Turn to Jimmy Carter For a Solution to Trump’s Return by Charles Mudede What did Donald Trump's return to the White House make loud and clear? White votes are more important than all other votes. No other voting block has the power to return a candidate to the highest office in the land after they attempted to overthrow the government, were convicted of a crime, and paid a pornstar to keep an affair on the down low. And that’s not the half of it. On November 6, we could not look away. We had to see white supremacy (politician, billionaire, voters, the political system) in all of its hory glory.  An adequate analysis of the presidential election must begin with the fact that the US's dominant ideological state apparatuses preserved the eligibility of a candidate who was, by all accounts, ineligible. Progressives and socialists, however, will do everything possible to ignore this primary fact. Why? Because doing so makes it impossible to see November 5 as anything other than a catastrophe of the first order. The hope here is that something is redeemable; and the greatest fear is: nothing's redeemable. The former feeling is, ultimately, comforting; the latter is not. The former finds some signs of life in the data that shows Trump gained more votes from Blacks, Latinos, and what have you in 2024; the latter, sees nothing but a black hole that's sucked in all that's left of American democracy.  One might point to the Watergate scandal, which resulted in the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, as support for the conclusion that Trump’s reelection expresses the general erosion of American democracy rather than a fixation with and privileging of the white vote. But I would counter that with this conclusion: the white vote was almost unchallenged in the early 1970s and so was in a state of confidence. Of 150 million registered voters in 1972, only 20 million (13%)  were Black and Hispanic. Indeed, it shrank from “85% in 1996 to 69% [in 2020].” The GOP was sharply aware of this decline, which is why it turned to George W. Bush in 2000.  W was actually called a “compassionate conservative [see the pic of him hugging a Black woman]” and with good reason. His program was to reduce the GOP’s dependence on white voters. This was the vision at the heart of his “ownership society” policy and the apparent diversity of his cabinet. When this program was registered as a disaster in 2008 (America sent a Black man to the White House), Bush’s de-racialization program effectively collapsed, and the GOP retreated to the white vote, which was still weakening. What to do? 1) Repress votes and, 2) make a complete break with democracy. October 6 did not become a Watergate because the white vote is facing an existential crisis today it did not exist in 1972.     Today on Wall Street 12/10/2024: Walgreens $WBA is in advanced talks with private-equity firm Sycamore Partners to sell itself, marking a potential shift for the iconic pharmacy chain after years of declining market value. Once valued at over $100 billion in 2015, Walgreens now… pic.twitter.com/HtaC0UjJ7N — Street Chatter (@Street_Chatter) December 10, 2024   So what to do? Not long ago, I was in a Walgreens (I'll not name the location) and waiting to buy some over-the-counter thing to help me sleep. In front of me were two male boomers being served by two young women. One of the young women realized that her old man was being ripped off. He did not have to pay so much for his drugs. He could save lots of money if he just did such and such. The other young woman was a bit sullen. She said nothing to her old man. And as a consequence, received, while ringing up his items, this sharp criticism: "You are not very friendly." This was, apparently, more than the young woman could handle. She took a step back, covered her mouth, and began crying. The old man's face went blank. The young woman collapsed on the floor and continued balling. I decided to not buy anything and walked out of the Walgreens.  I see our present moment in American politics in this Walgreen drama. Some of us are trying to be helpful, trying to be hopeful, trying to convince ourselves that collaboration is possible with this new administration; others are seeing Trump's return to the White House for exactly what it is: an institutional catastrophe from which nothing can be recovered. But if you do not accept this fact, and if you refuse to see the US for what it is today (only white votes matter), and do not feel the real pain of this fact, we will, as a society, go nowhere. We will make no progress. We will  remain exactly where we are now.  Nevertheless, we have been here before, been at the point of an extraordinary national crisis, and were presented with a solution that would have worked back then as it would today. The solution came from the White House, from Jimmy Carter. It is in the middle of his “Malaise Speech,” which he delivered in the midst of energy/inflation crisis (July 15, 1979):  “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose. The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us.” What Carter was calling for here was nothing but a profound transformation of American culture. And though his speech concerned American materialism, it addressed the same culture that couldn’t, 40 years later, punish Trump for inciting violence in an attempt to maintain power illegally.  Carter, who was popular with Black Americans, came closer than any other modern American president to saying it like it is: We really need a reevaluation of our values.  And what did the US do? Laugh him out of the White House. RIP, you peanut farmer.