Trump’s inauguration ushers in a new redemptive era of white power politics and violence

On Monday, January 20, two political legacies collide in real time. Donald Trump will become our 47th president on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It feels poetic in the worst possible way. The cartoonish bully seemingly intent on destroying civil rights — among countless other hard-fought freedoms — will take power on the day we celebrate a civil rights icon. I can already see the memes that will fill my family’s group chat comparing the patron saint MLK Jr. with a man with 34 felony convictions and a rebellion to his name.

But Monday is about more than two men or their dueling legacies. There are also two political ones cycles that will come to the fore: Reconstruction and Redemption. Pick up any McGraw Hill textbook and you’ll read that we’ve only had one round of Reconstruction and Redemption in the United States. Reconstructionsay the textbooks, was the transformative period immediately following the Civil War, from about 1865 to 1877, when the United States sought to integrate newly freed black Americans into its institutions and workplaces. Redemption was the violent white supremacist backlash ignited by Southerners.

But the story is not that simple. At the end of his life, King believed that the “black revolution” was passing beyond the issue of civil rights for black Americans; it was about confronting “racism, poverty, militarism and materialism” and called for a “radical reconstruction of society.” To reconstruction, a decades long political struggle which is often downplayed in how we mythologize King, became widely known as the Civil Rights Movement. It ushered in our second attempt to make multiracial democracy a reality. Trump is undeniably an enemy of this legacy, but he seems intent on going even further. He wants to destroy many of our gains first Reconstruction. He fights for a new era of redemption.

The redeemers were first and foremost losers. Literally. They lost their right to exploit, enslave and subjugate entire groups of people after the Civil War. President Andrew Johnson doesn’t care pardoned Confederate soldiers “conditionally and unconditionally” in 1868 or that a number of slaves received damages to compensate for their “lost property”; The Redemptorists wanted the old ways—the old America—back.

That mission became overburdened when Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from the former Confederate states as part of a compromise that secured his victory in the contested presidential election of 1877. The Redemptorists finally had freedom again—freedom to be violent to make choices and cleansing Black people from political offices and the electoral rolls. It was the “resurgence and bloody normalization of White Power politics”, historian NDB Connolly wrote in boston review, a time when “Southern whites took over the political and propaganda apparatus of all eleven states of the former Confederacy.” This period, also known as the “nadir,” or lowest point, overlapped with the Gilded Age. If you’ve seen the HBO show, you might associate that phrase with incredible dresses, Meryl Streep’s daughter, and rich people fighting over who has more money. But it was also a period, from around the 1870s to the early 1900s, when the super-rich rose to power and political corruption ran rampant.