Preferring a white* king to a Black* president

Samuel Alito makes the case for a particular kind of dictatorship.

One silly thing I used to believe is that serious Republican thinkers held to a principle that has often been described as the “unitary executive theory.” 

This is the ridiculous idea that a bunch of guys who hated kings (so much that they didn’t want to even give governors any real executive power) essentially wanted a king with some mild consultation from the branch of government described in Article 1 of the Constitution.

During an interview with the great San Bagenstos, who was then running for Michigan’s Supreme Court and is now general counsel for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I naively suggested that conservatives genuinely embraced this theory that had justified many of the Constitutional abuses of the Bush/Cheney administration.

His response was, more or less, “Strangely, these powers seem reserved for Republican presidents.”

This week at the Supreme Court, we saw the endpoint of what can only be called “MAGA unitary executive theory.” 

A Republican majority that recently threw out education debt forgiveness from the Biden Administration that explicitly followed the letter of the law was now the scene of Samuel Alito arguing, in J.V. Last’s words, that “a coup as merely an alternate path to power, no more or less valid than an election.”

As long as that coup was attempted by a Republican president, of course.

When you view the members of the Supreme Court as what they are, superlegislators selected for lifetime terms by the winners of a barely democratic electoral college and confirmed by a majority of an even less democratic US Senate, Samuel Alito’s behavior makes perfect sense. He represents the views of a median Fox News viewer perfectly. Thus his judicial philosophy matches the editorial standards of Fox News. There is a simple rubric upon which all cases can and will be judged, “Does this help Republicans win?”

And increasingly, the answer to that question has been informed by an insight “Republicans can’t win, at least not fairly. And we can’t risk that. So how can we make the minority support for our positions dominant?”

One answer is that you allow Republicans who lose presidential races to simply say, “I would rather not,” and enforce that with both the threat and the realization of the threat of violence.

A while back I said, “Congratulations to everyone who had ‘one’ for how many Black presidents it would take to get Republicans to turn against democracy!”

As the impact of Thursday’s hearing in the Supreme Court sank in, I tweeted, “I don’t know how to describe the last 15 years other than to say most Republicans revealed that they would rather have a white king than a Black president.”

Of course by white*, I mean white cis Christian male. And by Black*, I mean anyone who’s not that, including white cis Christians who identify with or “side” with anyone who is not that.

The responsible thing is to ask myself whether that was always true. Like Elon Musk, Donald Trump has invented nothing but rather taken the credit and power that comes from recognizing what was his to exploit. And every power Trump wants is clearly a power Republicans would like to give to any Republican president, as we know from Project 2025, which could also be called "Project Preferring a White* King to a Black* President."

But the obvious insight here is that until Barack Obama became the Democratic presidential nominee in the middle of a financial collapse that punctuated two-terms of what felt like a Katrina every day, it didn’t seem possible that we could have a Black president. And until Hillary Clinton was leading in the polls, before Jim Comey, Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange decided to put all their feet on the scale, it didn’t seem possible that we could have a woman president.

Alito’s judicial “philosophy” reflects the insecurity that comes from the end of this hierarchical domination that made it safe for Republicans to somewhat trust democracy. It also surfaces the anxiety inherent in the right-wing refrain “We’re a Republic not a democracy!” that I’ve always translated in my mind into “If voting didn’t matter, we wouldn’t mind if Black people did it.”

But it’s still somewhat unfair to call this “Republican unitary executive theory” rather than “MAGA unitary executive theory.” There is 15% or so of the GOP that seems at least a bit uncomfortable with a white king over a Black president. That’s about the percentage of Republican primary voters who keep voting for Nikki Haley even after she dropped out, which is coincidentally as well as she did when she was running.

I make this point because we know exactly who makes up the MAGA coalition, thanks to social science, and yet we rarely hear it discussed in precise terms.Well, here it is, thanks to the 2021 study “Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support”:

Leveraging panel data beginning before Trump’s candidacy, we find that animus toward Democratic-linked groups in 2011 predicts future support for Trump regardless of party identity. 

Who are those “Democratic-linked groups” you ask?

Trump’s support is thus uniquely tied to animus toward minority groups. 

In other words, people who prefer a white* king to a Black* president.

We know, or we have proof, that Trumpism is all about white dominance despite and over all Constitutional safeguards. That point of view actually extends beyond the GOP, which may explain why Trump consistently has outperformed polls in key battleground states including Michigan and Pennsylvania. 

And we also know that this view is the dominant view of the Republican Party and the median Fox News viewer because we’re hearing it come out of Samuel Alito’s mouth.

There are a lot of benefits of a white king – tax cuts for billionaires, freedom to pollute, attacks on unions – that go beyond (or are implicit in) white dominance. But we should be at the point where we can admit what Alito and anyone who votes with him is after, because it has nothing to do with justice.