marks the day on which the forces of racism and fascism finally went too far, that MAGA voters didn’t want this bill even though Trump campaigned on every aspect of it, and that Trump’s tribe will now do a complete 180 and make the GOP pay for this in future elections, you haven’t grasped the fundamental American truth: that the long arc of our country’s history bends not for justice but for racism.