One way to make sense of the last 24 hours — the historic victories in Georgia and pro-Trump siege on the Capitol — is as a long-run contest between two American traditions: one committed to preserving the status quo racial hierarchy and one fighting to advance equality. 1/

This framework comes from an influential paper, “Racial Orders in American Political Development,” in which scholars Desmond King & Rogers Smith identify two governing coalitions, a ”white supremacist” order and a ”transformative egalitarian” order. 2/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/30038920.pdf

In short, while African Americans were enslaved and indigenous folks were dispossessed of their land, the white supremacist coalition ruled. With the Civil War and Reconstruction, the egalitarian coalition briefly prevailed. 3/

Post-reconstruction, the governing coalition flipped back to the enforced racial hierarchy of Jim Crow but then, under the sustained pressure of the civil rights movement, egalitarians were able to enact laws like the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1965 Immigration Act. 4/

The last 50 years are more ambiguous, though. We’ve seen both retrenchment in the push for equality, like the rise of mass incarceration and dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, and milestones for the egalitarian coalition, like the success of the push for marriage equality. 5/

Many people have commented that today’s political violence is ”un-American.” Seen from the perspective of the long Black freedom struggle, however, political violence to counter the possibility of a true multi-ethnic democracy is actually deeply American. 6/

The Senate races also speak to the power of the other American tradition. The egalitarian coalition fought slavery & Jim Crow. And today through intense organizing & coalition building, @ReverendWarnock is the first popularly elected Black Senator from the former Confederacy. 7/7

* The phrase ”popularly elected” here is meant to distinguish Warnock from Tim Scott who was initially appointed to his Senate seat.

* It’s also worth noting that the term ”white supremacist coalition” is both true to a long tradition in American politics but also misses some important ways in which things have changed in the last half-century (eg, elections of Tim Scott, Nikki Haley & Bobby Jindal).

Drawing on work in comparative politics and King & Smith, I find it more useful to think of two coalitions, one committed to preserving ethnoracial and religious political dominance (think of Hindu Nationalism or ”the War on Christmas”) and a multi-ethnic egalitarian coalition.