Prelude:
NATAMBU’S LAW states: “No matter how bad things are or appear to be one can rest assured, upon further investigation, that in reality things are FAR WORSE than anything one could possibly imagine"
"The most deadly, dangerous, and powerful enemy of African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans in general, Women in general, the poor in general, the working class in general, children in general, Freedom in general and Democracy in general in American society today is the truly heinous Republican Party and their endless number of severely bigoted and demagogic minions, mentors, sponsors, and supporters. Anyone who doesn't know or believes this blatantly obvious fact is not only a hopeless FOOL but ultimately deserves their "fate.”
NATAMBU’S LAW states: “No matter how bad things are or appear to be one can rest assured, upon further investigation, that in reality things are FAR WORSE than anything one could possibly imagine"
"The most deadly, dangerous, and powerful enemy of African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans in general, Women in general, the poor in general, the working class in general, children in general, Freedom in general and Democracy in general in American society today is the truly heinous Republican Party and their endless number of severely bigoted and demagogic minions, mentors, sponsors, and supporters. Anyone who doesn't know or believes this blatantly obvious fact is not only a hopeless FOOL but ultimately deserves their "fate.”
—Kofi Natambu, July 15, 2009
November 29, 2016
FACING REALITY after November 8, 2016...
RE: The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election:
RE: The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election:
WHITE SUPREMACY, FASCIST DEMAGOGUERY, AND PATHOLOGICAL MISOGYNY IN THE U.S. 'TRUMPS' HUMANITY AND SANITY...AGAIN…
AND AS USUAL IT'S ONLY GOING TO GET MUCH WORSE VERY SOON...
“What’s Past is Prologue…"
OPEN LETTER TO JACOBIN MAGAZINE; Or Wake Up & THINK:
RE: What's dreadfully WRONG with the editorial 'Politics is the Solution" by the JACOBIN magazine staff…
[The following editorial was originally published in the Panopticon Review on November 26, 2016]:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/trump-victory-clinton-sanders-democratic-party/
All,
It is absolutely specious and infantile reasoning to assert that one must simply determine who to ‘blame’ for Trump’s victory by “choosing" between the elites and "the American people” (as though all those people generally voted in the same way and for the same reasons). It is furthermore idiotic and brazenly dishonest to suggest that Trump’s ‘appeal' was essentially driven by factors that were rooted in so-called “economic populism” or that "the working class” made their “choice" for Trump because of a virtually innocent desire to simply “change” the direction of the country (in which “direction” would this “change” be made and for whom and again exactly which ideological and political aspect and identity of this huge national class is one actually talking about?). It is also utterly absurd, irrelevant, and patently FALSE to claim that either voting for or against Barack Obama in any given election “proves” (or “disproves”) that one either "is or isn’t a racist" or that voting for Trump as opposed to voting for Hilary Clinton means or proves that one is NOT voting for the political and economic elites (as though Clinton and Trump themselves were not from the exact same class, er excuse me, ELITE). After all Donald Trump didn’t commit “class suicide” by deciding to run for the Presidency on the ludicrous and cartoonish reality television notion that “we must make America great again.” C’mon JACOBIN. Let’s get real here. Surely you can and must do far better than this. Why the emptyheaded and clearly opportunist/condescending pandering to this infantilized and magical “working class” you keep invoking as though it was some permanent, immutable and thus (non)dialectical category of aggrieved, innocent, and defenseless children who both inexplicably lack AND possess (at the exact same time, mind you!) the AGENCY to determine who—and what-- they voted for and why. Your editorial reeks of rank intellectual dishonesty and frankly smug abdication here. It’s as if you’ve never heard of or understood the very meaning of the word CONSCIOUSNESS and even more germane in this larger context FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS. Damn, I thought you guys and gals were supposed to be MARXISTS or at least "democratic socialists” for revolution’s sake...Give me a break…
Instead of engaging in phony and egregiously reductive pseudo psychoanalytical speculations and assertions about whether "white workers" were or were not “racists” based on who they voted for from 2008–2016 (as though their overall voting patterns in any election year could ever be an accurate or final barometer of who they were or weren't as individuals one way or the other), what about making the far more important bedrock demand that one must take full and complete responsibility for who and what they voted for and why. As allegedly critical theoreticians and radical activists/organizers doesn’t it seem incredibly LAZY and self serving to act as though the actual choices—and the various logics and perceptions guiding and informing these choices— doesn’t require that individuals and groups making these choices be held accountable on some concrete level of political engagement and activity? In other words WHY would white workers or any other ethnic, racial, or gender subset of voters be simply given a pass just because they were ”alienated" “frustrated”, and “suffering” and felt legitimately abused by the elites. After all MILLIONS of African Americans and many other working people of color as well as women of all “races” and nationalities were and are obviously just as or even more angry, alienated and suffering as much or even far more abuse from these exact same elites as their white brothers and sisters in the U.S. “working class" and yet they emphatically didn’t vote for Donald Trump. WHY is that and what does it MEAN that so many members of the American “working class” were so divided and remain so ideologically and otherwise on the role(s) that Donald Trump and his various (overwhelmingly white) supporters nationally (from the poor, working, middle, and wealthy elite classes alike) will and/or will not play in this division both now and in the future.
Don’t you understand JACOBIN that white supremacy or any other structural, institutional, and systemic form of national oppression and exploitation based on or justified by “difference” is not seriously addressed by whether or not you simply “believe” it not to be a problem based on your faith in whether you think or “believe” individual voters rely on it or not? White supremacy like male supremacy, or heterosexual supremcy is IDEOLOGY. As such it has deeply rooted material effects, and consequences in our political economy and culture that can’t be evaded, avoided, or otherwise “transcended” by whatever category you choose to put individuals in or what “beliefs” you personally hold. As for quoting from national polls about what "the American people" think about the system one must remember also that for centuries millions of Americans dishonestly claimed to think and believe that “all men are created equal” and that “women are free citizens just like men.” Despite all brazenly phony and utterly fullashit claims to the contrary we (always) knew better in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries just as we know much better now no matter what and how many lies we continue to tell ourselves (just as we most emphatically did then in the not-so-distant “past.”).
Therefore, something much greater and far more necessary, creative, dynamic, nuanced, and USEFUL than mere polls and any individual belief in the "sanctity and infinite wisdom (or is it immutability) of the working class” is required in our future work as thinkers and activists on behalf of revolutionary transformation of American politics at this point in our collective history and no mere simplistic reductive manichean analysis of “elites” vis-a-vis “the American people” writ large is gonna get it on its own alone as we enter the clearly neofascist age of Trump and all that it signifies and implies whether any of us like it or not…Stay tuned…
Kofi
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/trump-victory-clinton-sanders-democratic-party/
Politics Is the Solution
We can’t move to Canada or hide under the bed. This is a moment to embrace democratic politics, not repudiate them.
by Jacobin
OPEN LETTER TO JACOBIN MAGAZINE; Or Wake Up & THINK:
RE: What's dreadfully WRONG with the editorial 'Politics is the Solution" by the JACOBIN magazine staff…
[The following editorial was originally published in the Panopticon Review on November 26, 2016]:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/trump-victory-clinton-sanders-democratic-party/
All,
It is absolutely specious and infantile reasoning to assert that one must simply determine who to ‘blame’ for Trump’s victory by “choosing" between the elites and "the American people” (as though all those people generally voted in the same way and for the same reasons). It is furthermore idiotic and brazenly dishonest to suggest that Trump’s ‘appeal' was essentially driven by factors that were rooted in so-called “economic populism” or that "the working class” made their “choice" for Trump because of a virtually innocent desire to simply “change” the direction of the country (in which “direction” would this “change” be made and for whom and again exactly which ideological and political aspect and identity of this huge national class is one actually talking about?). It is also utterly absurd, irrelevant, and patently FALSE to claim that either voting for or against Barack Obama in any given election “proves” (or “disproves”) that one either "is or isn’t a racist" or that voting for Trump as opposed to voting for Hilary Clinton means or proves that one is NOT voting for the political and economic elites (as though Clinton and Trump themselves were not from the exact same class, er excuse me, ELITE). After all Donald Trump didn’t commit “class suicide” by deciding to run for the Presidency on the ludicrous and cartoonish reality television notion that “we must make America great again.” C’mon JACOBIN. Let’s get real here. Surely you can and must do far better than this. Why the emptyheaded and clearly opportunist/condescending pandering to this infantilized and magical “working class” you keep invoking as though it was some permanent, immutable and thus (non)dialectical category of aggrieved, innocent, and defenseless children who both inexplicably lack AND possess (at the exact same time, mind you!) the AGENCY to determine who—and what-- they voted for and why. Your editorial reeks of rank intellectual dishonesty and frankly smug abdication here. It’s as if you’ve never heard of or understood the very meaning of the word CONSCIOUSNESS and even more germane in this larger context FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS. Damn, I thought you guys and gals were supposed to be MARXISTS or at least "democratic socialists” for revolution’s sake...Give me a break…
Instead of engaging in phony and egregiously reductive pseudo psychoanalytical speculations and assertions about whether "white workers" were or were not “racists” based on who they voted for from 2008–2016 (as though their overall voting patterns in any election year could ever be an accurate or final barometer of who they were or weren't as individuals one way or the other), what about making the far more important bedrock demand that one must take full and complete responsibility for who and what they voted for and why. As allegedly critical theoreticians and radical activists/organizers doesn’t it seem incredibly LAZY and self serving to act as though the actual choices—and the various logics and perceptions guiding and informing these choices— doesn’t require that individuals and groups making these choices be held accountable on some concrete level of political engagement and activity? In other words WHY would white workers or any other ethnic, racial, or gender subset of voters be simply given a pass just because they were ”alienated" “frustrated”, and “suffering” and felt legitimately abused by the elites. After all MILLIONS of African Americans and many other working people of color as well as women of all “races” and nationalities were and are obviously just as or even more angry, alienated and suffering as much or even far more abuse from these exact same elites as their white brothers and sisters in the U.S. “working class" and yet they emphatically didn’t vote for Donald Trump. WHY is that and what does it MEAN that so many members of the American “working class” were so divided and remain so ideologically and otherwise on the role(s) that Donald Trump and his various (overwhelmingly white) supporters nationally (from the poor, working, middle, and wealthy elite classes alike) will and/or will not play in this division both now and in the future.
Don’t you understand JACOBIN that white supremacy or any other structural, institutional, and systemic form of national oppression and exploitation based on or justified by “difference” is not seriously addressed by whether or not you simply “believe” it not to be a problem based on your faith in whether you think or “believe” individual voters rely on it or not? White supremacy like male supremacy, or heterosexual supremcy is IDEOLOGY. As such it has deeply rooted material effects, and consequences in our political economy and culture that can’t be evaded, avoided, or otherwise “transcended” by whatever category you choose to put individuals in or what “beliefs” you personally hold. As for quoting from national polls about what "the American people" think about the system one must remember also that for centuries millions of Americans dishonestly claimed to think and believe that “all men are created equal” and that “women are free citizens just like men.” Despite all brazenly phony and utterly fullashit claims to the contrary we (always) knew better in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries just as we know much better now no matter what and how many lies we continue to tell ourselves (just as we most emphatically did then in the not-so-distant “past.”).
Therefore, something much greater and far more necessary, creative, dynamic, nuanced, and USEFUL than mere polls and any individual belief in the "sanctity and infinite wisdom (or is it immutability) of the working class” is required in our future work as thinkers and activists on behalf of revolutionary transformation of American politics at this point in our collective history and no mere simplistic reductive manichean analysis of “elites” vis-a-vis “the American people” writ large is gonna get it on its own alone as we enter the clearly neofascist age of Trump and all that it signifies and implies whether any of us like it or not…Stay tuned…
Kofi
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/trump-victory-clinton-sanders-democratic-party/
Politics Is the Solution
We can’t move to Canada or hide under the bed. This is a moment to embrace democratic politics, not repudiate them.
by Jacobin
Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais
We have no illusions about the impact of Donald Trump’s victory. It is a disaster. The prospect of a unified right-wing government, led by an authoritarian populist, represents a catastrophe for working people.
There are two ways to respond to this situation. One is to blame the people of the United States. The other is to blame the elite of the country.
In the coming days and weeks, many pundits will be doing the former. Frightened liberalshave already written explainers on how to move to Canada; last night, the Canadian immigration website went down after a surge of traffic. The people who brought us to this precipice are now planning their escape.
But blaming the American public for Trump’s victory only deepens the elitism that rallied his voters in the first place. It’s unquestionable that racism and sexism played a crucial role in Trump’s rise. And it’s horrifying to contemplate the ways that his triumph will serve to strengthen the cruelest and most bigoted forces in American society.
Still, a response to Trump that begins and ends with horror is not a political response — it is a form of paralysis, a politics of hiding under the bed. And a response to American bigotry that begins and ends with moral denunciation is not a politics at all — it is the opposite of politics. It is surrender.
To believe that Trump’s appeal was entirely based on ethnic nationalism is to believe that a near majority of Americans are driven only by hate and a shared desire for a white supremacist political program.
We don’t believe that. And the facts don’t bear it out.
This election, in the words of New York Times analyst Nate Cohn, was decided by people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Not all of them can be bigots.
Clinton won only 65 percent of Latino voters, compared to Obama’s 71 percent four years ago. She performed this poorly against a candidate who ran on a program of building a wall along America’s southern border, a candidate who kicked off his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists.
Clinton won 34 percent of white women without college degrees. And she won just 54 percent of women overall, compared to Obama’s 55 percent in 2012. Clinton, of course, was running against a candidate who has gloated on film about grabbing women “by the pussy.”
This was Clinton’s election to lose. And she lost. A lot of the blame will fall on Clinton the candidate, but she only embodied the consensus of this generation of Democratic Party leaders. Under President Obama, Democrats have lost almost a thousand state-legislature seats, a dozen gubernatorial races, sixty-nine House seats and thirteen in the Senate. Last night didn’t come out of nowhere.
The problem with Clinton wasn’t her peculiarity but her typicality. It was characteristic of this Democratic Party that the power players in Washington decided on the nominee — with overwhelming endorsements — many months before a single ballot was cast.
They made a fateful choice for all of us by stacking the deck, decisively, against the kind of politics that could win: a working-class politics.
Seventy-two percent of Americans who voted last night believed that “the economy is rigged to the advantage of the rich and powerful.” Sixty-eight percent agreed that “traditional parties and politicians don’t care about people like me.”
Almost alone among Democratic politicians, Bernie Sanders spoke to this simmering sense of alienation and class anger. Sanders had a basic message for the American people: you deserve more and you are right to believe you do. Health care, college education, a living wage. It’s a message that has made him by far the most popular politician in the country.
Hillary Clinton’s formal platform approached some of Sanders’s concrete ideas, but repudiated its core message. For those in charge of the Democratic Party, it made no sense to rail against America. For them, America never stopped being great. And things have only been getting better.
Party leaders asked voters to hand politics over to them. They thought they had it under control. They were wrong. Now we all have to deal with the consequences. And we will.
This is a new era that requires a new type of politics — one that speaks to people’s pressing needs and hopes, rather than to their fears. Elite liberalism, it turns out, cannot defeat right-wing populism. We can’t move to Canada or hide under the bed. This is a moment to embrace democratic politics, not repudiate them.
— Megan Erickson, Katherine Hill, Matt Karp, Connor Kilpatrick, and Bhaskar Sunkara
All,
This scathing takedown (by Frank Bruni from the NY Times of all people!) of the thoroughly corrupt and brazen greed of the venal political oligarchy led by Donald Trump openly masquerading as "grassroots democracy" (gasp) and "economic populism" (gag) is dedicated to all the hopelessly braindead gliberal pundits and operatives from the Democratic Party and even among some willfully pompous and self deluded "leftists" who stupidly keep insisting that Trump is somehow "representing" the fundamental economic and political interests of the "working class." It would all be absolutely laughable if it weren't the epic lie and permanent catastrophe that it is, always was, and always will be...Stay tuned...
Kofi
http://www.nytimes.com/…/the-pretend-populism-of-donald-tru…
Sunday Review | Op-Ed Columnist
The Pretend Populism of Donald Trump
by Frank Bruni
November 26, 2016
New York Times
For a politician who won the White House by railing against the elites and demonizing the establishment, Donald Trump presented an odd argument for why Americans should believe, as he does, that his adviser Steve Bannon is no racist, anti-Semitic ally of the alt-right.
“Steve went to Harvard,” Trump reminded about two dozen of us at The Times last week, and then, a few sentences later, added, “I think he was with Goldman Sachs on top of everything else.”
Well, that certainly settles it. If Bannon has been cleansed in the rose-scented bathwater of the Ivy League and then spritzed with the perfume of Wall Street, he can be no ideological outlier, no cultural ruffian, no threat. He knows to use the smaller, outside fork first and to put his linen napkin on his lap, not to cut eyeholes in it and wear it over his face.
Trump styled himself as a populist during his flamboyantly provocative campaign, claiming to hear, understand and channel the working-class Americans so wrongly ignored by other leaders. Sure, he flew in a private jet at an economic altitude far above theirs and lived in ostentatious splendor. He was nonetheless the “blue-collar billionaire,” to quote the oxymoron that some of his surrogates took to using.
Where’s that blue collar now? I’m seeing a spotless, perfectly pressed white one, along with a plush silk necktie and, metaphorically speaking, a pocket kerchief to boot.
There’s a thickening clique of plutocrats around him, as Politico’s Ben White and Matthew Nussbaum noted late last week in an article with the headline “Trump’s Team of Gazillionaires.” They observed that his emerging administration is largely a rich man’s (and woman’s) club, including Betsy DeVos, his nominee for education secretary, whose family is worth an estimated $5.1 billion.
Trump is also considering high-level roles for the “oil mogul Harold Hamm ($15.3 billion), investor Wilbur Ross ($2.9 billion), private equity investor Mitt Romney ($250 million at last count), hedge fund magnate Steve Mnuchin (at least $46 million) and superlawyer Rudy Giuliani (estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars),” according to the Politico article. “And Trump’s likely choice for deputy commerce secretary, Todd Ricketts, comes from the billionaire family that owns the Chicago Cubs.”
That’s hardly the oddest or most unsettling part of the Trump transition, which has been a mesmerizing confirmation of so much about him, including his tendency to turn every aspect of his life into a self-aggrandizing pageant. It’s not enough for him to interview potential cabinet members: There must be photographs and footage of them coming to grovel for his favor, as if each is a courtier and he the king. Where’s the populism there?
And for all his thunderous talk before Election Day about “draining the swamp” of Washington, the water level looks fine, the mosquitoes seem unworried and the gators remain plentiful and well-fed.
Any suggestion that he would put an end to the self-dealing and personal enrichment of political insiders is contradicted by Trump himself, who hasn’t provided any concrete assurances that he won’t use the presidency to elevate his and his children’s fortunes.
In his interview with The Times, he was emphatic (and correct) that he had no legal obligation to liquidate any of his holdings or put them in a blind trust. And while he said that his concerns now are about the country, not his businesses, he acknowledged, “The brand is certainly a hotter brand than it was before.”
He also volunteered that history provided no real guide for what he should do, because other presidents hadn’t possessed his kind of wealth. The remark came across as less philosophical than self-congratulatory.
This supposed populist has never been much for humility, and has spent at least as much time emulating the elites as defying and insulting them. He sent his children to fancy boarding schools. Three of them later attended the same Ivy League institution, the University of Pennsylvania, that he graduated from.
The signature ingredient in Melania Trump’s short-lived skincare line was caviar, because, I suppose, nothing says hydration to the everyday American woman like ingestible fish eggs. Had her business taken off, a white-truffle facial masque and Dom Perignon toner would surely have followed: populist ablutions for the parched skin of the little people.
Trump’s populist daughter Ivanka appeared on “60 Minutes” wearing a gold and diamond bracelet that she sells on her website for $10,800. A press release hawking it was distributed just after the program aired.
Her populist husband, Jared Kushner, who may be the wiliest of all Trump whisperers, has his own Harvard degree (his is undergraduate, while Bannon attended the graduate business school) and, as Daniel Golden initially reported in his eye-opening book “The Price of Admission,” Kushner’s ticket to Harvard was punched, despite questionable academic qualifications, after his father made a $2.5 million donation.
Populists and more populists: Even Giuliani, who prides himself as a hero to the segment of the electorate that Trump won over, spent his post-mayoral years not fighting for the forgotten man but raking in many millions from foreign companies and governments dazzled by his star power. That’s why he’s no cinch for secretary of state. A Senate controlled by his fellow Republicans might not be willing to confirm him. He’s too swampy even for the swamp.
I’m not sure how Trump’s populism figured into his determination as a young man to expand his family’s real estate business from Brooklyn and Queens into Manhattan, where the ruling class romped. Or into the location of his gaudiest palace, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach.
Or into the staffing decisions he’s making now. As the Politico article said, “Put together, Trump’s cabinet and administration could be worth as much as $35 billion, a staggering agglomeration of wealth unprecedented in American history.”
Trump’s campaign cast Goldman Sachs as an emblem of all that was sinister and rigged in an economy that shortchanged the working class. But now it’s proof that Bannon’s a respectable guy, and Mnuchin, another of its alums, is reportedly on Trump’s shortlist for Treasury secretary.
And though in some situations Trump plays the skunk at the garden party, in others he’s the garden party itself. He can pantomime populism all he likes. The reality is still pomp.
I invite you to follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni) and join me on Facebook.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 27, 2016, on page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: The Pretend Populism of Donald Trump. Today's Paper
Photo: Credit Ben Wiseman
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35240-why-are-liberal-commentators-acting-as-apologists-for-trump-s-racism
There are two ways to respond to this situation. One is to blame the people of the United States. The other is to blame the elite of the country.
In the coming days and weeks, many pundits will be doing the former. Frightened liberalshave already written explainers on how to move to Canada; last night, the Canadian immigration website went down after a surge of traffic. The people who brought us to this precipice are now planning their escape.
But blaming the American public for Trump’s victory only deepens the elitism that rallied his voters in the first place. It’s unquestionable that racism and sexism played a crucial role in Trump’s rise. And it’s horrifying to contemplate the ways that his triumph will serve to strengthen the cruelest and most bigoted forces in American society.
Still, a response to Trump that begins and ends with horror is not a political response — it is a form of paralysis, a politics of hiding under the bed. And a response to American bigotry that begins and ends with moral denunciation is not a politics at all — it is the opposite of politics. It is surrender.
To believe that Trump’s appeal was entirely based on ethnic nationalism is to believe that a near majority of Americans are driven only by hate and a shared desire for a white supremacist political program.
We don’t believe that. And the facts don’t bear it out.
This election, in the words of New York Times analyst Nate Cohn, was decided by people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Not all of them can be bigots.
Clinton won only 65 percent of Latino voters, compared to Obama’s 71 percent four years ago. She performed this poorly against a candidate who ran on a program of building a wall along America’s southern border, a candidate who kicked off his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists.
Clinton won 34 percent of white women without college degrees. And she won just 54 percent of women overall, compared to Obama’s 55 percent in 2012. Clinton, of course, was running against a candidate who has gloated on film about grabbing women “by the pussy.”
This was Clinton’s election to lose. And she lost. A lot of the blame will fall on Clinton the candidate, but she only embodied the consensus of this generation of Democratic Party leaders. Under President Obama, Democrats have lost almost a thousand state-legislature seats, a dozen gubernatorial races, sixty-nine House seats and thirteen in the Senate. Last night didn’t come out of nowhere.
The problem with Clinton wasn’t her peculiarity but her typicality. It was characteristic of this Democratic Party that the power players in Washington decided on the nominee — with overwhelming endorsements — many months before a single ballot was cast.
They made a fateful choice for all of us by stacking the deck, decisively, against the kind of politics that could win: a working-class politics.
Seventy-two percent of Americans who voted last night believed that “the economy is rigged to the advantage of the rich and powerful.” Sixty-eight percent agreed that “traditional parties and politicians don’t care about people like me.”
Almost alone among Democratic politicians, Bernie Sanders spoke to this simmering sense of alienation and class anger. Sanders had a basic message for the American people: you deserve more and you are right to believe you do. Health care, college education, a living wage. It’s a message that has made him by far the most popular politician in the country.
Hillary Clinton’s formal platform approached some of Sanders’s concrete ideas, but repudiated its core message. For those in charge of the Democratic Party, it made no sense to rail against America. For them, America never stopped being great. And things have only been getting better.
Party leaders asked voters to hand politics over to them. They thought they had it under control. They were wrong. Now we all have to deal with the consequences. And we will.
This is a new era that requires a new type of politics — one that speaks to people’s pressing needs and hopes, rather than to their fears. Elite liberalism, it turns out, cannot defeat right-wing populism. We can’t move to Canada or hide under the bed. This is a moment to embrace democratic politics, not repudiate them.
— Megan Erickson, Katherine Hill, Matt Karp, Connor Kilpatrick, and Bhaskar Sunkara
All,
This scathing takedown (by Frank Bruni from the NY Times of all people!) of the thoroughly corrupt and brazen greed of the venal political oligarchy led by Donald Trump openly masquerading as "grassroots democracy" (gasp) and "economic populism" (gag) is dedicated to all the hopelessly braindead gliberal pundits and operatives from the Democratic Party and even among some willfully pompous and self deluded "leftists" who stupidly keep insisting that Trump is somehow "representing" the fundamental economic and political interests of the "working class." It would all be absolutely laughable if it weren't the epic lie and permanent catastrophe that it is, always was, and always will be...Stay tuned...
Kofi
http://www.nytimes.com/…/the-pretend-populism-of-donald-tru…
Sunday Review | Op-Ed Columnist
The Pretend Populism of Donald Trump
by Frank Bruni
November 26, 2016
New York Times
For a politician who won the White House by railing against the elites and demonizing the establishment, Donald Trump presented an odd argument for why Americans should believe, as he does, that his adviser Steve Bannon is no racist, anti-Semitic ally of the alt-right.
“Steve went to Harvard,” Trump reminded about two dozen of us at The Times last week, and then, a few sentences later, added, “I think he was with Goldman Sachs on top of everything else.”
Well, that certainly settles it. If Bannon has been cleansed in the rose-scented bathwater of the Ivy League and then spritzed with the perfume of Wall Street, he can be no ideological outlier, no cultural ruffian, no threat. He knows to use the smaller, outside fork first and to put his linen napkin on his lap, not to cut eyeholes in it and wear it over his face.
Trump styled himself as a populist during his flamboyantly provocative campaign, claiming to hear, understand and channel the working-class Americans so wrongly ignored by other leaders. Sure, he flew in a private jet at an economic altitude far above theirs and lived in ostentatious splendor. He was nonetheless the “blue-collar billionaire,” to quote the oxymoron that some of his surrogates took to using.
Where’s that blue collar now? I’m seeing a spotless, perfectly pressed white one, along with a plush silk necktie and, metaphorically speaking, a pocket kerchief to boot.
There’s a thickening clique of plutocrats around him, as Politico’s Ben White and Matthew Nussbaum noted late last week in an article with the headline “Trump’s Team of Gazillionaires.” They observed that his emerging administration is largely a rich man’s (and woman’s) club, including Betsy DeVos, his nominee for education secretary, whose family is worth an estimated $5.1 billion.
Trump is also considering high-level roles for the “oil mogul Harold Hamm ($15.3 billion), investor Wilbur Ross ($2.9 billion), private equity investor Mitt Romney ($250 million at last count), hedge fund magnate Steve Mnuchin (at least $46 million) and superlawyer Rudy Giuliani (estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars),” according to the Politico article. “And Trump’s likely choice for deputy commerce secretary, Todd Ricketts, comes from the billionaire family that owns the Chicago Cubs.”
That’s hardly the oddest or most unsettling part of the Trump transition, which has been a mesmerizing confirmation of so much about him, including his tendency to turn every aspect of his life into a self-aggrandizing pageant. It’s not enough for him to interview potential cabinet members: There must be photographs and footage of them coming to grovel for his favor, as if each is a courtier and he the king. Where’s the populism there?
And for all his thunderous talk before Election Day about “draining the swamp” of Washington, the water level looks fine, the mosquitoes seem unworried and the gators remain plentiful and well-fed.
Any suggestion that he would put an end to the self-dealing and personal enrichment of political insiders is contradicted by Trump himself, who hasn’t provided any concrete assurances that he won’t use the presidency to elevate his and his children’s fortunes.
In his interview with The Times, he was emphatic (and correct) that he had no legal obligation to liquidate any of his holdings or put them in a blind trust. And while he said that his concerns now are about the country, not his businesses, he acknowledged, “The brand is certainly a hotter brand than it was before.”
He also volunteered that history provided no real guide for what he should do, because other presidents hadn’t possessed his kind of wealth. The remark came across as less philosophical than self-congratulatory.
This supposed populist has never been much for humility, and has spent at least as much time emulating the elites as defying and insulting them. He sent his children to fancy boarding schools. Three of them later attended the same Ivy League institution, the University of Pennsylvania, that he graduated from.
The signature ingredient in Melania Trump’s short-lived skincare line was caviar, because, I suppose, nothing says hydration to the everyday American woman like ingestible fish eggs. Had her business taken off, a white-truffle facial masque and Dom Perignon toner would surely have followed: populist ablutions for the parched skin of the little people.
Trump’s populist daughter Ivanka appeared on “60 Minutes” wearing a gold and diamond bracelet that she sells on her website for $10,800. A press release hawking it was distributed just after the program aired.
Her populist husband, Jared Kushner, who may be the wiliest of all Trump whisperers, has his own Harvard degree (his is undergraduate, while Bannon attended the graduate business school) and, as Daniel Golden initially reported in his eye-opening book “The Price of Admission,” Kushner’s ticket to Harvard was punched, despite questionable academic qualifications, after his father made a $2.5 million donation.
Populists and more populists: Even Giuliani, who prides himself as a hero to the segment of the electorate that Trump won over, spent his post-mayoral years not fighting for the forgotten man but raking in many millions from foreign companies and governments dazzled by his star power. That’s why he’s no cinch for secretary of state. A Senate controlled by his fellow Republicans might not be willing to confirm him. He’s too swampy even for the swamp.
I’m not sure how Trump’s populism figured into his determination as a young man to expand his family’s real estate business from Brooklyn and Queens into Manhattan, where the ruling class romped. Or into the location of his gaudiest palace, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach.
Or into the staffing decisions he’s making now. As the Politico article said, “Put together, Trump’s cabinet and administration could be worth as much as $35 billion, a staggering agglomeration of wealth unprecedented in American history.”
Trump’s campaign cast Goldman Sachs as an emblem of all that was sinister and rigged in an economy that shortchanged the working class. But now it’s proof that Bannon’s a respectable guy, and Mnuchin, another of its alums, is reportedly on Trump’s shortlist for Treasury secretary.
And though in some situations Trump plays the skunk at the garden party, in others he’s the garden party itself. He can pantomime populism all he likes. The reality is still pomp.
I invite you to follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni) and join me on Facebook.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 27, 2016, on page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: The Pretend Populism of Donald Trump. Today's Paper
Photo: Credit Ben Wiseman
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35240-why-are-liberal-commentators-acting-as-apologists-for-trump-s-racism
Why Are Liberal Commentators Acting as Apologists for Trump's Racism?
by Henry A. Giroux
16 March 2016
Truthout | News Analysis
by Henry A. Giroux
16 March 2016
Truthout | News Analysis
PHOTO: Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 6, 2014.
Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com)
The lynch-mob mentality that permeates Donald Trump campaign rallies was made visible once again this month at a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, when Rakeem Jones, a 26-year-old Black protester, was sucker punched by a white Trump supporter. A video of the incident documents how, after Jones was punched, the audience cheered and the police threw Jones to the ground and handcuffed him. John McGraw, the man who admitted on camera that he had punched Jones, was later arrested. When asked why he did it, McGraw, 78, not only admitted to having committed the assault, but said he "liked it, clocking the hell out of that big mouth," whom he said he thought might be a member of ISIS. He then added, "Yes, he deserved it. We don't know who he is, but we know he's not acting like an American ... the next time we see him, we might have to kill him."
For more original Truthout election coverage, check out our election section, "Beyond the Sound Bites: Election 2016."
Of course, this incident was not out of the ordinary. Trump supporters have a consistent history of attacking those protesting Trump's policies. When an activist named Mercutio Southall Jr. started shouting "Black Lives Matter!" at a Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama, on November 21, 2015, some Trump supporters punched and choked him. Dara Lind observes that the Southall Jr. attack "isn't an isolated incident. Trump supporters have gotten physical with protesters at several other events throughout his candidacy. A protester was dragged out of a Trump rally in Miami. A Trump supporter ripped up a protester's sign. A Trump bodyguard was filmed sucker-punching a protester outside Trump Tower in early September. And at a rally in DC, photographers captured a Trump supporter pulling a protester's hair." Meanwhile, last week, after a March 11 rally was cancelled in Chicago, a number of skirmishes and fistfights broke out between Trump supporters and protesters. Many commentators noted that the rally offered a signpost of the escalating violence that has taken place at Trump's rallies.
The lynch-mob mentality that permeates Donald Trump campaign rallies was made visible once again this month at a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, when Rakeem Jones, a 26-year-old Black protester, was sucker punched by a white Trump supporter. A video of the incident documents how, after Jones was punched, the audience cheered and the police threw Jones to the ground and handcuffed him. John McGraw, the man who admitted on camera that he had punched Jones, was later arrested. When asked why he did it, McGraw, 78, not only admitted to having committed the assault, but said he "liked it, clocking the hell out of that big mouth," whom he said he thought might be a member of ISIS. He then added, "Yes, he deserved it. We don't know who he is, but we know he's not acting like an American ... the next time we see him, we might have to kill him."
For more original Truthout election coverage, check out our election section, "Beyond the Sound Bites: Election 2016."
Of course, this incident was not out of the ordinary. Trump supporters have a consistent history of attacking those protesting Trump's policies. When an activist named Mercutio Southall Jr. started shouting "Black Lives Matter!" at a Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama, on November 21, 2015, some Trump supporters punched and choked him. Dara Lind observes that the Southall Jr. attack "isn't an isolated incident. Trump supporters have gotten physical with protesters at several other events throughout his candidacy. A protester was dragged out of a Trump rally in Miami. A Trump supporter ripped up a protester's sign. A Trump bodyguard was filmed sucker-punching a protester outside Trump Tower in early September. And at a rally in DC, photographers captured a Trump supporter pulling a protester's hair." Meanwhile, last week, after a March 11 rally was cancelled in Chicago, a number of skirmishes and fistfights broke out between Trump supporters and protesters. Many commentators noted that the rally offered a signpost of the escalating violence that has taken place at Trump's rallies.
At their core, Trump's politics and appeal are built around violence.
Trump has repeatedly indicated his support for such actions by saying he "would like to punch a protester in the face" and labeling protesters as "bad Americans." He also incited this violence through his response to the November incident that occurred in Alabama, when Trump supporters punched and choked Southall Jr., who started shouting "Black Lives Matter!" as Trump started to speak. When asked about the incident, Trump responded in a Fox News interview with the remark: "Maybe he should have been roughed up."
Such comments make clear that at their core, Trump's politics and appeal are built around violence. Trump's encouragement of violence can be seen very starkly in his decision to look into paying for McGraw's legal fees. In defense of such actions, Trump told "Meet the Press" that McGraw "obviously loves his country," and that he might "have gotten carried away." Meanwhile, some Trump supporters have reportedly expressed interest in forming a makeshift militia called the Lion's Guard to oppose "far-left agitators."
To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.
One would think that these incidents would be enough to convince liberals that Trump's popularity is deeply tied to his open advocacy of racist violence, but a disconcerting number of liberal commentators have sought to downplay Trump's racist and fascist tendencies.
Liberal Apologists for Trump
Some conservatives, such as Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, predictably downplay the racist and fascist undertones of Trump's candidacy, arguing that Trump is simply a symptom of massive disillusionment among Americans who are exhibiting a profound disdain, if not hatred, for the political and economic mainstream elites. Disappointingly, however, this argument is also often bolstered by liberals who go too far in their efforts to prove that criticism of Trump's bigotry and racism cannot fully account for Trump's political appeal.
For instance, historian Thomas Frank (also a former Wall Street Journal columnist) observes that Trump actually embraces a number of left-leaning liberal positions that make him popular with working-class white people with lower education levels. He cites Trump's criticism of free trade agreements, his call for competitive bidding with the drug industry, his critique of the military-industrial complex and its wasteful spending, and his condemnation of companies that displace American workers by closing factories in the United States and opening them in much poorer countries such as Mexico in order to save on labor costs.
Trump's appeal to fear, aggression and violence makes people more vulnerable to authoritarianism.
Purveyors of this view present the working class as a noble representative of a legitimate populist backlash against neoliberalism and appear to deem irrelevant the question of whether or not this backlash embraces an American form of fascism. Frank, however, has a long history of ignoring cultural issues, ideologies and values that do not simply mimic the economic system. As Ellen Willis has pointed out in her brilliant critique of Frank's work, Frank makes the mistake of imagining popular and media culture, or what I call the educative nature of culture and politics, as simply "a pure reflection of the corporate class that produces it." Hence, the racism, ultra-nationalism, bigotry, religious fundamentalism and other anti-democratic factors get downplayed in Frank's analysis of Trump's rise to power.
Journalist John Judis, a senior writer at The National Journal, extends this argument by comparing Trump with Bernie Sanders, claiming that they are both populists and outsiders while suggesting that Trump occupies a legitimate outsider status. Judis argues that Trump raises a number of criticisms regarding domestic policies for which he should be taken seriously by the American people and not simply dismissed as a racist, clown or pompous showman. In a piece for Vox, he writes:
Sanders and Trump differ dramatically on many issues -- from immigration to climate change -- but both are critical of how wealthy donors and lobbyists dominate the political process, and both favor some form of campaign finance reform. Both decry corporations moving overseas for cheap wages and to avoid American taxes. Both reject trade treaties that favor multinational corporations over workers. And both want government more, rather than less, involved in the economy.... Both men are foes of what they describe as their party's establishment. And both campaigns are also fundamentally about rejecting the way economic policy has been talked about in American presidential politics for decades.
Some liberals such as scholar and blogger Arthur Goldhammer go so far as to suggest that Trump's appeal is largely an extension of the "cult of celebrity"and his attentiveness to "a very rational and reasonable set of business practices" and to the anger of a disregarded element of the working class. Goldhammer asserts without irony that Trump "is not an authoritarian but a celebrity," as if one cancels out the other. While celebrity culture confers authority in a society utterly devoted to consumerism, it also represents less a mode of false identification than a manufactured spectacle that cheapens serious and thoughtful discourse, and puts into play a focus on lifestyles and personalities. This has given rise to mainstream media that devalue politics, treat politicians as celebrities, refuse to give politicians a serious hearing and are unwilling to raise tough questions. This occurs because the media assume that celebrities are incapable of answering difficult questions and that the public is more concerned about their personalities than anything else.
Celebrity culture is not simply a mode of entertainment; it is a form of public pedagogy central to creating a formative culture that views thinking as a nuisance at best or dangerous at worse. Treated seriously, celebrity culture provides the architectural framing for an authoritarian culture by celebrating a deadening form of self-interest, narcissism and civic illiteracy. As the historian of Germany Fritz Stern has argued, the dark side of celebrity culture can be understood by the fact that it gave rise to Trump and represents the merger of financial power and a culture of thoughtlessness.
Roger Berkowitz, the director of the Hannah Arendt Center, takes Goldhammer's argument further and claims that Trump is a celebrity who knows how to work the "art of the deal" (a reference to the title of Trump's well-known neoliberal manifesto). That is, he suggests that Trump's appeal rests on his role as a celebrity with real business acumen and substance. In particular, Berkowitz argues that Trump's appeal is due, in part, to his image as a smart and successful businessman who gets things done. Berkowitz goes into overdrive in his claim that Trump is not Hitler, as if that means he is not a demagogue unique to the American context.
The authoritarian tendencies of Trump's followers cannot be explained through economic analyses alone.
Without irony, Berkowitz goes so far as to write that "it is important to recognize that Trump's focus on illegal immigrants, protectionism, the wall on the Mexican border, and the terrorist danger posed by Muslims transcends race." I am assuming Berkowitz means that Trump's racist ideology, policies and rhetoric can be separated from the hateful policies for which he argues (such as torture, which is a war crime) and the violence he legitimates at his rallies. Indeed, Berkowitz implies that these policies and practices derive not from a fundamentally racist and xenophobic orientation but rather are rooted in Trump's sound understanding of economic issues related to his business practices.
The sound business practices that Berkowitz finds admirable have a name: neoliberal capitalism. This neoliberal capitalist system has produced an untold degree of human misery, political corruption and inequality throughout the world. It has given us a social and political formation that promotes militarization, attacks the welfare state, aligns itself slavishly with corporate power and corrupts politics. Moreover this system seeks to justify the disproportionate police violence directed toward Black communities by referring to Black people as "criminals" and "thugs." Proponents of this political and economic system may not constitute a fascist party in the strict sense of the word, but they certainly embrace toxic elements of a new style of American authoritarianism.
In declaring that Trump isn't being racist and in claiming that the difference between Trump and Sanders is one of attitude and not policy, Berkowitz reveals the extent to which his eagerness to defend neoliberal capitalism requires him to overlook Trump's racism. Berkowitz even goes so far as to downplay the differences between Trump and Sanders on racism by arguing that they have both "pushed the limits of racial propriety." This statement whitewashes Trump's overt racism and appears to suggest that both candidates share similar ideological positions toward people of color and inhabit the same racist landscape, truly a claim that borders on the absurd and represents an intellectual deceit in its claims to legitimate a false equivalency. Of course, if Berkowitz had used the word "racism" instead of "racial propriety," the latter claim would not make sense given Sanders' long history of fighting racial injustices.
I strongly doubt that Trump's call to ban Muslims from entering the United States, his call to expel 11 million undocumented immigrants, his appeal to white nationalism, his intention to kill terrorists and their families as well, or his support for state-sponsored torture, among other egregious policy practices, constitute simply different attitudes between him and Bernie Sanders.
Trump attempts to generate intolerance out of misfortune while Sanders goes to the political, economic and social roots of the problems that cause it. Trump promotes an intense culture of fear that cannot be excused by appealing to his alleged good business practices or for that matter to his criticism of some of the Republican Party's more regressive domestic and foreign policy endeavors. On the contrary, Trump's appeal to fear, aggression and violence makes people, especially those who have been politically victimized, more vulnerable to authoritarianism.
The Downplaying of Trump's Racism
Berkowitz's argument is more than apologetic; it is a species of postracial discourse that became commonplace during the Obama years. It is also disingenuous and nonsensical. It is hard to make up such apologetic reasoning at a time in which racist invective and actions are more visible than ever: Police brutality against Black people is widespread; racist comments against Obama proliferate without apology; Black congregants are killed while praying in their church; white supremacists target immigrants, Muslims and Planned Parenthood with repeated acts of violence; and all the while the racially coded prison system is bursting at its seams. We also live at a time when a dangerous resurgence of racism, Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise. Against the reality of a society immersed if not saturated in racial violence, Berkowitz's postracial and market-drenched discourse mimics a naive form of liberalism, if not a species of right-wing ideology too afraid to name itself, and too unwilling to address Trump's authoritarian and myopic drive for power.
Trump echoes a fascist script that has been updated to address the fears and anxieties of people who feel betrayed by mainstream politics.
Critical race theorist David Theo Goldberg is right in arguing that this line of argument is a form of "postraciality [that] heightens the mode of racial dismissal" and "renders opaque the structures making possible and silently perpetuating racially ordered power and privilege" (see Goldberg's book Are We All Postracial Yet?). Trump's followers cannot be defined simply by an anger that is associated with oppressive economic institutions, policies and structures. They are also defined by an anti-democratic politics that embraces the long legacy of racialized human trafficking and enslavement, a hatred of immigrants and an embrace of the ethos of privatization.
The positions that many liberals such as Thomas Frank, Arthur Goldhammer and Roger Berkowitz have taken on Trump often sound like apologies for Trump's reactionary utterances. Moreover, they tend to downplay his toxic racism, nativism, class bullying, demagogic policies and chilling embrace of violence. In focusing on Trump's populism alone, these analyses ignore David Neiwert's insight that Trump's updated neo-fascist rhetoric is "designed to demonize an entire class of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination."
What is disturbing about accounts that celebrate, however cautiously, Trump's more liberal tendencies is that, in the words of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, "they give racist contempt the impeccable alibi of ethical and secular legitimacy." This type of restricted discourse runs the risk of absolving the Republican Party and Trump and his followers of some of their most vile, right-wing, nativist legacies. These liberal cover-ups do more than underplay Trump's fascist tendencies; they also overlook a moment in which political authoritarianism is on the rise and in which the very fate of humanity and the planet are at risk. As Los Angeles Times reporters Don Lee and Kurtis Lee observe:
If Donald Trump were president, [he would end abortion rights, repeal Obamacare,] put U.S. ground troops in Iraq to fight Islamic extremists, rescind President Obama's executive orders that protect millions of immigrants from deportation, eliminate American citizenship for U.S.-born children whose parents are in the country illegally and "police" but not necessarily revoke the nuclear pact with Iran. Trump wants to deport all immigrants in the U.S. illegally -- an estimated 11 million people -- but says he wouldn't break up families because their families would be deported too. "We're going to keep the families together ... but they have to go," he said in a wide-ranging interview on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We have to make a whole new set of standards. And when people come in, they have to come in legally." Deportees who qualify could return, he said. Trump would end Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows young people brought to the country illegally as children to work and attend college without facing deportation.
Trump's toxic racism and discourse has been leading to violence for some time. According to an August 2015 article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi, when two brothers from South Boston urinated on and severely beat with a metallic pipe a Latino man, "one of the brothers reportedly told police that 'Donald Trump was right, all of these illegals need to be deported.'"
Taibbi adds:
When reporters confronted Trump, he hadn't yet heard about the incident. At first, he said, "That would be a shame." But right after, he went on: "I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that."
Trump later modified his response, one that both appeared to condone and legitimate the violence done in his name, but the fact remains that he is disseminating hate and creating the conditions for dangerous ideas to mobilize real-life violence in a society seething with a toxic disdain for immigrants. In what can only be interpreted as an openly racist justification for such violence -- reminiscent of similar attacks against Jews in Nazi Germany -- Trump's initial response truly reflects the degree to which right-wing extremism has become an acceptable register of US politics.
The authoritarian tendencies of Trump's followers cannot be explained through economic analyses alone. Denying the importance of racism, xenophobia, corporate-driven public pedagogies and a culture shaped by the financial elite greatly ignores modes of domination that go far beyond economic discontents and are produced and legitimated daily in mainstream cultural apparatuses. As Ellen Willis has pointed out, domination is not simply structural -- it takes shape through beliefs, persuasion, rhetoric and the pedagogical dimensions of politics. What Trump has tapped into is not simply economic resentment but also decades of a formative culture that is as divisive as it is anti-democratic. Violence is ubiquitous in US society and has become normalized, furthering a politics of anxiety, uncertainty and bigotry.
Trump has taken advantage of a proliferating culture of fear to create what Susan Sontag has described as a mimicry of fascinating fascism that trades in a carnival of violence and hatred. This spectacle furthers a politics of nihilism and brings many Americans closer to the abyss of proto-fascism. Under such circumstances, it is fair to argue that many of Trump's supporters have embraced the core elements of totalitarian politics. In this instance, politics has become a staged event, a spectacle that both normalizes violence and makes it a source of pleasure.
Trump echoes a fascist script that has been updated to address the fears and anxieties of people who feel betrayed by mainstream politics and channel their anger toward immigrants, Black people and anyone they deem un-American. Given the way in which racism mixes with the growing fear and anger over economic precariousness of working-class white people in this country, is it any wonder, that Trump presents himself as the strong leader, the mythic strongman offering redemption, revenge and a revitalized white Christian United States? Trump is not only the new face of proto-fascism, but also the logical end result of neoliberal capitalism's numerous assaults on democracy itself.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Critical race theorist David Theo Goldberg is right in arguing that this line of argument is a form of "postraciality [that] heightens the mode of racial dismissal" and "renders opaque the structures making possible and silently perpetuating racially ordered power and privilege" (see Goldberg's book Are We All Postracial Yet?). Trump's followers cannot be defined simply by an anger that is associated with oppressive economic institutions, policies and structures. They are also defined by an anti-democratic politics that embraces the long legacy of racialized human trafficking and enslavement, a hatred of immigrants and an embrace of the ethos of privatization.
The positions that many liberals such as Thomas Frank, Arthur Goldhammer and Roger Berkowitz have taken on Trump often sound like apologies for Trump's reactionary utterances. Moreover, they tend to downplay his toxic racism, nativism, class bullying, demagogic policies and chilling embrace of violence. In focusing on Trump's populism alone, these analyses ignore David Neiwert's insight that Trump's updated neo-fascist rhetoric is "designed to demonize an entire class of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination."
What is disturbing about accounts that celebrate, however cautiously, Trump's more liberal tendencies is that, in the words of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, "they give racist contempt the impeccable alibi of ethical and secular legitimacy." This type of restricted discourse runs the risk of absolving the Republican Party and Trump and his followers of some of their most vile, right-wing, nativist legacies. These liberal cover-ups do more than underplay Trump's fascist tendencies; they also overlook a moment in which political authoritarianism is on the rise and in which the very fate of humanity and the planet are at risk. As Los Angeles Times reporters Don Lee and Kurtis Lee observe:
If Donald Trump were president, [he would end abortion rights, repeal Obamacare,] put U.S. ground troops in Iraq to fight Islamic extremists, rescind President Obama's executive orders that protect millions of immigrants from deportation, eliminate American citizenship for U.S.-born children whose parents are in the country illegally and "police" but not necessarily revoke the nuclear pact with Iran. Trump wants to deport all immigrants in the U.S. illegally -- an estimated 11 million people -- but says he wouldn't break up families because their families would be deported too. "We're going to keep the families together ... but they have to go," he said in a wide-ranging interview on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We have to make a whole new set of standards. And when people come in, they have to come in legally." Deportees who qualify could return, he said. Trump would end Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows young people brought to the country illegally as children to work and attend college without facing deportation.
Trump's toxic racism and discourse has been leading to violence for some time. According to an August 2015 article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi, when two brothers from South Boston urinated on and severely beat with a metallic pipe a Latino man, "one of the brothers reportedly told police that 'Donald Trump was right, all of these illegals need to be deported.'"
Taibbi adds:
When reporters confronted Trump, he hadn't yet heard about the incident. At first, he said, "That would be a shame." But right after, he went on: "I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that."
Trump later modified his response, one that both appeared to condone and legitimate the violence done in his name, but the fact remains that he is disseminating hate and creating the conditions for dangerous ideas to mobilize real-life violence in a society seething with a toxic disdain for immigrants. In what can only be interpreted as an openly racist justification for such violence -- reminiscent of similar attacks against Jews in Nazi Germany -- Trump's initial response truly reflects the degree to which right-wing extremism has become an acceptable register of US politics.
The authoritarian tendencies of Trump's followers cannot be explained through economic analyses alone. Denying the importance of racism, xenophobia, corporate-driven public pedagogies and a culture shaped by the financial elite greatly ignores modes of domination that go far beyond economic discontents and are produced and legitimated daily in mainstream cultural apparatuses. As Ellen Willis has pointed out, domination is not simply structural -- it takes shape through beliefs, persuasion, rhetoric and the pedagogical dimensions of politics. What Trump has tapped into is not simply economic resentment but also decades of a formative culture that is as divisive as it is anti-democratic. Violence is ubiquitous in US society and has become normalized, furthering a politics of anxiety, uncertainty and bigotry.
Trump has taken advantage of a proliferating culture of fear to create what Susan Sontag has described as a mimicry of fascinating fascism that trades in a carnival of violence and hatred. This spectacle furthers a politics of nihilism and brings many Americans closer to the abyss of proto-fascism. Under such circumstances, it is fair to argue that many of Trump's supporters have embraced the core elements of totalitarian politics. In this instance, politics has become a staged event, a spectacle that both normalizes violence and makes it a source of pleasure.
Trump echoes a fascist script that has been updated to address the fears and anxieties of people who feel betrayed by mainstream politics and channel their anger toward immigrants, Black people and anyone they deem un-American. Given the way in which racism mixes with the growing fear and anger over economic precariousness of working-class white people in this country, is it any wonder, that Trump presents himself as the strong leader, the mythic strongman offering redemption, revenge and a revitalized white Christian United States? Trump is not only the new face of proto-fascism, but also the logical end result of neoliberal capitalism's numerous assaults on democracy itself.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Henry A. Giroux
Henry A. Giroux currently is the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. He also is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University. His most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015) and coauthored with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City Lights, 2015). Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors.
His website is www.henryagiroux.com.
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FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on March 2, 2016):
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on March 2, 2016):
(A mere 9 weeks ago...)
All,
Keep in mind that the following article ("The Real Danger of Donald Trump") was written a mere six months ago(!)
NOW (after winning seven of the ten Republican primaries tonight in resounding fashion) look at how much closer we are to the very real possibility that a genuine fascist could become the next President of the United Hates in November. Don't laugh, or even think about blithely dismissing this once extremely remote possibility. A looming catastrophe of monumental proportions is now only 8 months away from actually happening. If Trump is able to win a mere 2-3 more midwestern states (given that like Romney in 2012 it is absolutely assured that he will win at least 95% of the entire South--a grand total of 13 states-- plus 5 more in the Plains states region of Wyoming, Montana, Utah, North and South Dakota in addition to 3 more in Nebraska, Alaska, and Idaho). Add the certainty that like Romney in 2012 Trump would also easily win three of the 10 midwestern states (Indiana, Kansas, and Missouri), and all of a sudden we are looking at a grand total of 24 states (which is exactly the same number of states Romney won in 2012). It is also likely under this horrific scenario that if Trump is also able to win back the state of Florida that Obama was barely able to win against Romney by a little less than 1% of the vote he would suddenly be much closer to actually winning the Presidency. Then all Trump would need to win the election is two more states TOTAL in the rest of the country, If you don't think this is possible given how thoroughly reactionary and rabidly rightwing most of the national white vote in this country actually is (in 2012 60% of that national voting demographic went to Romney as Obama only won a feeble 39% nationally of this vote and actually lost the white vote in both New York and California!) you are deluding yourself.
So don't think for a nanosecond that the worst possible scenario could not possibly occur at this point and that an extremely wealthy and openly bigoted white male supremacist and certifiable meglomaniac could win the White House and turn a horrific fantasy into a nightmarish reality very soon ...Stay tuned...
Kofi
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/…/the-real-danger-of-…/…
Taking Note - The Editorial Page Editor's Blog
The Real Danger of Donald Trump
by Lawrence Downes
September 16, 2015
New York Times
Some may find him amusing, but he is stirring up hatred that will take a long time to die down.
Donald Trump. Credit Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The caller to Brian Lehrer’s WNYC radio show on Wednesday morning was pining for a strongman, a president who would do what was necessary to get rid of immigrants, whom she blamed for taking jobs and money away from real Americans.
“We’re very angry about what’s going on in the world today. We’re very angry about all the immigration,” she said. “He does speak for the people. I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t realize that there are a lot of angry people out here that are tired of listening to the politicians step all over us.”
She was speaking, of course, of Donald Trump, whose vehement anti-immigrant message is working brilliantly for him. Heading into tonight’s second Republican debate, he is the 2016 campaign’s main object of fascination and intimidation — the gas planet around which the discussion will likely revolve, while his rivals spin, tumble and flail.
Because Mr. Trump is caustic and bombastic, many people find him delightful and refreshing. Late-night comedians have been praying for him to stick around, because the jokes write themselves.
But the problem with this particular clown is that his words are not clownish. The language he uses about immigrants is dehumanizing and vile. The audiences that adore him are animated not just by infatuation, but by the age-old catalysts of fear, resentment and hate.
This is what moves the Trump effect into the realm of the frightening, rather than amusing or fascinating.
When did that move happen? For me, it was his rally on Monday in Dallas, where he told an adoring crowd he was disgusted with what was happening to America. He called it “a dumping ground for the rest of the world.”
The garbage he was referring to is people, the same kind of people we describe more poetically on a plaque at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.
Mr. Trump’s rivals are talking, in all seriousness, of undoing the Constitution and building a border wall. A Fox News host compares immigration to “a tumor or a disease.” Two young thugs in Boston attack and urinate on a homeless Latino man, saying Mr. Trump inspired them. A Trump supporter outside the Dallas rally grabs a microphone and yells at anti-Trump protesters: “Clean my hotel room, bitch!” Another, referring to Mr. Trump’s mass-deportation plan, says: “This isn’t going to be painless. They’ve been inflicting pain on us for 20 years.”
It’s not clear that Mr. Trump will end up with any power to pursue his racist agenda — his ambitions seem a lot narrower, more TV-based. But the toxic support he is stirring up, the polluted ideas he is spreading, the hate he is emboldening his supporters to voice with his blaring, surround-sound campaign — that evil will live after him. We will be cleaning up after Mr. Trump for a long time.
Vice President Joe Biden spoke reassuringly to a Latino group on Tuesday, saying that Mr. Trump and his fellow Republicans were taking pages from an old playbook that always fails.
“This will pass,” he said. This “sick message” has been tried on America before, and we always — “always, always, always, always” — overcome it.
Yes, we do, but it keeps coming back, and keeps doing damage.
I think of some recent examples, close to home.
Long Island, where I live, has been transformed in recent years, like many other American suburbs, by an influx of Latino immigrants. The demographics of Long Island’s two counties, Nassau and Suffolk, are similar. But where Nassau had a cool, pragmatic county executive, who talked of unity and sensible solutions, Suffolk had a county executive who liked to blame immigrants for overburdened housing, schools and hospitals, and for supposedly lawless acts like gathering on sidewalks to look for work. His words inflamed and incited community passions; his claims that immigrants were a blight on the county found a receptive audience.
And Suffolk, not Nassau, became nationally notorious for repeated attacks on Latino immigrants, including one horrific murder. Even the county police department was accused of patterns of racial abuse. Other politicians have risen to power in communities where people feel uneasy and resentful and are looking for a target for their anger. Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., has perennially been elected despite — or rather because of — his history of oppressing Latinos in his jurisdiction.
Mr. Trump has made the nativists restless, on a national scale. Those in media and entertainment who are distracted by his comedic potential are missing the point. Jimmy Fallon, doing a skit with Mr. Trump, normalizes his toxic message, with giggles. (I’m hoping that Stephen Colbert, who has Mr. Trump on his show next week, will do better at avoiding this moral trap, but I’m not holding my breath.)
The Trump effect leads to a question I’ve been pondering. Is politics like physics, where adding gas to a container creates pressure and heat? If you keep pumping inflammatory speech into the public discourse, do you eventually get ignition?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/opinion/the-not-so-silent-white-majority.html?_r=0
The Opinion Pages |
All,
Keep in mind that the following article ("The Real Danger of Donald Trump") was written a mere six months ago(!)
NOW (after winning seven of the ten Republican primaries tonight in resounding fashion) look at how much closer we are to the very real possibility that a genuine fascist could become the next President of the United Hates in November. Don't laugh, or even think about blithely dismissing this once extremely remote possibility. A looming catastrophe of monumental proportions is now only 8 months away from actually happening. If Trump is able to win a mere 2-3 more midwestern states (given that like Romney in 2012 it is absolutely assured that he will win at least 95% of the entire South--a grand total of 13 states-- plus 5 more in the Plains states region of Wyoming, Montana, Utah, North and South Dakota in addition to 3 more in Nebraska, Alaska, and Idaho). Add the certainty that like Romney in 2012 Trump would also easily win three of the 10 midwestern states (Indiana, Kansas, and Missouri), and all of a sudden we are looking at a grand total of 24 states (which is exactly the same number of states Romney won in 2012). It is also likely under this horrific scenario that if Trump is also able to win back the state of Florida that Obama was barely able to win against Romney by a little less than 1% of the vote he would suddenly be much closer to actually winning the Presidency. Then all Trump would need to win the election is two more states TOTAL in the rest of the country, If you don't think this is possible given how thoroughly reactionary and rabidly rightwing most of the national white vote in this country actually is (in 2012 60% of that national voting demographic went to Romney as Obama only won a feeble 39% nationally of this vote and actually lost the white vote in both New York and California!) you are deluding yourself.
So don't think for a nanosecond that the worst possible scenario could not possibly occur at this point and that an extremely wealthy and openly bigoted white male supremacist and certifiable meglomaniac could win the White House and turn a horrific fantasy into a nightmarish reality very soon ...Stay tuned...
Kofi
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/…/the-real-danger-of-…/…
Taking Note - The Editorial Page Editor's Blog
The Real Danger of Donald Trump
by Lawrence Downes
September 16, 2015
New York Times
Some may find him amusing, but he is stirring up hatred that will take a long time to die down.
Donald Trump. Credit Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The caller to Brian Lehrer’s WNYC radio show on Wednesday morning was pining for a strongman, a president who would do what was necessary to get rid of immigrants, whom she blamed for taking jobs and money away from real Americans.
“We’re very angry about what’s going on in the world today. We’re very angry about all the immigration,” she said. “He does speak for the people. I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t realize that there are a lot of angry people out here that are tired of listening to the politicians step all over us.”
She was speaking, of course, of Donald Trump, whose vehement anti-immigrant message is working brilliantly for him. Heading into tonight’s second Republican debate, he is the 2016 campaign’s main object of fascination and intimidation — the gas planet around which the discussion will likely revolve, while his rivals spin, tumble and flail.
Because Mr. Trump is caustic and bombastic, many people find him delightful and refreshing. Late-night comedians have been praying for him to stick around, because the jokes write themselves.
But the problem with this particular clown is that his words are not clownish. The language he uses about immigrants is dehumanizing and vile. The audiences that adore him are animated not just by infatuation, but by the age-old catalysts of fear, resentment and hate.
This is what moves the Trump effect into the realm of the frightening, rather than amusing or fascinating.
When did that move happen? For me, it was his rally on Monday in Dallas, where he told an adoring crowd he was disgusted with what was happening to America. He called it “a dumping ground for the rest of the world.”
The garbage he was referring to is people, the same kind of people we describe more poetically on a plaque at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.
Mr. Trump’s rivals are talking, in all seriousness, of undoing the Constitution and building a border wall. A Fox News host compares immigration to “a tumor or a disease.” Two young thugs in Boston attack and urinate on a homeless Latino man, saying Mr. Trump inspired them. A Trump supporter outside the Dallas rally grabs a microphone and yells at anti-Trump protesters: “Clean my hotel room, bitch!” Another, referring to Mr. Trump’s mass-deportation plan, says: “This isn’t going to be painless. They’ve been inflicting pain on us for 20 years.”
It’s not clear that Mr. Trump will end up with any power to pursue his racist agenda — his ambitions seem a lot narrower, more TV-based. But the toxic support he is stirring up, the polluted ideas he is spreading, the hate he is emboldening his supporters to voice with his blaring, surround-sound campaign — that evil will live after him. We will be cleaning up after Mr. Trump for a long time.
Vice President Joe Biden spoke reassuringly to a Latino group on Tuesday, saying that Mr. Trump and his fellow Republicans were taking pages from an old playbook that always fails.
“This will pass,” he said. This “sick message” has been tried on America before, and we always — “always, always, always, always” — overcome it.
Yes, we do, but it keeps coming back, and keeps doing damage.
I think of some recent examples, close to home.
Long Island, where I live, has been transformed in recent years, like many other American suburbs, by an influx of Latino immigrants. The demographics of Long Island’s two counties, Nassau and Suffolk, are similar. But where Nassau had a cool, pragmatic county executive, who talked of unity and sensible solutions, Suffolk had a county executive who liked to blame immigrants for overburdened housing, schools and hospitals, and for supposedly lawless acts like gathering on sidewalks to look for work. His words inflamed and incited community passions; his claims that immigrants were a blight on the county found a receptive audience.
And Suffolk, not Nassau, became nationally notorious for repeated attacks on Latino immigrants, including one horrific murder. Even the county police department was accused of patterns of racial abuse. Other politicians have risen to power in communities where people feel uneasy and resentful and are looking for a target for their anger. Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., has perennially been elected despite — or rather because of — his history of oppressing Latinos in his jurisdiction.
Mr. Trump has made the nativists restless, on a national scale. Those in media and entertainment who are distracted by his comedic potential are missing the point. Jimmy Fallon, doing a skit with Mr. Trump, normalizes his toxic message, with giggles. (I’m hoping that Stephen Colbert, who has Mr. Trump on his show next week, will do better at avoiding this moral trap, but I’m not holding my breath.)
The Trump effect leads to a question I’ve been pondering. Is politics like physics, where adding gas to a container creates pressure and heat? If you keep pumping inflammatory speech into the public discourse, do you eventually get ignition?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/opinion/the-not-so-silent-white-majority.html?_r=0
The Opinion Pages |
Contributing Op-Ed Writer
The Not-So-Silent White Majority
by Thomas B. Edsall
November 17, 2016
New York Times
Trump supporters at a rally in Michigan in September. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
Between Richard Nixon’s election by the silent majority in 1968 and Donald Trump’s stunning victory in 2016, there have been six conservative waves that swept Republicans into office. Disaffected white voters without college degrees have been the driving force in all of them.
This is surprising not only because these voters were once the backbone of the Democratic coalition, but because they have steadily declined as a share of the electorate. The percentage of white voters without college degrees fell from 83 percent in 1960 to 36 percent in 2012. It was 34 percent this year.
So why did they matter as much as they did in 2016? For one thing, Trump’s 39-point lead among less well educated whites surged past Mitt Romney’s 25-point margin. This was enough to make up for the fact that Trump’s margin of victory among whites with college degrees, at 4 points (49-45), was well behind Romney’s. (Romney carried college-educated whites by 14 points, 56-42.)
Despite their declining share of the electorate, these voters continue to exercise an outsize influence: as the Silent Majority of 1968 and 1972; the Reagan Democrats of 1980; the Angry White Men of 1994; the Tea Party insurgents of 2010; and now the triumphant Trump Republicans of 2016.
Thomas B. Edsall
American politics, inequality, campaign strategy and demographics.
The Democratic Coalition’s Epic Fail NOV 10
Hillary Clinton’s Juggling Act NOV 3
The Great Democratic Inversion OCT 27
Can the Democrats Resurrect the Middle Class? OCT 13
Global Trade War, Trump Edition OCT 6
See More »
Let’s take a look at the history of this trend.
In 1968, these white voters — often low or moderate income, disproportionately male and clustered in exurban and rural areas, then as now — were crucial to the birth of the modern conservative coalition.
That year, famously, southern whites angered by enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act abandoned the Democratic Party in droves, and they were soon joined by many northern whites opposed to court-ordered busing.
The Democratic Party’s commitment to civil rights prompted millions of white voters to cast ballots either for Richard Nixon, running as the Republican nominee, or for George Wallace, the segregationist Dixiecrat and former governor of Alabama, running as the nominee of the American Independent Party.
Together, Nixon and Wallace won 56.9 percent of all votes in 1968 and more than six out of every ten white votes, laying the groundwork for the conversion of the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party into a key component of the modern Republican Party. Democrats have made inroads into this coalition a few times, either by running more centrist Southerners like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton or through the campaign magic of Barack Obama, who promised to transcend the red-blue divide. But this white Republican coalition has proved remarkably enduring.
In the two elections before 1968, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, both Democrats, averaged 55 percent of the white working class vote. According to Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the pro-Democratic Center for American Progress, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern, both Democrats, averaged 35 percent of that vote, in 1968 and 1972. Since that time, many Republican candidates have tapped into anti-black bias without running as overt segregationists.
“The Republicans suddenly became the party of the white working class,” Teixeira wrote on his blog.
The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 further strengthened the commitment of the white working class to Republican presidential candidates, especially in the North.
It was not, however, until 1994, with the so-called Gingrich revolution, that the Republican Party was able to finally rupture the continuing commitment of lower and moderate income whites to Democratic congressional candidates. The accompanying charts, derived from the 2000 book, “America’s Forgotten Majority,” by Teixeira and Joel Rogers, show how the bottom fell out in 1994 for white working class Democratic congressional support.
White Flight
Change, in percentage points, in Democratic support in congressional races by white voters from 1992 to 1994 by education levels.
High school dropout
High school graduate
Some college
College graduate
MEN
WOMEN
–11
–3
–20
–10
–15
–10
–6
+2
Source: “America’s Forgotten Majority” by Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers
By The New York Times
Gingrich claimed responsibility for his party’s 1994 victories. Bill Clinton’s initial abandonment of the themes that he campaigned on in 1992 was, in fact, more important.
In his first presidential run, Clinton promised welfare reform, a middle-class tax cut and to commit his presidency to the “ideal that if you work hard and play by the rules you’ll be rewarded.” Clinton’s first two years in office, however, were dominated by the issues of gays in the military, health care reform and his attempt make good on his vow to pick a cabinet that “looks like America.”
The changed agenda proved disastrous for Democratic members of the House and Senate.
Stanley Greenberg, Clinton’s 1992 campaign pollster, wrote in the 1999 book “The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics’’ that
The 1994 congressional debacle should be a reminder of what happens when Democrats lose touch with the lives of working people. Bill Clinton’s election was accompanied by great hopes in the country, but over the next two years those hopes turned to disappointment. On the eve of the off-year elections Clinton seemed like a culturally liberal president who could not deliver.
Greenberg continued:
The 1994 election was a disaster produced by a downscale, working-class revolt against the Democrats. Support for congressional Democrats among high school graduates dropped 12 points to only 46 percent. Among white male high school graduates, support for the Democrats fell off a cliff, careening 20 points downward from 57 percent to 37 percent.
The march of working and middle class whites toward the Republican Party took another giant step forward in the Tea Party election of 2010, when they voted against Democratic congressional candidates by 30 points (65-35), providing crucial ballast for the Republicans as they gained 63 seats in the House.
Lost Ground
Change, in percentage points, in Democratic support in congressional races from 1992 to 1994 by voters’ education levels.
Less than
high
school
High
school
Some
college
College
graduate
–10
–11
–12
NO
CHANGE
Source: “America’s Forgotten Majority” by Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers
By The New York Times
For many analysts and Democratic operatives, Obama’s two victories in 2008 and 2012 marked the final collapse of the conservative coalition. Even the Republican Party, notably in the so-called Autopsy Report produced in 2013 by Reince Priebus — soon to be Trump’s chief of staff — acknowledged that a white-dominated conservative alliance was doomed to defeat unless the party opened its doors in general and to Hispanics in particular.
Which brings us to 2016.
On one level, demographic change was moving in Clinton’s direction. The overall white share of the electorate, which was 91 percent in 1960, continued to decline, falling to 72 percent in 2012 and 70 percent in 2016.
How, then, is it possible that this supposedly fading constituency played such a decisive role in 2016?
Two reasons.
First, while Trump barely improved on Romney’s margin among whites generally, the whites who did vote for Trump were significantly different from those who voted for Romney. Trump won non-college whites by 14 points more than Romney, a modern day record. Just as important, the working class voters Trump carried by such huge margins were heavily concentrated in the Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Pennsylvania — all states carried by Obama in 2012 and lost by Clinton in 2016. Together, these state cast 70 Electoral College votes.
Trump’s voters were situated in a way that allowed them to exercise far more influence on the outcome in the Electoral College than their overall numbers would suggest, allowing Trump to sweep across the Rust Belt to victory.
This apostasy among white voters has certainly not gone unnoticed, and party strategists have long debated what, if anything, could be done to bring these voters back into the Democratic fold, particularly since the landslide defeat of 1984.
In 1985, Democrats conducted two major studies of white working class discontent, one by Greenberg, which looked at white U.A.W. workers and retirees in Macomb County Michigan, the other of 33 focus groups nationwide conducted by CRG, a marketing and polling firm.
Greenberg found that for these voters, “Blacks constitute the explanation of their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives.”
This
special status of blacks is perceived by almost all of these individuals as a serious obstacle to their personal advancement. Indeed, discrimination against whites has become a well-assimilated and ready explanation for their status, vulnerability and failures.
The CRG study was equally brutal. These voters
have a whole set of middle-class economic problems today, and their party is not helping them. Instead it is helping blacks, Hispanics and the poor. They feel betrayed.
CRG found that in the view of the white working class, the “Democrats are the giveaway party and ‘giveaway’ means too much middle class money going to blacks and the poor.”
The struggle to revive Democratic support among low and moderate income white voters has more recently become a regular subject on The Democratic Strategist, a website run by the Democratic activist Ed Kilgore, who was once the vice president for policy at the Democratic Leadership Council. Kilgore also publishes a newsletter, the White Working Class Roundtable. In the first issue of the newsletter, Kilgore wrote:
It has become increasingly clear that progressives and Democrats have no alternative except to challenge the hold that conservative and the GOP have established over white working Americans.
In a direct counter to Kilgore, Lee Drutman, a senior scholar at the New America Foundation, argued in a Nov. 11 essay in Foreign Policy that the Democrats need to give up on appeals to working class whites. The headline of his article reads: “The GOP has become the party of populism. Now the Democrats have to build a new party of multicultural cosmopolitanism.”
Drutman argues that
If Democrats define themselves as the party that is opposed to Republicans (as they must), they will soon find themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility (as opposed to the Republicans, who will again run huge deficits), as the party of international responsibility (as opposed to the more isolationist and nationalist Republicans), and as the party of global business (as opposed to the protectionist Republicans). They will continue to be the party of environmentalism (the stakes of this will get even greater soon) and the party of diversity and tolerance.
At the policy level, there are substantial objections to the full-scale emergence of a Democratic Party along these lines. It would mean that neither party would represent the economic interests of the bottom half of the income distribution — regardless of race or ethnicity — on crucial issues of tax and spending policies.
There is, however, growing evidence that the wheels of electoral politics have made the developments Drutman describes increasingly likely.
A comparison of 2004 exit polls and 2016 exit polls shows the changing relevance of income to voting.
In 2004, those with incomes under $30,000 voted Democratic by 20 points; in 2016, these voters voted Democratic by 12 points, a 40 percent decline.
At the upper end, voters with household incomes from $100,000 to $200,000 voted Republican in 2004 by 15 points. In 2016, they voted Republican by one point. Voters making more than $200,000 in 2004 voted Republican by 28 points; in 2016, they also voted Republican by 1 point.
As Drutman points out, “with a President Trump, there is now a change agent to accelerate these forces.”
In another postelection analysis, published on Nov. 15, Teixeira argues that the conservative victory on Election Day will prove short-lived: “In the end, the race will be won by change — as it always is.”
By 2032, Teixeira writes, “we are far more likely to view the 2016 election as the last stand of America’s white working class, dreaming of a past that no longer exists.”
Maybe.
In 2002, Teixeira and John Judis published the classic book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” only to see the re-election of George Bush two years later and the election of Donald Trump 14 years later.
Judis, whose most recent book is “The Populist Explosion,” is less confident than Teixeira. He argues that in this year’s election, either John Kasich or Marco Rubio “could have beaten Clinton, but the coalition would have looked different,” adding in an email that
what I would say, if someone put a gun to my head, is that there is still a stalemate between the two parties in spite of Trump’s and the Republicans success. Trump could fail, the Dems could come back, and then the G.O.P. Or Trump could thread the needle and win two terms. Not clear what will happen. But politically — leave aside the Census Bureau — the Dems are in disarray.
White tribalism or ethnocentrism — whatever you want to call it — is undeniably a powerful force. But so are the identities, loyalties and resentments of those who have their own competing racial and ethnic commitments. The American experiment, which gives all these interests participatory roles in a dynamic democracy, has long been under strain. Over the next four years, it will now be openly tested. The outcome may well be wrenching.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/the-persistence-of-racial-resentment/
The Persistence of Racial Resentment
by THOMAS B. EDSALL
FEBRUARY 6, 2013
NEW YORK TIMES
[Tom Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author, most recently, of “The Age of Austerity.” His column on demographic and strategic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. During the year leading up to the 2012 elections, he wrote for The Times as a weekly contributor to Campaign Stops. He covered American politics at The Washington Post from 1981 to 2006, and before that at The Baltimore Sun and The Providence Journal. He has written four other books: “Building Red America,” “Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics,” “Power and Money: Writing About Politics” and “The New Politics of Inequality.” He splits his time between Washington and New York.]
Although there was plenty of discussion during the 2012 presidential campaign about the Hispanic vote and how intense black turnout would be, the press was preoccupied with the white vote: the white working class, white women and upscale whites.
Largely missing from daily news stories were references to research on how racial attitudes have changed under Obama, the nation’s first black president. In fact, there has been an interesting exploration of this subject among academics, but before getting to that, let’s look back at some election results.
In the 16 presidential elections between 1952 and 2012, only one Democratic candidate, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, won a majority of the white vote. There have been nine Democratic presidential nominees who received a smaller percentage of the white vote than Obama did in 2008 (43 percent) and four who received less white support than Obama did in 2012 (39 percent).
In 2012, Obama won 39 percent of the white electorate. Four decades earlier, in 1972, George McGovern received a record-setting low of the ballots cast by whites, 31 percent. In 1968, Hubert Humphrey won 36 percent of the white vote; in 1980, Jimmy Carter got 33 percent; in 1984, Walter Mondale took 35 percent of the ballots cast by whites. As far back as 1956, Adlai Stevenson tied Obama’s 39 percent, and in 1952, Stevenson received 40 percent – both times running against Dwight D. Eisenhower. Two Democratic nominees from Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis in 1988 (40 percent) and John Kerry in 2004 (41 percent), got white margins only slightly higher than Obama’s in 2012 — and worse than Obama’s 43 percent in 2008. In other words, Obama’s track record with white voters is not very different from that of other Democratic candidates.
Ballots cast for House candidates provide another measure of white partisanship. These contests have been tracked in exit polls from 1980 onward. Between 1980 and 1992, the white vote for Democratic House candidates averaged 49.6 percent. It dropped sharply in 1994 when Newt Gingrich orchestrated the Republican take-over of the House, averaging just 42.7 percent from 1994 through 2004. White support for Democrats rose to an average of 46.7 percent in 2006 and 2008 as public disapproval of George W. Bush and of Republicans in Congress sharply increased.
How can the percentage of people holding anti-black attitudes have increased from 2006 to 2008 at a time when Obama performed better among white voters than the two previous white Democratic nominees, and then again from 2008 to 2012 when Obama won a second term?
In the aftermath of Obama’s election, white support for Congressional Democrats collapsed to its lowest level in the history of House exit polling, 38 percent in 2010 — at once driving and driven by the emerging Tea Party. In 2012, white Democratic support for House candidates remained weak at 39 percent.
Despite how controversial it has been to talk about race, researchers have gathered a substantial amount of information on the opinions of white American voters.
The political scientists Michael Tesler of Brown University and David O. Sears of UCLA have published several studies on this theme and they have also written a book, “Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America,” that analyzes changes in racial attitudes since Obama became the Democratic nominee in 2008.
In their 2010 paper, “President Obama and the Growing Polarization of Partisan Attachments by Racial Attitudes and Race,” Tesler and Sears argue that "the evidence strongly suggests that party attachments have become increasingly polarized by both racial attitudes and race as a result of Obama’s rise to prominence within the Democratic Party."
Specifically, Tesler and Sears found that voters high on a racial-resentment scale moved one notch toward intensification of partisanship within the Republican Party on a seven-point scale from strong Democrat through independent to strong Republican.
To measure racial resentment, which Tesler and Sears describe as “subtle hostility towards African-Americans,” the authors used data from the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey, an extensive collection of polling data maintained at the University of Chicago.
In the case of A.N.E.S. data, Tesler and Sears write:
The scale was constructed from how strongly respondents agreed or disagreed with the following assertions: 1) Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors. 2) Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class. 3) Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve. 4) It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.
The General Social Survey included questions asking respondents to rate competing causes of racial discrimination and inequality:
The scale was constructed from responses to the following 4 items: 1) Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors. 2) A 3-category variable indicating whether respondents said lack of motivation is or is not a reason for racial inequality. 3) A 3-category variable indicating whether respondents said discrimination is or is not a reason for racial inequality. 4) A three-category variable indicating whether respondents rated whites more, less or equally hardworking than blacks on 7 point stereotype scales.
Supporting the Tesler-Sears findings, Josh Pasek, a professor in the communication studies department at the University of Michigan, Jon A. Krosnick, a political scientist at Stanford, and Trevor Tompson, the director of the Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, use responses from three different surveys in their analysis of “The Impact of Anti-Black Racism on Approval of Barack Obama’s Job Performance and on Voting in the 2012 Presidential Election.”
Pasek and his collaborators found a statistically significant increase from 2008 to 2012 in “explicit anti-black attitudes” – a measure based on questions very similar those used by Tesler and Sears for their racial-resentment scale. The percentage of voters with explicit anti-black attitudes rose from 47.6 in 2008 and 47.3 percent in 2010 to 50.9 percent in 2012.
Crucially, Pasek found that Republicans drove the change: “People who identified themselves as Republicans in 2012 expressed anti-Black attitudes more often than did Republican identifiers in 2008.”
In 2008, Pasek and his collaborators note, the proportion of people expressing anti-Black attitudes was 31 percent among Democrats, 49 percent among independents, and 71 percent among Republicans. By 2012, the numbers had gone up. “The proportion of people expressing anti-Black attitudes,” they write, “was 32 percent among Democrats, 48 percent among independents, and 79 percent among Republicans.”
At the moment, the population of the United States (314 million) is heading towards a majority-minority status in 2042.
The American electorate, on the other hand (126 million) is currently 72 percent white, based on the voters who cast ballots last November.
Obama’s ascendency to the presidency means that, on race, the Rubicon has been crossed (2008) and re-crossed (2012).
What are we to make of these developments? Is the country more or less racist? How can the percentage of people holding anti-black attitudes have increased from 2006 to 2008 at a time when Obama performed better among white voters than the two previous white Democratic nominees, and then again from 2008 to 2012 when Obama won a second term?
In fact, the shifts described by Tesler and Pasek are an integral aspect of the intensifying conservatism within the right wing of the Republican Party. Many voters voicing stronger anti-black affect were already Republican. Thus, in 2012, shifts in their attitudes, while they contributed to a 4 percentage point reduction in Obama’s white support, did not result in a Romney victory.
Some Republican strategists believe the party’s deepening conservatism is scaring away voters.
“We have a choice: we can become a shrinking regional party of middle-aged and older white men, or we can fight to become a national governing party,” John Weaver, a consultant to the 2008 McCain campaign, said after Obama’s re-election. Mark McKinnon, an adviser to former President George W. Bush, made a similar point: “The party needs more tolerance, more diversity and a deeper appreciation for the concerns of the middle class.”
Not only is the right risking marginalization as its views on race have become more extreme, it is veering out of the mainstream on contraception and abortion, positions that fueled an 11 point gender gap in 2012 and a 13 point gap in 2008.
Given that a majority of the electorate will remain white for a number of years, the hurdle that the Republican Party faces is building the party’s white margins by 2 to 3 points. For Romney to have won, he needed 62 percent of the white vote, not the 59 percent he got.
Working directly against this goal is what Time Magazine recently described as the Republican “brand identity that has emerged from the stars of the conservative media ecosystem: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and others.”
It is not so much Latino and black voters that the Republican Party needs. To win the White House again, it must assuage the social conscience of mainstream, moderate white voters among whom an ethos of tolerance has become normal. These voters are concerned with fairness and diversity, even as they stand to the right of center. It is there that the upcoming political battles — on the gamut of issues from race to rights — will be fought.
In 1968, these white voters — often low or moderate income, disproportionately male and clustered in exurban and rural areas, then as now — were crucial to the birth of the modern conservative coalition.
That year, famously, southern whites angered by enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act abandoned the Democratic Party in droves, and they were soon joined by many northern whites opposed to court-ordered busing.
The Democratic Party’s commitment to civil rights prompted millions of white voters to cast ballots either for Richard Nixon, running as the Republican nominee, or for George Wallace, the segregationist Dixiecrat and former governor of Alabama, running as the nominee of the American Independent Party.
Together, Nixon and Wallace won 56.9 percent of all votes in 1968 and more than six out of every ten white votes, laying the groundwork for the conversion of the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party into a key component of the modern Republican Party. Democrats have made inroads into this coalition a few times, either by running more centrist Southerners like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton or through the campaign magic of Barack Obama, who promised to transcend the red-blue divide. But this white Republican coalition has proved remarkably enduring.
In the two elections before 1968, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, both Democrats, averaged 55 percent of the white working class vote. According to Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the pro-Democratic Center for American Progress, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern, both Democrats, averaged 35 percent of that vote, in 1968 and 1972. Since that time, many Republican candidates have tapped into anti-black bias without running as overt segregationists.
“The Republicans suddenly became the party of the white working class,” Teixeira wrote on his blog.
The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 further strengthened the commitment of the white working class to Republican presidential candidates, especially in the North.
It was not, however, until 1994, with the so-called Gingrich revolution, that the Republican Party was able to finally rupture the continuing commitment of lower and moderate income whites to Democratic congressional candidates. The accompanying charts, derived from the 2000 book, “America’s Forgotten Majority,” by Teixeira and Joel Rogers, show how the bottom fell out in 1994 for white working class Democratic congressional support.
White Flight
Change, in percentage points, in Democratic support in congressional races by white voters from 1992 to 1994 by education levels.
High school dropout
High school graduate
Some college
College graduate
MEN
WOMEN
–11
–3
–20
–10
–15
–10
–6
+2
Source: “America’s Forgotten Majority” by Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers
By The New York Times
Gingrich claimed responsibility for his party’s 1994 victories. Bill Clinton’s initial abandonment of the themes that he campaigned on in 1992 was, in fact, more important.
In his first presidential run, Clinton promised welfare reform, a middle-class tax cut and to commit his presidency to the “ideal that if you work hard and play by the rules you’ll be rewarded.” Clinton’s first two years in office, however, were dominated by the issues of gays in the military, health care reform and his attempt make good on his vow to pick a cabinet that “looks like America.”
The changed agenda proved disastrous for Democratic members of the House and Senate.
Stanley Greenberg, Clinton’s 1992 campaign pollster, wrote in the 1999 book “The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics’’ that
The 1994 congressional debacle should be a reminder of what happens when Democrats lose touch with the lives of working people. Bill Clinton’s election was accompanied by great hopes in the country, but over the next two years those hopes turned to disappointment. On the eve of the off-year elections Clinton seemed like a culturally liberal president who could not deliver.
Greenberg continued:
The 1994 election was a disaster produced by a downscale, working-class revolt against the Democrats. Support for congressional Democrats among high school graduates dropped 12 points to only 46 percent. Among white male high school graduates, support for the Democrats fell off a cliff, careening 20 points downward from 57 percent to 37 percent.
The march of working and middle class whites toward the Republican Party took another giant step forward in the Tea Party election of 2010, when they voted against Democratic congressional candidates by 30 points (65-35), providing crucial ballast for the Republicans as they gained 63 seats in the House.
Lost Ground
Change, in percentage points, in Democratic support in congressional races from 1992 to 1994 by voters’ education levels.
Less than
high
school
High
school
Some
college
College
graduate
–10
–11
–12
NO
CHANGE
Source: “America’s Forgotten Majority” by Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers
By The New York Times
For many analysts and Democratic operatives, Obama’s two victories in 2008 and 2012 marked the final collapse of the conservative coalition. Even the Republican Party, notably in the so-called Autopsy Report produced in 2013 by Reince Priebus — soon to be Trump’s chief of staff — acknowledged that a white-dominated conservative alliance was doomed to defeat unless the party opened its doors in general and to Hispanics in particular.
Which brings us to 2016.
On one level, demographic change was moving in Clinton’s direction. The overall white share of the electorate, which was 91 percent in 1960, continued to decline, falling to 72 percent in 2012 and 70 percent in 2016.
How, then, is it possible that this supposedly fading constituency played such a decisive role in 2016?
Two reasons.
First, while Trump barely improved on Romney’s margin among whites generally, the whites who did vote for Trump were significantly different from those who voted for Romney. Trump won non-college whites by 14 points more than Romney, a modern day record. Just as important, the working class voters Trump carried by such huge margins were heavily concentrated in the Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Pennsylvania — all states carried by Obama in 2012 and lost by Clinton in 2016. Together, these state cast 70 Electoral College votes.
Trump’s voters were situated in a way that allowed them to exercise far more influence on the outcome in the Electoral College than their overall numbers would suggest, allowing Trump to sweep across the Rust Belt to victory.
This apostasy among white voters has certainly not gone unnoticed, and party strategists have long debated what, if anything, could be done to bring these voters back into the Democratic fold, particularly since the landslide defeat of 1984.
In 1985, Democrats conducted two major studies of white working class discontent, one by Greenberg, which looked at white U.A.W. workers and retirees in Macomb County Michigan, the other of 33 focus groups nationwide conducted by CRG, a marketing and polling firm.
Greenberg found that for these voters, “Blacks constitute the explanation of their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives.”
This
special status of blacks is perceived by almost all of these individuals as a serious obstacle to their personal advancement. Indeed, discrimination against whites has become a well-assimilated and ready explanation for their status, vulnerability and failures.
The CRG study was equally brutal. These voters
have a whole set of middle-class economic problems today, and their party is not helping them. Instead it is helping blacks, Hispanics and the poor. They feel betrayed.
CRG found that in the view of the white working class, the “Democrats are the giveaway party and ‘giveaway’ means too much middle class money going to blacks and the poor.”
The struggle to revive Democratic support among low and moderate income white voters has more recently become a regular subject on The Democratic Strategist, a website run by the Democratic activist Ed Kilgore, who was once the vice president for policy at the Democratic Leadership Council. Kilgore also publishes a newsletter, the White Working Class Roundtable. In the first issue of the newsletter, Kilgore wrote:
It has become increasingly clear that progressives and Democrats have no alternative except to challenge the hold that conservative and the GOP have established over white working Americans.
In a direct counter to Kilgore, Lee Drutman, a senior scholar at the New America Foundation, argued in a Nov. 11 essay in Foreign Policy that the Democrats need to give up on appeals to working class whites. The headline of his article reads: “The GOP has become the party of populism. Now the Democrats have to build a new party of multicultural cosmopolitanism.”
Drutman argues that
If Democrats define themselves as the party that is opposed to Republicans (as they must), they will soon find themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility (as opposed to the Republicans, who will again run huge deficits), as the party of international responsibility (as opposed to the more isolationist and nationalist Republicans), and as the party of global business (as opposed to the protectionist Republicans). They will continue to be the party of environmentalism (the stakes of this will get even greater soon) and the party of diversity and tolerance.
At the policy level, there are substantial objections to the full-scale emergence of a Democratic Party along these lines. It would mean that neither party would represent the economic interests of the bottom half of the income distribution — regardless of race or ethnicity — on crucial issues of tax and spending policies.
There is, however, growing evidence that the wheels of electoral politics have made the developments Drutman describes increasingly likely.
A comparison of 2004 exit polls and 2016 exit polls shows the changing relevance of income to voting.
In 2004, those with incomes under $30,000 voted Democratic by 20 points; in 2016, these voters voted Democratic by 12 points, a 40 percent decline.
At the upper end, voters with household incomes from $100,000 to $200,000 voted Republican in 2004 by 15 points. In 2016, they voted Republican by one point. Voters making more than $200,000 in 2004 voted Republican by 28 points; in 2016, they also voted Republican by 1 point.
As Drutman points out, “with a President Trump, there is now a change agent to accelerate these forces.”
In another postelection analysis, published on Nov. 15, Teixeira argues that the conservative victory on Election Day will prove short-lived: “In the end, the race will be won by change — as it always is.”
By 2032, Teixeira writes, “we are far more likely to view the 2016 election as the last stand of America’s white working class, dreaming of a past that no longer exists.”
Maybe.
In 2002, Teixeira and John Judis published the classic book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” only to see the re-election of George Bush two years later and the election of Donald Trump 14 years later.
Judis, whose most recent book is “The Populist Explosion,” is less confident than Teixeira. He argues that in this year’s election, either John Kasich or Marco Rubio “could have beaten Clinton, but the coalition would have looked different,” adding in an email that
what I would say, if someone put a gun to my head, is that there is still a stalemate between the two parties in spite of Trump’s and the Republicans success. Trump could fail, the Dems could come back, and then the G.O.P. Or Trump could thread the needle and win two terms. Not clear what will happen. But politically — leave aside the Census Bureau — the Dems are in disarray.
White tribalism or ethnocentrism — whatever you want to call it — is undeniably a powerful force. But so are the identities, loyalties and resentments of those who have their own competing racial and ethnic commitments. The American experiment, which gives all these interests participatory roles in a dynamic democracy, has long been under strain. Over the next four years, it will now be openly tested. The outcome may well be wrenching.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/the-persistence-of-racial-resentment/
The Persistence of Racial Resentment
by THOMAS B. EDSALL
FEBRUARY 6, 2013
NEW YORK TIMES
[Tom Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author, most recently, of “The Age of Austerity.” His column on demographic and strategic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. During the year leading up to the 2012 elections, he wrote for The Times as a weekly contributor to Campaign Stops. He covered American politics at The Washington Post from 1981 to 2006, and before that at The Baltimore Sun and The Providence Journal. He has written four other books: “Building Red America,” “Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics,” “Power and Money: Writing About Politics” and “The New Politics of Inequality.” He splits his time between Washington and New York.]
Although there was plenty of discussion during the 2012 presidential campaign about the Hispanic vote and how intense black turnout would be, the press was preoccupied with the white vote: the white working class, white women and upscale whites.
Largely missing from daily news stories were references to research on how racial attitudes have changed under Obama, the nation’s first black president. In fact, there has been an interesting exploration of this subject among academics, but before getting to that, let’s look back at some election results.
In the 16 presidential elections between 1952 and 2012, only one Democratic candidate, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, won a majority of the white vote. There have been nine Democratic presidential nominees who received a smaller percentage of the white vote than Obama did in 2008 (43 percent) and four who received less white support than Obama did in 2012 (39 percent).
In 2012, Obama won 39 percent of the white electorate. Four decades earlier, in 1972, George McGovern received a record-setting low of the ballots cast by whites, 31 percent. In 1968, Hubert Humphrey won 36 percent of the white vote; in 1980, Jimmy Carter got 33 percent; in 1984, Walter Mondale took 35 percent of the ballots cast by whites. As far back as 1956, Adlai Stevenson tied Obama’s 39 percent, and in 1952, Stevenson received 40 percent – both times running against Dwight D. Eisenhower. Two Democratic nominees from Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis in 1988 (40 percent) and John Kerry in 2004 (41 percent), got white margins only slightly higher than Obama’s in 2012 — and worse than Obama’s 43 percent in 2008. In other words, Obama’s track record with white voters is not very different from that of other Democratic candidates.
Ballots cast for House candidates provide another measure of white partisanship. These contests have been tracked in exit polls from 1980 onward. Between 1980 and 1992, the white vote for Democratic House candidates averaged 49.6 percent. It dropped sharply in 1994 when Newt Gingrich orchestrated the Republican take-over of the House, averaging just 42.7 percent from 1994 through 2004. White support for Democrats rose to an average of 46.7 percent in 2006 and 2008 as public disapproval of George W. Bush and of Republicans in Congress sharply increased.
How can the percentage of people holding anti-black attitudes have increased from 2006 to 2008 at a time when Obama performed better among white voters than the two previous white Democratic nominees, and then again from 2008 to 2012 when Obama won a second term?
In the aftermath of Obama’s election, white support for Congressional Democrats collapsed to its lowest level in the history of House exit polling, 38 percent in 2010 — at once driving and driven by the emerging Tea Party. In 2012, white Democratic support for House candidates remained weak at 39 percent.
Despite how controversial it has been to talk about race, researchers have gathered a substantial amount of information on the opinions of white American voters.
The political scientists Michael Tesler of Brown University and David O. Sears of UCLA have published several studies on this theme and they have also written a book, “Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America,” that analyzes changes in racial attitudes since Obama became the Democratic nominee in 2008.
In their 2010 paper, “President Obama and the Growing Polarization of Partisan Attachments by Racial Attitudes and Race,” Tesler and Sears argue that "the evidence strongly suggests that party attachments have become increasingly polarized by both racial attitudes and race as a result of Obama’s rise to prominence within the Democratic Party."
Specifically, Tesler and Sears found that voters high on a racial-resentment scale moved one notch toward intensification of partisanship within the Republican Party on a seven-point scale from strong Democrat through independent to strong Republican.
To measure racial resentment, which Tesler and Sears describe as “subtle hostility towards African-Americans,” the authors used data from the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey, an extensive collection of polling data maintained at the University of Chicago.
In the case of A.N.E.S. data, Tesler and Sears write:
The scale was constructed from how strongly respondents agreed or disagreed with the following assertions: 1) Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors. 2) Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class. 3) Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve. 4) It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.
The General Social Survey included questions asking respondents to rate competing causes of racial discrimination and inequality:
The scale was constructed from responses to the following 4 items: 1) Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors. 2) A 3-category variable indicating whether respondents said lack of motivation is or is not a reason for racial inequality. 3) A 3-category variable indicating whether respondents said discrimination is or is not a reason for racial inequality. 4) A three-category variable indicating whether respondents rated whites more, less or equally hardworking than blacks on 7 point stereotype scales.
Supporting the Tesler-Sears findings, Josh Pasek, a professor in the communication studies department at the University of Michigan, Jon A. Krosnick, a political scientist at Stanford, and Trevor Tompson, the director of the Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, use responses from three different surveys in their analysis of “The Impact of Anti-Black Racism on Approval of Barack Obama’s Job Performance and on Voting in the 2012 Presidential Election.”
Pasek and his collaborators found a statistically significant increase from 2008 to 2012 in “explicit anti-black attitudes” – a measure based on questions very similar those used by Tesler and Sears for their racial-resentment scale. The percentage of voters with explicit anti-black attitudes rose from 47.6 in 2008 and 47.3 percent in 2010 to 50.9 percent in 2012.
Crucially, Pasek found that Republicans drove the change: “People who identified themselves as Republicans in 2012 expressed anti-Black attitudes more often than did Republican identifiers in 2008.”
In 2008, Pasek and his collaborators note, the proportion of people expressing anti-Black attitudes was 31 percent among Democrats, 49 percent among independents, and 71 percent among Republicans. By 2012, the numbers had gone up. “The proportion of people expressing anti-Black attitudes,” they write, “was 32 percent among Democrats, 48 percent among independents, and 79 percent among Republicans.”
At the moment, the population of the United States (314 million) is heading towards a majority-minority status in 2042.
The American electorate, on the other hand (126 million) is currently 72 percent white, based on the voters who cast ballots last November.
Obama’s ascendency to the presidency means that, on race, the Rubicon has been crossed (2008) and re-crossed (2012).
What are we to make of these developments? Is the country more or less racist? How can the percentage of people holding anti-black attitudes have increased from 2006 to 2008 at a time when Obama performed better among white voters than the two previous white Democratic nominees, and then again from 2008 to 2012 when Obama won a second term?
In fact, the shifts described by Tesler and Pasek are an integral aspect of the intensifying conservatism within the right wing of the Republican Party. Many voters voicing stronger anti-black affect were already Republican. Thus, in 2012, shifts in their attitudes, while they contributed to a 4 percentage point reduction in Obama’s white support, did not result in a Romney victory.
Some Republican strategists believe the party’s deepening conservatism is scaring away voters.
“We have a choice: we can become a shrinking regional party of middle-aged and older white men, or we can fight to become a national governing party,” John Weaver, a consultant to the 2008 McCain campaign, said after Obama’s re-election. Mark McKinnon, an adviser to former President George W. Bush, made a similar point: “The party needs more tolerance, more diversity and a deeper appreciation for the concerns of the middle class.”
Not only is the right risking marginalization as its views on race have become more extreme, it is veering out of the mainstream on contraception and abortion, positions that fueled an 11 point gender gap in 2012 and a 13 point gap in 2008.
Given that a majority of the electorate will remain white for a number of years, the hurdle that the Republican Party faces is building the party’s white margins by 2 to 3 points. For Romney to have won, he needed 62 percent of the white vote, not the 59 percent he got.
Working directly against this goal is what Time Magazine recently described as the Republican “brand identity that has emerged from the stars of the conservative media ecosystem: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and others.”
It is not so much Latino and black voters that the Republican Party needs. To win the White House again, it must assuage the social conscience of mainstream, moderate white voters among whom an ethos of tolerance has become normal. These voters are concerned with fairness and diversity, even as they stand to the right of center. It is there that the upcoming political battles — on the gamut of issues from race to rights — will be fought.