Donald Trump is the gift that keeps on giving. To columnists. To late-night comedians. And, most dangerous of all, to his base.

Trump voices confusion over US history: 'Why was there a civil war?' Read more

The latest red meat that he has thrown to the most reactionary elements of American society came in an interview with Salena Zito that was broadcast on satellite radio last weekend. In the interview, he engaged in some interesting commentary on the antebellum period of American history.

People don’t realize, you know, the civil war, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the civil war? Why could that one not have been worked out?

Many people are going to attack the logic of the statement itself, and there’s much to attack it on. Negotiations require, to some degree, an acceptance of the legitimacy of the viewpoints on the other side. Given that the civil war was fought to maintain chattel slavery as the dominant mode of economic production in the south, it is puzzling that Trump conceives of a negotiation that legitimizes the concept of owning other human beings.

It would be easy to dismiss this statement – and the person who uttered it – as buffoonish; a caricature of the overt and hostile racism that many believe we have put behind us. The signs at the various marches proclaim “This Is Not Normal”, as if Trump is an aberration that lies outside mainstream conservative politics.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Trump is simply the latest in a long line of rightwing Republicans who believe that justice and equality for all is an obstacle to “making America great again”.

US senator Jesse Helms, polling behind Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt in the final stages of the 1990 Senate race in North Carolina, ran one of the most despicable advertisements in modern US political history. The “Hands” ad showed a pair of white male hands crumpling up a job rejection letter while the narrator in the background intoned:

You needed that job, and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is. Harvey Gantt supports Ted Kennedy’s racial quota law, which makes the color of your skin more important than your qualifications. You vote on this issue next Tuesday: for racial quotas, Harvey Gantt; against racial quotas, Jesse Helms.

Helms would come back from behind to win re-election by five points. Over the course of the next Senate term, Carol Moseley Braun, the first black person to be elected to the Senate from Illinois, would accuse Helms of getting into an elevator with her and stating that he was gonna “sing ‘Dixie’ until she cries” in retaliation for Moseley Braun’s vote against extending the patent of the logo of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The war on drugs is racist. Donald Trump is embracing it with open arms | Steven W Thrasher Read more

Remember when Senate majority leader Trent Lott got into trouble for stating that the US would have been better off if his colleague Strom Thurmond – who ran for president in 1948 on a platform of continuing racial segregation in all walks of life – had been elected president? You don’t even have to go back that far: Larry Pittman, a Republican state senator from North Carolina, said that Abraham Lincoln was “the same kind of tyrant” as Adolf Hitler two weeks ago. Congressman Steve King questioned whether “other sub-groups” had made the same contribution to society as white people during the Republican national convention last year.

But with Trump in the White House, those behind such ideas have been handed a megaphone. And the reactionary base is taking notice. White supremacists have always been at Trump rallies, but now they are showing up openly wearing their insignia. Neo-Nazis are targeting communities and college campuses more openly than at any time since the days of the Greensboro massacre and the murder of Michael Donald.

People who think that we can simply vote this stuff away are simply ignorant of even the most recent history. It is a grave error to take Trump as a one-off, but it’s an error much of the American political class is making, and one from which we may not recover as a society.