The Prick

Donald Trump, in a recent Republican presidential debate, defended the size of his penis, which he felt had been unfairly maligned by a rival candidate.  How reassuring.  Everyone is familiar with the profusion of Trump’s offenses against civility, dignity, fairness, evidence, and reason – claiming that Mexico deliberately sends criminals and rapists across the border; bragging about his wealth; peddling debunked statistics about crime and race; promising to prevent Muslims from entering the country; blaming a female journalist’s criticism on menstruation; excusing and encouraging violence at his rallies; declining to disavow support from overt racists; urging official use of “torture”; recommending killing the families of terrorists – the list goes on and on.  The most distinguishing feature of Trump’s campaign is its utter lack of seriousness, its stubborn refusal to engage the process of choosing the President of the United States with the circumspection and respect it justly demands.  The country and the world are in a perilous state, and Trump responds with schoolyard bullying and locker room braggadocio.  But beneath all the adolescent bluster, the childish taunts, the petulance, the threats, the bombast, the ocean of boorishness so vast that it would shame a barroom bigmouth – beneath all that appalling unseriousness lies a very serious message: Working Americans – in particular white, Christian, working American men – have been pushed around for a long time and they finally have a champion who pushes back.  They’ve been persistently and systematically disrespected, and Trump’s mission is to make that disrespect a two-way street.

In other words, Trump’s dismissal of the norms of political engagement – even his dismissal of the norms of civilized conduct! – are central to his appeal.  They signal to his supporters that he won’t let elite disapproval undermine his fight for them.  But there’s a deeper and more important implication: the normal political rules are themselves illegitimate.  This is the prime doctrine of Trumpism: the game is rigged in favor of the powerful, the comfortable, the rich, the connected, and fighting those elites requires breaking their rules.  If America is to be made great again then the received rules of capitalism, trade, campaign finance, civility, and particularly the rules of political discourse, must be broken.  This is what his supporters mean when they say, “He tells it like it is.”  He ignores received notions of what’s politically correct, of what’s acceptable or reasonable, and boldly speaks for white working people against a system of lies deliberately designed to exploit them.

It’s true, of course, that for decades the economic interests of working whites (indeed, of all working people) have been sacrificed for those of the investor class, while their cultural sensibilities – traditional, patriotic, religious – have been disdained and denigrated by cosmopolitan cultural elites.  And the pathetically unimaginative slogan festival that passes for our current political discourse positively hinders addressing the serious issues we face.  On both sides, political rhetoric is crafted primarily to delegitimize the other side and squash dissent on one’s own.  For conservatives, Obamacare is “socialism”, Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme”, and invading a non-threatening country was part of the bizarrely named “War on Terror.”  For liberals, any resistance to immigration or affirmative action can only be motivated by the most malicious racism.  Why should white working people respect notions of propriety that are used to dismiss their interests?

But this semi-conscious critique of our dismal discourse goes one step further.  On the outer reaches of the Trumpian worldview not just elite rules of conduct are dismissed, but any thought of proper conduct entirely!  Here, the fear of being denied official recognition to fight for one’s interests slips over into discounting the need for that recognition, and finally into discounting all recognition; arguably justifiable reassertion takes a wrong turn into destructive and juvenile rebellion against all constraint.  It’s this attitude that opens the door into that Trumpian world where anything in the service of one’s interests is justified, even embraced.  Violence, torture, barbarism – these are just more tools for achieving one’s ends.  This is positively post-modern: politics is war by other means, and all that matters in war is winning.  Trump will do anything to win.

And he’ll win for America.  There are two things Trump steadfastly believes in: the essential goodness of the American common man and his own indomitable talents and instincts.  If his instincts tell him he can get Mexico to pay for that wall, then they will.  If he remembers seeing New Jersey Muslims cheering as the twin towers fell, then they did.  And if he wants to slug those irritating protestors, then it must be OK to do so.  And his flawless instincts license him to make up policy – or even facts! – on the fly.  Without knowing the slightest thing about such topics he can blather on about NATO, or nuclear policy, or climate change, or anything at all.  He can claim, on the basis of an online video that’s been proven to be a hoax, that a man who’d tried to attack him was connected to ISIS, insisting “All I know is what’s on the internet.”  Has there ever been a candidate whose communications have consisted entirely of talking out of his ass?  His supernaturally perfect instincts even permit him to contradict himself from one moment to the next, such as calling for criminally punishing women who have abortions one day and then walking it back the next, all while insisting his position hasn’t changed!  People who reason, and marshal facts and arguments can’t be trusted; they’re all on the side of the elites!  But if one’s heart is in the right place, if one’s faith in America remains pure then one’s instincts can always be trusted.  Any action taken in that moral purity and for that moral purity is axiomatically moral, too.  Right makes might.

Trump’s supporters love him because his instincts and theirs are identical, and he lacks the capacity for self-reflection or critical thought that might impede the bounteous flourishing of those instincts.  This is the one thing that Trump thoroughly understands, if only viscerally: White America is his tribe and he is their chieftain.  He stokes their fears, he humors their pieties, he mocks their natural inferiors, he dallies with their darkest prejudices.  In short, he reclaims for them their rightful place as the heroes of the American story, the best people in the world.  He will do anything for them, and they deserve no less.

Trumpism represents a colossal over-reaction by white, male, Christian America in the face of its economic and cultural decline.  The various components of that over-reaction – the rejection of civility, the embrace of barbarism, the glorification of impulse over circumspection – have been rampant on the right for years.  Now the right is using the political chaos of the last decade – the Iraqi debacle, the Great Recession, the Obamacare wars, white decline – as an excuse to indulge its worst inclinations.  And Donald Trump came along at just the right moment and pulled it all together into a semi-coherent whole, even if it’s a whole that almost entirely lacks intellectual substance.  But Trump’s utter obliviousness to actual political content – to what is still quaintly referred to in certain circles as reality – is crucial to his ongoing success, since it insures he’ll never stop fighting for his tribe.  It’s not just that’s he willing to be a shameless jerk to advance the interests of his people, it’s that he’s incapable of being anything other than a shameless jerk.  He’s a prick, but he’s their prick, and they’re convinced a prick is exactly what they need.

The Whitest Guilt

Who is to blame for the ongoing social dysfunction – poverty, illegitimacy, drug abuse, violence – in much of the African-American community?  More reliably than almost any other issue, your answer reveals you as a liberal or a conservative.  The standard liberal understanding is that the persistence of white racism traps blacks in bad jobs, terrible neighborhoods, constricted lives.  There are more sophisticated liberal explanations that involve the loss in recent decades of urban industrial jobs as well as the legacy of centuries of slavery, deliberate segregation and debilitating social and economic oppression.  Conservatives, on the other hand, attribute black social dysfunction to black cultural pathology, that is, to attitudes and norms prevalent in the black community that discourage behavior broadly associated with success, e.g. family stability, educational attainment, steady work, self-control.  The sophisticated liberal explanations lay some blame at the feet of African-American culture, but what characterizes the conservative explanations is the focus on cultural explanations to the exclusion of anything else.  To conservatives, blacks alone are to blame for their plight.

Paul Ryan, conservative Republican congressman from Wisconsin and the 2012 GOP Vice Presidential nominee, recently got in trouble for expressing just that view.  Here’s what he said on March 12^th on conservative Bill Bennett’s “Morning in America” radio show:

We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

The immediate, forceful reaction from many quarters on the left was that Ryan was trafficking in surreptitious racism.  That is, he was referring in coded language to the black community particularly, characterizing African-Americans as work-averse and attributing that aversion to moral failure.  That is, blacks are poor because they’re lazy.  The very next day Ryan shifted into full politician damage-control mode, labeling his comments “inarticulate”, meeting with African-American political leaders, denying he had meant blacks in particular, and (sounding suspiciously like a liberal) blaming the troubles of the poor on “society as a whole.”

Seriously?  Can anyone doubt he was criticizing African-American culture?  Ryan’s radio comments are the sort of thing conservatives always say when addressing the troubles of poor blacks.  Some have pointed out Newt Gingrich’s similar remarks made while running for president in 2012:

Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day; they have no habit of “I do this and you give me cash,” unless it's illegal.

Is it possible Gingrich wasn’t talking about blacks?  No, that’s exactly who he was talking about!  Ryan’s remarks may not have been as artless as Gingrich’s, but his point was the same: African-American culture does not sufficiently inculcate an ethic of work and self-sufficiency.  It’s not exactly calling them lazy, but it comes dangerously close to that ancient and appalling racist libel.

But it’s not the same.  There’s nothing necessarily racist about assessing a culture as deficient in some particular.  Some cultures are clearly better at some things – consider the Italian attitude of slowing down and enjoying life – and not so good at other things – consider the lax Italian attitude toward bribery.  Each culture arises from a unique, complex and contingent set of circumstances and each has its strengths and weaknesses.  Cultures are like unhappy families, each imperfect in its own way.  To be racist one has to believe an ethnic group is inherently inferior, that it has some genetically-determined quality that unavoidably causes it to fall behind.  If Ryan meant to imply this about African-Americans then he was indeed expressing racism, and if he meant to subtly signal such notions to receptive whites he was indeed employing racist dog whistles.  But is there any reason to think so?  Ryan did himself no favor by citing, in his original comments, Charles Murray of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, a writer infamous for claiming that African-American social problems result from their genetically-determined inferior intelligence.  Yes, that’s right.  Ryan says he meant nothing racist – that he wasn’t even referring to blacks particularly! – while citing an explicitly racist writer.  This is inarticulateness of the highest order!

But even though all conservatives attribute black troubles to black culture, not all conservatives attribute black cultural dysfunction to black genes.  Indeed, even Ryan probably didn’t mean that.  And, as noted, many liberals believe black culture does play an important part in black troubles.  Here’s Jonathan Chait:

The argument is that structural conditions shape culture, and culture, in turn, can take on a life of its own independent of the forces that created it. It would be bizarre to imagine that centuries of slavery, followed by systematic terrorism, segregation, discrimination, a legacy wealth gap, and so on did not leave a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success.

To these more sophisticated liberals, the horrific historical treatment of African-Americans has left a terrible legacy which, through normal cultural transmission, continues even now to debilitate African-American attitudes and norms.  That is, oppression by whites caused the problems of black culture, and once such pathologies took hold they became quite hard to mend.  Non-racist conservative explanations for black social pathology ignore those hundreds of years of oppression and instead revolve around the liberal welfare state.  To conservatives, excessive liberal condemnation of America’s real and imagined sins leads blacks to see themselves as victims deserving compensation in the form of government handouts.  Thus liberals provide both the rationale and the funding for black dependency and sloth.  So liberals blame the present-day troubles of blacks on their historical mistreatment at the hands of the dominant white power structure, as well as the persisting white racism that liberals find all too evident.  That is, traditional American society – the society that liberals fought so hard to improve and that conservatives fought so hard to preserve – is at fault.  Meanwhile, conservatives fault many of those same liberal improvements (while failing, of course, to credit liberalism’s clear successes, such as civil rights laws).  When it comes to the problems of African-Americans, liberals and conservatives, unsurprisingly, blame each other.

Birmingham, Alabama, 1963

But conservatives never seriously address the historical and traditional oppression – cruel, violent, horribly destructive – of blacks by whites.  Conservative analysis of African-American dysfunction begins with the Great Society, as if nothing relevant happened before then.  They seem embarrassed by discussions of slavery and Jim Crow, by the thought that America could have committed such momentous and monstrous crimes.  And this reluctance, this touchiness, is of a piece with conservative hyper-sensitivity to charges of racism.  When liberals accused Ryan of race-hustling, conservatives howled at the injustice.  Every time conservatives talk about racial problems they blame blacks, and every time they’re accused of racism they blame liberals.  They’re desperate to escape any accountability on race!  No rational person believes all of conservatism is tainted by racism, but there is no denying the historical fact that modern American conservatism was founded upon implacable antipathy toward three huge threats to traditional society: international communism, the welfare state and racial integration.  Liberal success in substantially actualizing that third threat has ironically given some cover to the conservative claim that whites no longer hold blacks back.  Conservatives mock liberals for what they call “white guilt”, i.e. the desperate liberal shame over being part of the race that treated blacks so badly for so long.  They believe white guilt enervates liberals by robbing them of the moral authority needed to place blame where it belongs: at the feet of blacks themselves.  But consider the absurd conservative refusal to confront not only present-day racism but even historical racism, particularly conservative complicity in historical racism.  We can only call this preposterous denial the conservative version of white guilt.  While there is some truth to the notion that liberals too readily let African-Americans avoid their responsibilities, it’s conservatives who scramble like madmen to avoid their own.

And the notion of conservative white guilt helps explain another quite strange phenomenon: white fear of oppression by blacks.  To be conservative is to believe that in present-day America whites are more mistreated by blacks than the reverse.  This putative oppression takes many forms: black-on-white crime, liberal taxation to pay for plush welfare benefits for blacks, affirmative action programs that take jobs from deserving whites and give them to undeserving blacks, black intimidation of white voters, black calls for reparations for slavery.  Rush Limbaugh famously referred to Obamacare as “reparations.”  Indeed, it’s black self-pity and resentment that causes our racial troubles.  Whites are now the true victims of racism, mostly at the hands of a “racial grievance industry” run by “race hustlers”, the most infamous being Al Sharpton.  And the most vicious form such vile race hatred takes is the constant liberal accusation of conservative racism.  In this view, Paul Ryan is more of a victim than the poor “inner city” denizens to whom he condescends.  Conservatives are hyper-aware that racism of the old-fashioned kind is now so comprehensively and thoroughly delegitimized that any taint of it instantly undermines any position or policy.  In this view no charges of white racism are ever valid; they’re all transparent attempts to silence or marginalize conservatives and conservative ideas, as bludgeons used to beat down whites fighting for fair treatment.  In the 60’s it was Bull Connor spraying demonstrators with fire hoses, now it’s the Huffington Post spewing defamation of conservative whites.

But the worst white fear, going back at least as far as Reconstruction, is fear of blacks in power.  When Obama first ran for president in 2008 he received more votes in almost every county than had his 2004 Democratic predecessor, John Kerry.  But in a broad swath of the Upland South, stretching from West Virginia through Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas, Obama got a smaller percentage of the vote than Kerry.  We need not wonder why this area bucked the national trend.  When (in another context) voters in this area were asked why they didn’t vote for Obama they expressed fear of “minorities in positions over the white race”.  This is the fear of black revenge.  But revenge for what?  Deep down conservative whites know blacks are right to be so profoundly aggrieved, and so profoundly aggrieved at them.  This is conservative white guilt: if the Negroes get in charge they’ll screw us the way we’ve screwed them.  To such people, all liberals are carpetbaggers and all liberalism is reparations.

Paul Krugman, in a piece on the Ryan controversy, argues that “American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.  Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics,” such as conservative support for Medicare paired with opposition to Medicaid.  Krugman is right to see white populism lurking behind many domestic conservative policies, particularly white opposition to the welfare state (of course, such opposition has perfectly legitimate non-racial motivations, as well).  But there’s more going on in the racial churn than just white anger over paying taxes for Those People.  There’s white fear of retribution and there’s the stubborn white refusal to face responsibility.  And, importantly, there’s the boiling resentment at liberal attempts to force that responsibility upon them.  No one likes to be reminded of the guilt they’re trying so hard to repress.  This is less about income tax rates and more about the shackle and the poll tax and the lynching noose and the long shadow they cast over white American pride. 

And that illuminates what liberal charges of racism are really after.  Sure, sometimes liberals use those charges to bully, to intimidate, to silence.  “Racist” is for liberals what “socialist” is for conservatives: a clumsy but powerful rhetorical weapon.  And sometimes liberals honestly see racism where none exists; for some liberals it’s always 1965 on the march from Montgomery to Selma.  But deeper down is the earnest liberal wish that conservatives face up to the persistent hard realities of race in America and undertake the hard work of racial expiation as liberals have tried to do. Before the Civil Rights era, liberalism largely ignored the problems of blacks; to maintain the partisan unity that made the New Deal possible the Democratic Party acquiesced to the demands of its southern conservative wing and denied government benefits to blacks. But, starting in the 1960’s, liberals atoned for their racial sins by trying substantively to address these issues.  Indeed, the entire conservative critique of racial liberalism is that it has atoned all too well – and that the atonement is underwritten by those in strenuous dissent.  But that dissident resentment helps perpetuate the antipathy toward African-Americans that keeps them in their collective place.  Why does the party that espouses small government and individual freedom find it so necessary to justify even obvious and genuine expressions of white animosity?  The issue of past and persistent African-American misery is not one issue among many, it is central to the acrimonious and hateful ideological divide that plagues us.  The hard feelings of guilt, resentment and fear it elicits polarize and poison all of our politics.  Liberals react to every remotely insensitive conservative remark as the second coming of Bull Connor. And conservatives react same way to every liberal accusation of racism (even those with clear merit) and thereby harden racial alienation and deepen our ideological polarization.

But let’s stand athwart that vicious cycle and yell Stop!  There are few genuine Bull Connor’s still around.  But there are some (don’t you know any?) and liberals are right to expose them.  But how bleeding obvious is it that liberals must be more fair and circumspect in their accusations, but also that conservatives must respond with more open and honest self-examination.  Even though there are the more sophisticated liberal explanations for African-American troubles, the liberal instinct is to blame only white racism and excuse almost any bad black behavior.  That’s because liberals are so exquisitely aware of the terrible reality of white-on-black oppression – both historically and in its current subtler forms – that blaming black culture at all feels to them like blaming the victim.  And conservatives are working so tirelessly to avoid that same awareness that they cannot blame anyone else.  But liberals need to remember that victims can act badly too.  And they need to understand that racial resentment and racial bigotry may be closely related, but they are not the same.  It may be more gratifying to stomp the latter, but they’d do better to soothe the former.

But here is the crucial question: Can conservatives be made to acknowledge and appreciate the historical and continuing immiseration of African-Americans?  They must, but they almost certainly won’t.  There are so many obstacles that seem so insurmountable: a conservative communications complex invested in pushing racial hot-buttons, the social and economic separation of whites and blacks, the worsening of political polarization and mutual mistrust, and – most importantly – 60 years of smoldering resentment.  But just as African-Americans must acknowledge their own cultural shortcomings and assume the responsibility and hard work needed to overcome them, so must conservatives take responsibility for how their own denial of racial reality contributes to our painful political polarization.  Conservatives may comfort themselves with the thought that African-Americans vote for Democrats in overwhelming numbers because liberals enable their victimhood, but blacks easily perceive conservative racial irresponsibility and resentment.  Thus, as the demographics slowly move America in a more racially diverse direction they also move it in an irrevocably liberal direction.  But the conviction that whites owe blacks nothing – not transfer payments, not preferential treatment, not protection for voting rights, not even understanding – is so central to conservative ideology and psychology that they couldn’t give it up without a radical reworking of their worldview.  Conservative white guilt is at the heart of our ongoing political dysfunction and unhappiness.  Unable to come to terms with the enormity of the moral failure of traditional American culture, unable to concede the persistence of racial mistreatment, unable to accept their own complicity, they consign African-Americans to unequal treatment, themselves to resentful alienation, and all of us to bitter division and strife.