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Governing after four years of divisive rule will be a profound challenge. “The Weight on My Back is Greater,” Lula said. Photograph by Tommaso Protti

A Reporter at Large: After Bolsonaro, Can Lula Remake Brazil?

Following a prison term, a fraught election, and a near-coup, the third-time President takes charge of a fractured country.

— By Jon Lee Anderson | January 23, 2023 | January 30, 2023 Issue

All around the immense city of São Paulo, posters on telephone poles display a Pop-art image of the newly elected President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—Lula, as he is universally known. His head is crowned by dark curls, his face adorned with a red star, a symbol of his Workers’ Party. It is a vision of Lula in his early days: the left-wing idealist, the charismatic strike leader, the prophet of an imaginary future in which Brazil would become a center of social justice where no one went hungry, the rain forest was protected, and the enmity between races and classes dissolved. It is an old cliché that Brazil is the country of the future—a future that will never arrive. It is also true that the colossus of Latin America has not fulfilled many of its people’s hopes.

For generations of Brazilians, Lula is the country’s most familiar public figure. He served two previous terms as President, from 2003 to 2010. In 2018, he was imprisoned on charges of money laundering and corruption. Lula denied any wrongdoing, insisting that he was the victim of a political revenge scheme. His candidacy represented an almost unprecedented comeback.

After a long career of constant crisis, of triumph and embattlement, Lula looks his age. He is seventy-seven, short and sturdy, with a rooster’s erect posture and puffed-out chest. His hands are tough, like a boxer’s, but his skin is pale, and his curly hair has gone thin and white. When I saw him last November, a few days after he won the Presidential election, he entered the living room of a hotel suite in São Paulo surrounded by a phalanx of aides and security guards. He was dressed in a politician’s gray suit jacket and slacks, which he seemed to wish he could trade for his customary guayabera and jeans.

Lula looked not just exhausted but also unwell. In 2011, barely a year after he broke a half-century smoking habit, he had received a diagnosis of throat cancer and undergone chemotherapy. Doctors urged him to take special care of his throat, but of course he had ignored them during the campaign, and often when he spoke now his voice was reduced to a gravelly, theatrical growl. During his victory announcement, he seemed to strain to produce an impassioned whisper.

Lula’s campaign speeches suggested that he was engaged in an existential conflict. His opponent was Jair Bolsonaro, the incumbent, a right-wing populist who had become known as “the Trump of the tropics,” and as one of the hemisphere’s most controversial leaders. Like Trump, he had come to power by appealing to voters who were outraged by abortion rights, gay marriage, and sex education in primary schools. Throughout his career, his rhetoric was often hateful. He once dismissed a female legislator by saying that she was “not worth raping, she is very ugly.” On the subject of homosexuality, he said, “If your child starts to become like that, a little gay, you beat him and change his behavior.” In office, he allowed corporations to hack away at the rain forest virtually unimpeded, and police to shoot suspects without restraint. Responding to the covid-19 pandemic, he was neglectful and often cruel, telling his citizens, “Everyone has to die one day. We have to stop being a country of sissies.” Brazil has had nearly seven hundred thousand reported deaths, second only to the United States.

Lula, in his campaign, had talked in almost messianic terms about his desire to “rescue” Brazil. He had also begun to speak about God, his age, how he felt lucky to have endured his adversities. On the night he finally won, he said, “They tried to bury me alive, but I survived. Here I am.”

When I’d last seen Lula, in December, 2019, he had appeared vigorous and relatively youthful. Now, despite his campaign rhetoric, he seemed a little overwhelmed by the prospects he faced in his mission to save Brazil. Sinking into a chair and exhaling heavily, he said that he’d been on the telephone all morning with world leaders who’d called to congratulate him. When I asked what political initiatives he had planned, he spoke almost by rote, as if still on the campaign trail. But when I said that, outside Brazil, many people expected him to rescue not just his country but the global environment, by reversing the deforestation of the Amazon, his eyes widened almost fearfully, and he exclaimed, “Yes, I know!” Reaching over to grab my knee, he leaned in and began speaking intently of reshaping the country. “People are very optimistic about our governance,” he said. “People are expecting something to change, and it will change.” This was the Lula from the Pop-art poster, the leftist crusader who had enthralled Brazilians since his first appearance on the national stage, forty years earlier. But now the country around him was different, divided sharply between those who loved him and those who despised him.

On New Year’s Day, Lula was inaugurated in the capital, Brasília, a sprawling city carved from the forest in the late nineteen-fifties. In a speech from the Planalto Palace, a modernist building that contains the Presidential offices, he made an attempt at conciliation. “There are not two Brazils,” he said. “It is of no interest to anyone to live in a family where discord reigns. It is time to bring families back together, to remake the ties broken by the criminal spread of hate.”

A week later, Bolsonaro supporters swarmed the capital, arriving on more than a hundred buses from around the country to overturn what they insisted was a stolen election. Shouting, “Overthrow the thieves!” and “We will die for Brazil!,” they invaded the Presidential offices, the Supreme Court, and the legislature, setting fires and smashing whatever they found.

At Lula’s order, Brazilian authorities moved swiftly to turn back the siege, arresting more than fifteen hundred protesters and promising an inquiry into the origins of the violence. Lula also orchestrated a display of unity: dozens of government leaders, including some loyal to Bolsonaro, walked arm in arm across the vast plaza that connects the Planalto Palace with the Supreme Court. It was an effective gesture—a reminder of the street protests that had helped establish his reputation decades before. But Lula seems conscious that making the country function after four years of authoritarian rule will be a profoundly larger challenge. “My responsibility is much greater now,” he told me. “The weight on my back is greater.”

Last October 1st, the day before voting began in the Presidential election, Lula stood in the back of a pickup truck as it rolled along Rua Augusta, a narrow street in São Paulo known for its bars, sex shops, and raucous night life. Crowds had gathered along the sidewalks and on apartment balconies, and more clogged the street around his truck. Brazilian elections have two rounds, but any candidate who wins a simple majority in the first round can clinch the Presidency. Lula, who is at his best in a throng of supporters, was hoping to inspire voters to put him in office without delay.

Electoral rules forbid candidates to speak to voters on the last day of the campaign, so Lula waved silently and blew kisses. The crowd was noisy, though: music was pounding from speakers on his vehicle, and people in the streets were dancing. Suddenly, Lula began jumping around the truck, like a kid in a mosh pit. At his encouragement, his campaign ally Fernando Haddad, two decades his junior and a head taller, began jumping, too. As they bounced, more or less in time to the music, onlookers cheered them on. Video of the spectacle soon spread on social media.

It was a moment of buoyancy in a contentious campaign, one that had divided voters over questions about what kind of a country Brazil is and what kind it should be. Lula’s followers tended to be younger, more multiracial, and lower-income, with a considerable L.G.B.T.Q. contingent; Bolsonaro’s skewed older, whiter, and wealthier. As Lula’s rowdy cavalcade made its way down Rua Augusta, a Bolsonaro procession traversed a nearby avenue, accompanied by squads of hard-faced men on motorcycles.

Most polls suggested that Lula would win by a comfortable margin. But it was uncertain whether Bolsonaro would honor the results of the election if he lost. Like Donald Trump, with whom he had established a close rapport, Bolsonaro had long questioned the security of Brazil’s electronic voting machines—even though they had affirmed his victory in the previous election. In 2021, he told a group of loyalists that he saw only three possible scenarios for himself in the election: victory, arrest, or death. He appeared to be prepping his supporters, the bolsonaristas, to reject any result that favored Lula. He had also hinted repeatedly that the armed forces, where he had a great deal of support, would back him in a contested election. His minister of security, a hard-line former general, made threatening remarks about the possibility of military intervention.

In the United States, Trump’s allies helped amplify Bolsonaro’s arguments. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson warned that Lula would be a puppet of the Chinese President, Xi Jinping. “Allowing Brazil to be a colony of China would be a significant blow to us and potentially a very serious military threat,” he said. “The Biden Administration appears to be in favor of it. One person who is emphatically not in favor of it is the President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro.” (Days before, Carlson had conducted a fawning interview with Bolsonaro, suggesting that he was a better leader than the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and posing with him for pictures afterward wearing an Indigenous feather headdress.) The former Trump official Steve Bannon stoked fears that Lula intended to cheat his way to power: “Bolsonaro will win unless it’s stolen by, guess what, the machines.”

With concerns growing, the Biden Administration quietly deployed visiting emissaries, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, to warn Bolsonaro, his senior officials, and the military not to interfere in the election. As a U.S. official familiar with the outreach told me, “We made a concerted policy to let them know where the lines were for us. The outcome of the election was their business, but what we cared about was that the process be respected. We think they listened.”

Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court also joined the effort. Its head justice, Alexandre de Moraes, moved quickly to engage the armed forces, inviting them to participate in an election-transparency commission. To defuse Bolsonaro’s claims, he also arranged for the military to inspect a number of voting machines on Election Day. The proposal drew criticism from advocates of electoral independence, but the armed forces agreed. Whatever else might happen, it seemed, they were unlikely to launch a coup.

The concerns about the stability of the government were not frivolous. Democracy has tenuous roots in Brazil. From 1964 to 1985, the country was ruled by a military dictatorship, whose officers harshly oppressed labor unionists, clergy, academics, and the country’s tiny contingent of Marxist guerrillas. Nearly five hundred people were killed, and thousands were imprisoned and tortured—including Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s successor as President, who was captured when, as a young woman, she was an urban guerrilla.

Some of Brazil’s neighbors suffered far worse. In Argentina, between nine thousand and thirty thousand people were tortured, murdered, and “disappeared” by the military. But, while Argentina reckoned with the regime’s atrocities in a series of trials, Brazil left its military untouched, passing a law in 1979 to provide amnesty for abuses. As an institution, it has expressed no remorse.

The relatively unexamined legacy of Brazil’s dictatorship, in which the hard-right military attacked both leftist protesters and democrats, still informs the country’s politics. Bolsonaro, a former Army captain, was an eager participant in the dictatorship, and during a twenty-seven-year stint in parliament often called for a return to military rule. In one famous outburst, he said that the military had not gone far enough—that, if only it had killed thirty thousand more people, Brazil’s problems with leftists would have been solved. In 2016, when Brazil’s Congress impeached Rousseff, Bolsonaro cast his vote in the name of a notorious military colonel who had commanded the unit that tortured her.

Lula, on the other hand, is Brazil’s archetypal leftist. He was born poor, the sixth of seven children. His parents worked as farmers in famine-stricken Pernambuco, a state in the northeastern part of the country. When Lula was a young child, his father set off for São Paulo, in pursuit of a more stable livelihood, and found work as a day laborer. By the time the rest of the family could join him, when Lula was seven, he had found another woman and started a new family. For four years, they all lived together until Lula’s mother could find another place—a cramped room behind a bar.

Lula did not learn to read until he was about nine, and he quit school soon afterward. He worked as a street vender, a shoeshine boy, a warehouse laborer, and, eventually, a machine operator in a screw factory. At nineteen, he damaged the little finger on his left hand in an accident with a mechanical press. He couldn’t get medical treatment until the next day. To his dismay, the doctor performed a full amputation. In time, his opponents came to deride him as Nine-Finger.

He soon got involved in trade-union politics, organizing protests outside factories and displaying a gift for oratory. He was imprisoned for leading an illegal strike but emerged after a month, and by the waning years of the dictatorship had become a prominent labor leader in São Paulo. In 1980, as the armed forces prepared to relinquish power, he founded the left-wing Partido dos Trabalhadores, the Workers’ Party, known as the P.T. He soon began running for political office, and, over the years, whether winning elections or losing them, he has become the undisputed leader of the Brazilian left. “There’s no one else of his stature in the hemisphere,” a Western official who has met with him several times said. “He’s the boss.”

As the returns came in for the first round of voting, Lula’s campaign team gathered in a São Paulo hotel. In a briefing room, scores of journalists, hangers-on, and politicians crowded around a huge television screen, watching as the tally tipped toward one candidate, then the other. The sound in the room tracked the results: agitated silence when Lula was trailing, laughter and cries of “Lula-la!,” a refrain from an old campaign song, when he took the lead.

By early morning, Lula had 48.4 per cent of the votes—five points ahead of Bolsonaro, but short of what he needed to win the Presidency in the first round. Moreover, Bolsonaro had attracted many more voters than pollsters had predicted. Lula’s team was realizing not only that a second round was going to be necessary but that, even if their candidate won, Brazil had become a vastly different country from the one he had presided over twelve years earlier.

Lula left office in 2010 with a historic eighty-eight-per-cent approval rating. The economy had boomed during his tenure, thanks in large measure to surging commodities prices, a significant oil discovery off the coast, and the explosive growth of China, a major buyer of Brazilian exports. In 2010, the rate of economic growth was 7.5 per cent, the highest in decades. Brazil belonged to a group of fast-growing nations known as the brics—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. But, since then, the economy has slumped, and Brazil, once the world’s fifth-largest economy, is now its ninth.

Bolsonaro worked to make Brazil friendlier to business, but many of his supporters were more energized by his prosecution of a culture war. He had won the Presidency in 2018 with the backing of the powerful consortium known as the three B’s: beef, Bibles, and bullets, signifying agribusiness, the evangelical church, and the arms lobby. In public appearances, his characteristic gesture was shooting make-believe pistols. He enjoyed widespread support among law-enforcement groups, especially the military police, which have a reputation for indiscriminate force and for involvement in organized crime.

In office, he expanded police departments and gave them wide leeway in dealing with criminals. In 2020 and 2021, police in Brazil killed more than six thousand people a year—six times the total in the United States. Bolsonaro also loosened gun laws, arguing that citizens needed to defend themselves against criminals and left-wing land invaders. Registered gun ownership grew sixfold while he was in office; gun shops and shooting ranges flourished.

It is illegal in Brazil to make racist remarks, but Bolsonaro regularly found ways to insult his country’s nonwhite inhabitants, saying that members of Afro-Brazilian communities were “not even good enough to breed” and that the Indigenous were “increasingly becoming human beings just like us.” Refugees were “the scum of the earth.” Violence against these communities, and against L.G.B.T.Q. people, surged during his tenure.

Soon after Lula took office, Bolsonaro supporters stormed the federal district of Brasília, calling for military intervention. Photograph by Antonio Cascio / Reuters / Redux

As Bolsonaro’s popularity grew, Brazilian politicians on the right began proclaiming their adherence to bolsonarismo. In the recent elections, candidates sympathetic to his ideas had done unexpectedly well, taking a majority of Senate and gubernatorial seats. One of those who won legislative posts was Eduardo Pazuello, an Army general who for a time ran Bolsonaro’s calamitous response to the pandemic. Another was Ricardo Salles, Bolsonaro’s first environment minister, who left office while under investigation for conspiring to traffic Amazonian hardwoods. (He denies the allegations.)

In São Paulo state, Brazil’s largest electoral constituency, the returns were mixed. The capital swung to Lula. Smaller cities and the countryside went to Bolsonaro, as they had in many other places where ranching and agribusiness drive the economy. In the campaign press room, Lula professed confidence: “We’ll have to fight on, but we’ll win.” His protégé Guilherme Boulos put it more starkly. Running against Bolsonaro, he said, was “a war between democracy and barbarism.”

Lula began running for President as soon as he was able. He launched his first campaign in 1989, just a year after a new constitution, adopted as Brazil returned to democracy, made it legal for leftist parties to run for office. He lost narrowly to Fernando Collor de Mello, a sharply dressed young proponent of free-market ideas. Collor de Mello resigned two years later, brought down by a corruption scandal. (He was later acquitted.)

Lula ran again in 1994 and 1998, and lost both times to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a left-wing scholar who had once marched alongside him in street protests. As President, Cardoso moved toward the center, supporting the privatization of several major government-owned corporations. Lula remained a committed leftist, assailing the “neoliberal” reforms that swept the region, with American encouragement. While Cardoso became friendly with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, Lula was more philosophically aligned with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez.

But when Lula finally won the Presidency, in 2002, he showed a surprising pragmatism, along with a political survivor’s wiliness. He weathered a scandal involving a scheme to buy legislators’ votes, which became known as mensalão, or “the big monthly payment.” Though several of his closest deputies were implicated, he was not charged. In the same years, he launched a cash-transfer program, known as Bolsa Família, that lifted some thirty million Brazilians out of extreme poverty, and initiated an ambitious program to bring electricity to neglected areas of the countryside. During his tenure, the illegal destruction of the Amazon rain forest decreased dramatically, as he implemented programs to police the region and designated several million acres as conservation areas and as reserves for the Indigenous.

Lula’s personal warmth is probably his greatest political asset, and, unlike other Latin American leftists of his generation, he showed an exceptional ability to work both sides of the political aisle. Despite his opposition to the Iraq War, he cultivated a genial relationship with George W. Bush. When Barack Obama shook hands with Lula for the first time, at a G-20 summit in 2009, he told officials there, “I love this guy. He’s the most popular politician on Earth.” (In fact, the two didn’t get along that well; Lula told me that he had a better rapport with Bush, who, notwithstanding their differences, was a guy you could have a barbecue with. Obama, for his part, wrote in his memoirs that Lula was “impressive” but “reportedly had the scruples of a Tammany Hall boss.”)

At times in last year’s campaign, though, Lula seemed to have lost his easy dexterity. At a television studio in Rio, I watched him take part in the last of three Presidential debates. Bolsonaro’s insistent theme was that if Lula won back the Presidency Brazil would become like Venezuela—a byword for failed left-wing politics. Bolsonaro strutted grimly around the studio, calling his opponent “a thief, a traitor to the fatherland, and an ex-prisoner.” Lula sputtered outraged denials and shouted back that Bolsonaro was “shameless, repulsive,” and unfit to hold the Presidency. Few of Lula’s loyalists were happy about his performance. While Bolsonaro was characteristically vulgar, Lula had reacted badly to his attacks, and failed to express any new ideas or policy initiatives.

Bolsonaro’s accusations—he called Lula a “national embarrassment”—are complicated by the fact that corruption has been endemic in Brazil for much of its modern history. The government owns large sectors of the economy, and many legislators expect to be compensated for their coöperation. “Parliament is either subservient or rebellious,” José Eduardo Cardozo, a lawyer and a prominent Brazilian politician, told me. “And, when it is subservient, it is because it participates in the government—it has the money. If it’s not participating, it wants the government out.”

Lula, in his two terms, managed to cultivate the legislature while avoiding the consequences of the mensalão vote-buying scandal. His successor, Dilma Rousseff, lacked his nimbleness. “She was not a woman who liked to talk to parliamentarians,” Cardozo, who also served as Rousseff’s minister of justice, told me. “She was a cadre who thinks about politics, but who does not perform politics.”

Rousseff was Brazil’s first female President, and a formidable figure. After her early stint as a Marxist guerrilla, she had spent three years in prison, before going on to serve as Lula’s minister of energy and his chief of staff. When she became President, though, the economy was beginning to stagnate, and in her second term a crash in commodities prices meant that Brazil had less money coming in. Street protests became commonplace. So did maneuvering by her political opponents to unseat her. Even her Vice-President, Michel Temer, supported calls for her impeachment, ostensibly for manipulating the country’s budget.

One irony of those years is that Lula and Rousseff strengthened the judiciary, which made corruption more visible in their own government. Under Rousseff, the federal police began a series of investigations known as Lava Jato, or Car Wash. For several years, a team led by a judge named Sergio Moro operated out of Curitiba, in the conservative south of Brazil. It investigated corruption across Latin America, bringing down powerful C.E.O.s, government officials, and even several foreign Presidents for their involvement in money laundering and bribery.

Many of the schemes were linked to Brazil’s state oil firm, Petrobras, and to the construction giant Odebrecht, both of which had thrived during Lula’s tenure. Moro accused Lula of being the mastermind of an international conspiracy, and a years-long investigation began. In the end, the charges were narrow: Moro alleged that Lula was illicitly promised a beachside apartment, and that friends had effectively bought a ranch for his use, where Odebrecht made renovations at the request of Lula’s wife.

In a dramatic televised hearing, Moro coolly interrogated Lula, who angrily denied the charges and demanded proof of the allegations against him. Lula’s supporters have persistently argued that there is little evidence tying him to the properties. But, not long after the hearings, Moro released recordings that his agents had made of phone conversations between Rousseff and Lula, in which she said that she was sending him papers that would secure him a ministerial post. Rousseff said that the post was routine; Moro claimed that she was trying to protect Lula from arrest. A few months later, the legislature forced Rousseff out, and Temer took her place.

Political corruption did not diminish in Brazil. Eduardo Cunha, who had led the congressional campaign against Rousseff, was found guilty of accepting forty million dollars in bribes. Temer himself was implicated, but the same Congress that had voted to impeach Rousseff opted to leave him in office, for the sake of what the presiding judge called the “stability of the electoral system.”

As the 2018 Presidential election approached, Lula remained the most popular politician in the country, with what one poll said was a fifteen-point lead over his closest competitor. But he was increasingly embroiled in criminal investigations. A few months before the voting, police burst into Lula’s house to search for evidence; Marisa Letícia Casa, his wife of four decades, died of a stroke shortly afterward. Lula was convicted of corruption, sentenced to thirteen years in prison, and placed in a federal-police facility in Curitiba.

A contingent of supporters camped outside the fence near Lula’s cell, greeting him every morning with calls of “Good day, Lula.” But Moro’s investigation insured that he was barred from public office, instantly making Jair Bolsonaro the Presidential front-runner. In the election, Bolsonaro secured a narrow victory over Lula’s stand-in, the former São Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad. Soon after being elected, he made Moro his minister of justice.

Among the loyalists who visited Lula in prison was his friend Emidio de Souza—a genial, burly man in his early sixties, who has served for years as a state legislator for the P.T. When Lula was arrested, it was de Souza who negotiated his surrender, persuading the police to abide by two conditions: “no haircut, no handcuffs.” He also arranged for Lula to be picked up discreetly, out of sight of a television crew circling in a helicopter nearby, in the hope of avoiding public humiliation.

Still, the arrest affected Lula profoundly. “He expected to be in prison for a week, maybe, or ten days,” de Souza told me in São Paulo. “But his extended imprisonment showed him that the world was going to move against him.” He passed the time by working through an earnest undergrad’s reading list: a history of slavery in Brazil, a treatise on how oil has led to wars, a biography of Nelson Mandela. He continued to follow party politics, de Souza said: “He wasn’t allowed the Internet, but he received daily written reports, news clippings, sometimes analyses of the political situation in the country. He also recorded the P.T. meetings on a flash drive, and then watched them on TV.”

From prison, Lula looked on as Bolsonaro began to generate his own corruption scandals. Though he had campaigned as a reformer, he and his family members were accused of a series of offenses, all of which they deny. Prosecutors allege that two of his sons embezzled public funds, and that an aide involved in one of the schemes funnelled money into an account owned by Bolsonaro’s wife. The family was eventually found to have bought at least fifty-one properties, largely in cash. (Bolsonaro gave a bluff response: “What’s wrong with buying houses in cash?”) To cultivate political allies, Bolsonaro’s administration maintained a “secret budget,” which gave the legislature access to some three billion dollars—a fifth of all discretionary spending—which could be apportioned without oversight.

In June, 2019, the Intercept published leaks of phone messages between Moro and the prosecutors who had tried Lula, which revealed significant ethical lapses. Moro illicitly discussed tactics with the prosecutors; the lead prosecutor expressed doubts that Lula had actually owned the apartment at the center of the case. In other leaks, the Lava Jato investigators admitted that they hoped to bring down Lula and the P.T. The United Nations Human Rights Council subsequently found that the investigation had violated due process.

In November, 2019, Lula was released, after five hundred and eighty days in prison. De Souza told me that Lula insisted he could rebuild his image, saying, “I’m not going to go down in history as a guy who stole.” In his first speech after being released, he called himself “the victim of the greatest legal lie ever told in five hundred years of history.”

I saw Lula a few weeks later, in a hotel overlooking Rio’s Copacabana beach. He was seventy-four—one year shy of the age at which the Catholic Church would no longer allow him to be a bishop, he joked. He said he’d been working out and felt fitter than he had in years. He had also fallen in love, with Rosângela (Janja) da Silva, a sociologist and a Workers’ Party member twenty-one years his junior; her daily letters had sustained him in prison, he said. He was still legally barred from politics, but he made it clear that he would return as soon as his prohibition was lifted. “If I were a candidate in 2022, I would surely win,” he said. “Because there is a faithful relationship between the Brazilian people and me.”

When Lula won the second round of voting, on October 30th, the crowds in São Paulo were ecstatic. From a two-story soundstage above Avenida Paulista, the city’s main thoroughfare, Lula waved and blew kisses, as his supporters danced and sang and waved flags bearing images of his face. His voice cracked with exhaustion and emotion as he declared, “Brazil is back!”

For many Brazilians I spoke with, though, the main reason for celebrating Lula’s victory was not that it would return the P.T. to power but that it would prevent another four years of Bolsonaro. João Moreira Salles, a documentary filmmaker, the founder of the magazine Piauí, and an astute political observer, told me, “That he could win in these conditions is nothing short of stunning. But we might remember the election as the most admirable part of Lula III. Winning was indeed epic. Governing might be a lot less rewarding.”

Lula’s team was uneasy. He had won by just over two million votes, making this the closest election in Brazil’s history. Bolsonaro had not conceded, and his supporters insisted that the election had been rigged. Along with a large contingent of bolsonarista truckers, they swarmed onto highways to block traffic and, in some cases, to erect burning barricades, halting commerce across the country.

For days, Bolsonaro remained out of sight and issued no public statements. Finally, he made an appearance at the Planalto Palace, apparently under pressure from allies. In a brief, stiff ceremony, he suggested that his supporters had every right to express their anger, but should not block the roads: “Our methods should not be those of the left, which have always been bad for the populace.” As soon as Bolsonaro was finished, he turned and walked off, while his chief of staff remained to say that officials from the current administration would be meeting with Lula’s team to begin handing over power.

There was going to be a transition, it seemed. But, within days, the mobs that had occupied the country’s highways had moved to new positions outside military garrisons. There, they set up camps and demanded an intervention to stop Lula—the thief, the Communist—from taking away their country.

Outside the main gates of the Southeast Military Command, a sprawling Army headquarters in São Paulo, several hundred bolsonaristas held a daily vigil. Men and women draped in Brazilian flags or wearing the national colors of yellow and green stood chanting, “S.O.S., armed forces!” Some held fists in the air. Several knelt to pray, their eyes closed and their arms outstretched in the fashion of Pentecostalism, which has a large following in Brazil. Some had their faces contorted in expressions of pain; others looked to Heaven, beseechingly.

Men strode in front of the chanting crowd, urging them on. When I approached several women to ask why they were there, demonstrators nearby became hostile, screaming at them, “No talking!” With rising hostility, the crowd began to yell, “Go away, dirty press!,” until I backed off.

As I left, I passed a clothesline strung between trees, which was hung with soccer jerseys, many of which were emblazoned with a 10—the number of Neymar, Brazil’s soccer star, who had recently declared that he was a bolsonarista. Alongside them was a green-and-yellow banner that read, in English, “Our flag will never be red. Out Communism.”

All over the country, crowds had gathered to protest and to pray for an intervention. In the U.S., Tucker Carlson broadcast their claims of fraud on his show. On November 2nd, he said, “According to official tallies, a convicted criminal and avowed socialist called Lula da Silva beat the incumbent President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, by a narrow margin this weekend. And yet millions of Brazilians—millions—don’t believe that’s what actually happened. . . . There are questions about whether all the ballots had been counted. Why so many were thrown out. Millions. And whether election laws were violated in the process. So we can’t render judgment on those questions, but if you care about democracy, if you think the process is essential, then you would look into those allegations.”

Steve Bannon echoed Carlson. Just days after he was convicted of refusing to testify before Congress about his role in the January 6th insurrection, he went on social media to claim that Brazil’s election “was stolen in broad daylight.” He called Lula “a Criminal Atheistic Marxist” and the pro-Bolsonaro demonstrators “freedom fighters.”

Brazil’s military had largely remained quiet throughout the monthlong electoral process. A week after the second round of voting, it still had not produced the results of its inspection of voting machines. In São Paulo, Lula admitted to feeling fretful about the delay. “This report should have been delivered before the elections,” he said.

His concerns extended beyond the silence of the military. When I told him about the protesters outside the Army garrison, he turned grim. “I think we need to find out who is financing and who is feeding them, because this is not spontaneous,” he said. The day before, he’d had a discouraging talk with the governor of Pará state, in the Amazon. “When police went and tried to unblock the roads, demonstrators shot up their car,” he said. “The entire country is like this. And Bolsonaro has locked himself inside his house. We are not used to this kind of thing here. Since the return of democracy, elections have always been respected.”

Lula mentioned reports that pro-Bolsonaro police around the country had interfered with his voters on Election Day, and had assisted bolsonaristas who blocked the highways. Lula said that he wasn’t worried about being kept out of office: “It may be difficult, but, you see, the law exists to give guarantees to society.” The problem was instability, and Bolsonaro’s seeming willingness to deploy the police to keep Lula out of office. “This election was atypical,” he said, “because it was the candidacy of a candidate against the state—an absurd thing.”

Like many others, Lula likened what was happening in Brazil to the Trump phenomenon in the U.S. January 6th had established a destabilizing precedent all over the world. “Whatever disagreements you may have with the United States, it still represents the face of democracy on planet Earth,” he said. “When the most important country fails to exercise democracy, you are giving an endorsement to all the crazies in the world.”

In speeches, Lula often raises the need to address hunger in Brazil, describing it as an unassailable moral imperative. He talked at length about hunger when we met in 2019, and with increasing emotion in his campaign appearances last year. In our interview after his recent victory, it came up when I questioned him about Ukraine. A few months earlier, he’d made acerbic remarks about Volodymyr Zelensky, and had seemed to suggest, as Vladimir Putin had, that the United States was partly responsible for the conflict. Apparently eager to set the issue aside, Lula told me that he intended to talk with Zelensky and Putin, and with Biden as well, but that all he cared about was “world peace.” Soon enough, he returned to the issue of hunger. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t betray these people,” he said, tears welling in his eyes. “I’ll have to fight with the markets sometimes, but people have to be able to eat again. I don’t want anything much, but people have to have hope again, and a full belly, with morning coffee and lunch and dinner.”

Lula remains an earnest believer in the leftist project in Latin America. But, as Cardozo, Rousseff’s minister of justice, told me, “Lula is not a man who theorizes about politics like Lenin or Trotsky. He is a pragmatist, a trade unionist.” He added, “He is also a political genius and a charismatic man. Inside the P.T., everyone below Lula fights against one another, but not against him. That’s how he conserves his power.”

Lula’s team is mostly made up of fairly doctrinaire leftists, but he has brought in some ideological diversity, in an effort to reassure the business lobby and other conservative interests. His Vice-President is Geraldo Alckmin, a center-right physician who once ran against him for President. His minister of planning and budget is Simone Tebet, who leans to the right on the economy. But Cardozo suggested that he’d need to go further to cultivate people who disagreed with him. “The extreme right is going to be strong and make permanent efforts to destabilize things. To keep the P.T. in its place and the extreme right in its place, he will need a broad alliance,” he said. “You can’t put out a fire with alcohol.”

A couple of days after I met Lula in São Paulo, he travelled to Brasília, hoping to widen his network of allies. Even as he had retaken the Presidency, Bolsonaro’s party had won ninety-nine seats in Congress, forming the largest bloc in the lower house; in the upper house, it secured fourteen of eighty-one seats. For Lula to run the country, he would have to make a deal with the Centrão, a shape-shifting coalition of right-of-center parties that have come to wield extraordinary power in the capital. The Centrão has few ideological allegiances; its members’ main imperative seems to be exchanging their votes for lucrative concessions for their constituencies, and for themselves.

But the Centrão was increasingly aligned with the hard right. It had voted out Rousseff in 2016 and then protected her successor, Temer. It had also effectively partnered with Bolsonaro when he joined one of its parties, the Partido Liberal, to run in last year’s election. Brazilian politicians change parties often. Bolsonaro has belonged to nine. The leader of the lower house of Congress, Arthur Lira, has belonged to five. Lira was a main beneficiary of Bolsonaro’s “secret budget,” and the person Lula most needed to cultivate on this trip. Judging by their encounter, Lira was eager to make a deal; he came out of Congress to greet Lula warmly.

But Valdemar Costa Neto, the president of the Liberal Party, had decided to stick with Bolsonaro. A canny, amiable man in his seventies, Costa Neto was a former Lula ally; in 2012, he was convicted on money-laundering charges related to the mensalão scheme, and spent two and a half years in detention before he was pardoned. “I had to rebuild the Party when I got out, because my image was destroyed,” he told me. The Liberal Party had traditionally leaned to the center, but he had shifted it right, and eventually the affiliation with Bolsonaro had paid off. “Now we have ninety-nine congressmen,” he said, scribbling figures on a scrap of paper to demonstrate how much funding they were bringing in. He explained brightly, “We have to make room for the extreme right now.”

Costa Neto said that he had nothing against the new President. Smiling, he told me that Lula had recently asked if he would back his coalition, but he’d shown him the math and Lula had understood. But, he added, Bolsonaro didn’t approve of him talking to Lula: “Bolsonaro’s not like you or me. He’s not normal.”

Costa Neto said that he thought Lula had won the election fairly. He recalled telling Bolsonaro to accept the results, relax, take a break, become the honorary president of the Liberal Party, and rebuild for the next elections. But Bolsonaro truly believed he had won, he said—he was wounded and “really depressed.” Costa Neto threw up his hands in exasperation. At Bolsonaro’s insistence, he had hired a company to investigate his claims of voting-machine fraud, and, Costa Neto said, it had come back with “troubling data.” He explained vaguely that the issue had to do with voting machines that had inexplicably identical serial numbers. In a few days, he said, he was going to hold a press conference on the matter.

He confessed to feeling anxious, because the claim of fraud would surely bring “three times as many people onto the streets as those already camped out in front of the Army bases.” But Bolsonaro was an important ally, and Costa Neto had promised to advance his cause. A few days later, he held his press conference. The claim was quickly rejected by Brazil’s electoral tribunal; the military had already assessed its sample of voting machines and declared Lula the legitimate winner. Still, the report generated a flurry of headlines—enough to feed the bolsonaristas’ conviction that there had been a conspiracy.

On the afternoon of January 8th, Bolsonaro supporters poured into the federal district of Brasília, overrunning the complex that houses the three branches of government—the Three Powers, as they are known. In the plaza, protesters gathered to confront soldiers protecting the buildings. Others prayed, or yelled slogans: “Brazil was whored out by those nasty, corrupt people!” Rioters forced their way in, shattering windows and setting fires. The district police, led by a former Bolsonaro official, offered little resistance, and sometimes provided aid.

Marina Dias, a Brazilian journalist, was near the Ministry of Defense when she saw an older woman dressed in a camouflage shirt, of a kind that bolsonaristas wear in tribute to the armed forces. The woman said that she had been camped out at the military headquarters in Brasília for two months. She had joined the protest on the eighth to urge Bolsonaro to hide; she explained that Alexandre de Moraes, the head of the Supreme Electoral Court, was conspiring to have him killed.

Dias, like other observers, was confused by the timing of the riots. Why wait until a week after the inauguration? When she asked the woman if she was inspired by the January 6th insurrection in the U.S., another protester yelled, “Don’t answer her! She’s a journalist, a leftist!” Sensing a threat, Dias walked away, but she was surrounded by bolsonaristas, and someone tripped her. “I fell to the street, where people kicked me and punched me,” she told me. “Two men tried to protect me, saying, ‘You will kill her and ruin our movement.’ ” But women were scratching her, pulling her hair, grabbing for her phone. Someone snatched her glasses, broke them, and yelled, “We have to kill her!”

Finally, a military officer forced his way through the crowd and pulled her away. As the officer escorted her off, “people yelled that I was a whore, and someone threw a bottle of water at me,” she told me. “It was clear they felt like there would be no punishment.”

On the day of the insurrection, Lula and Janja were visiting the city of Araraquara, in São Paulo state, five hundred miles away. But they were able to monitor the situation, an aide told me. One of Lula’s bodyguards entered the Planalto Palace, recorded the rampage, and shared it with the President in real time. No one noticed the bodyguard, the aide said, because “they were all filming themselves, too.”

Outside the President’s offices, on the third floor, the rioters wrecked furniture and destroyed art: a seventeenth-century French clock, a painting by Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, an ancient Chinese vase. The vandals broke nearly everything they encountered, but they were stopped at a glass door outside Lula’s private office by his personal security team—a group of longtime loyalists, which includes a former federal police officer who oversaw Lula’s imprisonment and then went to work for him after he was freed.

From São Paulo, Lula and his team worked to assert control, starting by organizing the dismissal of the Bolsonaro official who led the district police and replacing him with a loyalist. As they scrambled, Lula received a phone call from his minister of defense and the chief of staff of the armed forces. They proposed that he sign a “law-and-order assurance”—a directive that would effectively hand them power to reëstablish control. Lula refused, fearing that it was the first step in a coup. Instead, he ordered military police to retake the buildings of the Three Powers. The Supreme Court and the Planalto Palace were quickly secured, and then officers turned their focus on Congress, deploying horses, water cannons, and pepper spray to clear the building and the roof. As helicopters dropped tear gas, protesters ran, coughing and struggling for air. By about seven o’clock that evening, the building had been cleared.

Despite the ferocity of the violence, many Brazilians believed that it was less an attempted coup than an act of political theatre. People took selfies and FaceTimed friends. One rioter, streaming video as he entered Congress, asked viewers to subscribe to his YouTube channel. Venders sold spectators grilled chicken and cotton candy. “On the surface, 1/8 was a resounding failure,” João Moreira Salles said. “The mob ransacked empty buildings and didn’t even try to occupy them. It was more of a simulacrum of a coup, a spectacle—a coup for the Instagram age.”

The lawlessness of the attack had demonstrated Bolsonaro’s hold on his loyalists, but it had also damaged him politically. “It means the end of Bolsonaro as a democratically viable candidate,” Moreira Salles argued. Soon after the elections, Bolsonaro had fled to Florida, and reportedly was staying near Orlando, as the guest of the Brazilian mixed-martial-arts fighter José Aldo. After four turbulent years as President, he suddenly didn’t seem to have much to do. He looked for a church to join. One afternoon, he was spotted sitting alone at a KFC, eating fried chicken out of a box. Admirers reported, with astonishment, that they had been able to drop by his house for a chat. “He’s completely isolated, and his influence is reduced to the fringe of Brazil’s extreme right,” Moreira Salles said. “Flying to Disney when the going gets tough is not exactly conducive to becoming the next strongman.”

The Biden Administration has said that it would take seriously a request to extradite Bolsonaro, but Lula has not yet submitted one. Even from Orlando, though, Bolsonaro can have an effect on Brazilian politics. Like many of his supporters, he is a skilled provocateur. During his Presidency, his opponents faced such vicious attacks online that Brazilians spoke about a clandestine “office of hate,” run by Bolsonaro’s allies. The P.T. is less adroit on social media. (Its leaders are largely older; one told me that sixty is considered young.) Members of Lula’s administration told me that the solution was greater regulation of the media, particularly on the Internet. “You can allow total freedom, but you cannot allow evil, hatred, the encouragement of lies to gain space,” Lula said.

In Moreira Salles’s view, people who were radicalized online were unlikely to succeed in toppling the government. “The danger is of an endless repetition of smaller January 8ths around the country,” he said. “Roads blocked, refineries occupied, that sort of thing. If they can’t seize power, then the next best thing is to make the current Presidency utterly chaotic.”

Still, the threat of political violence remains real; in December, police stopped a bomb plot against Lula. People close to him are particularly concerned about the military, and perplexed by its reluctance to quell the violence on January 8th. It has bases near the Three Powers buildings, and its troops secured the compound during a demonstration in 2017—but this time, despite repeated requests in the preceding days to step up security, it had intervened late, and seemingly halfheartedly. At least fifteen members of the military and the security forces are linked to the insurrection, including a retired senior officer of the Navy and a retired general of the Army reserves.

On Paulista Avenue, in São Paulo, a raucous crowd celebrated Lula's victory in the Presidential election. Photograph by Larissa Zaidan for The New Yorker

When Bolsonaro was President, he handed over large swaths of the government to the armed forces, appointing more than six thousand military personnel to the civilian bureaucracy. To assert control, Lula knows that he will have to purge some officers and cultivate many others. It will be delicate, unpopular work. “The armed forces didn’t join Bolsonaro’s efforts to remain in power, otherwise he would still be in Brasília,” Moreira Salles said. “But they are not coming forward to condemn the events of January 8th. Lula has to decipher this silence and bring the military to his side. It’s going to be one of his hardest tasks. History shows that the armed forces in Latin America are not guarantors of democracy.”

Some of the politicians who benefitted from Bolsonaro’s rise are figuring out how to keep up their momentum without him. Sergio Moro, the judge who put Lula in jail, was for a time a kind of folk hero for right-wing Brazil. In the recent election, he launched a campaign for President before dropping out to support Bolsonaro, whom he coached through the debates. He also ran for the Senate, and won a seat, representing his home state of Paraná, in southern Brazil.

I met him in his office in Curitiba, the state capital, in a modern tower that stood above a downtown of tidy lawns, churches, and steak houses. A neatly groomed man with a deacon’s seriousness, he was imperturbable as we talked about his role in the political combat of the past few years.

When I asked why he had agreed to serve as Bolsonaro’s justice minister, Moro said that he had hoped to do some good for the country: “Who wouldn’t try that?” Before 2018, he said, he’d known almost nothing about Bolsonaro. When I noted that Bolsonaro was already famous for offensive behavior, Moro fidgeted. “I heard from a lot of people who said, ‘I’m relieved that you’re joining the government, because you will be the voice of moderation.’ And I never endorsed any kind of attacks, verbal attacks of the President against women or anything like that,” he said.

Moro pointed out that he had quit his post after a year and a half, after Bolsonaro forestalled a police investigation into one of his sons’ activities. When I asked if he believed that Bolsonaro was guilty of the offenses he had been accused of, he nodded. Then why had he rejoined him during the debates with Lula? “I have never recanted what I said in the past,” he said. “The past is the past. But, if you have a second round with two options, you need to make a choice.” But why imprison one politician you regard as corrupt and aid another? “Well, we are talking about different levels of corruption. And you need to consider other issues. I don’t believe in the economic thoughts of the Workers’ Party.”

Moro did not deny that Lula had won the election, yet he spoke sympathetically about the people who questioned his legitimacy. “I am against any kind of violence or any kind of coup,” he said. “But there are a lot of people unsatisfied with the return of Lula, because there’s this perception that the corruption scandals were not solved in a proper way. So these people believe that Lula should never have been a candidate.” Even before January 8th, he acknowledged that the protesters had “committed some mistakes.” But, he said, “I believe Brazilian democracy should give these people an answer and understand them, and not treat all of them as kind of villains. They are not. They have families—they have children.”

People close to Lula were grappling with the same essential concern: How could they bring Bolsonaro voters over to their side? Lula’s protégé Guilherme Boulos is a forty-year-old activist and politician. We met for breakfast in a buffet-style “kilo” restaurant, where customers pay according to the weight of the food piled on their plates. He lamented, “Before, the opposition was, if you will, civilized. We have a real problem in the countryside.”

As the founder of the Homeless Workers’ Movement, Boulos spent years organizing takeovers of disused buildings to provide shelter for Brazilians in need. He won a legislative seat in the recent elections, and will work closely with Lula. When I asked about the bolsonaristas, he said, “We have to learn to talk to those people.” But he suggested, in the tones of a New Yorker talking about Texans, that Brazil’s rural areas were effectively a different country. “It’s a mostly right-wing culture, which revolves around the idea that one’s properties must be protected from left-wing land invasions,” he said. “Its economic program is neoliberal, and it is socially moralistic. Therein lies our problem: the left hasn’t attended to this sector, and it really has to, if it wants to defeat bolsonarismo.”

Lula, he said, “has an extraordinary capacity to govern and to articulate points in common with different sectors.” But the past four years had made bridging the differences much more difficult: “Bolsonaro didn’t govern—he set out the guideposts for an ideological battle, and he almost beat us by nearly winning reëlection!”

Boulos estimated that bolsonarista extremists represented ten to twelve per cent of the Brazilian population: “These are the people who don’t believe in the pandemic, who defend the use of torture, and who believe that the Earth is flat.” The key, he said, was to improve their economic opportunities. “There are those who say Brazil has increasingly become a polarized country. I’d argue that it’s always been polarized. Think of it: this country is the third-largest food producer in the world, while thirty million of its citizens go hungry, and one per cent of the population owns most of the resources. Of course there’s going to be polarization!” He reminded me that when Lula left office the electorate had overwhelmingly supported him—“because their lives were better!” Now, though, there was less money flowing; the economy was in a downturn, and the country was still recovering from the pandemic. “Lula’s margin of maneuverability will be reduced,” he said.

In the weeks after Lula won the election, he often seemed as if he hoped to simply return the country to the time before Bolsonaro took over—when the Amazon was less imperilled, the economy was thriving, and Brazil was in a cohort of fast-ascending countries. “It was the best moment of social rise of the poor people in Latin America,” he told me in São Paulo, adding, “Let’s recover the brics!”

Four days after the January 8th insurrection, his administration released its economic plan, which called for restoring the Bolsa Família, increasing aid to the poor, rolling back privatization, and increasing taxes on gasoline. According to Brian Winter, the editor of Americas Quarterly and a longtime analyst of Brazilian politics, “The announcements basically got a C-plus from the markets—nobody too excited, nobody too upset.” But Winter was not optimistic that Lula’s government would be able to spend its way out of a decade-long slump.

Recovering the Amazon will be harder still. During Bolsonaro’s term, as ranchers and miners cleared land, fires consumed an area of rain forest estimated to be the size of Belgium. The region is rife with anti-government sentiment, and Lula and his allies are effectively asking residents not to take advantage of the valuable resources around them. One rancher I spoke with said, “How can you live on top of a treasure chest and not be able to do anything with it?”

Lula’s environment minister is Marina Silva, who served for five years during his first tenure but resigned in frustration over his desire to balance conservation with development. Now Lula had called her back, promising a zero-tolerance policy on deforestation. Silva, a rubber tapper’s daughter of Black Brazilian descent, is an evangelical Christian, a soft-spoken, long-haired woman in her sixties. At her office in Brasília, she told me that she hoped to expand sustainable agriculture while halting illegal deforestation. She acknowledged that there would still be violations of environmental laws, and that the process would take time. “We won’t be able to do this in four years—that would be utopian,” she said. “The problem during Bolsonaro was that the transgressors had total impunity. With Lula, at least, the expectation of impunity will end.”

Lula and his aides are conscious that the world will judge them less by the details of ordinary governance than by their handling of monumental crises: the collapse of the environment and the near-collapse of democracy. Simone Tebet, his planning minister, told me, “President Lula’s big problem is not just economic. He can solve the problem of inflation, the problem of unemployment, reduce social inequality, reduce the percentage of poor people in Brazil. But, if you don’t work on political pacification and unity, in four years’ time bolsonarismo will come back with force.” At seventy-seven, Lula had only one term left, and a great deal to do, Tebet reasoned. “He wants to clean the soul of Brazil,” she said. “He wants to halt injustice. I have no doubt that he will assemble a team for this. What worries me is whether he will have the strength, ability, discernment to understand that his main role is not just these four years. It is building bridges so that we can, in 2026 and 2030, have democratic governments in Brazil.” ♦

— Published in the print edition of the January 30, 2023, Issue of The New Yorker, with the headline “Lula’s Restoration.”

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How Did Republicans Gain Control Of Southern Governments

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-did-republicans-gain-control-of-southern-governments/

How Did Republicans Gain Control Of Southern Governments

The Return Of Conservative Control

Shortly after the election, the North Carolina House of Representatives brought charges against Holden, which alleged that he acted illegally in declaring martial law and arresting individuals; in refusing to obey the writs of habeas corpus; and in raising state troops and paying them. After a seven week trial, the Senate convicted Holden and voted to remove him from office. He became the first state governor in the country to be impeached and removed from office. Lt. Gov. Tod R. Caldwell replaced him as governor.

For the most part, after the 1870 election and the return of the Conservatives to power, Klan activity ceased in many areas. The group remained active in the western counties, resulting in federal intervention and trials for Klan leaders. By 1872, the Klan became more focused on race rather than politics and ceased to play a major role in North Carolina’s political circles until the next century.

Back in legislative power, the Conservatives set about changing much of what the Republicans had accomplished. They amended the constitution in 1873 and again in 1875, concentrating power in Raleigh and ensuring that only white Conservatives would hold local offices through legislative control of county governments. Other amendments, like those that outlawed interracial marriage and prohibited integrated public schools, served to relegate African Americans to a lower level of society and politics: the status quo antebellum.

Politics Of The Southern United States

United States Census Bureau

The politics of the Southern United States generally refers to the political landscape of the Southern United States. The institution of had a profound impact on the politics of the Southern United States, causing the American Civil War and continued subjugation of African-Americans from the Reconstruction era to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Scholars have linked slavery to contemporary political attitudes, including racial resentment. From the Reconstruction era to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, pockets of the Southern United States were characterized as being “authoritarian enclaves”.

The region was once referred to as the Solid South, due to its large consistent support for Democrats in all elective offices from 1877 to 1964. As a result, its Congressmen gained seniority across many terms, thus enabling them to control many Congressional committees. Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, Southern states became more reliably Republican in presidential politics, while Northeastern states became more reliably Democratic. Studies show that some Southern whites during the 1960s shifted to the Republican Party, in part due to racial conservatism. Majority support for the Democratic Party amongst Southern whites first fell away at the presidential level, and several decades later at the state and local levels. Both parties are competitive in a handful of Southern states, known as swing states.

New Census Numbers Shift Political Power South To Republican Strongholds

Political power in the United States will continue to shift south this decade, as historically Democratic states that border the Great Lakes give up congressional seats and electoral votes to regions where Republicans currently enjoy a political advantage, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Texas, Florida and North Carolina, three states that voted twice for President Donald Trump, are set to gain a combined four seats in Congress in 2023 because of population growth, granting them collectively as many new votes in the electoral college for the next presidential election as Democratic-leaning Hawaii has in total.

At the same time, four northern states with Democratic governors that President Biden won in 2020 Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York will each lose a single congressional seat. Ohio, a nearby Republican-leaning state, will also lose a seat in Congress.

The data released Monday was better for Democrats than expected, as earlier Census Bureau estimates had suggested the congressional gains in Florida and Texas would be even bigger. The margins in certain states that determined the final congressional counts were razor thin, with New York losing a seat because of a shortfall of only 89 people.

Your questions about the census, answered

In other parts of the country, the shifts in population will have a less obvious effect on partisan power.

Ted Mellnik contributed to this report.

The Radical Republicans Take Control

Northern voters spoke clearly in the Congressional election of 1866. Radical Republicans won over two-thirds of the seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate. They now had the power to override Johnson’s vetoes and pass the Civil Rights Act and the bill to extend the Freedmen’s Bureau, and they did so immediately. Congress had now taken charge of the South’s reconstruction.

Republican America: How Georgia Went ‘red’

July 15, 2004

Relaxing in front of his small ranch house, watching the birds flit around his feeder, Ronnie Pilcher looks out over the changing face of the place he calls home.

In the four decades he and his wife have lived here on 10 verdant acres, Mr. Pilcher has seen an explosion in population and wealth that’s transformed this old orchard crossroads into a booming Atlanta exurb. Where once he knew almost everyone driving by on the old Birmingham Highway – and many of them stopped to chat – now an unfamiliar flow of Beemers and Hummers weave among the dented Fords and Chevys on the traffic-choked road. Nondenominational megachurches are replacing small country chapels, gated communities are spreading rapidly, and big chain restaurants compete with old-time establishments like Shelia’s BBQ, where the sign says proudly: “Parking for Rednecks Only.”

Pilcher, a Baptist deacon and retired data cruncher for SunTrust Bank, says he’s an independent. But as a self-described conservative, he identifies with the GOP far more than with the Democrats. Like many in Crabapple, he admits his vote for President Bush this fall is pretty much assured.

It’s not just because he sees Bush as standing up for “traditional” morals – though he is firmly against gay marriage, and on abortion says: “Only the good Lord has the right to choose life and death.”

Georgia’s swift transformationFrom farms to a surge of new wealthOzzie, Harriet, and a white picket fenceFrom the wallet to the pews

The South Becomes Majority Republican

For nearly a century after , the majority of the white South identified with the Democratic Party. Republicans during this time would only control parts of the mountains districts in southern Appalachia and competed for statewide office in the former border states. Before 1948, Southern Democrats believed that their stance on states’ rights and appreciation of traditional southern values, was the defender of the southern way of life. Southern Democrats warned against designs on the part of northern liberals, Republicans , and civil rights activists, whom they denounced as “outside agitators”.

After the Civil Rights act of 1964 and The Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed in Congress, only a small element resisted, led by Democratic governors Lester Maddox of Georgia, and especially George Wallace of Alabama. These governors appealed to a less-educated, working-class electorate, that favored the Democratic Party, but also supported segregation. After the Brown v. Board of EducationSupreme Court case that outlawed segregation in schools in 1954, integration caused enormous controversy in the white South. For this reason, compliance was very slow and was the subject of violent resistance in some areas.

White Terrorists Resist The Changes

Even before the end of the Civil War, white Southerners had begun to resist the changes occurring in the societyand culture they cherished. The familiar world they had known, in which black people existed as inferior beings fit only to serve whites, was falling down around them, and they fought back. They did so through violent attacks that included arson, beatings, rape, and murder. These attacks were focused not only on the former slaves but on anyone who tried to help them or seemed sympathetic to the idea of freedom, civil rights, and equality, including teachers, soldiers, and white Unionists.

During the period of President Johnson’s Reconstruction program, race riots had occurred in two major Southern citiesMemphis, Tennessee, where forty-six blacks were killed, and New Orleans, Louisiana, where thirty-four blacks and three whites died. These riots had underscored the link between white resentment and violence. With the triumph of the Radical Republicans’ plan for Reconstruction, the violence increased. Secret terrorist societies, most of whose members covered their identities with masks and long robes, began a widespread campaign to try to control through fear what they had not been able to control any other way. They wanted to prevent blacks from exercising their new rights, and they also wanted to ensure that plantation owners had the same kind of disciplined labor force they had enjoyed during the days of slavery.

Reconstruction Comes To An End

After 1867, an increasing number of southern whites turned to violence in response to the revolutionary changes of Radical Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations targeted local Republican leaders, white and Black, and other African Americans who challenged white authority. Though federal legislation passed during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1871 took aim at the Klan and others who attempted to interfere with Black suffrage and other political rights, white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South after the early 1870s as support for Reconstruction waned.

Racism was still a potent force in both South and North, and Republicans became more conservative and less egalitarian as the decade continued. In 1874after an economic depression plunged much of the South into povertythe Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War.

READ MORE: How the 1876 Election Effectively Ended Reconstruction

The Compromise of 1876 marked the end of Reconstruction as a distinct period, but the struggle to deal with the revolution ushered in by slaverys eradication would continue in the South and elsewhere long after that date. A century later, the legacy of Reconstruction would be revived during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as African Americans fought for the political, economic and social equality that had long been denied them.

For Discussion And Writing

What legal devices did Southern states use to exclude most of their black citizens from voting? What other methods were used to stop blacks from voting?

What was unfair about the way literacy tests were used for voter registration in the South from 1890 to 1965?

What were the consequences to African Americans of being excluded from voting in the segregated South?

Reaction To The Freedmens Bureau

In North Carolina, as well as elsewhere in the South, questions existed as to how to assimilate 350,000 freed slaves into the economy, society and political system of the state. These questions arose before the war was over, at such places as Roanoke Island and James City, but were now being addressed across the state in emancipation communities such as Freedom Hill. While whites accepted the abolishment of slavery, most did not agree that the freedmen and women were equal to them. They found the Freedmens Bureau to be meddlesome and believed everyone would find his or her natural place in society if left alone.

In the minds of most white people, the natural place for former slaves was still at the bottom of the social order. Early in 1866, the North Carolina legislature enacted the Black Code, a series of laws that regulated control of the African American population. Although North Carolinas code was less rigid than those of other southern states with larger black populations, it nevertheless denied the rights of citizenship to free blacks and the recently emancipated. The code also placed restrictions on free movement within and outside the state, made it difficult for blacks to purchase and carry firearms, and prohibited interracial marriages. This denial of rights created strong opposition by northerners and blacks within and outside the state.

How Did Southern Whites Regain Political Power During Reconstruction

MICHELLE LEE

At the conclusion of the Civil War, the 13th Amendment was passed and slaves in all areas of the U.S. were emancipated. Reconstruction was implemented in 1866 to integrate the southern states back into the Union and provide resources for newly freed slaves. Reconstruction continued until 1877 when President Rutherford Hayes was elected. His presidency allowed the South to regain political power and indirectly facilitated practices that prevented African-Americans and other minorities from enjoying the rights granted by the 13th Amendment.

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Threats and Intimidation

Who Should Not Vote

All states have some voting restrictions. Are they necessary? Below are five traditional restrictions on the right to vote. Form small groups to decide whether your state should retain each of these restrictions. Before making a decision on each restriction, the group should discuss and write answers to these two questions:

What are some reasons favoring the restriction?

What are some reasons against the restriction?

After the groups have finished their work, each restriction should be discussed and voted on by the entire class.

Impact Of The War On North Carolina

North Carolina suffered terrible human losses from the Civil War. More than 30,000 troops died, almost half from battle deaths and the rest from disease. Untold numbers were wounded or disabled by injury. There were human costs at home as well. With the majority of white men off fighting the war, the women struggled to maintain farms and families. The results often included impaired health and even death of the elderly and weak.

Economic costs were also staggering. These included millions of dollars of property destroyed or looted across the South; millions spent by the Confederate government to wage the war; and the abolition of slavery, which cost slaveholders nearly $200 million in capital investment. Worthless currency, repudiated war debts, and few avenues for credit caused many individuals, institutions, and businesses to declare bankruptcy. During the war many colleges closed, factories shut down, and banks collapsed. Almost none were in any condition to re-open after the war.

Developments In The North And The West

Events and trends occurring across the rest of the United States during the Reconstruction era both paralleled and, in some ways, influenced what was happening in the troubled Southern part of the country. In the North, the span of years from 1865 to 1877 was marked by economic growth and political and social reforms, but there were also periods of economic depression, episodes of political corruption, and clashes between the expanding class of wealthy people and professionals and the small farmers and workers who stillmade up the bulk of the population. Northern state governments, like those in the South, were raising taxes and expanding their budgets in order to pay for new social services and public schools. But the North had not experienced the devastation of the Civil War in the same dramatic way as the South, and its stronger economy meant that it could better afford to finance the changes.

Between 1865 and 1873, industrial production increased by 75 percent. The population was expandingincluding the addition of three million immigrantsbut migration to the open spaces of the West had been eased by the construction of 35,000 miles of railroad routes. In the West were plenty of opportunities for farming as well as lumber harvesting, mining, and ranching.

The Obama Years And The Rise Of The Tea Party: 20082016

John BoehnerHouse SpeakerBarack Obama

Following the 2008 elections, the Republican Party, reeling from the loss of the presidency, Congress and key state governorships, was fractured and leaderless.Michael Steele became the first black chairman of the Republican National Committee, but was a poor fundraiser and was replaced after numerous gaffes and missteps. Republicans suffered an additional loss in the Senate in April 2009, when Arlen Specter switched to the Democratic Party, depriving the GOP of a critical 41st vote to block legislation in the Senate. The seating of Al Franken several months later effectively handed the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority, but it was short-lived as the GOP took back its 41st vote when Scott Brown won a special election in Massachusetts in early 2010.

Republicans won back control of the House of Representatives in the November general election, with a net gain of 63 seats, the largest gain for either party since . The GOP also picked up six seats in the Senate, falling short of retaking control in that chamber, and posted additional gains in state governor and legislative races. Boehner became Speaker of the House while McConnell remained as the Senate Minority Leader. In an interview with National Journal magazine about congressional Republican priorities, McConnell explained that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for Obama to be a one-term president”.

Mitt Romney

Republican Goals And Achievements

Among the Republicans who were now in charge of the South’s new state governments, many differences of background and opinion existed. There was tension between the native Southerners and the Northerners, between blacks and whites, and between free blacks and former slaves. There were different views on how much power should be given to blacks, on whether or not the government should confiscate and redistribute land, and on whether or not former Confederates should be allowed to vote.

On certain points, however, most Republicans were in agreement. They wanted to guarantee civil and political rights for African Americans, modify the Southern economy to benefitpeople at all income levels, and provide expanded public services. The idea that the state had a responsibility to offer such benefits to its citizens was somewhat revolutionary; indeed, before the war the Southern states had offered very few services. Describing prewar conditions in South Carolina, twentieth-century African American leader W. E. B. Du Bois , quoted in Reconstruction and Reaction: The Emancipation of Slaves, 18611913, wrote: “It is said that the ante-bellum state was ruled by 180 great landlords. They made the functions of the state just as few as possible, and did by private law on plantations most of the things which in other states were carried on by the local and state governments.”

Who Were The Redeemers And Why Did They Change Society And Politics In The New South

Who were the Redeemers and how did they change society and politics in the New South. The Redeemers were a coalition of merchants, planters, and business entrepreneurs who dominated Southern politics after reconstruction. The goal of the Redeemers was to undo as much of reconstruction as they could.

READ: What is ethics in communication competence model?

World War Ii And Its Aftermath: 19391952

From 1939 through 1941, there was a sharp debate within the GOP about support for Great Britain as it led the fight against a much stronger Nazi Germany. Internationalists, such as Henry Stimson and Frank Knox, wanted to support Britain and isolationists, such as Robert A. Taft and Arthur Vandenberg, strongly opposed these moves as unwise for risking a war with Germany. The America First movement was a bipartisan coalition of isolationists. In , a dark horse Wendell Willkie at the last minute won over the party, the delegates and was nominated. He crusaded against the inefficiencies of the New Deal and Roosevelt’s break with the strong tradition against a third term, but was ambiguous on foreign policy.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 ended the isolationist-internationalist debate, as all factions strongly supported the war effort against Japan and Germany. The Republicans further cut the Democratic majority in the 1942 midterm elections in a very low turnout episode. With wartime production creating prosperity, the conservative coalition terminated nearly all New Deal relief programs as unnecessary.

In , a clearly frail Roosevelt defeated Dewey for his fourth consecutive term, but Dewey made a good showing that would lead to his selection as the candidate in .

Southern strategy

V Racial Violence In Reconstruction

Violence shattered the dream of biracial democracy. Still steeped in the violence of slavery, white southerners could scarcely imagine Black free labor. Congressional investigator Carl Schurz reported that in the summer of 1865, southerners shared a near unanimous sentiment that You cannot make the negro work, without physical compulsion. Violence had been used in the antebellum period to enforce slave labor and to define racial difference. In the post-emancipation period it was used to stifle Black advancement and return to the old order.

Much of life in the antebellum South had been premised on slavery. The social order rested on a subjugated underclass, and the labor system required unfree laborers. A notion of white supremacy and Black inferiority undergirded it all. White people were understood as fit for freedom and citizenship, Black people for chattel slave labor. The Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court House and the subsequent adoption by the U.S. Congress of the Thirteenth Amendment destroyed the institution of American slavery and threw southern society into disarray. The foundation of southern society had been shaken, but southern whites used Black Codes and racial terrorism to reassert control over formerly enslaved people.

The Radical Republicans After The Death Of Thaddeus Stevens

Thaddeus Stevens died on August 11, 1868. After lying in the state in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, he was buried in a cemetery in Pennsylvania he had chosen as it allowed burials of both White and Black people.

The faction of Congress he had led continued, though without his fiery temperament much of the fury of the Radical Republicans subsided. Plus, they tended to support the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, who took office in March 1869.

The Voting Rights Act Of 1965

As a result of intimidation, violence, and racial discrimination in state voting laws, a mere 3 percent of voting-age black men and women in the South were registered to vote in 1940. In Mississippi, under 1 percent were registered. Most blacks who did vote lived in the larger cities of the South.

Attempts to change this situation were met with animosity and outright violence. But in the 1950s, the civil rights movement developed. Facing enormous hostility, black people in the South organized to demand their rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. They launched voter registration drives in many Southern communities.

In the early 1960s, black and white protesters, called Freedom Riders, came from the North to join in demonstrations throughout the South. In some places, crowds attacked them while white police officers looked on.

Medgar Evers, the black veteran stopped by a white mob from voting, became a civil rights leader in his native Mississippi. Because of his civil rights activities, he was shot and killed in front of his home by a white segregationist in 1963.

But through the efforts of local civil rights leaders like Medgar Evers and other Americans, about 43 percent of adult black men and women were registered to vote in the South by 1964. That same year, the 24th Amendment was ratified. It outlawed poll taxes in federal elections.

Iii The Meaning Of Black Freedom

Land was one of the major desires of the freed people. Frustrated by responsibility for the growing numbers of freed people following his troops, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, in which land in Georgia and South Carolina was to be set aside as a homestead for the freedpeople. Sherman lacked the authority to confiscate and distribute land, so this plan never fully took effect. One of the main purposes of the Freedmens Bureau, however, was to redistribute lands to formerly enslaved people that had been abandoned and confiscated by the federal government. Even these land grants were short-lived. In 1866, land that ex-Confederates had left behind was reinstated to them.

In working to ensure that crops would be harvested, agents sometimes coerced formerly enslaved people into signing contracts with their former enslavers. However, the bureau also instituted courts where African Americans could seek redress if their employers were abusing them or not paying them. The last ember of hope for land redistribution was extinguished when Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumners proposed land reform bills were tabled in Congress. Radicalism had its limits, and the Republican Partys commitment to economic stability eclipsed their interest in racial justice.

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We’re at the end of white Christian America. What will that mean?

After accounting for eight out of 10 Americans in 1976, white Christians are now a minority, a study has found. The political implications could be profound

America is a Christian nation: this much has always been a political axiom, especially for conservatives. Even someone as godless and immoral as the 45th president feels the need to pay lip service to the idea. On the Christian Broadcasting Network last year, he summarized his own theological position with the phrase: God is the ultimate.

And in the conservative mind, American Christianity has long been hitched to whiteness. The right learned, over the second half of the 20th century, to talk about this connection using abstractions like Judeo-Christian values, alongside coded racial talk, to let voters know which side they were on.

But change is afoot, and US demographics are morphing with potentially far-reaching consequences. Last week, in a report entitled Americas Changing Religious Identity, the nonpartisan research organization Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) concluded that white Christians were now a minority in the US population.

Soon, white people as a whole will be, too.

The survey is no ordinary one. It was based on a huge sample of 101,000 Americans from all 50 states, and concluded that just 43% of the population were white Christians. To put that in perspective, in 1976, eight in 10 Americans were identified as such, and a full 55% were white Protestants. Even as recently as 1996, white Christians were two-thirds of the population.

The historic Lutheran Trinity church, in Manning, Iowa. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

White Christianity was always rooted in the nations history, demographics and culture. Among North Americas earliest and most revered white settlers were Puritan Protestants.

As well as expecting the return of Christ, they sought to mould a pious community which embodied their goals of moral and ecclesiastical purity. They also nurtured a lurid demonology, and hunted and burned supposed witches in their midst. These tendencies to millennialism, theocracy and scapegoating have frequently recurred in Americas white Christian culture.

Successive waves of religious revival, beginning in the 18th century, shaped the nations politics and its sense of itself. In the 1730s, the preacher Jonathan Edwards sought not only the personal conversion of his listeners, but to bring about Christs reign on Earth through an increased influence in the colonies.

As the religious scholar Dale T Irvin writes: By the time of the American revolution, Edwardss followers had begun to secularize this vision of a righteous nation that was charged with a redemptive mission in the world.

This faith informed the 19th-century doctrine of manifest destiny, which held that the spread of white settlement over the entire continent was not only inevitable, but just. The dispossession of native peoples, and the nations eventual dominance of the hemisphere, was carried out under an imprimatur with Christian roots.

In the late 20th century, another religious revival fed directly into the successes of conservative politics. Preachers like Billy Graham and Jimmy Swaggart in spectacular revival meetings and increasingly on television attracted millions of white converts to churches which emphasized literalist interpretations of the Bible, strict moral teachings and apocalyptic expectations.

In the south, the explosion of evangelical churches coincided with a wave of racial reaction in the wake of the civil rights movement. After being a Democratic stronghold, the south became solidly Republican beginning in the early 1970s. The Republican southern strategy used race as a wedge issue to attract white votes in the wake of the civil rights movement, but it also proffered a socially conservative message that gelled with the values of the emerging Christian Right.

In succeeding decades, Republicans have used this mix to help elect presidents, put a lock on Congress, and extend their dominance over the majority of the nations statehouses. Leaders of the Christian right became figures of national influence, and especially in the Bush years, public policy was directed to benefit them.

Members of the United House of Prayer For All People are baptized by fire hose, a church tradition since 1926, in Baltimore, Maryland. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

The author of The End of White Christian America, Robert P Jones, says it is remarkable how fast the trend is moving. In 2008, white Christians were still 50% of the population, so that theres been an 11-point shift since Barack Obamas election.

According to Jones, there are two big reasons for this shift.

One is the disaffiliation of young people in particular from Christian churches. That is, especially among the young, there are proportionally fewer Christians. If trends continue, that means that there will be fewer and fewer Christians.

While two-thirds of seniors are white Christians, only around a quarter of people 18-29 are. To varying degrees, this has affected almost every Christian denomination and nearly four in 10 young Americans have no religious affiliation at all.

The youngest faiths in America those with the largest proportion of young adherents are non-Christian: Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. This reflects the second big driver of white Christian decline: both America and its family of faiths are becoming less white.

The big picture is the steady erosion of Americas white majority. Due mostly to Asian and Hispanic immigration, and the consolidation of already established immigrant populations, white people will be a minority by 2042. This will be true of under-18s as soon as 2023. According to Pews projections, in the century between 1965 and 2065, white people will have gone from 85% of the population to 46%.

Perhaps inevitably, this is being reflected in a more diverse religious landscape.

Martin Luther King Jr once lamented: It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 oclock on Sunday morning. Even now, historically black denominations exist on parallel tracks with almost exclusively white churches, with little or no changes to their racial makeup.

But other churches are beginning to reflect the countrys increasing diversity. The Catholic church provides a stark illustration.

In the 1980s, white people outnumbered non-white people in Catholic churches by a 10-to-one margin. Now, thanks mostly to a large number of Hispanic parishioners, and the apostasy of young white people, Jones says that the church is almost reaching parity, and in many areas of the country the church is majority Latino.

From the colonial period onward, explains John Turner, the vast majority of white settlers would have considered themselves Protestant.

While the most ingrained narratives of North American history depict it as a haven for minority sects, this varied considerably by colony. People talk about the US as a Christian nation, but a better description would be a white Protestant nation that often made life uncomfortable for other groups, says Turner.

He points to anti-Catholic nativism in the 19th century, which was driven by a belief that the world is divided between Christ and anti-Christ, with Catholics on the other side of the divide.

This frequently led to violence. In 1834, a mob burned an Ursuline convent near Boston. On 6 August 1855, known afterwards as Blood Monday, 22 people died when another mob attacked an Irish Catholic neighborhood.

In 1854 the American party also known as the Know Nothings won 42 congressional seats on a populist, anti-Catholic platform. Two years later, their presidential candidate, Millard Fillmore, got a fifth of the vote.

The Mormon temple in Bountiful, Utah, sits above the Great Salt Lake at dusk. Photograph: Joel Addams/Getty Images/Aurora Open

Another example of Protestants making life uncomfortable for others was the persecution of Americas own Mormon church, founded in 1830. In the 19th century, Turner says, many Protestant Americans rejected the idea that Mormonism was really a religion at all.

Early Mormon history was marked by a series of violent attacks by non-Mormons, and subsequent escapes to new gathering places.

This repeated ostracism and violence led eventually to their overland trek to the Great Salt Lake, far from their often murderous Protestant antagonists, where they founded Utah.

From the 1890s and especially during the Great Depression, Jews were the victims of both ambient antisemitic sentiments and violent hate crimes, especially in the cities of the north-east.

The story of American Protestantism has not been all about persecution, of course. Protestant clergy and lay people have played a part in progressive struggles from abolition, to the civil rights movement, to manning the barricades in Charlottesville. Many mainstream denominations have a decidedly liberal cast on social and economic issues.

Politicized white Christian identity remains a potent force on the right. Jones points out that the Republican partys base has remained overwhelmingly white and Christian, with their decline inside the GOP tent much less dramatic than in the nation as a whole: their share of the Republican voting coalition declined only slightly over the past decade, from 81% in 2006 to 73% now.

Republican policies and priorities continue to reflect this influence. In the platform adopted at the nomination of Donald Trump, the party affirmed commitments to anti-abortion measures (including the defunding of Planned Parenthood), condemned the supreme courts decision to allow same-sex marriage, and promised to bar government discrimination against individuals and businesses who refused service to same-sex couples.

Trump himself has issued an executive order that prevents the enforcement of the so-called Johnson amendments, which stop organizations with tax-exempt status from engaging in partisan political campaigning. These measures have limited the political advocacy of churches on the Christian right, and Trumps move (which he overstated as a repeal) is a reward to evangelicals.

Even Trumps promises of a wall and an immigration crackdown reflect the values of white evangelicals, who among all faith groups are the most hostile to immigration.

White Christians are wedded to the GOP; Hawley remarks that white Christians remain the base of the GOP, and I would expect them to remain so.

Members of the St Elizabeth Parish celebrate the crowning of Saint Mary in Topawa, Arizona. Photograph: Max Becherer/AP

In a two-party system, the overwhelming whiteness of the Republican party has seen Democrats following the trends, and becoming more diverse. Democrats are heavily favored by black and Hispanic Americans, including Hispanic Catholics, by young people, and by the growing number of religiously unaffiliated Americans.

For years, these trends have produced optimism among Democrats their coalition appears to resemble Americas future, whereas the Republicans appear mired in the past, with a shrinking base. Even Republicans have been growing alarmed: the famous autopsy document produced by Reince Priebuss RNC in the wake of Mitt Romneys defeat urged the party to reach out to Latinos with, among other things, meaningful immigration reform.

A glance at the present, however, shows Republicans in charge of Congress, the presidency, and a majority of statehouses, and Trump looking to implement the stridently anti-immigrant, Christian right-friendly platform he was elected on.

Turner says that in the short term, changing demography will not necessarily guarantee election results: For a long time people have been saying that the marriage of Republican politics to white Christians was a losing game, but it wasnt last year.

And it bears saying that nothing guarantees that Latinos, African Americans, or other non-white groups in America will remain loyal Democrats. White Christianity is not an immutable category. After all, white Catholics and Mormons formerly the targets of Protestant persecution have themselves become a part of the white Christian coalition.

Last week John Judis, previously a leading advocate of demography is destiny predictions about an emerging Democratic majority, recanted, remarking: Whiteness is not a genetic category, after all; it is a social and political construct that relies on perception and prejudice. A century ago, Irish, Italians, and Jews were not seen as white.

Jones, though, thinks that even if the trends arent decisive in the short term, sooner or later these demographic realities will show up in national elections. He adds: We need to remember how close the 2016 election was.

He says there is a lag, but by 2024 the changes will have become electorally decisive, and for Republicans the problem will increasingly be that when one part of your base is so large and vocal, it becomes hard to pivot.

Republicans white Christian base in large part wants to slow immigration or even halt it altogether but it may be that that ship has sailed.

If Republicans cannot change, they may find that the country has changed around them.