The Lies We Tell Ourselves: James Baldwin and the 2020 Election Lie

Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election has spawned an insidious lie that has embedded itself in the fault lines of America’s grand political and social divisions. The 2020 election lie claims that Trump won the election and the Democrats throughout the country have engaged in a conspiracy of fraudulent ballots, rigged voting machines, and votes cast by the dead to swing the election in Joe Biden’s favor.

The obvious incredibility of this lie has not stopped it from rooting itself into the core of mainstream Republican politics. It has become a dumpster fire that has been fueled by daily Fox News monologues delivered by soulless profiteers of hate and the persistent steam of disinformation that flows from social media bots and from the mouth of the twice-impeached former president.

The Republican party in the age of Trump has fully embraced its core identity as the White People’s Party. It becomes hard to ignore the racial aspects involved in their commitment to this lie. The Republican party has spear-headed a vigorous effort to restrict voting rights in recent years in a way that has had — and will have — a disproportionate effect on the voting rights of Black people. Black people also make up the backbone of the Democratic party and are its most consistent voting block. Make no mistake: an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election is, in effect, an effort to throw out the votes of millions of Black Americans.

In America, white supremacy is always just a degree of separation away from any issue.

To help myself better understand the 2020 lie, I read Professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s book “Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons For Our Own.” Glaude has often referred to America as having a “value gap” — that is the idea that white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others. In “Begin Again’’, Glaude calls the Lie “a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by which the value gap is maintained.” He goes on to write that the Lie can be broken into two parts:

1. Lies focused on the debasement of Black people. That they are essentially inferior, less human than white people, and therefore, deserving of their particular station in American life.
2. Lies about American history and about the trauma that America has visited throughout that history on people of color at home and abroad.

The Lie maintains that America is fundamentally innocent and its bad deeds are just mistakes to be corrected in the journey “to become a more perfect union.” To James Baldwin, the Lie is part of the very foundation of this country.

“The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t… anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn’t, then no crime has been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble,” wrote Baldwin.

The Lie and the 2020 election lie both rely on this myth that white people matter most in this country.

On January 6, the world bore witness to white America’s commitment to its lie. As we watched supporters of Trump, right-wing militias, and white weekend warriors form a violent mob that stormed the nation’s capital in hopes of maintaining their minority rule over this country. The country’s congressional leaders fled just moments before a mob of Trump fanatics managed to breach the Senate Chambers. This moment of national disgrace and embarrassment brought with it numerous injuries and a few deaths — a Capitol police officer and a deluded woman who was fully committed to the lie were among the casualties.

Egged on by the former white-supremacist-in-chief and his allies, the mob was obstinately present to support the effort of Republican officials to deny the election results. But the white men made sure to remind us of their ulterior motive as they paraded through the Capitol building chanting, “This is OUR country!”

These men proclaimed their devotion to the Lie and their desire to maintain the hold on power that whiteness has had on America since the first boats dared to cross the Atlantic. The changing demographics of the country scares them. The proud proclamations of the value of Black lives scares them. Americans seeking to create a rainbow coalition of a country that is focused on maintaining a just and equitable society truly frightens them.

But they would never admit this fear exists. Instead, they hide their desire to maintain white supremacy in a cloak of lies. They cry for a return to a time of greatness in America that does not exist. They are nostalgic for a Lie. They act in what Baldwin called a sense of “weird nostalgia” that is based on some imagined America that was some beacon of peace and prosperity, a shining city on a hill for the world to model themselves after.

When protesters take to the streets in demand for racial justice, the security of rights of women, access to healthcare and living wages, and the end of police brutality, they call for a return of law and order in the name of maintaining this caste system that has placed whiteness on top.

In “The Fire Next Time,” Baldwin wrote, “It is galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them.” Their desire to hold onto whiteness bars them from imagining an America that does not need to hold on to such outdated things as race. The calls for universal healthcare would benefit the Black woman who has developed asthma from lifelong exposure to New York City’s smog as well as the white man in the backwoods of Alabama who needs help with his diabetes medicine. The calls for a proper living wage would benefit both the single Hispanic mother struggling in Los Angeles’s dreadful housing market as well as the white family in rural Tennessee who is struggling to make sure that their family can eat.

If white people would let go of whiteness, they would see that calls for an end to police brutality and a beginning of a culture of accountability for wrong-doing would serve to protect their little boys and girls as well.

Alas, white Americans are, by and large, committed to the Lie. This Lie is the source of the violence that has become routine in American life. Chants of “Black Lives matter” and a desire to create a truly multi-ethnic and inclusive society have been met with violent reprisal by white Americans — from the Charlottesville demonstration to the January 6 mob. In the wake of the El Paso Walmart shooting, in which a white supremacist who was committed to the Lie saw fit to target and kill Mexican and Hispanic people, Professor Glaude offered insight on MSNBC’s Deadline. He preached, “Either we are going to change, or we are going to do this again and again. And babies are going to have to grow up without mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts, friends, while we’re trying to convince white folk to… embrace a history that might set them free from being white.”

We can only hope that white America’s commitment to the Lie will weaken and that their illusion of an American that has never existed will be shattered. In the meantime, it is everyone else that will bear the brunt of the dangers of the Lie. Baldwin wrote that “time folds upon itself.” This certainly seems true when Black people have been dealing with the same violence and injustices that our parents, grandparents, and relatives further beyond have faced. Perhaps the way to shatter this cycle of violence is to shatter the Lie.