The title of this post is misleading because at this point I want to suggest that in her two videos (see
Parts 1 and
2), Tess Rafferty's real target isn't people who voted for Trump.
Her target is people like me.
Let me explain.
The election of Donald Trump shocked the American left like nothing I have seen in my lifetime. It certainly shocked me. When a few people compared Election Day to 9/11 I thought the comparison grotesque but in one respect I understood it. The September 11 attacks shook all Americans to their core. They served notice that we didn't live in the world that we thought we lived in. Most liberals were viscerally shaken by the election and the discovery that Trump could not only get taken seriously as a candidate and gain the Republican nomination, but could actually become the 45th President of the United States.... Well, if anything could convey the impression that we didn't live in the country we thought we lived in, Trump's election could do it. And did.
Against any other candidate in the Republican field I cannot imagine people getting so rattled. Had Jeb Bush defeated Hillary Clinton, for example, liberals would have been disappointed in the same way that all of us are disappointed when our guy doesn't win. I think that would have been true even if Ted Cruz had won. Sure, there would have been the usual Chicken Little rhetoric--"the sky is falling, the sky is falling"--but nobody would actually have believed it. With Trump, however. Well, maybe the sky was indeed falling.
The problem wasn't Donald Trump per se. The problem was that so many of our countrymen voted for him. According to the
final tally, Trump received 62,979,636 votes, more than sufficient to give him a convincing majority in the Electoral College: 306 to 232. (That is of course prior to the
formal electoral college vote on December 19, in which two Republican electors defected from Trump and five defected from Clinton, yielding an official tally of 304 to 227.)
Hillary Clinton, for whom 65,844,610 Americans cast their ballots, won the popular vote by a margin a 2.1 percent--the second highest margin for a losing presidential candidate in US history. (In 1876 Samuel J. Tilden lost despite a margin of 3 percent). But the operative word is "losing."
To explain just why Trump's election was so disturbing would take so long that it would essentially hijack this post. And others--Tess Rafferty, for instance--have explained it well enough already. So let me get directly to Tess Rafferty and her two videos, ostensibly aimed at Trump voters but really aimed at me.
Why me? Well, in the aftermath of the election liberals essentially had two impulses. The first was to underscore, as firmly as possible, their rejection of the misogyny and xenophobia that Trump openly displayed and the tacit racism that was obvious enough to make white supremacists regard him as their champion. The second was to try to understand why so many Americans chose to vote for Trump despite myriad glaring flaws. The impulses weren't mutually exclusive but they did require a difficult balancing act that required nuance. And in our polarized political culture, nuance is not highly prized.
Given a forced choice, my heart was more with the second impulse than the first. I have always been a sucker for the idea that a way to have a constructive dialogue can always be found and that we have a moral responsibility to find it. Spouses have to find ways to reach spouses. Parents have to find ways to reach children. Friends have to find ways to reach friends. Nations have to find ways to reach rivals. And countrymen have to find ways to reach countrymen. LBJ is said to have frequently quoted Isaiah: "Come now, and let us reason together." The idea that humans can do this--that they can reason their way out of conflict--is powerfully attractive.
In recent weeks we've seen a number of liberal opinion pieces that try to understand Trump supporters. A op/ed that currently stands at #5 on the New York Times list of its most popular articles bears the title,
"Sorry, Liberals, Bigotry Didn't Elect Donald Trump.", written by David Paul Kuhn, author of
The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma (2007).
Several weeks before the election, a Quinnipiac University
poll
found that 51 percent of white working-class voters did not believe
that Mr. Trump had a “sense of decency” and ranked Mrs. Clinton slightly
higher on that quality.
But
they were not voting on decency. Indeed, one-fifth of voters — more
than 25 million Americans — said they “somewhat” disapproved of Mr.
Trump’s treatment of women. Mr. Trump won three-quarters of these
voters, despite their disapprobation.
Bluntly
put, much of the white working class decided that Mr. Trump could be a
jerk. Absent any other champion, they supported the jerk they thought
was more on their side — that is, on the issues that most concerned
them.
Just yesterday an article from September briefly occupied the #16 spot:
"We Need 'Somebody Spectacular': Views From Trump Country," a sympathetic portrait of voters in eastern Kentucky. "Appalachian voters know perfectly well the candidate is dangerous," says the teaser. "But they're desperate for change."
"Everybody Is Reading Books to Try to Explain Trump Voters," reported the Style section of the
Washington Post in early September. Prominent among those books was
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Culture and Crisis, by J.D. Vance, a young author with a Harvard degree but roots in the coal country of Kentucky and the transplanted working class Appalachians living in Ohio.
Hillbilly Elegy briefly held status as practically a Rosetta Stone for understanding the core Trump supporter--enough to provoke a backlash. A writer in
The New Republic excoriated the author as
"J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America."
But that was a rejection of Vance, not the idea of trying to understand Trump voters empathetically. The author, herself a native of Appalachia, argued that Appalachian voters turned to Trump because the Democratic Party forgot about them: "We don’t need to normalize Trumpism or empathize with white
supremacy to reach these voters. They weren’t destined to vote for Trump; many
were Democratic voters. They aren’t destined to stay loyal to him in the
future. To win them back, we must address their material concerns, and we can
do that without coddling their prejudices. After all, America’s most famous
progressive populist—Bernie Sanders—won many of the counties Clinton lost to
Trump."
Perhaps an even more powerful explanation for why Trump supporters voted as they did came from Michael Moore, because he predicted a Trump victory at a time when people like me were offering odds of ten-to-one on Hillary Clinton. On October 26, an article in Salon explained Moore's belief that
"People Will Vote for Donald Trump as a Giant 'Fxxk You'--and He'll Win."
Trump’s sincerity in wanting to stand up for the average Joe doesn’t
even matter, Moore argued, because voting for him is a giant message
that disaffected Americans will be happy to send to media and political
elites who they see as not caring about them.
“Trump’s election is going to be the biggest ‘fuck you’ ever recorded in human history — and it will feel good,” Moore argued.
“Whether
Trump means it or not is kind of irrelevant because he’s saying the
things to people who are hurting, and that’s why every beaten-down,
nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called
the middle class loves Trump,” Moore continued. “He is the human
Molotov cocktail that they’ve been waiting for, the human hand grenade
that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from
them.”
In and of itself, the impulse to understand the Trump voter is not problematic--until you start arguing that maybe the Trump voter has a point. It's perhaps bad enough if the Trump voter has an economic point--maybe it's a problem if you used to be a coal miner making $70,000/year and now you're struggling to find two dimes to rub together, and maybe we should have factored that outcome into our concerns about the environment. But it's worse if they have a cultural point, which is the argument that Columbia University humanities professor Mark Lilla made in a widely-discussed New York Times op/ed,
"The End of Identity Liberalism." (November 18). It's sufficiently important to be worth quoting at length:
It is a truism that America has become a more diverse
country. It is also a beautiful thing to watch. Visitors from other countries,
particularly those having trouble incorporating different ethnic groups and
faiths, are amazed that we manage to pull it off. Not perfectly, of course, but
certainly better than any European or Asian nation today. It’s an extraordinary
success story.
But how should this diversity shape our politics? The
standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should
become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle
of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in
our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a
kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted
liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of
governing.
One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election
campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must
be brought to an end.
***
A convenient liberal
interpretation of the recent presidential election would have it that Mr. Trump
won in large part because he managed to transform economic disadvantage into
racial rage — the “whitelash” thesis. This is convenient because it sanctions a
conviction of moral superiority and allows liberals to ignore what those voters
said were their overriding concerns. It also encourages the fantasy that the
Republican right is doomed to demographic extinction in the long run — which
means liberals have only to wait for the country to fall into their laps. The
surprisingly high percentage of the Latino vote that went to Mr. Trump should
remind us that the longer ethnic groups are here in this country, the more
politically diverse they become.
Finally, the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals
of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has
encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a
disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such
people are not actually reacting against the reality of our diverse
America (they tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the
country). But they are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of
identity, which is what they mean by “political correctness.” Liberals
should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American
politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the
identity game should be prepared to lose it.
For many liberals, that kind of response is fundamentally unacceptable. Comedian Samantha Bee
explained why when she used the op/ed as Exhibit A in her contention that "identity politics" is a dangerous euphemism for something else:
Bee: "Identity politics. That's a fun word. Can anyone whitesplain it to us?"
FOX News guest Heather McDonald: "Identity politics defines whites, and particularly white males, as the oppressors of every other group, real or imagined, in the United States. It has produced vast government bureaucracies, dedicated to extirpating phantom white racism."
Bee: "OK. One: 'White males' is an identity. Two: The only way white racism is a phantom is that its most iconic uniform is literally a ghost costume." [Photo of KKK rally in full regalia]
[Laughter]
Bee: "I forget. What do you call it when you have two phrases for the same thing, but one makes people feel better?
Trump, speaking at a rally: "... but that was a euphenism [sic]."
[Laughter]
Bee: Right! A 'euphenism.' He is, like, smart. . . . Identity politics is the dismissive term for what we used to call 'civil rights' and 'equality.'"
Then follows a montage of FOX News commentators agreeing that the Democrats lost because of their fixation on identity politics rather than jobs.
Bee: "It's our fault. We fell down the stairs. We're so clumsy. Look, stop it! Come on, Democrats! There's Loser Stockholm Syndrome and then there's taking your talking points from Steve Doosy and pals." [Doosy is the co-host of the morning talk show, "FOX and Friends."]
Another montage follows, that segues to North Carolina Republican Governor Pat McCrory's loss to his Democratic opponent, widely seen as due to his association with the infamous "bathroom" bill aimed at transgender persons.
Bee: "Democrats, I know you're having a rough time. You hate being lost in the wilderness. You have allergies, and you were reading a book in a corner when your Scoutmaster taught everyone which leaves to avoid. [Laughter.] But if your panic over a loss makes you abandon both your principles and the people who actually vote for you, then you'll be in the wilderness for a decade. Or until Trump's cabinet sells the wilderness to oil companies. By all means, invite working class white people to the party. Just don't let them take over the d.j. table."
By all means, let's embrace working class white people--but on our own terms.
This gets to the purpose of Rafferty's demands that Trump voters must take ownership for the full implications of their vote, which includes lending aid and comfort to racists, xenophobes, and just plain assholes. It isn't directed at Trump voters at all. It's directed at Democrats who might be inclined to open a dialogue with Trump voters, by modeling an approach to dialogue designed to foreclose it at the outset. The real message is that dialogue--honest dialogue involving give-and-take and an open mind--constitutes betrayal.
I reject that sentiment, of course. But here's a disquieting idea that is its functional equivalent, and that is becoming harder for me to dismiss: Dialogue constitutes a waste of time. I'll explain my reasons for disquiet in my next entry.
