America’s latest counter-revolution reflected in the recent election was nearly a century in the making.

This one started after President Harry Truman ended racial segregation in the military and President Lyndon Johnson later signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights bills to advance the cause of racial reconciliation.

Conservative Democrats in the South, the so-called Dixiecrats, responded by creating the States Rights Democratic Party on a platform that the federal government should stay out of the affairs of individual states, including in matters related to slavery.

The Dixiecrats picked then South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond, an avowed racist who embraced segregation, to run against Truman in 1948. He won 1.1 million popular votes and 39 electoral votes. Truman garnered 24.1 million and 303 and Republican Thomas Dewey, 21.9 million and 189, respectively.

The Democrats sustained their revolution for change, even as Johnson predicted, “We’ve lost the South for a generation.” Then. Richard Nixon ran successfully in 1968 and 1972 on a “Southern Strategy” that blatantly appealed to some European Americans’ enduring resistance to civil rights and integration, but he resigned over the Watergate scandal.

Millions of African Americans, finally enfranchised, showed their gratitude to the Democratic Party with overwhelmingly electoral support and staying its most loyal supporters. But it was a vulnerable alliance that was likely preserved partly by the efforts of one man, the late John Lewis, a civil rights champion who bore the physical scars inflicted on him and others during peaceful demonstrations for civil and political rights.

A new biography, “John Lewis: A Life,” by historian Daniel Greenberg, explores how Lewis shaped the national conversation on race. More than anyone else, New Yorker reviewer Kelefa Sanneh writes, Lewis helped keep the Democratic Party-Civil Rights Movement coalition viable. “Although he continued to believe in the necessity of marches,” Sanneh writes, “he came to see the Democratic Party as his own. Protest and partisanship, he decided, were more compatible than he once thought.”

But, Sanneh added, “In the second half of his life, he had to contend with the seeming mismatch between the soaring rhetoric of nineteen-sixties activism and the more earthbound reality of everyday politics, which often seemed rather petty or sordid by comparison.”

Meanwhile, the Republican Party embraced opposition to civil rights and integration and engaged in an enduring so-called culture war that seeks to undo the gains of African Americans, in particular, and other politically vulnerable citizens such as gays and undocumented immigrants. It became the home of conservative activists working to return the country to the era prior to the 1930s and 1940s.

Those activists found fertile ground during the Nixon years, but it was on Donald Trump’s arrival on the political scene that the crop became ripe for picking. The harvest was hauled in with his resounding victory on Nov. 5. The Republican candidate defeated the Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, winning 74.1 million popular votes and 312 electoral votes to her 71.1 million and 226, respectively.

Following thought on his campaign statements, Trump has started to surround himself with senior aides who are heirs to Thurmond and the Dixiecrats and who, emboldened by his formidable mandate, will swiftly move to undo civil and voting rights and Constitutional protections such as separation of church and state and established precedents such as public education, while upending the current democratic order.

It is ironic that Trump’s voters include the most African Americans of any Republican president, especially among young adults. A Gallup poll found that, by 2020, the percentage of African Americans identifying as Democrats dropped from 77 to 66 and those preferring the Republican Party rose from 8 percent in 2018 to 14 in 2022. Some 21 percent of young African American men voted for him this year. Even greater support came from Latino Americans, estimated at a 40 percent.

Voters in both those groups cited the economy as their reason for picking Trump but there is more to it. Especially for African Americans.

“I think a certain generation of Black voters don’t have the direct experience with the civil rights movement or the knowledge of those things, because to them that’s not memory, it’s history,” Winthrop University political scientist Adolphus Belk Jr. told Al Jazeera’s Dwayne Oxford. “They’re coming in without an understanding of these historical contours and turns, limitations, opportunities. And those frustrations are being made clear in the rising percentage of Black voters that’s taking a different look at the Republican Party in general and are exploring some curiosities with Trump, despite his racial baggage.”

African Americans are frustrated also because they do not see themselves as receiving benefits from the Democratic Party that match their long-term loyalty, Belk added: “White voters, in general — white male voters most especially — are the greatest constituency that the Republican Party has and they tend to be treated well by the Republican Party. You don’t see that same sort of consistent celebration, respect for and rewarding of Black voters and Black women voters [by the Democratic Party].”

Of course, there are reasons for that state of affairs, including the skewed democracy which the Constitution enshrines, such as the Electoral College which ignores the popular will and also gerrymandering that enables Republicans to dominate a number of small states and Congress and frustrate Democrats’ efforts to advance the racial revolution. That will be even more difficult now that Republicans control the Congress and the presidency and the U.S. Supreme Court has a conservative super-majority.

But if the pro-Trump African Americans expect some sort of reward from the Republican Party, they are likely to be disappointed. He has been denigrating them all his adult life and devoted his 2024 campaign to mocking them.

That, of course, leaves African Americans in a crisis, especially women, who have been voting for the Democratic Party by more than 90 percent and who have just witnessed the repudiation of a superb female presidential candidate with partly African parentage. What next?

An unprecedented number of Latino American voters chose Trump despite his portrayal of migrants – as most of them once were – whom he has accused of “poisoning the blood” of America, while an ally called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” at one of his rallies. And he plans to deport all estimated 11 million undocumented migrants.

Miami-born journalist Paola Ramos, in her book “Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What it Means for America,” published in September, argues that this is due to a “fantasy heritage,” a term which, Guardian reviewer Melissa Hellmann explains, civil rights activist and historian Carey McWilliams coined in the late 1940s. It describes the situation in which “Latinos whitewash their Indigenous or Black roots in favor of their Spanish ancestry” and which “draws some Latinos to white supremacist values.”

Hellmann reports that, in conversations with African Dominicans in the Bronx who support Trump, they, as she puts it, “highlight their Spanish ancestry over their African roots, although they are racialized as Black in the U.S.” As Ramos herself puts it, “in their minds, because of fantasy heritage, they see themselves more aligned racially with Trump’s America than they do with Blackness, and so I think that that’s where Trump is able to tap into their racial grievance.”

Fordham University law professor Tanya Katerí Hernández, in her 2023 book “Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle For Equality,” points to a similar disconnect between Latino Americans and African Americans, who should be allies. However, she writes, “The ongoing upkeep and silent acceptance of anti-Blackness implicates many other racial and ethnic groups in the United States as well as across the globe.”

But if those Trump supporters expect favorable treatment, they would do well to heed this Turkish and Jewish proverb which has making the social media rounds: “The Forest was shrinking but the Trees kept voting for the Axe for the Axe was clever and convinced the Trees that because his handle was made of Wood, he was one of them.”