By Cliff Potts, CSO & Editor-in-Chief, WPS News

The Comeback Nobody Asked For

There is a dangerous myth circulating in American politics: that the nation’s long struggle over civil rights is settled history. That the arc bent, the work was done, and the country moved on. That myth collapsed the moment the current fascist administration took power in January 2025. What we are witnessing now is not a policy disagreement or a pendulum swing. It is the deliberate revival of Jim Crow logic, plantation-era power structures, and a coordinated rollback of civil rights—rebranded, sanitized, and enforced through modern mechanisms.

This is not nostalgia. It is strategy.

The tools have changed. The goal has not.

Jim Crow Was a System, Not a Sideshow

Jim Crow is often misremembered as a collection of crude racist laws, bad actors, or regional aberrations. That framing is comforting—and wrong. Jim Crow was a system of governance designed to preserve elite power after emancipation made slavery politically untenable. It functioned by restricting voting rights, controlling labor, enforcing social hierarchy, and criminalizing dissent.

Its purpose was simple: maintain economic and political dominance for a small ruling class by ensuring that large segments of the population could not meaningfully participate in democracy.

Sound familiar?

The Plantation Owner Mentality Never Left

The plantation economy did not disappear after the Civil War. It reorganized. Where whips once enforced labor, debt and law replaced them. Where overseers once monitored movement, police and courts assumed the role. The underlying mentality—the belief that society must be ordered with a permanent underclass—remained intact.

That mentality is back in full view today.

Modern policy debates about “labor discipline,” “work requirements,” “benefit fraud,” and “public order” are not neutral. They are heirs to plantation logic: extract maximum value from people while denying them power, voice, and security. The rhetoric may reference efficiency or morality, but the outcome is the same—control.

The current administration’s hostility toward labor protections, unions, and wage standards fits neatly into this framework. Workers are expected to produce. Not to organize. Not to demand. Not to vote against their “betters.”

Voting Rights: The First Target, Always

Every authoritarian project begins by controlling who gets to vote.

That lesson was learned during Reconstruction and perfected during Jim Crow. Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and outright violence eliminated Black political participation without repealing the Constitution. The appearance of legality was enough.

Today’s version uses voter ID laws, aggressive purges of voter rolls, reductions in early voting, targeted closures of polling locations, and hyper-partisan gerrymandering. These are not accidents. They are precision tools.

The administration’s open support for states rewriting election rules to their advantage—and its silence when courts allow those efforts to proceed—signals federal abdication. That abdication mirrors 1877, when federal protection was withdrawn and Southern states were given free rein to disenfranchise millions.

History did not repeat itself by chance. It repeated itself because the same incentives were restored.

Gerrymandering as a Weapon of Class Rule

Gerrymandering is often discussed as a partisan nuisance. In reality, it is a structural weapon against democracy.

By manipulating district lines, elites ensure that votes no longer translate into representation. Urban communities, minority populations, and working-class voters are either packed into a few districts or cracked across many. The result is legislative bodies that do not reflect the electorate and cannot be dislodged through normal democratic means.

This is plantation logic applied to maps.

The administration’s support for mid-cycle redistricting, judicial appointments hostile to voting rights, and legislative interference in election administration all serve the same function: lock in power while maintaining the façade of elections.

Civil Rights Enforcement by Neglect

Jim Crow did not require constant federal violence. It required federal indifference.

The current administration has embraced that lesson. Civil rights laws remain on the books, but enforcement has withered. Agencies are understaffed or redirected. Consent decrees are abandoned. Disparate impact standards are dismissed as “ideological.”

When the law is not enforced, it becomes optional. When enforcement is selective, it becomes a weapon.

This quiet dismantling is more effective than open repeal. It avoids public backlash while delivering the same outcome: rights that exist only on paper.

Project Governance, Not Policy Drift

What makes the current moment especially dangerous is coordination. This is not improvisation. It is design.

The restructuring of the federal government along Christian nationalist and authoritarian lines—the purge of career civil servants, the politicization of justice, the use of executive power to override institutional guardrails—resembles the post-Reconstruction capture of Southern governments by Redeemer elites.

Then, as now, the goal was not governance for all. It was governance for the “right” people.

Women’s autonomy, LGBTQ rights, racial equality, academic freedom, and press independence are all treated as obstacles to be managed, not rights to be protected. This is not conservatism. It is reactionary authoritarianism with a clerical veneer.

Why This Time Feels Familiar—and Worse

Jim Crow thrived because it was normalized. People adapted. They learned which doors were closed, which risks were fatal, which hopes were foolish. The system did not need universal approval. It needed resignation.

Today’s danger lies in fatigue.

After decades of progress followed by backlash, many Americans are tired. Tired of outrage. Tired of warnings. Tired of history lessons. That exhaustion is precisely what authoritarian movements rely on.

What is different now is speed and scale. Technology accelerates suppression. Courts move faster. Disinformation travels instantly. And the economic precarity that keeps people compliant is deeper and more widespread than at any point since the Great Depression.

This is Jim Crow with better software.

Resistance Requires Memory

The most radical act in this moment is remembering what this looks like.

Jim Crow was not an aberration. It was policy. Plantation power was not cultural—it was economic. Civil rights were not “granted”—they were fought for, enforced, and defended.

If the United States is to avoid repeating its darkest chapter, it must reject the fantasy that democracy is self-sustaining. It is not. It requires constant maintenance and federal responsibility.

For further social commentary and analysis, see https://Occupy25.com.

References (APA)

Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New Press.

Daley, D. (2016). Ratf**ked: Why your vote doesn’t count. Liveright.

Foner, E. (1988). Reconstruction: America’s unfinished revolution, 1863–1877. Harper & Row.

Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Crown.

United States Commission on Civil Rights. (2021). An assessment of minority voting rights access in the United States. U.S. Government Printing Office.

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