Earlier this week, the people of Georgia spoke clearly. Overcoming a range of voter suppression tactics, Sen. Raphael Warnock won re-election by defeating Republican Herschel Walker by 51 to 48 percent, a margin of almost 100,000 votes.
That victory gives Democrats a 51-seat majority in the U.S. Senate, a net gain of one. It will be easier to confirm President Biden's judicial nominees and other high-level appointments and to advance legislation through committee. Admittedly, with Republicans taking control of the House, we are not likely to see much actual legislation. An actual Democratic majority in the Senate may also mean that investigations into the Jan. 6 coup attempt and other crimes of the Trump administration can continue.
But Warnock's victory also possesses another kind of significance. It has great symbolic and historic meaning for the country's centuries-long struggle toward multiracial democracy.
Warnock is only the 11th African American to have served in the Senate in the nation's history (and only the seventh to be elected by popular vote). He is the first Black senator from Georgia, and for that matter the first Black Democratic senator from any Southern state.
The Georgia Senate election was about what "type" of Black person white voters were most comfortable with, and what the difference between the two Black candidates revealed about whiteness and white identity.
The historic weight and resonance of Warnock's victory cannot be overstated in the aftermath of Jan. 6 and Trump's coup attempt, when an overwhelmingly white mob overran the Capitol, some carrying Confederate flags and other symbols of white supremacy, yelled racial slurs at Black and brown police officers, erected a functioning gallows like the Ku Klux Klan, all with the goal of nullifying the results of the 2020 election and in effect ending multiracial democracy in America.
In so many ways, Jan. 6 was a rebirth of the hateful energy behind the Confederacy and the Jim Crow era, channeling the same current of white terrorism that was used to tear down multiracial democracy across the South during the decades after the Civil War. This year's midterm election, and the subsequent Georgia runoff, were an important test of white voters and an object lesson in how white racism creates grotesque caricatures of Black personhood and Black dignity.
On a basic level, the Georgia Senate election was about what "type" of Black person white voters were most comfortable with. Such a choice reveals a great deal about whiteness and white identity in the Age of Trump and beyond. The differences were striking.
Raphael Warnock is a highly intelligent and accomplished person, who also comes the moral authority and gravitas of serving as senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, a position once held by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Whatever one's party affiliation may be, it should be clear that as a senator Warnock has shown himself to be a competent, knowledgeable and a responsible public servant who builds consensus and has tried to serve the best interests of all the people of Georgia.
His Republican opponent, of course, was Herschel Walker, who was personally chosen for that campaign by Donald Trump because of Walker's previous fame as a star running back both in college football and the NFL. He was a disastrous candidate, credibly accused of domestic violence and abuse, who repeatedly lied about his personal and professional life. Walker also appears to be delusional or profoundly ignorant, quite possibly both. It's highly plausible that he suffers from cognitive impairment or neurological damage resulting from his football career.
Walker is of course also Black, and that fact is crucial to his symbolic meaning in the American white popular imagination. He functions as comic relief and fulfills racist and white supremacist fantasies about Black people as ignorant, nearly childlike beings (yet to varying degrees potentially menacing and dangerous) who are more physical than intellectual and serve as cheerful sycophants who make white people feel comfortable and superior. Such images and caricatures are highly malleable: They were once used to legitimate chattel slavery and then changed over time in service to the Jim Crow era and now the age of "colorblind" racism.
In a powerful essay at the New York Times, Danté Stewart works through the deeper meaning of Herschel Walker and what he represents about race and power, writing that when Walker entered the Georgia race, "he represented himself less as Black people's potential representative than as white America's tool":
As the months rolled on, the scandals piled up: the allegation that Mr. Walker, who strongly opposes abortion rights, allegedly paid for his former girlfriend to abort their baby; his son's rants against his father, and even recent questions about his Georgia residency. Throughout it all, Mr. Walker's campaign draws from white supremacy's greatest fantasy and stereotype: using a Black man for white people's entertainment and consumption.
Mr. Walker is part of a long tradition of Black people willing to distance themselves from the humanity and dreams of their community in exchange for white praise and white power. Black people betraying Black people has a legacy stretching from the plantation to today. Mr. Walker has willingly, as he did in the N.F.L., taken the handoff from the likes of Mr. Trump, Ron DeSantis and Lindsey Graham, shucked and juked and jived over Black people's real needs, just to hit the end zone and win at the white man's game….
Politics aside, positions aside, I have to wonder: What is it that so many white people see as desirable in Mr. Walker? ... The race and runoff are reflections of who white people believe is best for Black people and the nation. Mr. Walker is a very visible and violent symbol of just how far many white people in America will go to preserve a dying world of whiteness they refuse to let go of.
What a sad thing it is to watch a man's and a people's desire to destroy even themselves in an attempt to control what America is, means and can become. It is not just white supremacy. It is not just white hatred…. It is white ingratitude that refuses to acknowledge just how deeply racist a vote for Mr. Walker actually is
Both in the November general election and the runoff this week, nearly all of Walker's support came from white voters.
Although Warnock is an ordained Christian minister, white Christian evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for Walker, who has had numerous children out of wedlock, allegedly coerced at least two women to have abortions, allegedly abused multiple intimate partners and by all accounts has led a less than virtuous life.
In an essay for Ms. Magazine, Jackson Katz observes that in the first round of the Georgia election white women supported Walker over Warnock "by a wide margin that was even more pronounced along class lines," while Walker's advantage among white men was overwhelming:
But Walker utterly trounced Warnock among white men by 71-27 percent. This was nearly identical to the margin that Donald Trump had over Joe Biden among these Georgia voters in the 2020 presidential race. Walker's advantage among white men without a college degree was an astounding 80-19 percent.
This conservative appeal to "masculinity" helps to explain why — despite Walker's numerous gaffes and bizarre statements on the campaign trail — he has kept this election within the margin of error. It has simply become unthinkable for millions of white men to vote for a party they see — in crudely stereotypical and misogynous terms — as soft, weak and effeminate.
Very few Black voters chose Walker: they see him as an embarrassing caricature who is working in direct opposition to their political progress and collective dignity. As historian Peniel Joseph writes in his book "The Third Reconstruction":
Black Dignity serves, then, as a precursor to effective claims of citizenship. It took a cataclysmic civil war to make the prospect of Black citizenship viable. Dignity provided the resilience, tenacity, and courage to make freedom dreams that included citizenship possible.
Some might respond that the overwhelming white support for Walker was "just" about partisanship and a corollary to the fact that Republican voters are overwhelmingly white. Logically, any Republican candidate, irrespective of that individual's race or gender or any other identity, will receive most of their votes from white people.
That is a superficial and incomplete conclusion. The post-civil rights era Republican Party is committed to a political and societal project centered on protecting, advancing and enshrining white privilege and white power. Black and brown "conservatives" play an important role in that agenda, providing cover in the guise of "colorblindness" and the seemingly commonsensical proposition that the Republican Party cannot really be racist if it nominates a Black or Latino or Asian-American person as a candidate for an important position.
Black and brown conservatives play an important role in the white supremacist agenda, providing cover in the guise of "colorblindness" and the seemingly commonsensical proposition that Republicans cannot be racist if they nominate a person of color.
In fact, there is no way to understand the contemporary Republican Party as separate or apart from white supremacy and racism, especially after the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. As America becomes more racially diverse and inclusive, the Republican Party will clearly be eager to include more Black and brown faces (as well as more women and members of other marginalized communities) as candidates, spokespeople, celebrities, media figures and so on. But those individuals, virtually by definition, do not feel a sense of linked fate or shared struggle and commitment to those groups, and intentionally or otherwise are actually working to reverse the progress that Black and brown people, women, LGBTQ people and other historically disenfranchised Americans have struggled to achieve.
Fascism and related authoritarian movements often possess an inherent absurdity, which also makes them especially dangerous. For many observers, it becomes easier to mock and point fingers than to sound the alarm about the imminent danger. That is one of the processes by which political deviance takes hold and becomes normalized, even irreversible.
At the Daily Beast, Michael A. Cohen noted the obvious but alarming fact that even though Walker lost the Georgia election, more than 1.6 million people voted for him, a problem also seen with other grossly unqualified Republican candidates, including Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Kari Lake and Blake Masters in Arizona:
Before Trump ran for office, it's hard to imagine candidates as unskilled and dangerous as Walker, Lake, Masters or Mastriano could win their party's nomination for the U.S. Senate or governor. But in the modern GOP, where competence and experience have become foreign, even toxic concepts, the bar for political entry has been lowered to the floor.
Herschel Walker deserved to lose, but what does it say about the Republican Party that so many of the party's voters were willing to support a candidate who had no business being a U.S. Senator — no less running for the office? American democracy survived 2022, but Walker's narrow defeat is a disquieting reminder that we're hardly out of the woods yet.
Although America avoided disaster in the 2022 midterms, and Warnock's re-election provides a historic coda, one thing is certain. There will be more Herschel Walkers, more buffoonish Republican fascists in the future — and not all of them will collapse the way he did.
