Simon Legree is emblematic of the racist and in particular the cruel beliefs held by many Republican politicians and voters.
From treating those seeking refuge and a better life in the United States like rapid vermin who should be shot (see Lauren Boebert’s video) to tacit approval of the police murdering black people they are channeling Simon LeGree.
Reading a 2008 NPR interview I learned some background about why Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe was very offended by the passage of the fugitive slave bill in 1850 that required northerners who were protecting blacks from - on the Underground Railroad. It required them to return them to the South and to slavery, and she decided to write a book to combat that influence.
To do her research, she looked into slave narratives, which were accounts of very real slaves who had escaped along the Underground Railroad into freedom, one of whom was Josiah Henson. She used a variety of these texts to put together the characters in "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
The parallel between this and how the Trump administration deported asylum seeking is obvious.
Related to the poll:
How racist is the Republican Party? Very.
PRRI also asked respondents whether they believed that, “It always makes the country better when all Americans speak up and protest unfair treatment by government.” Then, it asked the same question, but substituted “Black Americans” for “all Americans.” Democrats made no distinction between the two questions: 71 percent answered Yes to both. Among Republicans, however, 49 percent believed it made the country better when all Americans spoke up and protested unfair governmental treatment, but just 24 percent believed it when Black Americans spoke up and protested. Among Republicans whose most trusted news source is Fox News, the gap was 47 percent Yes for all Americans, and a bare 10 percent for Blacks.
Indeed, 57 percent of Republicans believed that whites face “a lot of discrimination,” while just 52 percent believe that Blacks do. Among Democrats, 13 percent said whites encounter a lot of discrimination; 92 percent said Blacks do.
The euphemistic encapsulation of the above is that Republicans have consolidated the traditionalist vote. A somewhat clearer encapsulation is that the Republicans have become a rats’ nest of sexists and racists.
The Republican Party Is Racist and Soulless. Just Ask This Veteran GOP Strategist. By David Corn in Mother Jones
In our conversation, Stevens exploded with loathing for the party he once faithfully (and lucratively) served. He rejected the common view that Trump had hijacked the GOP. No, he explained, the triumph of know-nothing Trumpism marked the culmination of an internal conflict that had existed for decades between the party’s “dark side” and its professed ideals. Even William F. Buckley Jr., often hailed as a grand public intellectual and the founding father of the modern conservative movement, was “a stone-cold racist” in the 1950s, Stevens pointed out. (Buckley at that time considered white people more “advanced” and more fit to govern.)
“A lot of us in the party liked to believe the dark side was a recessive gene, but it’s a dominant theme,” Stevens, a seventh-generation Mississippian who was named for Confederate Gen. Jeb Stuart, told me. “And it’s all about race. The Republican Party is a white party and there still are more white people than non-white people.”
Trump's Republican Party is defined by racism and those who tolerate it: GOP strategist
Whenever I tell my Republican friends that I think racial animosity is the root of Trump’s appeal, the inevitable and often angry rejoinder is, “Are you saying that 63 million Americans are racists?” What I try to point out to them is that you don’t have to consider yourself a racist (and, of course, most racists don’t consider themselves racists) but you do have to be willing to accept that having a racist president is less important than something else you are getting from that president.