In the morning thread, valued commenter Morzer pointed out an interesting piece over at Vox entitled “A pollster on the racial panic Obama’s presidency triggered — and what Democrats must do now.” I recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt, with the Vox interviewer (Desmond-Harris) citing the pollster’s (Belcher) tweet:
Jenée Desmond-Harris: You recently tweeted that “economic power is often perceived through group lenses.” What was that a response to, and how does it tie into the message of the book?
Cornell Belcher: That was a tweet really to the progressive establishment — which means too often white Northeastern liberals — the idea that if we just had a better economic message, these people would all of a sudden go, “Oh, my god, what was I thinking, I should be voting Democrat!” That if we just find the right words to connect with downscale whites, they’ll say, “Oh, you know what, I am voting against my economic interests.”
It’s a disconnect that’s frustrating to me. They’re not voting against their economic interests; they are voting for their higher interests — there’s an idea that your group positioning doesn’t matter economically. The idea that you can disconnect white people from their group position and make pocketbook arguments to them void of the history of their group is folly.
That is not to say don’t target or don’t go after them. That’s absolutely not what I’m saying. What I am saying is just that the answer isn’t simply a pocketbook argument — we do have to inoculate against the increased tribalism and racialism in order to have that conversation. As long as there is a group sense of decline, we do have to calculate for that in our conversation and try to inoculate that as opposed to simply coming up with another argument about why raising the minimum wage is beneficial to you.
The earlier post about the Obamacare enrollees who voted for Trump even though some depend on Obamacare for their very lives lends credence to Belcher’s theory, IMO. Either those voters are irretrievably stupid, or some other, more important factor is driving their votes — like maybe they’re engaged in white identity politics, consciously or not. Or both, in some cases.
Anyhoo, Belcher identifies President Obama’s election as the event that triggered racial panic, eventually prompting many white voters to vote as a white identity group this year. I haven’t read Belcher’s book, but that rings true from my experience living among small town middle-class and downscale white folks.
I’ll take it a step further and observe that while Obama’s election undoubtedly prompted racial panic, that was only the opening salvo, and subsequent events have spread the fear. PBO is incredibly skilled at not offending white people, or he’d never have been elected in the first place. He’s the most squeaky-clean, scandal-free, family-oriented president we’ve had in generations — he had to be.
Of course, behaving as a paragon wasn’t enough: Millions of people completely lost their shit about Obama right off the bat, and the Republicans capitalized on that fear by relentlessly otherizing PBO, openly disrespecting him and abandoning all pretense of good governance to oppose him 100%.
Still, because of his singular character, strengths as a leader and political skills, there were enough white Americans who didn’t succumb to racial panic to enable Obama’s reelection. So how was it possible that a nation that elected a black man president twice could turn around and elect a racist demagogue?
My theory is that the emergence of Black Lives Matter and related resistance to structural racism in the criminal justice system tipped more white folks into racial panic mode, contributing to Trump’s rise. I don’t believe it was just that; there were many other factors.* But it was enough to tip the scale in a tight race. I’ve seen the visceral hatred of BLM and Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem, etc., even among white folks I would not categorize as hardcore racists.
Anyhoo, Belcher contends that the only way to overcome this stalemate where the GOP is increasingly the white identity party is to confront our racist past and come to understand each other. Geez, I hope he’s wrong, because I don’t see us ever doing that.
But I think Belcher’s right about the economics argument. I’m all for making economic appeals to the working class, as long as we don’t downplay our commitment to equality and focus on an extra-special subset thereof. But there’s a shit-ton of evidence — not just from this election — that such appeals will fall on deaf ears.
*Including, but not limited to, Putin / Comey / WikiLeaks, the decades-long wingnut jihad against the Clintons, a lazy, corrupt, fragmented media, etc.
Lit3Bolt
No uppity latte-huffing coastal elite is gonna tell ME not to pull the trigger to my gun to my forehead.
*BLAM*
Kathleen
I saw emptywheel reply to a Dana Houle (I think it was Dana) on Twitter with a very insightful comment, which was that why is it so many Trump supporters are addicted to opioids and meth and committing suicide in higher numbers than rest of the population. I don’t know if there were actual data to make that correlation or if it was observation based on patterns documented in certain segments of white population (rural, older, etc.). It parallels that self destructive behavior that wants to abolish ACA, even if it means destroying their lives or lives of loved ones. I would call it a serious disconnect from their own life force. You can’t “reason” with people who are that disconnected.
BillCinSD
I never really understood the economic interests arguments. I don’t necessarily vote in my own economic interests, why should I ever think others would do so?
Baud
I vote for people who will increase my taxes. I’m not economically stupid — I simply consider the whole picture. The only difference is my picture is bright and sunny and theirs is dark and gloomy.
Brachiator
Not just a demagogue, but an incompetent buffoon. A damn good question.
Sadly, there may be much to this.
But you might say that the lines started being drawn with the Trayvon Martin case. Some white people became positively offended that Obama would say that the child could have been his son. They wanted an Other demonizing law-and-order president, and were confused and repelled when they did not get one.
Yarrow
Yep. Seen that myself, at least the Kaepernick hatred. “Why can’t the owners make him stand up and be respectful? They should have some way of making him!”
rp
Agree 100%. I’ve been thinking a lot about BLM since the election, and I think it might have had a far more significant impact than Obama himself. I agree with BLM on the merits, but I think the movement might have supplied a significant amount of the fuel that Trump was able to ignite.
I’ve talked to a few sophisticated and “reasonable” conservatives here in small town Washington, DC who absolutely LOATHE BLM and Kaepernick.
JMG
Making the whole dilemma worse is that the worst racial panic exists in places where about the only time black people are seen is when whites watch the NFL on TV. People are dissatisfied with their lives and communities, not without reason, so they blame it on an Other that exists only in their minds.
Cacti
@Brachiator:
Earlier.
It started when Obama had the audacity to say that a white cop acted “stupidly” when arresting Skip Gates for trying to get into his own damned house and telling the fuzz to shove off.
BGinCHI
Great post, Betty.
This is why, IMO, it’s always useful to remember that the right are not conservatives in this country.
They are reactionaries. That used to mean something.
Mike in NC
There is an Irish pub in our town where the owner put down a copy of Kaepernick’s football jersey as a doormat. I was vaguely aware of the name as we don’t follow football. Hey, but in the end it always comes back to Reagan’s talk of Cadillac-driving welfare queens and Young Bucks buying t-bone steaks with food stamps.
It’s part of the DNA of a certain segment of the white population. There were more Trump yard signs in our neighborhood than I ever expected to see; many more than for Romney in 2012.
Kristin D
@BillCinSD: I vote for the interests of those downtrodden WWC people who hate me so much. (Though I do mostly ascribe to “a rising tide lifts all boats” yadda, yadda, yadda.)
Sasha
I keep thinking about the last BLM protest in Milwaukee and I think it had to have an effect. I know that pointing out that I am black won’t inoculate me from blow back but I said to my husband at the time that the Milwaukee protest was an example of failing to think strategically. It was really ill-advised.
Jon
This is it. And in my opinion the reason Obama got reelected but Trump comes in is that he actually made an outright racist appeal. Romney really didn’t try/couldn’t make that kind of appeal. By doing that Trump activated a lot of racist, usually apathetic non-voters; just enough to push him over the edge.
Barbara
@BillCinSD: I think this way too, but I also think it depends on how you define your interests. My personal interests include that of my children, not guaranteed to replicate my professional trajectory, my mother, who is on Medicare, my siblings, who have had a rocky path as adults and one of whom relies on ACA coverage. So all in, I do think I am voting my interests even if, objectively, I also agree with many policies and programs that will not directly benefit me or my relatives. One of the things that upsets me a lot is the notion that we somehow aren’t in this together. If some brilliant kid in Kentucky or Mississippi doesn’t get a good education and so doesn’t think up some incredible invention to cure cancer or save the planet, that hurts all of us. It’s to our collective benefit for people to thrive, but as individuals, it is not necessarily the case. I might say, “well, if black boys in Alabama have the same opportunity to go the University of Alabama that means my mostly mediocre white son won’t get in.” People won’t say that, of course, instead, they will stack the deck by disinvesting from public education to make it all but certain that, on average, the white kid will be able to demonstrate more merit using the usual means of measurement. That’s our loss, and writ large, we will not sustain any kind of exceptionalism for long if that cause and effect is multiplied thousands of times every year. I have resigned myself to that even though it makes me very sad.
Baud
@Barbara: One might even say we’re Stronger Together.
Mnemosyne
This is just an anecdote, but my BFF’s brother in Michigan reported that all of the white voters he knew voted for Trump because they’re pissed about BLM. They told him this even though they know he’s married to a black woman.
I was told this on Election Day, so that’s why I never bought into the economic insecurity bullshit.
Chip Daniels
It’s also worth noting that every great advance engenders a backlash; after the civil rights victories of 1965, America elected Nixon and the Silent Majority.
I see Trump aS our era’s Nixon, the backlash agent who slows, but doesn’t stop progress.
Sasha
There was a podcast I listened to mentioned “priming” elections. It posited that the elections that Obama won were cast as economical while this election was racial. The idea being, that people can float into or out of groups depending on how the election is primed. Obama won because the economy was more important to people than race. Now the economy is okay and with Trump pushing race, people that voted for Obama ended up supporting Trump.
aimai
I hate to say it but I also think some portion of white people, on top of their racism, racial panic, and just general stupidity were also suffering from compassion and virtue fatigue. I had a bunch of conversations with blue state liberals who were feeling oppressed by things like our city’s anti-plastic bag law, or the renaming of columbus day, or the public school’s (which have muslim students in them) getting rid of christmas/santa imagery. It got to be like the god damned moronic “I miss being able to use the word ‘gay’ in its old sense of joy” conversations that people used to have twenty years ago. People got tired of having to think a little bit about the planet, or the other guy, or anything other than themselves. BLM, the LGBTQ polite requests for humane treatment, women’s libbers (sic), it all just got to be too much for their poor liddle heads. No real dems voted for trump as a result, but the red states sure as hell suffered from compassion fatigue.
Betty Cracker
@Sasha: That’s an interesting theory too.
chopper
@Brachiator:
i think a lot of white people flipped out over O winning in 2008, but his calm demeanor and competence slowly calmed them down over the course of 7 or so years. then BLM caused them to lose their shit and dive back under the bed. this isn’t to insult BLM, but rather to point out that there are a fuck of a lot of touchy-ass white people in this country who get scared as shit when black people start talking loudly about race.
Baud
@aimai:
More generally, fatigue from the pace of rapid change and the level of information noise people are receiving. I feel it myself sometimes.
ETA: That feeling is not limited to white people — although how they react in terms of voting depends on demographics.
Mnemosyne
@Sasha:
I wish I knew who keeps advising all of these lefty groups like Occupy and BLM that it’s better to be disorganized and not have any actual leaders making decisions. It is not serving anyone well.
trollhattan
@Chip Daniels: Nixon won but George Wallace vacuumed ten million southern former Democrats (as LBJ predicted, just not the Wallace part) plus Humphrey was a lousy candidate.
rp
I also wonder what impact the BLM protesters had on Sanders’ candidacy. Most liberals chided him for his lack of attention to the issue and how he handled the protesters who interrupted him, but those protests might have actually helped him among white liberals and given his campaign a significant boost.
JMG
@trollhattan: There was that whole Vietnam War thing, too. Kind of important.
Baud
@rp: His Sista Souljah moment?
gogol's wife
@Mnemosyne:
My anecdata indicates that BLM was a big bogeyman for white people. They’re oh, so scared of it.
Brachiator
@Cacti:
That put some white people on alert, but they didn’t lose their shit until later.
Baud
BLM was what they tried to make the New Black Panthers into.
gogol's wife
@Chip Daniels:
As long as he doesn’t destroy the whole world in the process.
Mnemosyne
@Sasha:
Also, I keep remembering the BLM activists who were given a meeting with Hillary Clinton to give her their wish list, and they didn’t have one, except that she should apologize for the 1990s crime bill. Really, you’re meeting with the Democratic candidate for president and you can’t think of one concrete thing that you’d like her to do for you as president? Really?
BillinGlendaleCA
I read “Nixonland” about 6 months ago and the 2016 election reminded me a lot of the 1968 election(I remember the 68 election but the book refreshed my memory of a lot of the details). Democrats with a competitive primary, Nixon and Wallace combined in the person of the ShitGibbon, and the backlash to the civil rights acts of the mid 60’s and then the riots that followed.
@Chip Daniels: Yup.
Это курам на смех
Fuck my fellow white people.
That is all.
Yarrow
@Chip Daniels: What will stop progress is global climate change and the coming fights over fresh water, livable land, and the necessary human migrations because of all of the above. Syria is a preview.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA: I have it and was hoping to read it after the election, but given the result, I’m not sure I can handle reading about what happened in 1968 yet.
gogol's wife
I’m interested to hear if there will be any complaints about the young member of our church who wore a BLM sweatshirt while doing one of the readings at our Christmas concert (attended by a lot of non-church members) the other day.
trollhattan
@JMG:
True that, and here comes Trick with his “secret plan” i.e., colluding with the enemy, just like St. Ronny 22 years later. That worked out GREAT.
rp
@Baud: Bingo. it showed he was a new kind of Dem not beholden to Wall Street and corporate america (oh, and those obnoxious minorities as well).
trollhattan
@Baud:
My copy is on the nightstand, unopened. Can’t bear to start at the moment.
Yarrow
@efgoldman: That’s what I thought when I heard it too.
BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattan: Wallace was Nixon without the dog whistle, remind you of anybody?
sukabi
@rp: it becomes extremely hard to deny racial inequality when blatant murders of unarmed black persons are televised in succession on your tv for a year.
And then to have scores of multi-ethnic people align to protest…positively unseemly that the (im)balance of power would be upturned.
Mary G
I have had a couple of bad days, just can’t concentrate on anything and feeling hopeless and helpless. I have been reading a few comments now and then and really appreciate you guys. Some idiot jumped off the freeway overpass at Crown Valley Parkway in Mission Viejo today, causing scads of accidents and traffic nightmares. Why can’t people kill themselves without hurting innocent people?
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Kathleen:
Propane Jane does a similar analysis on Twitter – the media does a terrible job at giving white people an accurate depiction of the changing country, encouraging their outdated world view and misinforming them in general about, well, everything, which creates a sense of anxiety about loss of status relative to women and immigrants and those black welfare cheats who get everything free, leading to alcohol and drug abuse, paranoia and gun fetishism. Coupled with old time religious simplistic authoritarian beliefs in white superiority, it’s a toxic mess.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud:
@trollhattan: You really should read it, it’ll help you understand where we are.
ETA: Also his book “The Invisible Bridge” about St. Ronnie.
geg6
I sign on to this theory absolutely. This is exactly my own experience. Those people in Kentucky are exactly like my neighbors.
Seanly
@Kathleen:
At this point, I could be the ultimate mansplaining/manthreading liberal effete east/west coast liberal and say “F*ck them. They can lose their health coverage. They can kiss true freedom goodbye while they get to play white knight with their Walmart semi-auto assault rifles. They can continue watching their crappy jobs evaporate while gorging on Big Macs and Whoppers. They can try to go fishing on public lands only to find the gate locked against them. They can watch their stupid 300 lbs kids rack up knee & brain injuries hoping to make it the NFL since there is no chance to get an education and decent job.” But that would be nasty of me so I won’t say it.
Chris
@Yarrow:
Yep. Crises increase competition over resources and migration, migration and competition fuels bigotry, bigotry feeds reactionary politics that make everything worse, lather, rinse, repeat.
That’s what makes the whole thing even more depressing. There’s never going to be a big Day After Tomorrow moment that’s clearly and obviously traceable to climate change in a way that forces most people to say “… oh. Yeah. I guess it’s real.” It’s going to be a slow slide, fueling tons of little things like the current refugee crisis, and people won’t care about global warming because they’ll be in hysterics over the “security” situation.
tobie
I’ve always found it odd how the two BLM stories of the past few years have merged. I don’t know what came first–Trayvon Martin’s murder or the Bundy clan’s belligerent refusal to pay grazing fees to the Bureau of Land Management. But fast forward to 2015 and Black Lives Matter and white resistance to the Bureau of Land Management reach a new pitch, and the signs of a resurgent white nationalism keep coming faster and faster. No convictions for fairly clear cases of police violence from Tamir Rice to Eric Garner and no convictions for the armed takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge by the Bundy clan.
Mary G
@BillinGlendaleCA: @Baud: @trollhattan: I bought “Nixonland” a few years ago when Anne Laurie or DougJ was doing a book club and I couldn’t get past chapter 2 then and wouldn’t even try now. Although there’s probably good info on Roger Stone, ratfucker supreme, in there.
rikyrah
All they had was “at least I am not a Nigger.”
And then, Barack Obama is elected President.
Oh well.
They whine about political correctness.
They have all the freedom of speech that has always been there.
What they want is freedom from consequences for their actions of such speech.
They want to party like it’s 1948.
Nobody is playing with them.
Yarrow
Other countries have had Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that have helped them deal with the past and move forward. It’s not a perfect solution but it’s perhaps better than what we have done so far. Of course I’d like a couple of unicorns too.
encephalopath
@Mike in NC:
Some people have a confused perception of symbols as if the symbol is somehow the real thing.
Stepping on Kaepernick’s jersey is a direct response to his ideas. Not standing for the flag is hating America.
It’s like they believe the flag to be the body of Christ in some weird ass patriotic mass.
elm
@Brachiator: White people never had their shit.
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: I couldn’t read it past 100 pages. Too depressing. This was when DougJ was doing a book club thingie with it.
RAM
Great post, Betty. I still can’t figure out what happened, but I figure if I keep reading the explanations that really smart people keep coming up with I’ll get it sooner or later. I’ve never really understood racism. Or religion, either, for that matter. But I’m going to keep giving it my best shot.
Chris
@Mary G:
I didn’t have the time to read it then, but I read the discussions on it here with great pleasure.
danielx
This. White voters in the south in particular have been voting this way forever. Candidates, Democrats and Republicans alike (Dems before passage of the Civil Rights Act, Rs since the inception of the Southern Strategy), have been doing this forever: we’ll keep Those People in their place if you elect and re-elect us. In return, you accept lower wages, lousy benefits and no fucking unions, plus as a bonus we’ll throw in some nods toward Jeebus and the bright shiny cultural issue of the day.
Mike J
@Mnemosyne:
Depends on your goal. If you want to make things better, you need to be organized. If you want to prevent change, disorganization works better as you’re not relying on a leader who can be discredited or otherwise taken down.
ISIL and the Republican party work better with no leadership. The civil rights movement worked better with real leadership. The best outcome we’ve had recently has been Moral Mondays in NC, and there’s leadership there.
debbie
@Kathleen:
Crappy health care and crappier jobs. The job’s physical toll results in injuries, and they don’t make enough for good care. Some doctors find it’s easier to just shove pills at them and move on to the next patient. There’s hardly ever any solid patient education about the risks of long-term opioid use, and when the scripts run out, it’s on to heroin which is much cheaper. How could that spiraling down not lead to despair and suicide?
And for all those belittling economic anxiety, it may not have been the only factor in the election, but it’s a legitimate factor. There’s no such thing as job security anymore, and no one knows who will be at risk at the next downsizing. The most vulnerable are the older workers who, if they lose their jobs, lack the education to start over. Clearly they lash out at the wrong people and they’re suckers for a con game, but still, they have legitimate gripes.
danielx
@Brachiator:
Actually a lot of older white people lost their shit right then and there in November 2008. In late 2009 I had occasion to meet with a business acquaintance who was a principle of a retirement housing company, high end private pay variety. During conversation I asked how the residents of the retirement community in which we were meeting had taken the election results. Residents were people who were primarily 75 to 80 years, well-heeled and white as the snow on the ground outside tonight. She said the more or less universal reaction was along the lines of ‘a black man in the Oval Office – this is the end of the world’.
Baud
@debbie: Was there really more job security in the past? I know relative wages were higher, but I haven’t seen any information about job security beyond what seems to be nostalgia.
Chris
@Baud:
When unions were at their zenith? Yeah, I think there was.
hovercraft
I agree the ’08 election was a triggering event, but I think the ’12 election proved to those who were panicking that it wasn’t that this was not an aberration, those people really were taking over the country. The BLM movement where the media showed an endless loop of black hooligans rioting* and burning up cities was also part of the panic. They were taking over the government, and they were demanding rights, and since in their tiny minds, you cannot bestow rights on one group without taking them from another, they came crawling out of every hidey hole they’ve lived in for the last thirty years to vote for the Shitgibbon in droves. This was their last chance to “Make America Great Again”, by ensuring it would once again be ruled by a white man, the way god intended it to be.
*It’s funny how when black people protest and destroy property, it’s rioting, but when white college kids do it after they win a game or a championship, it’s just over exuberant fans letting off steam. I wonder why the difference, one group are celebrating winning a game, the other are protesting the loss of a life.
debbie
@Baud:
Yes there was security (unless you messed up). If you liked your job and were good at it, you could expect to keep it.
Not to sound like too much of a broken record, but I think security ended when the MBAs arrived and the bottom line took precedence.
Dr. Ronnie James, D.O.
@Mnemosyne: I’ve spent a ton of time the past few months in “WWC” parts of the greater Philadelphia area (South Philly, South Jersey, exurban/ rural Montgomery County, Bucks Co.) and Blue Lives Matter/ Thin Blue Line flag / We Support Our Local Police signs are *everywhere*. I can’t imagine how popular it must be in redder parts of the country. It’s frustrating that the instinctive response is to react like BLM means “Off The Pigs.”
Baud
@Chris: The fifties were obviously the U.S.’s best times economically, and you had the war employment for much of the forties. Not sure about sixties and seventies.
Betty Cracker
@debbie: I don’t think anyone is denying there’s economic anxiety — many of us experience it ourselves. It just doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense as a driver of the Trump phenomenon, not when you look at the breakdown of how economic groups voted, etc.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@Mnemosyne: They came up with an extensive list within days of that meeting and several items from that list ended up being mentioned in Hillary’s Racial Justice platform. Also Hillary went on to hire a bunch of Black women to run her campaign so BLM seems to have done pretty well out of the interaction.
The question that remains for critics of Kaepernick and BLM is: what are they supposed to do that won’t cause a huge White-lash? Marching is too aggressive. Blocking traffic is too aggressive. Calling people racist is beyond the pale. Using the words “White Supremacy” is unfair. Burning a flag is wrong. Not saluting the flag is a hate-crime against the troops. Not standing for the anthem is wrong. Etc., etc. There is nothing Black people can do to call attention to their oppression that won’t result in a non-trivial portion of White voters losing their shit. When someone shows me a form of protest that doesn’t freak out White people, then we can start debating tactics.
schrodinger's cat
Also can we stop with the broad brush strokes? We have different countries in one large continent size country, what works in New England does not work in the South or vice versa.
hovercraft
@BillCinSD:
I think the difference is you are voting for the greater good, you understand that for society to work, we have to take care of those less fortunate than ourselves. You believe in stronger together. They ironically believe they are voting for the common good by saying fuck you I got mine, they think by forcing other people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, even if they have no boots, they are making society better. Never mind that so many of them are cutting their nose off to spite their face, at least they are not on the bottom wrung of society, those people are.
Baud
@Dr. Ronnie James, D.O.: Well, there were some high-profile cop killings last year, particularly the one in Dallas. I doubt many of these fearful people are capable of distinguishing between those shooters and BLM proper.
Betty Cracker
@schrodinger’s cat: What broad brush strokes?
Chris
@Uncle Ebeneezer:
This.
Note that pretty much all the polling from the old days indicates that this was always the case, too, and that it’s only after Martin Luther King was safely dead and buried that he was retroactively turned into some sort of all-American saint (one that much of the country remembers mainly for Having A Vague And Unspecified Dream and for telling black people never to be violent). Before that, he was regarded in exactly the same light in which Al Sharpton and the like are now viewed.
BillinGlendaleCA
@hovercraft: The same thing happened in the 1966 and 1968 elections, whites tended to think that “We’ve given them all this good legislation, and they thank us by burning down the city”. I see the same reaction with the election of Obama and the rise of BLM.
Archon
Ta-Nehisi Coates sums it up. “Much ink has been spilled in an attempt to understand the Tea Party protests, and the 2016 presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, which ultimately emerged out of them. One theory popular among (primarily) white intellectuals of varying political persuasions held that this response was largely the discontented rumblings of a white working class threatened by the menace of globalization and crony capitalism. Dismissing these rumblings as racism was said to condescend to this proletariat, which had long suffered the slings and arrows of coastal elites, heartless technocrats, and reformist snobs. Racism was not something to be coolly and empirically assessed but a slander upon the working man. Deindustrialization, globalization, and broad income inequality are real. And they have landed with at least as great a force upon black and Latino people in our country as upon white people. And yet these groups were strangely unrepresented in this new populism.”
“…The notion that the Tea Party represented the righteous, if unfocused, anger of an aggrieved class allowed everyone from leftists to neoliberals to white nationalists to avoid a horrifying and simple reality: A significant swath of this country did not like the fact that their president was black, and that swath was not composed of those most damaged by an unquestioned faith in the markets. Far better to imagine the grievance put upon the president as the ghost of shambling factories and defunct union halls, as opposed to what it really was—a movement inaugurated by ardent and frightened white capitalists, raging from the commodities-trading floor of one of the great financial centers of the world”.
Baud
@debbie: Not sure how you bring back job security in the private sector. Japan does it, but they couple it with worker loyalty to the company.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
Different people had different reasons for voting for Trump. It’s hard not to vote for someone who’s promising you everything you’ve ever wanted. Trump’s voters got conned into believing Trump would be the fairy godmother to their Cinderella.
BillinGlendaleCA
@debbie:
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: Status anxiety is more on the mark.
debbie
@Baud:
You can’t bring security back in this country. The focus is on profits and people are expendable.
Helen
Oh Hi John Cole. What do you think about commenters calling woman commenters BIMBO?
Baud
@debbie: What I’m saying is that I wouldn’t have a clue how to do it even if the Baud/Debbie ticket won in a landslide and we had a filibuster proof Congress.
Betty Cracker
@schrodinger’s cat: I don’t understand your point.
debbie
@BillinGlendaleCA:
And that’s another thing. No one thinks long-term anymore and everyone’s too impatient.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: In the late 60’s you had two factors impacting labor, the Boomers coming into the workforce and you couldn’t legally discriminate. The large increase in new entrants into the labor pool put a lot of pressure on the way unions had previously worked.
Jordan Rules
@Uncle Ebeneezer: Super co-sign!
Betty Cracker
@debbie: This is true.
@Helen: Link?
Chris
@Archon:
Yeah.
The more I read about modern times as well as American history as well as the rise of European fascism, the more I’m convinced that this is a real problem in the way we talk about all of them: most of us are loathe to face the fact (at least partly for understandable reason) that at any given time, in any given country, there are simply far more psychos than we’d like who would happily load thousands of their fellow countrymen onto cattle cars to satisfy their own whims and prejudices.
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: OK let me rephrase it, to understand what happened we need to look at the state level and county level data. Broad generalizations about huge swathes of people on the national scale are ultimately unhelpful in figuring out how to avoid a narrow loss such as the one in the last election.
Baud
@debbie:
To be honest, I think our side mirrors those bad business traits in the political realm.
SW
I don’t think we should try to appeal to these people. We need to beat them. Obviously by more than 2% next time. But that should happen anyway because we are growing and they are declining. They aren’t imagining a decline it is real. Perhaps the best way to accelerate their decline is to let them have the wheel for a time and show everyone else just how bat shit crazy they are.
Davebo
None of this explains the 2012 election, four years after the alleged “racial freakout”.
Color me unconvinced.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA: When you say previously worked, what do you mean? The forties had the War, and prior to that, we had the Great Depression. Going back further, you’re really into ancient union history.
debbie
@Baud:
We could use incentives as if they were cattle prods. They’d learn sooner or later.
Seriously, I’ve had many jobs. I’ve been self-employed. The corporation where I am now treats its employees like shit, even as they’re telling us how much they depend on us. No company would have gotten away with stuff like this a couple decades ago. Now, I bet this kind of lousy treatment is the norm. How can loyalty be cultivated in that kind of environment?
MazeDancer
In the “looking for a mind that works” tradition, love, love, love Cornell Belcher to the point of school girl crush. Always happy when he comes on the TeeVee.
And everything he and Betty said is true.
And even among decades proven liberals, much less racist white people, there is still a hesitation, sometimes, about People of Color and Women who aren’t nice. And demand complete, total, and there really isn’t a discussion to be had, full-time equality. No “working for it”. There is nothing to work for, it’s just a fact. We’re all equal.
Mr. Obama is a paragon of virtue. He is that innately. But “Angry Black Man” wasn’t going to help his tenure, so he stayed polite. He claims he won’t be so polite once he leaves office. However, we’re still in that place where white men and racists can be angry. But everyone else can’t
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: Its not economic anxiety that drove people into the arms of the monster, its the fear of losing their status. Someone pointed out that HRC won among those making less than 50,000.
schrodinger's cat
@Davebo: Obama was in a different league as a candidate than HRC.
debbie
@Baud:
True, that is what made Obama so exceptional. But he needed his fellow Dems in the Congress to be there with him, but they kept panicking.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Worked as in you could get a job for your kid in the union. The New Deal had labor union protections, so you can’t really go back any further than that. That started to break down in the late 60’s and early 70’s, in addition you had greater competition from trade. I’ll say it again, read “Nixonland”.
aimai
@Mnemosyne: They were so, so, so, very young. I am surrounded by people just that young now that I’m back at school. Practical goals, real organizing, is not their forte. A minority group, representing minority issues, simply can’t make a run for change that requires a buy in from a hostile white majority and choose to make enemies of everyone who isn’t pure enough. That’s not how a two party system works—its not even how a parliamentary system works if you don’t securely own a big enough voting bloc.
Monala
@hovercraft @Uncle Ebeneezer:: Your comments remind me of a FB meme of a photo of black rioters, with a superimposed quote, “Why can’t they protest peacefully?” Followed by three other photos, the first of Colin Kaepernick on bended knee, the second of black athletes wearing “Black Lives Matter” shirts, and the third of the cast of Hamilton reading their letter to Mike Pence, with the following superimposed quote, “But not like this. Or like this. And definitely not like that!”
Mart
I am an old guy who sometimes disc golfs with 5 or 6 dude-bros – 28 to 35. They are mostly from white neighborhoods surrounded by pretty grim black ghettos. They all supported Trump. There was a lot of misogyny, bitch, liar, c word etc. I staid away from the nasty woman and race. They are pretty good about not being openly racist, one of them is engaged to a black woman, but it is in the background. I go economics. $15 minimum wage sounds good, right? Oh hell no. I am a trained mechanic and I get $15 an hour. Why the fuk should lazy assholes get $15 an hour to fuking flip a burger. I tried the old lift your wage argument, but that was going nowhere. So many of the “economic” voters seem to me to be closet racists. It is “them” getting all the free healthcare from Obama, I have a $3,000 deductible from my work insurance, and the rates are going thru the roof. “They” are better off on welfare than I am working full time. Etc. Ronnie Rayguns welfare Queens driving big red Cadillac’s lives on, generation after generation. As long as Dems are the party of expanding the New Deal, they wil be the enemy of these voters. Even if it means screwing themselves.
bluefoot
@Brachiator: My experience tallies with this too re Trayvon Martin – I heard a lot of white people who voted for Obama say they felt betrayed when he said Trayvon Martin could have been his son. Whether they admit it or not, empathizing with a black teenager or his family meant to those white people that Obama was no longer “a good Negro.” That was the beginning.
Which is why I find the whole “They voted for Obama twice, they can’t be racist even though they voted for Trump” argument silly in the extreme. 2012 isn’t 2016. In between was Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman’s acquittal, Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, the Flag of Treason being taken down, etc etc. Actual voice or a chance of justice for minorities makes white people get all Fear of a Black Planet.
schrodinger's cat
Also, Republicans play to win, while Democrats come across as wishy washy. We need more Harry Reids.
trollhattan
@debbie:
Slogan of the worst corporation I’ve worked at WRT how they treat employees: “People are our number one asset.”
I was laid off via phone call.
Debbie1
This always bothers me when white writers or posters (and it’s usually them) say it, in this case, the writer says that Pres. Obama is the most squeaky-clean, scandal-free, family oriented president we’ve have in a long time. Then, she adds, “he’s HAD TO BE,” as if it’s an act that was put-on and continues to be performed, as if he has to act this way for the mighty white folks. I think it’s a condescending way to think, and that most liberals are not even aware they do it. Like when Bill Maher said that Obama should cast all caution to the side and just show his (naturally) aggressive black side. It suggests to me that whites (even those well-meaning types) have some preconception of how people of color should act and if they don’t see it, it’s just being camouflaged. Has it ever occurred to these writers or posters, even after observing PBO for over 10 yrs, that perhaps he’s slow to anger and is even-tempered? Has it ever occurred to these folks that perhaps the good family man is that way because that’s his nature – NOT because he’s “had to be.” These small slights too fall under the soft bigotry of low expectations. When I think of what this family has had to put up w/, both from the right and the left, I’m stunned at what they’ve accomplished. Well, that’s all I had to say. Good luck w/ your Trumps and their temper tantrums and ignorance, which I’m certain will never be linked to their race…
mai naem mobile
When the BLM stuff first started,I have to admit one of my thoughts was that it was the RW stirring shit up to scare white people. I not sure they didn’t contribute to some of the violence.
I don’t know about other places but I can tell you I strongly feel the explosion of the Hispanic population in AZ scares the shit out quite a few white people. Not black people, Hispanics.I think they see it as a loss of power in the near future. I-ve lived in Metro Phoenix for 30 years. There are multiple areas which used to be all white that are all Hispanic and it’s not all ghettos. A lot are middle class areas and it’s not all old housing. Even new housing. Same with colleges and administrative/middle management jobs. You can visually see more Hispanics in colleges and they aren’t just doing menial jobs anymore. That’s the reason “build the wall” plays so well down here.
opiejeanne
@Mary G: Is that what happened? We heard a little bit of KNX 1070’s traffic report about the Crown Valley Parkway area and how to get around it, but nothing about a jumper.
SatanicPanic
@Uncle Ebeneezer: Didn’t you kind of answer your own question? Disrupt meetings of sympathetic people, i.e. the Clinton campaign.
Mart
@Debbie1: Awesome post.
debbie
@trollhattan:
Yeah, I got told at a lunch in a restaurant that was empty because the power had shut down. Nothing like shivering for two hours (the guy had to talk about himself forever) on a cold winter’s day with a cup of cold coffee.
I wasn’t particularly surprised, but the way it was handled depressed the hell out of me. After it was over, I walked across the street to the Lincoln Center Coffee Shop, and as soon as I sat down, the waiter said I clearly needed some soup. He brought me matzo ball soup that was better than even my grandmother’s.
Jon G.
It’s the Hillary-bashing, stupid.
Look, HRC lost the election by a combined 80K votes across 3 rust belt states. So generalizing about ANYTHING regarding the Trump voters is a dead end. She also got more total votes than anyone ever, other than Obama, so her message did resonate with 2016’s electorate. Yes, she lost some states we thought she was going to win, but if she had gotten those mere 80,000 votes out of 140M cast, we wouldn’t be doing any of these hand-wringing, tea-leaf-reading exercises. If anything, I think that the campaign’s strategic blunders in WI and MI, as well as voter suppression, were probably the explanations for those states, while PA was just a dog fight she didn’t win. I don’t know if they could have done anything more in that state. Factor in the Comey letter, which may have caused the late deciders to break for Trump (which they did), and you have a loss.
The reason it’s the Hillary-bashing, therefore, is that the quarter-century Republican campaign to discredit her was successful, in that it enabled an unqualified Republican candidate to beat her. Remove the damage of some of that bashing and she wins more of the close states and again, this conversation wouldn’t be happening.
gene108
@Mike in NC:
The notion that blacks are no good lazy violent savages, who need to be kept in check by white men is as at least 300 years old.
Convincing whites otherwise has been a huge challlenge of the last 50 years.
EBT
@debbie: No one is supposed to be loyal anymore. You are expected to work someplace until a better job with a higher title comes along elsewhere then bust ass out the door.
Debbie1
@chopper: I entirely agree. Why oh why won’t they just quietly accept being shot in the back, or smile and nod when watching their young children get murdered by a white cop for having a toy gun, in an open carry state, no less! Why did some people feel the need to protest? Oy.
Mike J
@hovercraft:
Sometimes white people riot because they like pumpkins.
Mnemosyne
@Uncle Ebeneezer:
I do think that the recent tactics by BLM of blocking traffic have been counterproductive, but I unfortunately don’t know what would be a better idea. Maybe a general strike/sick-out of some kind?
I have NO idea why people were pissed about Kaepernick’s protest. Well, that’s not quite true, but I don’t know how my fellow white people justified it to themselves for any reason other than hating on a black man for not being compliant. And I thought the Seahawks’ response was even better since they had a team meeting and decided to unite as a team to do their protest rather than making it divisive within their team.
And I do think that the younglings doing things like BLM and Occupy need to have better leadership. As other people have mentioned, Moral Mondays is still going strong — and probably helped elect the new governor — by having strong and united leadership that can keep them on track.
SatanicPanic
@Monala: I think those make a good point that white people are basically full of it, BUT, the reality is we have to work with the white people we have, not the white people we want. Pointing out conservative hypocrisy doesn’t really get us to that place. We all know they are hypocrites. Pointing out that white people do tend to freak out OTOH is just an acceptance of facts. Something I have come to believe is that protesting only works when you have a receptive audience who has some power to respond in a positive way. So protesting at a Clinton rally= great. She wants to help even if it’s not her first priority. Protesting at a Trump rally= counterproductive. I don’t see the problem in pointing that out.
Betty Cracker
@Debbie1: Well, I’m sorry it came across that way to you, but that’s not what I meant, at all. I absolutely believe President Obama is even-tempered, honest, a family man, etc., because that’s just who he is — it’s not an act. My point is, if he wasn’t such an upstanding person, he would have never been elected president. He doesn’t have the same margin of error a white man has. It’s similar to the hurdles women have to overcome — you know, the “backwards and in high heels” thing.
mai naem mobile
@schrodinger’s cat: Obama was a better candidate than HRC but in 08 even freaking Mondale would have won because of the Dubbya disaster. By ’12 people were comfortable with him,he ran a good campaign and Romney didn’t run that hot a campaign and the 47 percent tape killed Romney. Americans weren’t going to change horses midstream.
bluefoot
@Uncle Ebeneezer: Amen to that. There is no form of protest or voice that won’t freak out white people. Hell, just asking for being treated equally under the law and being left alone to live our lives is enough to cause freak outs and bring the full force of the law or the Supreme Court (voter suppression, etc) down on minority ass.
Juice Box
I think that we aso underestimate the power of abortion, too. There are a lot of single-interest anti-abortion voters out there who aren’t focused on race or aware of economic issues.
Mnemosyne
Also, too, I would like to be very clear: as a white person, I am MEGA-PISSED at the fucktards among my own group who freaked the fuck out when black people dared to stand up and say, You know, we really don’t like it when our unarmed kids get shot dead in the street.
Those people are assholes, and we should NOT waste a millisecond of time trying to figure out how to “win them over” by downplaying civil rights.
In fact, I will repeat the wise words of Molly Ivins, which I think apply to most white people in this country:
We need to figure out a way to make a majority of white people in this country realize that they are being lied to about race. How we do that, I don’t know, but it is imperative that we figure that shit out ASAP.
Archon
One thing the Obama era along with Trumps election proved once and for all is that ideological conservatism is not an animating force for the majority of people that identify as Republican. We always suspected it but now we know for sure.
The scary part for Dems is that running on outright white populism (even the faux kind like Trumps) against changing demographics will be politically much more potent then movement conservatism.
mai naem mobile
@Juice Box: yep,abortion. I had two people mention abortion and I know several people who are single issue abortion voters. The two would be gettable w/o abortion. The others I don’t think so.I don’t have a solution to the abortion voting issue.
LAC
@Uncle Ebeneezer: Thank you for this – apparently now protesting the deaths of black citizens by police is now the new “why Hillary lost-ism” – BLM and black people by extension gave whites the ooogedy boogedees. And boy, we should feeling bad about the way they voted, the poor dears.
I never believed in the post racial world, despite the two terms served. That pot of racial stew is always bubbling gently on the back burner. And when you have a cable news network and rightwing radio there to season up white resentment and slanted “its you against the brown/black hordes” stories, it was bound to come out at some point. And now, we going to usher in the personification of a 5 year old temper tantrum.
It’s ironic I am being asked to understand “white working class” and now, how BLM scared voters into voting for Trump. Wow…
Debbie1
@hovercraft: Not to be a pedant, but whites have also rioted for things other than sports. It’s not always youthful high-jinx. You all should read about the Rosewood riots of 1923, it of course occurred in Florida.
Kathleen
@Baud: 1968 was the scariest year in my life, until this one. I was horrified and terrified by Regan’s administration, but was in emotional survival mode and dealing with intense personal issues. so I went into denial. But 1968 – the murders of Martin Luther King, and RFK – I thought the world was going to end.
ETA: Rethug buzzwords were “SIlent Majority” and “Law and Order”. Now it seems like it could be Dems’ buzzwords.
Kathleen
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Love me some Propane Jane! That lady delivers! She’s had several Storifys on Twitter, one about 2nd amendment and relationship to slavery.
frosty
@Mary G:
Me too. Far too painful. I gave it to the library hoping some local WWC might pick it up thinking it would be a hagiography.
Kathleen
@Seanly: Actually, I totally agree with you. My only concern is for those who didn’t vote for Trump and, if they live in Kentucky, Bevin. A dear friend of mine whose life was saved by Medicaid expansion lives in Kentucky and she really needs the coverage. My heart goes out to her. These others are not worth reaching out to. They’re too far gone.
Helen
@Betty Cracker: Me (I??) and Raven fixed it together. Thanks Betty.
Mike in dc
Does anyone think that some white folks are triggered by the thought of being held accountable by non-whites? The crux of BLM’s complaint is that when police officers commit violence against people of color, the current system does a poor job of holding them accountable for it. Perhaps a core precept of systemic racism/white supremacy is insulation from accountability? If you challenge that, you’re going to get pushback.
Rp
@Uncle Ebeneezer: focus on police militarization and lack of training rather than race.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@Mnemosyne:
Absolutely. The tricky part is that I don’t think there is a single or easy solution. I didn’t start becoming more aware of that fact through carefully-worded, kid-gloves arguments or actions designed not to scare or offend my White self. I actually started seriously paying attention when I read the no-Fs-to-give words of Imani Gandy right here at Balloon Juice and when I started listening to TWiB and I realized that pretty much everything I thought I knew about racism was totally wrong. So I think there is a need for several approaches to reach different types of potentially receptive people, which is why I hesitate to say that any of them are obviously better than another, or that any of them are wrong.
PS- I wasn’t trying to take shots at you in my response. My apologies if it came across that way.
LAC
@Rp: How about we focus on all of that? Until at least until there are as many white people shot for crossing the street slow, cigarette selling, driving a car, etc.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@Rp: If police only had boards with a nail in them for weapons, they would still kill disproportionately more Black people with them. Racism and Militarized Policing are both part of the equation (along with others.) It’s not either/or.
gogol's wife
@LAC:
When I mentioned white people scared by BLM I was not endorsing them or suggesting anyone reach out to them. They’re morons.
Kathleen
@debbie: Those same uncertainties plague many people who are not in the 1%. My sister in law was born in Kentucky in a blue collar family who lived in a poor neighborhood.
She was 1 of 8 children. Her father was racist, hated women, and emotionally and verbally abused her and her mother (she told me how Trump’s behavior triggered some very bad memories for her). Neither her parents nor siblings went to college, nor did any of her aunts, cousins, etc. Like other individuals in these situations, she decided she wanted something better in her life. She graduated high school, got a good job, moved out, went to another better job, worked and attended college, eventually got her bachelor’s, and has done very well for herself. She could have gone the direction her brothers did, most of whom numbed their pain with alcohol, and/or drugs, fueled by hopelessness. Nothing was ever their fault. My point is people have the power to make choices. Our media and culture say it’s OK to excuse white people’s racism because it’s about economic or social anxiety. We (as the dominant white culture) condemn African Americans who choose to stand up for justice and see that as aberrant behavior. Human beings can make different choices. They don’t have to condemn themselves to hatred and hopelessness.
mai naem mobile
@Mnemosyne: i think it was Studs Terkel who said the solution to the race problem was going to be love. Love in the sense that people of different races were going to fall in love get married and produce mixed race kids to the point where there weren’t going to be any single race people. I think he had something there.
Ksmiami
@Lit3Bolt: hey I was just chilling here and thinking that red state America just committed suicide@Baud: yeah because the USA sat on top of a world full of smoking craters with unparalleled material and scientific advantage ya know the whole ww2 thing kinda helped
weaselone
I’m reading a book about the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt and a small snippet is devoted to his handling of the situation regarding Minnie Cox, the first black postmistress. Cox was first appointed to the position in 1891, and by all accounts excelled at her job. In order to prevent friction with the white community, she even paid for some of the overdue fees out of her own pocket. Apparently, he salary as postmistress gave her the ability to make investments in businesses in her town which raised her status and that ultimately rubbed the white people of the community the wrong way and they forced her out with threats in 1902. Roosevelt ultimately did not accept her resignation, paid her through the end of her term, and closed the post office so the people of the town had to pick up their mail elsewhere.
In some ways, I can’t help but think this election was similar. A certain segment of this electorate chafed and increasingly resented having a black man as President. Damn well if they were going to let him have a third term.
Betty Cracker
@weaselone: Would you mind sharing the title of the book? Sounds interesting!
weaselone
The name of the book is Theodore Rex. The part about Minnie Cox is really only a couple of sentences. I only remember it because I read it today and looked for a little more detail about her online.
Betty Cracker
@gogol’s wife: Still, if you find yourself in that sort of conversation, it might be worthwhile to push back. We’ve been experimenting with that since the election, a little bit. My husband is better at it than I; he can stay calm and make points that occasionally seem to break through. Don’t know if it’ll matter in the long run, but we’ve decided silence / avoidance isn’t an option for us. It just emboldens the assholes.
Betty Cracker
@weaselone: Thanks!
Mnemosyne
@LAC:
Yeah, to be clear, I am absolutely NOT saying that people should not have protested (though I think the specific tactic of blocking traffic usually backfires). The fact that a majority of white people voted as a backlash to BLM means that a majority of white people are racist assholes, not that black people should not have protested. There should be no blaming of the victims when we observe that racist white people freaked the fuck out.
Hoodie
@Mnemosyne: I think the BLM crossed paths with a really pernicious tribalism in our country that causes a lot of white people (including a lot of liberals) to have a subconscious tendency to wonder if a black male they do not know is at least quasi criminal unless he is in uniform (military, sports or FedEx). That underscores the fact that the folks that most buy into this lie to have little or no contact with black males and therefore recognize no other clues that signify that a black guy is just a guy within six sigma of normal, i.e., maybe not the greatest guy in the world, but not a criminal. There is a much wider range of behavior that is tolerated in white males because they recognize those signifiers better. I think Obama got by because his behavior and manners are so exemplary and so aligned to an adult male ideal, kind of like Jackie Robinson was accepted (or at least tolerated) in his time because he was so dignified and damn good at what he did. They could get past some of those perceptual defaults with him, and doing so even made them feel better about themselves than they should have.
However, those perceptions are still there because Obama is not a good test for them. They need contact with people who are more flawed but nonetheless ok. They’ve thought they were tolerant of other groups (by gosh, they even voted for Obama!), but that tolerance never really has been tested and is therefore brittle because they don’t have much real contact with those groups. For people laboring under this perceptual baggage, BLM may have looked like excuse making for criminals. The problem is exacerbated because sometimes the victims of police violence may have been doing something marginally wrong (I’ve had cops tell me they could arrest someone for merely driving down the street if they really wanted to) or had spotty records, and the issue is really the ridiculously disproportionate use of force by police in reacting to behavior that would not elicit the same response if the person was white (the extreme being a white guy with an automatic weapon getting a psychiatrist while a black jaywalker who mouths off to a cop gets five rounds from a Baretta).
SFBayAreaGal
@Это курам на смех: Thank you. I was about to say the same thing.
Spinoza is my Co-pilot
@Yarrow:
This, absolutely. The greatest loss engendered by Trump’s election, by far, is that our last chance (small as it was) to do anything about global climate change is now irrevocably gone. Without America seriously engaging in the fight to at least slow climate change the battle is lost, which means it’s lost for good (for millennia, anyway, which might as well be forever).
The consensus commentary at Real Climate seems to be that Trump’s victory means little in this regard, but I disagree for this main reason: the SCOTUS. Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate will be able to install the most reactionary Supreme Court in many decades (hell, in probably the last 100 years), and that court will last for a generation.
Certainly, the next four years (at least) will be a horror-show of unprecedented anti-environmentalism at the federal level. But beyond that, no matter who occupies the White House or even who controls the Congress, this generation-spanning reactionary Court will ensure that nothing remotely-serious enough will be done on global climate change since that would require massive collective action (i.e., under the auspices of the federal gov’t) and any such attempts will be litigated in favor of the Kochs and their ilk, and not for environmental protection.
Which means, we are well and truly fucked. And not just for the relatively-few years under the worst person (by any measure) to ever be President, but (for all practical purposes) for all time. I didn’t believe that to be the case when Nixon was elected, or Reagan, or Cheney/Bush. But I believe it now. We could (and did) bounce back from each of those execrable administrations, and showed real progress on many fronts in doing so. But we’ve run out of time on this planet-wide existential crisis which trumps (ha ha) everything else.
I have no idea how we get past that. Still gonna plant my apple tree, as it were, but…
hovercraft
@Debbie1:
I am very familiar with Rosewood, and also the riots in Tulsa, Oklahoma against a wealthy black town, that basically wiped out the “Black Wall Street.”
Bobby Thomson
The Democrats are the party of equality. That’s their brand. A lot of white folks aren’t ok with equality and can’t be reached because of that. Fuck ’em. Can’t change the brand and shouldn’t try.
And look, Obama won twice notwithstanding the utter stupidity of white people. Maybe a non-hypothetical Trump presidency will bring the clue by fours necessary to educate them. If not we’ve got bigger problems.
rikyrah
@hovercraft:
What cities did BLM burn up?
I think that I am alert….how did I miss it?
rikyrah
@Uncle Ebeneezer:
yeah..this
gogol's wife
@Betty Cracker:
I tried. I said, “Hillary Clinton had police at her convention too, a whole bunch of them.” “Yes, but why weren’t they onstage at the same time as the BLM mothers?” I said, “Well, that would have been weird.” But I made no headway.
Matt McIrvin
@Cacti: Obama got reelected in 2012, though, which suggests that the worst of the racial panic didn’t get rolling until after that. Trayvon Martin was killed early in 2012, but BLM started after Zimmerman walked in 2013, and then there was Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015. It just built and built.
LAC
@gogol’s wife: I didn’t think you were excusing it. I am just tired of another edition of white people vapors. I am watching these cabinet position fill up with folks that are going to set us back decades and I just get angry all over again.
Rp
@Uncle Ebeneezer: of course not. I’m not arguing with you on the merits, I’m suggesting a way to reach white people terrified of race by using a back door.
We’re too focused on the right and fair argument rather than using the most effective one.
FlipYrWhig
Because of tribalism, IMHO a widespread white response to police shootings of unarmed black people is to think, “that cop could have been me, just trying to do his best when suddenly he makes a simple, tragic mistake and suddenly it’s a whole racial incident because everything is always about race with Those People.” There’s a ton of misfiring sympathy between and among white people lately, centered on the notion that People Like Me are having a rough ride lately, while Those People get to be the only thing anyone talks about. And this is the entire explanation of why Trump caught fire on the Republican side.
Mike Daggs
Bangs head on desk.
As someone who lives in one of the Pacific Coast states, which increasing feel like I’m living in a foreign country, any criticism of the past campaign or what to do going forward which starts with —-“That was a tweet really to the progressive establishment — which means too often white Northeastern liberals —” FU – there is an entire time zone that gave most of those 2.7 million votes and they don’t live on the Acela corridor.
Mnemosyne
Also, too, can I push back for a moment on the notion that white voters did this because they’re feeling “economically insecure” and that all we have to do is fix our economic system and racial equality will follow?
The problem with that notion is that it’s completely the opposite of what American history actually tells us. The big surge of white supremacy across the country wasn’t in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, it was in the late 1890s through the mid-1920s when things were pretty good economically. White people were actually getting a little bit ahead. The middle class started booming. Fortunes were being made.
And middle-class white people looked around and said, Okay, now let’s see how we can oppress us some black people (obviously, edited for modern ears). So they rioted and destroyed communities in places like Rosewood and Tulsa, where black people were also doing pretty well. They started passing Jim Crow laws — remember, Plessy v Ferguson, which legalized “separate but equal,” wasn’t decided until 1896.
I think we saw that same historical dynamic come into play again with this election. White people like the Obamacare enrollees in the previous post are actually doing okay. They have healthcare. They’re not in daily fear of bankruptcy. And as soon as they got just that little bit ahead, their very next thought was, Okay, now how do I stop Those People from getting ahead, too?
It’s not even crabs in a bucket. It’s getting slightly ahead and then pushing other people down.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Matt McIrvin: I believe that of the thousand cuts that led to demise of the Hillary Clinton campaign, the “whitewash” was one of the biggest. I also believe that, Michelle and the Constitution willing, Obama would’ve handily won a third term, against Trump or any of the other sixteen Deplorables who clowned through the 2016 Republican Clown Parade.
dww44
@gogol’s wife: As much as I hate the idea and the possibility of the shredding of the social safety net, I truly do fear what an unpredictable President with a twitchy twitter finger and a desire to upend foreign policy may do to global politics. In the world of geopolitics, slow and steady (thanks, President Obama) is infinitely preferable to what we are likely to get come January 20, 2017.
LongHairedWeirdo
I agree the reachout isn’t a simple pocketbook message. But what I think should be done is not try to reach out to them. It’s to destroy the advantage.
Slag the Republicans in terms that mean something to them. “Oh, you don’t think they loves them immigrants? Letting immigrants in is their favor to their corporate buddies – it helps keep them from having to pay YOU a fair wage!” They just want it illegal so the immigrants can’t demand better working conditions.”
Ask if they care about honest, hardworking Americans, why they keep trying to help companies ship jobs OUT of America, to give them to foreigners. When they try to pull out a talking point, scoff and say “that’s why they keep giving the rich tax breaks and let them earn unlimited money outside the US tax free, right?”
You can’t out-bigot them, but you can out-play them.
sunny raines
Yes WWC racism, sexism, and bigotry was key, but you also should not discuss ‘what happened’ without mentioning two key elements:
1) the success of the republican voter suppression in key states like the WI, MI, NC, and others
2) the continued media news decline into infotainment for profit: smearing Clinton sold; putting trump’s outrage-o-da-week on daily sold; presenting truth, facts, and policy – verboten.
sunny raines
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Clinton was Obama’s third term – the WWC rejected it.
KS in MA
@Mnemosyne: THIS.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@sunny raines: Not quite, Clinton was not Obama, and a great many voters, white and non-white, working-class and otherwise, rejected her.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@Rp: So what do I say to all the Black, LGBTQ, women, Muslim, disabled people I care about who are literally begging me as a White male to stop putting concerns of what’s “more effective” before the need to do what is right. These marginalized groups are telling me to do the opposite of what you suggest. They are asking me to call out __ists and __phobes and stop making goddamn excuses for them. They are asking me to show my support for them by going against my conventional wisdom idea of what is best for Democrats or even Democracy and to stand up for them. They want me to call out __ism/__phobia and to make people of privilege uncomfortable. This is literally what they are asking and telling me to do. So what am I supposed to tell them? What rationale do I have for rejecting THEIR wishes for the actions needed to fight their oppression because I or someone else claims to know better? I don’t know your race/gender etc., but it’s been notable (and telling) that most (not all) of the let’s-not-ruffle-feathers sentiment is coming from people who are not part of the marginalized groups.
Mnemosyne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Actually, as far as I’ve seen, the Obama coalition held and everyone voted in pretty much the same percentages as 2012. There were some what higher percentages African-American and Latino men who voted for Trump, which I suspect was due to sexism and not wanting a woman president, but even there we’re talking about a few percentage points’ difference.
But, for the most part, targeted suppression of Democrats who had voted in 2012 is what gave Trump the Electoral College victory. White voters went for Trump in the same percentages as they went for Romney, which is why those missing/suppressed voters were so crucial.
Ian
When I ask people I know why they did the stupid thing they do I get
A)
And B) Trumped that bitch.
Racism and Misogyny. I do not ever hear, ohh… he will be better at trade.
Morzer
My ten cent take on Black Lives Matter – and why it was and is the right thing to do, even if it panics a number of idiots into voting Trump:
1) Protests like BLM aren’t just about immediate wins – which are fairly rare when going up against an entrenched power
2) If protests like BLM don’t happen, the entrenched power won’t concede anything, because .. why would it?
3) Young people are heavily liberal – and protests like BLM make them more aware of essential issues for their future and that of the country. Failure to educate young people politically and motivate them to turn out has been one of the Democratic party’s more significant failings over time. Young people who go to the polls for you will also turn into your solid, dependable base that wins you elections.
4) BLM are arguing for a fairer, more honest society and better, more just law enforcement. This is something that ultimately benefits the overwhelming majority of citizens.
sherparick
Belcher’s book and Katherine Kramer’s books and articles strike a very similar theme around the politics of racial aversion (Belcher’s rather useful term) and resentment. But as Kramer points out, it is not just a racial resentment, but that Hillary was simply very unpopular in among rural and working class white people in the “Blue Wall” states going back to 2007-08. Partly due to sexism and partly due to their resentment concerning her husband’s neoliberal, coast centric, economic policies. Kramer also points out that in Wisconsin Clinton under performed in cities. Part of that may have been vote suppression, but part of it was again the NAFTA/WTO association. It should have been a big warning flag to this campaign that they lost both Wisconsin and Michigan primaries and struggled so hard with whites (both men and women) without college degrees in Iowa, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Still should not be forgotten that Clinton did get 48% of the popular vote nationally, 2% more than Mr. Orange Hair.
sherparick
@sherparick: I do this because I think we still need a politics that draws a distinction between the cultural white Northern working class and the cultural white Southern working class. For a variety of reasons, the group identification of the Southern working class is so bound up in whiteness, anti-Blackness, and religious reaction that it has voted consistently for 150 years to sustain various oligarchies, as long as the oligarchies are members of their tribe and the oligarchs explicitly or implicitly give them a privileged place in the social order based on skin color. So they vote for reaction, even as their reactionary rulers make their lives harder and shorter. (Bill O’Reilly’s recent rant holding President Obama responsible for an uptick in heroin use in white America because of “Black Street dealers” and President Obama (who is also black) supporting sentencing reform is an example of how it is done.)
Morzer
@sherparick:
One exception to this might be Huey Long, who ran against the oligarchs as a populist and did so while generally avoiding race baiting and creating programs that aimed to lift poor people of all skin colors out of poverty. He was denounced by the KKK and responded that the Imperial Wizard better not set foot in Louisiana for the good of his health.
chopper
@Debbie1:
you are definitely in the mind of a scaredy-cat white person. now the question is, how do we as a society deal with this quality in these idiots?
chopper
@Mnemosyne:
exactly. we can’t deal with these people by coming down to their level on race. and it ain’t just the WWC types that do this. lots of totebagger types had this reaction. fuckers.
Sondra
We have been asking “What’s the Matter With Kansas” for years without ever getting a good answer. This conclusion does take that into account: that they have a different priority i.e., loss of status and white supremacy. But voters have been electing Republicans for years without considering race and in spite of the fact they they always implement policies that are not in the economic interests of the working poor. So there is that.
As for the ACA in Kentucky, most of those people weren’t fooled into believing that their insurance wasn’t Obamacare, and they did hear the promise to repeal it. They just didn’t think it applied to them. They cannot believe that Rs would want to hurt so many of them. They don’t mind if the others lose out. Just as they love their Medicare, they also enjoy having insurance because they work and they deserve it. Besides, they are going to hit the lottery and vault into the rich upper class any minute now and when they die they will be able to leave their fortunes to their children without any death taxes.
Grung_e_Gene
@encephalopath: That’s spot on. The symbol has become the ideals it was supposed to represent. Those angry about ate Idolaters.
terry chay
@Mnemosyne: Or the BLMers who got to speak to President Obama and said, “Our voice isn’t being heard!” And Obama replied, “You are in the White House, talking to the President of the United States. Your voice is being heard.” *drops mike*
One thing important to remember is that the election wasn’t decided by white people flocking to Trump, it was because a lot of Democratic leaners (inc. minorities) who chose to not vote, and, more importantly, lie to pollsters about their intent to vote. To the extent that BLM depressed that turnout, they are responsible, but no more, than Bernie Sanders who did the same, if not a heck of a lot more (though I like to believe it was unintentional).
I don’t know how bad it was because I live in California. Our turnout wasn’t depressed, and people for the most part, had sensible discussions about BLM and BernieOrBust to the point that they were statistically irrelevant. Though I have no doubt that some influenced people in other states to vote 3rd party or not at all.
artem1s
how many of them completely lost their shit because he was a paragon? I think a lot. These are people who will never, ever again be able to wipe away their children’s experience of a black man in a position of power, working with white men and women in power, and doing a good job of it. These are people who will never be able to wipe away their children’s experience of one know-nothing everyday white guy president crashing the economy and failing to protect us from terrorism and failing to clean up after Katrina. Then their bigoted parents and neighbors and pastors did it again X1000 in 2016 because they were incoherently enraged by the color of someone’s skin and that he did a better job than W. The so called WWC are pissed that they got shown up by a black man and it happened in front of their children. They lost this war a long time ago.
artem1s
@Mnemosyne:
That’s what turned me around on race. Every fucking white loser white guy who couldn’t do his job bitching about having to answer to a black supervisor or take a class from someone who spoke multiple languages. And every white guy who had a melt down because Hank Aaron broke Ruth’s record or Tiger Woods encroaching on Nicolas’ records. It was so annoying knowing the bitching was coming everytime the camera wasn’t focused on the white men. Or the endless butthurt that their children actually learn some history about ALL the fucking men and women who built this country for a couple of weeks out of the year. Once I started seeing the endless lying I couldn’t NOT see it. I am so fucking tired of living in a pastie white world.
LongHairedWeirdo
With all due respect, the Republicans are lying about *everything*. That’s what I intend to point out.
They lie about caring about taxes – they just want to serve the wealthy and cutting taxes is how you do that.
They lie about caring about jobs – they know that jobs are being outsourced and offshored because that’s what the rich want.
They lie about caring about abortion. Or rather, why they care about abortion.
a) it keeps the fundies in line
b) they get to pretend they CAAAARE about BABIEZ!!!!!!! and
c) it’s a hell of a wedge issue – “hate those baby murdering bastards!”
They lie about everything – it’s time to start focusing on that.
Look: They love St. Ronnie because he made it okay to speak their ideals: worship of wealth, mostly. But by the late 80s/early 90s, no one wanted to hear about making it easy to be rich and easy *on* the rich. They were losing on their claims about the prosperity gospel.
So they started slagging the other side. And it worked!
But it only works when you take them seriously.
Paul Ryan says he wants to “save” Medicare. No, he wants his wealthy overlords to get their fair cut – Medicare is super-efficient, no private industry is going to match that.
Republicans want to cut social security now – because otherwise, taxes will go up to pay promised benefits, which would hurt the wealthy when the best place to start is raising or eliminating the income cap!
Hammer them on the lies about everything else – then, you can start talking lies about race. “Oh, yeah, like they’re suddenly *honest* on matters of race!”