According to Fox News, Trump’s victory in 2024 is a ‘redemption story’ because, politically, he was considered as good as dead after losing the 2020 election. Plus, there was the failed January 6th coup – and yet he came back to win in 2024.

Some even say it was a spiritual redemption, claiming that it was God who saved him from that assassin’s bullet.

But Trump also has a longer, darker redemptionist history linking him to the South’s opposition to our government’s efforts after the Civil War to expand equal civil rights to all Americans.

Reconstruction had the highest aspirations. The esteemed historian Eric Foner called it America’s “Second Founding,” because that’s when the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were added, “finally establishing the American ideal of equality under the law for all – completing, in other words, the revolution that the Founders left unfinished.”

This was seen as a positive development by the North. But not for the South, which viewed Reconstruction as anathema because it tore apart their culture, wiped out their aristocratic ruling class and disrupted their economy. For them, redemption meant defeating Northern Reconstruction.

Redemption for the South involved passing new Jim Crow laws and unleashing violent retribution by the Ku Klux Klan to undo the progress made during Reconstruction. Simply put: For the South, “redemption meant returning to white supremacy and the re-subjugation of the Negro.”⁠

According to many historians, including Michael Tomasky, editor of the New Republic, “We’ve been locked in this battle between Reconstruction and Redemption ever since.⁠” Until Trump, the reactionaries like segregationists and Joe McCarthy were consigned to the shadows.

Nevertheless, racism has long been a significant force in our country, discriminating against not only Black people but also brown-skinned folks. As Greg Grandin pointed out recently in the New York Times, decades before the Civil War, “slavery expanded, Indian removal and westward expansion accelerated and a bellicose nationalism, the kind today represented by MAGA, found its voice.”⁠

This led to the United States’ invasion of Mexico in 1846. After we won in 1848, expansionists sought to incorporate all of Mexico into the U.S., but Senator Calhoun of South Carolina won the day. He insisted it was out of the question to take in Mexicans as citizens because there were too many of them to make them slaves. “Ours is the government of the white man.”

Today, President Trump objects to having Mexicans in our country just as Senator Calhoun did – and for the same reasons. As such, he is our first president to be a die-hard redemptionist. Like the Southern slave owners, he is a racist following a long tradition dating back to when “white ‘Texan’ slaver-settlers broke free in 1836 from Mexican rule.”⁠

The question is, what can we do? We know what the Republicans are up to. The real question is, what can Democrats do? The answer is to transform themselves into true redemptionists.

I got this idea from a brilliant Substack post by Michael Morrill, the organizing director of New Hampshire Peace Action. The title of his post is “Redemption as Rebellion: Organizing at the Edge of Grace.”⁠

MLK is his lodestone. Like his mentor, Morrill writes about redeeming the soul of America, not only by protest but through “moral confrontation, through a belief in the possibility of repentance and rebirth. This is not naïveté,” he writes. It is an act of rebellion to say we will not hate you, even if you hate us.

Redemption comes not by marches and protests alone but from an invitation: “We need to build spaces not only for the already converted but for the deeply confused, the misled, the wounded who have wounded others.”

Redemption “means understanding that even racists are made, not born. That capitalism distorts not only economies, but imaginations. That imperialism trains not just soldiers, but citizens. And if systems can mold minds into weapons, movements can unmake them into neighbors.”⁠

I love Morrill’s inspiring thesis, returning redemption to its original spiritual essence. It’s a vision I pray for. In Morrill’s words, “A future forged not only by the righteous, but by the forgiven.”

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com and jstim.substack.com.