Kelly's Heroes

Donald Trump and John Kelly

We’re all Civil War re-enactors.  As the most dramatic and consequential chapter in our tortured racial history it compels our concern and provokes our passions. But we seem unable to deal with it maturely. Instead of facing it and learning from it, we succumb to its distortions and lies. Instead of settling it, it unsettles us. We fight it every single day, and it always wins. And on October 30, White House Chief of Staff, General John Kelly recklessly threw himself into that fight, responding to a question about Civil War monuments by saying:

I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now where it’s different today. But the lack of the ability to compromise led to the Civil War and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand with where their consciences had them make their stand.

But this is monumentally foolish. The entire history of the American republic before the Civil War is one of endless compromises aimed at reassuring the South that slavery would not be disturbed. The precipitating cause of the war was the election of a profoundly conciliatory and compromising president who merely wished to prevent the expansion of slavery into new territories, and promised to leave it alone in the states where it already existed.  We compromised our ideals for decades, but that ultimately proved incapable of preventing war with people prepared to fight to the death to maintain such a monstrous evil. And apparently we need to be reminded that General Lee (who was a gallant soldier, but a brutal slave-master) led an army intent on destroying the United State in the service of that evil.

But why do we need to be reminded? How does an intelligent person like Kelly manage to overlook such glaring truths? The easy answer from liberals is: deliberate racism. In this view Kelly finds Confederate generals admirable because they’re the heroes of white power over black bodies. Maybe he even likes slavery!  But this is cheap and irresponsible; there is no evidence that beneath Kelly’s bland exterior there beats a cold racist heart. Indeed, there’s a better, a more subtle explanation, and it’s the reverse of the liberal accusation. It’s not that Kelly admires men like Lee because of their white supremacy; it’s that he goes easy on their white supremacy because he admires them.  And he admires them because it’s too painful not to. That is, to admit Lee’s evil is to admit American evil and that’s something a conservative can never do. Slavery and racism are central to the American story, and the inability to accept that is central to American conservatism.

And what’s true for Kelly is true for the millions more – in the South and elsewhere – who perceive the Civil War in the same way. Some of them are indeed motivated by outright racism, but most are simply unable to concede that America committed such grievous crimes. It’s probably true that most people in most countries are similarly unable to face up to their own national sins. But Americans find it particularly painful, since we invest such emotion in the view of ourselves as noble and enlightened crusaders fighting for democracy and truth. How can the shining city on the hill have a rotten foundation?  Downplaying American racial sin to preserve American idealistic self-image is older than the republic itself.

Rutherford B. Hayes, who ascended to the presidency
in 1877 by agreeing to a backroom deal that ended the
federal guarantee of the rights of African Americans

It’s because the Civil War presents a direct threat to that self-image that we continue to fight over it so bitterly. And in the period after the war, known as Reconstruction, we dug ourselves deeper. When the South lost it faced a profound moral choice: either concede the horrible wrongness of its war aims, or preserve its self-image by pretending it fought for other more respectable reasons, and by suppressing the ex-slaves as lesser creatures whose rights need not be respected.  We all know what it chose. And, crucially, it asked the rest of the country to share its mythology. Or rather, it demanded widespread acceptance of that mythology as the price for white reconciliation. In effect, southern whites presented northern whites with a choice of their own, “Side with us or with our ex-slaves; you can’t have both.” And we all know what they chose. The mythology became the consensus, and black Americans paid the price.

Kelly, and the millions who agree with him, are still making that same choice. They callously disregard and minimize the death and destruction visited upon black people under slavery, Jim Crow, and even now, all to preserve white unity and white pride. But unsurprisingly, callousness is not a constructive strategy. It’s what impels conservative denial about the continuing harsh reality of black life in America today. It pushes whites toward white identity politics, even white nationalism, even outright racism. Its suppressed guilt makes conservatives bitter, defensive, resentful, angry.  It allows them to be manipulated by malevolent hucksters like Donald Trump. Conservative denial is the very poison that is killing us.

But liberals are immune because they’ve opted out of the old consensus. That’s what makes them liberals! Starting in the 1950’s and 60’s they determined to expand the New Deal economic and social success story – which had until then been limited to whites – to include all Americans.  In effect they rejected the white southern Reconstruction-era choice as a false one and determined to side with everyone.  But southern and conservative whites refused – even at this late a stage – to honestly face their historical and current crimes, and liberals, in frustration and desperation, gave up the project of shared prosperity.  After the Civil War, northern whites reconciled with southern whites and blacks suffered.  But now white liberals side with blacks and reconciliation suffers. We’re all Reconstruction re-enactors.

But that’s partly because liberal reluctance to surrender American unity has turned into wild-eyed enthusiasm.  Liberals are happy to see themselves as the good guys, the protectors and allies of black people, and even happier to see conservatives – particularly southern white conservatives – as the embodiment of all American evil. Increasingly, liberals see America itself as so essentially compromised by racial evil that anyone would be foolish and naive to bestow upon her any hope or loyalty. But liberal racial sanctimony, like conservative racial denial, is really about unresolved guilt, about attempting to remove oneself from American sin. Conservatives childishly pretend it doesn’t exist; liberals face it but project it entirely onto the political Other. Conservatives hold onto American idealism by denying it’s less than ideal, liberals hold onto it by psychologically and politically removing themselves from America. The liberal response is more forgivable, of course, since they do face the truth, and they do hold onto their idealism. But they do so at the cost of alienation from their own country, that is, from themselves. And that detachment makes it too easy to indulge the darker aspects of that idealism and go crusading against conservatives like Puritan ministers railing against Satan. But unsurprisingly, shaming is not a constructive strategy. But it is an inevitable one when you’ve concluded that the only way to hold onto your idealism is by rebuking your own country.

And that’s how we’ve hardened into our two sad, familiar camps, defined by our respective dysfunctional reactions to the horrible contradiction between our national ideals and our national crimes. But callous denial and aloof sanctimony are not our only options.  The only hope, and it’s a slim one, is for liberals to see the damage they do when they so fundamentally deplore their fellow countrymen. Liberals, as the conscience of America, must be the more mature party here. If they can face up to American sin, can’t they face up to their own? It’s true that many conservatives are still outright racist, but most are not, and calling them all racists and labeling them as essentially evil does enormous harm to our national life. It degrades the discourse and increases mistrust and resentment, it hardens people in their resistance.  It confuses the symptom, racial resentment, with the disease, national pride, and it angers people who simply want to believe in themselves and their country. It plays into the hands of white nationalists and unscrupulous politicians. Conservatives have foolishly conflated believing in America with believing America has never really done anything wrong, and they badly need to educate themselves on the distinction. Many, out of stubbornness or animus or ignorance, never will.  But many could, and liberals need to give them the space to do so.

And as liberals, the only effective way we can educate is by example. We can do all three things at once: hold onto our ideals, squarely face our country’s sins, and honestly accept that they’re our sins, that we’re inextricably American too. Honest judgment of American history will never get a fair hearing if it’s not joined to a deep commitment to America itself, since no one will hear criticism from someone they don’t trust. And we can be a little more forgiving of those who find it so difficult to hear.  If liberals cannot transcend their own misunderstandings, if they cannot graduate to a more mature and constructive engagement with our terrible history, if they can’t accept that redeeming America means redeeming actual Americans, and if they can’t meet them as equals and as fellow Americans – if they can’t do all this they won’t be honestly addressing our deepest problems; they’ll only be perpetuating them. 

Which Tribe Are You On?

Stokely Carmichael, Donald Trump's ideological father

Just as Bernie Sanders is not a socialist, Donald Trump is not a fascist, nor are his followers.  They resemble fascists – with their worship of the strong leader, their dreams of unmediated state power, their casual attitude toward violence, their embrace of barbarism, and their hostility toward minorities – but they also differ in very important ways.  They don’t wish to end democracy, for instance, or embark upon wars of conquest.   Indeed, Trump defends majority rule and denounces foreign interventionism (though inconsistently).

But Trump does share one notable thing with historical fascists: he has borrowed the tactics and style of his opponents on the left.  In fact, right-wing movements traditionally take on the stylistic attributes of their contemporaries on the left.  Hitler famously adopted the organizational and rhetorical style of the Communists of his day.  The Birchers of the 1950’s self-consciously organized themselves into cells modeled on those of the Communists.  The Goldwater-Reagan right of the 1960’s created and nurtured a slew of conservative media and think-tanks to counter the then-dominance of liberal institutions.  The Moral Majority of the 1970’s portrayed itself as a Christian version of the Civil Rights Movement, claiming to be victims of anti-religious prejudice.  In each case, the right-wing movement in question became the mirror of its left-wing counterpart – only with inegalitarian goals.  They were all wolves in left-wing clothing.

And as our present left consists of identity politics – promoting the interests of traditionally oppressed groups: blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, etc. – so the new right that Trump is crafting consists of white identity politics; in its distilled version: politics for straight, white, Christian men.  White identity politics has been the lurking in the shadows on the right for decades, and though we’ve occasionally glimpsed its sinister face, conservatism’s Reaganite masters have generally kept it hidden (while still happily profiting from its electoral support, of course).  But Trump has dragged it into the bright sunshine and made it the shining, shouting, strutting star.  Trump is not a present-day Hitler, he’s a white Al Sharpton.

Consider Trump’s attacks on Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge who has ruled unfavorably for Trump in the ongoing Trump University fraud case.  Trump complained that Curiel can’t be fair to him because he’s “Mexican” (on an earlier occasion he called him “Spanish”) and therefore, presumably, must be angry at Trump’s anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant positions.  Curiel was actually born in Indiana of Mexican immigrant parents, and Trump seemed to imply he’s not American because he’s not white, and that is inarguably racist.  But was it racist to question the judge’s objectivity?

Many seem to think so, even many conservatives.  Republican Speaker of the House and 2012 nominee for Vice President Paul Ryan explained:

Claiming a person can’t do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment.

But that’s not quite fair.  Trump wasn’t complaining that Curiel was incompetent because of his national descent; he wasn’t saying that his race made him an inherently inferior judge, as a classic racist might; he was complaining that he was irredeemably biased against Trump.  At best, Trump was saying that Curiel couldn’t possibly be objective in the face of Trump’s well known anti-Mexican animus.  That’s not necessarily racist, since anyone’s bias might affect his or her objectivity.  At worst, Trump was saying the judge couldn’t possibly be fair to a white man.  Even that isn’t necessarily racist, since racial animosity, regrettably, can be found everywhere.  Though it’s reasonable to wonder if he meant that all non-whites are irredeemably hostile to whites, since he based his conclusion on little more than Curiel’s ethnic background.  And that would definitely be racist.

But the point is not whether Trump was being racist, the point is he was being self-consciously white, he was engaging in white identity politics.  And he was doing it just like leftists do it.  That is, left-wing identity politics isn’t simply about advancing the interests of oppressed racial and sexual groups, goals that are themselves tremendously necessary and important; it’s also about group consciousness, group pride and, crucially, group loyalty.  One of its axioms is that only members of an oppressed group can really understanding that oppression, and only they can apply that understanding as needed.  So only blacks can really understand the black experience and only blacks can do it justice; only gays know what it means to be gay and only gays can represent that, and so on.  This is the reasoning that says, for instance, that minorities need to be well represented in the judiciary, because white judges can’t be counted on to treat minorities fairly.  This seems plausible, as far as it goes.  But some on the left drive it off the rails when they claim, for example, that only a black person can fairly judge another one.  Trump has merely turned that logic back on itself, saying that only whites can be fair to whites.

He seems to be adopting the entirety of identity thinking, with all of its concomitant dogmatism and intolerance.  We begin to see the squalid outlines of this newest right, and it’s not a new fascism, it’s White Lives Matter.  Its first premise is that whites are themselves victimized by other groups, notably immigrants and Muslims, also by liberals and blacks.  And, crucially, they are victims of political correctness.  That is, the commonly accepted rules of political discourse prevent whites from asserting their values and interests.  This is a direct borrowing of the post-modern belief common on the left that received notions of propriety, reason, and truth are merely tools the oppressors use to squash dissent.  Following the rules is for suckers.  So almost anything – name-calling, attacking motives, suppressing opposition, even violence – is justified in the interests of one’s tribe.  And this is the essence of the new white nationalism: Whites have interests as whites, interests that can only be properly addressed when informed by consciousness of that whiteness.  The least self-aware person in America is leading whites into a deeper self-consciousness of themselves as white!

But this is how Trump and his followers understand, if only viscerally, their current situation, and it explains why they love him so.  To them, politics is about who is screwing who, and they’re determined to be the ones doing the screwing.  In this telling, there are various innately antagonistic tribes in America, defined primarily by skin color, the non-white tribes have been ganging up on the whites, and the whites are finally fighting back.  Politicians and activists can argue about capital-gains tax rates and Obamacare subsidies and abortion, but those issues don’t really matter.  They’re only symbols for signaling where one’s loyalties lie, and that’s all that really matters: loyalty to one’s tribe.  There are white conservatives on one side and blacks, gays, Muslims, and all the other racially, religiously and sexually dubious tribes on the other, and all that matters is who wins.  And white liberals, obviously, are traitors to their own tribe, and are therefore worthy of the worst scorn.  Tribe is all.

Which America?  And great how?

And America belongs to the white tribe.  Or it once did.  There was a time, not so long ago, when being a true American meant being a white, straight, Christian; others were casually consigned to the periphery.  That’s why Trump thinks Curiel can’t really be American.  Some white nationalists wish to restore male whiteness to its proper place at the center of American identity and social deference.  Other Trumpians merely feel that working whites in particular have been unfairly denigrated as backward, ignorant, malicious.  But all Trumpians share the conviction that whites are being treated unfairly by society at large.  When they hear Trump say “Make America Great Again”, they know he means them, only them.

It is, of course, foolish to think that whites per se are an oppressed group.  They still hold the vast majority of the wealth and power in this country.  And there are still oceans of anti-black, anti-gay, anti-Hispanic, etc. feeling out there; Trump’s rise demonstrates that all too well (there is ample rigorous empirical evidence, as well).  And it’s reasonable to think, for example, that a white judge might be unfair to a Hispanic claimant in a way that a Hispanic judge would be less likely to.  Indeed, there’s every reason to believe that a thoroughly white judiciary would be significantly less sympathetic and fair to minorities.

But the reverse is true as well.  There are probably fewer racially hostile minority figures in authority – judges, politicians, policemen, lawyers, etc. – than racially hostile white ones, because white supremacy has been and still is such a potent and insidious force in our national life, even if it is now largely unconscious.  But it’s highly unlikely that there are no non-white authorities who would be tougher on a white person.  And there is truth to the charge that working-class whites have been systematically and unfairly disdained by political and cultural elites.   (And of course working whites are being genuinely exploited, not by blacks or Muslims or gays, but by investors and globalist politicians.  That is, they’re being oppressed not as whites but as workers.)  And consider that programs like affirmative action are explicitly designed to lessen the number of white men in certain occupations.  Whatever good such programs may do (and they don’t do much good, even for minorities) is done by artificially maintaining higher barriers for whites.  This is a minor injustice compared to the universe of injustice that America has dispensed to racial and sexual minorities, but it is nonetheless an actual injustice committed against the individual whites in question.

But need justice be a zero-sum affair?  Is it necessary to lower whites in order to raise others? Are the Trumpians right that America is only a cage match of hostile tribes?  Either the logic of identity applies to all the tribes or it applies to none.  As the Civil Rights Movement was winding down, white liberals and black activists decided that blacks would be better off claiming blackness as their primary identity and loyalty – but what good has that done them?  One increasingly obvious result is that it has provided white nationalists with the perfect rationale for fighting for the interests of whites as whites.  It’s true that it has helped bring a small number of minorities into the higher echelons of American power.  But how does that help minorities stuck in the ghetto?  In practice, left-wing identity politics has been an abject failure.  It’s only changed the color of the CEO’s.  If whites embrace it too, it will do as little for them.

Our real enemy is racial consciousness itself.  America wallowed in racial identity politics for hundreds of years before the Civil Rights Movement, but the answer to white consciousness is not black consciousness, nor the reverse.  Race is a fiction, a social construct that has no objective existence, though plenty of racists have believed otherwise.  The early Civil Rights Movement understood this and worked mightily to overcome race consciousness and replace it with color-blindness.  But that short period was the only time in our long history when fully color-blind assimilation was seen as the ideal, when the very idea of race was attacked as meaningless and destructive.  The full weight of our sordid history has made race a most powerful and implacable fiction, one powerful enough to destroy us yet.  If whites follow Trump – and their own worst instincts – they’ll make real that other unimaginably destructive fiction: that we are nothing more than that war of all tribes against all.  And that can only unleash mistrust and hatred so horrible that we can barely imagine it now.

There are social constructs that are objectively real, and unlike race, national culture is one of them.  We all speak the same vernacular; we all share the same folkways and traditions; we’re all products of the same history.  We’re all Americans.  When generations of white Americans thought minorities were not real Americans, they were wrong.  And when black nationalists and white leftists think they themselves are not real Americans, they’re wrong too.  Thomas Jefferson and Frederick Douglass and Robert E. Lee and Susan B. Anthony and Cesar Chavez and Malcolm X and Judith Butler and Donald Trump and Gonzalo Curiel are all irredeemably American, even if they may not all recognize each other – or even themselves! – as such.  But this is the consciousness that must be raised, that must be re-invigorated, that must be embraced if we are to avoid the hideous nightmare into which both Trump and his obliging leftist opponents are so eager to lead us.  Only if we resist those false identities and accept our common, actual identity can we have any hope of making life better for all of us.  Let’s make America conscious again.

The Great Comeuppance

Poetic Justice with bad hair

The conservative shuffle over to populism has finally broken into a run.  Unending economic hardship and liberal cultural triumph have torn the white middle class away from their neglectful conservative masters.  While those affluent overlords were swooning over no-capital-gains-tax fantasies and drinking themselves deep of Social Darwinist ideological purity, their downscale cousins were weathering decades of lowered wages and lowered expectations.  The America those workers knew, that sustained them and valued them, has been dying, and they’ve become desperate for a solution.  Now a large section of the supposedly conservative base supports a candidate who has argued for raising taxes and lowering pay for the rich, who opposes free trade and cuts to social welfare programs, and who condemns the influence of money in politics.  Donald Trump is what happens when the interests and sensibilities of such a large constituency are consistently ignored, marginalized and disdained.   Trump is the blowback from conservative failure.

Conservatism has always had a troubled relationship with its own base.  Modern American conservatism began in the 1950’s as a small intellectual movement that coalesced around National Review magazine, which argued over such things as whether the great British conservative Edmund Burke supported tradition per se, or as a means to protect ordered liberty.  They wrote homages to the British ruling class and Generalissimo Franco’s enthusiastically Catholic fascism – hardly positions likely to garner widespread support in a country with such a small-d democratic political culture.  Their anti-welfare-state positions gave them ready-made supporters among the rich and the business community, but little more.

So they went shopping for a constituency.  Their first lucky break was McCarthyism.  The conservatives were staunch anti-communists (opposed to socialism in general and Stalinism in particular) and they were quite happy to support a demagogue who accused liberal Democrats of being Soviet spies.  But McCarthyism was about more than overblown fear of communist subversion, it was also a movement of small town working whites against supposedly unpatriotic Northeastern establishment technocrats.  It was the first stirring of right-wing populism since the decline of the Father Coughlin and the America First crowd in the early 40’s.  That is, it was a base of support conservatives could use to attack the New Deal.

But McCarthyism collapsed and the conservative movement had to keep shopping.  This time they found a more reliable constituency: segregationists.  Opponents of civil rights shared conservative hostility toward the liberal federal government, and conservative’s natural deference to traditional social hierarchy meant they had no compunction about throwing their intellectual heft behind an explicit defense of white supremacy.  In the internal Republican fights of early 1960’s they supported Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a thoroughgoing conservative who forged an alliance of business interests and segregationists by strongly denouncing both the New Deal and civil rights legislation.  By the time Goldwater had become the Republican nominee in 1964, the ideology of modern American conservatism had hardened into implacable resistance against the three main threats to traditional American order: international communism, the welfare state, and racial integration.  Conservatism was now an alliance of the capitalist class and white supremacists, held together by a program of resistance to the federal government.

As the 1960’s progressed and liberation movements sprung up for not just blacks, but for women, Latinos, gays, etc. conservative opposition to racial equity broadened into opposition to all egalitarian social movements.   Shrewd Republican politicians like Nixon and Reagan rode white middle class resentment of those movements all the way to the White House.  The segregationists became the Moral Majority, then the Conservative Coalition and, finally, the Tea Party; but they were always the same rightward-leaning portion of the white working and middle class base, afraid of social change and looking to conservative politicians to halt it.

To achieve political influence and power, conservatism turned itself from a genteel ruling class intelligentsia into a broad populist movement.  But it sold its soul to do so.  It chose expediency over intellectual integrity, and it consistently appealed to the darker impulses of its base.  As the situation called for it, it invoked the threat of Stalinist feds, shiftless Negroes, family-hating feminists, child-molesting gays, welfare bums, union thugs, etc.  It portrayed liberals as snooty, condescending, feminized aristocrats, sipping lattes, nibbling French cheese, disdaining working class values and wasting working class tax dollars on undeserving populations.  Conservatism excused, justified, and encouraged the worst American instincts, and thereby undermined its self-proclaimed project of moral renewal.  It became gutter populism.

Gutter populism in the service of cynical capitalism, that is. In policy, conservatives stuck to reducing the social safety net, de-regulating the market, and allowing the unobstructed flow of capital, goods, jobs and workers around the world.  The cliché has it that conservative politicians promised the base they would protect traditional family values while all they were really interested in was free-market economics.  That’s true of course.  Reagan made the decision early in his presidency to prioritize undoing the New Deal, not the Sexual Revolution.  But it’s not just that conservative office-holders fought half-heartedly against abortion while fighting like demons for upper-end tax cuts; it’s that they pursued economic policies – free trade, relaxed immigration, social insurance privatization, de-unionization – that working people generally oppose!  And working people haven’t been too crazy about the results of those policies: stagnating wages, the replacement of high-paying manufacturing jobs with low-paying service jobs, the immiseration of small-town and rural America.  At the end of the day, conservatives gave them nothing.

To keep working whites in their electoral coalition, conservatives had to do two contrary things: keep the populist fires of resentment and paranoia burning high, but keep them from spreading over into resentment of the rich.  They called a market-friendly healthcare plan socialism; they warned of death panels; they questioned the first black president’s religion and birthplace – all to frighten and anger the base.  They insisted the terrible liberal threat justified the most ruthless tactics – shutting down the government, undermining the government’s credit, stonewalling all compromise – and condemned as insufficiently conservative anyone who dissented.  And all the while they denounced resentment of the rich as envy, progressive taxes as class warfare, reliance on social insurance as irresponsibility, and the slightest trace of pragmatism or moderation as profoundly un-American.

Needless to say, it’s not easy to both intensify and contain populist passion.  Eventually, something had to give.  In theory, conservatives could have directed economic policy more toward middle class interests, as many reformicons have been urging.  But no, that would have undercut the central premise of American conservatism, that individual wealth results from the highest personal virtue.  And for a long time it seemed that thoroughgoing ideological conservatism was spreading and consolidating among the white middle class.  Tea Party activists sure made a good show of hating government programs.  But no, both the traditional populism of American whites and their own real and pressing material interests made genuine widespread conservatism improbable. We are led to the startling revelation that a great deal of the conservative base has never really been conservative.  In particular, they never accepted the notion that what is good for the rich is always good for the rest of us.  It turns out they hate Wall Street as much as they hate Washington and Harvard and Hollywood.  This has all been a terrible shock to the conservative chattering classes.  After spending decades indoctrinating the rubes, firing up their hatred of the liberal establishment and the cultural establishment and the Republican establishment, those rubes now direct that hatred, ironically enough, at their real enemies, those alleged conservative masters themselves!  Working whites have stopped pretending to be conservatives, they’ve stopped fooling both the conservative movement and themselves, and they’ve gone home.

To be precise, they’ve come to the realization that American elites don’t really give a damn about them.  Conservatives promised American unity, prosperity and peace, all while inviting jobs overseas, allowing banks to crash the economy, and invading a country that posed no threat to us.  They carelessly discarded American jobs, American prosperity, American lives, and – maybe worst of all – American promise.  The sold it all for a few extra points on the Dow.

But liberals haven’t done much better.  Conservatives may have had ulterior motives for accusing liberals of elitist condescension, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong.  Since the time of Jefferson and Jackson, American populism was generally a phenomenon of the left, i.e. regular people fighting against exploitation by a rich and powerful elite.  But American populism ruptured in the 60’s when the Civil Rights movement put liberals and working whites at odds.  This is the part of the story we didn’t mention above: conservatives were able to attract large number of whites in the 60’s and 70’s because liberals were so willing to let them go.  At first liberals had tried to turn economic populism for whites into economic populism for everyone.  But many whites resisted full racial equality and began voting for thoroughly conservative politicians who, as we noted, were quite happy to profit from white resentment.  Liberals abandoned the project of broadly shared prosperity and instead focused on cultural emancipation for everyone who wasn’t a straight, white male.  That emancipation was and is a tremendously worthwhile goal, but excesses in pursuit of that goal further alienated the white working class that until then had been the heart of the liberal base.  Liberals and whites walked away from each other, each convinced the other had shown itself to be unworthy of friendship.

We still live amongst the wreckage of that Great Rupture.  Race, as always in American life, has poisoned everything.  Post-60’s liberals, twisted round by white guilt, abandoned sober color-blind integration for the romance of black nationalism and multiculturalism.  They rejected the heroic and hard task of assimilating blacks into the American mainstream and settled instead for the cheap tokenism of affirmative action.  That is, they chose sanctimony over results.  And, crucially, they condemned all dissent as abject racism.  They so over-reacted to rampant racism, militarism, fundamentalism and patriarchy that they started to wonder if there was something dark lurking at the heart of American culture.  They became suspicious of patriotism and religion and the military per se, and even of the American people themselves.  They adopted a host of problematic cultural attitudes – post-patriotic, post-religious, post-color-blind, post-gender – that were unpalatable to middle America.  They still pushed for programs to help workers – universal healthcare, family leave – but they came to culturally mistrust the very people their economic policies were designed to help.  And after a while they even abandoned those policies.  Many became New Democrats like Bill Clinton, promoting privatization and free trade and curtailing government programs.  They rejected American culture from the left and pro-worker policies from the right.  They became caricature anti-populists.

All these concerns come together perfectly on immigration.  This is one issue on which conservative and liberal ideologues agree: the more immigration, the better.  Conservatives are happy to remove constraints on the labor market, and consequently drive down wages and benefits.  And their free-market dogmatism prevents them from seeing the economic injury caused by flooding the market with cheap labor.  To them, resistance to immigration can only be motivated by the lazy and irresponsible desire to avoid honest competition, and nothing matters more to a conservatives than allowing competition to prove one’s moral worth.  Meanwhile, liberals are eager to prove their humanitarian virtue by rejecting any American immigration policy that might particularly benefit Americans.  Their love for the foreign poor blinds them to the damage done to their own countrymen.  Indeed, their cosmopolitan detachment protects them from any pedestrian concerns about American workers or – grab the smelling salts! – American culture.  To them, resistance to immigration can only be motivated by racism, and nothing matters more to liberals than proving they’re not racist.  Conservatives have no consideration for American workers as workers, but liberals have no consideration for them as Americans. 

And working people of all races are starting to understand that the people running the country are not looking out for them.  Indeed, when you consider the takeover of American politics by rich donors, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that almost nothing constrains elites from pursuing policies that actively hurt working people.  And history and ideology have conspired to leave working people, and working whites particularly, with no responsible leadership.  Both conservatives and liberals pretend to be populists during election time, and liberals even make half-hearted attempts to help working people; but there is no political movement that fights for the interests of American workers as American workers.  Indeed, elites would condemn as vulgar and unrespectable any politics that was both patriotic and pro-worker.

This is where the white middle and working classes finds themselves.  Liberals have abandoned them to the gutter populism in which conservatives have so cynically invited them to indulge.  And behold the result: Donald Trump, the genuine gutter populist!  Decades of gutter populist propaganda, combined with genuine economic pain, and good old-fashioned Puritan paranoia have left working whites bitter, angry and desperate.  Many of them are still right-wing populists, fearing blacks and feminists and gays and Muslims.  That hasn’t changed just because they now perceive the damage that conservative policy has done them.  That’s why they should gravely worry us.  And following Trump won’t exactly improve that.

Looking for a real leader

But they love Donald Trump because he perfectly speaks to their fear and desperation.  He shares their deepest instincts: that it’s regular working Americans who make America prosper, that America is strong and good and our standing in the world should reflect that, that economic and political elites have been ignoring those first two points, and at their peril.  Unfortunately, he also shares their darker instincts: that America is morally superior to every other country, that regular Americans are the best people in the world, particularly straight, white, Christian, male breadwinners.  He’s been rightly called the American id, the strutting embodiment of all those impulses.  But part of the reason his shtick works so well is that he’s little more than id himself!  He lacks a coherent ideology or set of policies because all he has are those nationalist instincts and a gigantic, monumental, indestructible faith in both them and himself.  He’s not just looking out for working white people, in cultural sensibility he is them, but independent and strong enough to fight like hell.  He’s not just a genuine gutter populist, he’s a determined gutter populist.  They delight in his irrepressible contempt for decent propriety.  He’s the cocksure naughty boy, breaking all the rules, smirking as the children cheer, and sneering at the grownups who try to shame him.  He is the national will to tear everything down and dance on the rubble.

We may even see – God help us! – President Donald Trump if enough independents feel sufficiently marginalized and desperate.  But it need not have been this way.  It’s conceivable – isn’t it? – that  we could have had a constructive and enlightened populism, one that picked itself up out of the gutter and fought for the interests of all American working people.  Or does the damnable intransigence of racial hostility make that impossible?  Both conservatism and liberalism, in their current forms, have eagerly exploited and exacerbated that hostility.  Neither is capable of addressing the current crisis, which is at bottom a crisis of political imagination.  Both are too rigid, too wedded to blind and implausible ideologies, too comfortable in their institutional power, too removed from the realities of American life.  They fight their petty, scripted battles over the heights of American society, while the foundation rots beneath their feet.  They have become irrelevant.

It’s unclear where working whites will go now.  They broke with conservatism when they came to understand that the system cannot be indifferent; it can only work for them or against them.  That is, they now know – in their experience and in their bones – that their economic condition is a function of more than just their own actions.  When they make this simple fact an explicit doctrine and a rallying cry and an organizing principle then they will have become full populists.  What they will do with that populism, whether it will be a force for preserving and promoting the best of America, or whether it will degrade and destroy – we don’t know yet.  Only disaster can result if they allow leaders like Trump to drag them further into the gutter.  They have the potential to become a powerful force for unmediated white authoritarianism, and that’s an outcome too awful to contemplate.

If there is to be a constructive populist alternative, an inclusive, color-blind, mature populism, it can ultimately come only from a reconstructed liberalism.  Bernie Sanders has taken liberalism halfway there, with his stress on economic concerns over cultural ones, and his nascent and inchoate economic nationalism.  The rupture between liberalism and white working people must be reconciled, and that can only happen when liberals come to understand the centrality of our shared American identity.  And maybe a program of working class unity could reduce racial tension.  Maybe such a movement could address our actual problems and offer real solutions.  Maybe it could remind us all who we are to each other, what we owe each other, and what we can accomplish together.  Maybe it could elicit the better angels of our nature.  And maybe, finally, it could tell us how we can be healed.

The Campus and the Hope

Yale University students demonstrate for racial inclusion

“It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.” – Mark Twain

Is it possible to rid America of racism?  To make African-Americans completely and comprehensively included in our national life?  To make them feel completely included?  And if that’s seems an impossible dream, then what about eliminating racism from a college campus?  Is that more modest goal conceivable?  And if it is, what tactics are justified in reaching it?  How should we approach that dream?  What do we owe each other?  Because that’s what the controversies at Yale University and Missouri University and other colleges are really all about.

Consider the Yale Halloween costume controversy.  In previous years some students wore racially and culturally provocative costumes, some even including blackface and redface.  This year, a few days before Halloween, a Yale administrative committee distributed suggestions for avoiding costumes that “disrespect, alienate or ridicule segments of our population based on race, nationality, religious belief or gender expression.”  A few students in Silliman College (the largest Yale dormitory residence) privately complained to their resident administrators, known as “masters”, that the university was trying to control their free expression in the choice of costumes.  Those masters, Nicholas and Ericka Christakis, Yale faculty members, were sympathetic, and Ericka subsequently sent out an email of her own, urging students to be less sensitive about Halloween costumes, to ignore or rationally engage with those wearing costumes they found offensive.  She argued that there is value in breaking these kinds of social taboos, and denied it was her job to enforce them. 

But a sizeable number of students strongly disagreed.  A large group confronted Nicholas in the campus yard and demanded he repudiate his wife’s position.  When he refused, on the grounds that a college should provide an open “intellectual space”, a few of the students became belligerent, quite upset that these administrators were refusing to enforce their program of racial inclusion.  To them, Ericka’s email condoned behavior that made them feel excluded, second-class, lesser members of their community.  One unhappy student’s letter to the school paper (since removed) reprimanded the masters for subordinating the real pain of that exclusion to the merely abstract principle of free speech; in her memorable line, “I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.”

The students are arguing, in effect, that their residence is a home, and the job of the administrators is to make sure it’s a “safe space” where no one feels excluded.  But an administrator is not a parent, a student is not a child, and – most importantly – a college is not a home.  The purpose of a college is to increase and transmit human knowledge and wisdom, and censorship and coercion are its deadly enemies.  If a college is not an open intellectual space then it has undermined its own reason for being.  But really, how have we come to the point where this needs to be said?

Some students, it seems, want much more than just to talk about their pain.  They angrily demand that official institutional power be employed to control Halloween costumes and opinions about costumes, and that dissenting administrators and students be punished.  The students of Amherst College have gone so far as to explicitly state they “do not tolerate” certain dissenting opinions on racial issues.  They’ve demanded that their college suppress those opinions through official proclamation, and that it force stubbornly dissident students to “go through the Disciplinary Process” and “attend extensive training for racial and cultural competency.”  They even demand that the college try to suppress alumni dissent!  Official orthodoxy promulgated, maintained and enforced through firings, denunciations and re-education; behold the new dispensation.  They do not tolerate!

Sadly, the world is full of the intolerable: poverty, disease, war, economic exploitation, sexism, and yes, of course, racism.  The eradication of racism – in the world, in America, on a college campus, in a single dorm – is a goal to be devoutly hoped for, and ardently fought for.  But that ardor must be tempered by practicality, by recognition of reality.  Indeed, part of the radical black analysis of modern America is that it is essentially racist.  Ta-Nehisi Coates, probably today’s pre-eminent African-American intellectual, has written that, “in America, the notion that black people are lacking in virtue is ambient.”  Last year Coates and liberal writer Jonathan Chait argued back and forth on the causes of black poverty, with Coates explicitly arguing that there was little or no hope of ending racism in America.  Damnably, American racism does seem incurable!  It pollutes our cultural bloodstream like alcohol, distorting our perceptions, impairing our judgment, quickening our anger, and eroding our trust.  We drank it so long ago, but it wreaks its havoc even now, and we never sober up.

And it’s not that the students have forgotten their racial pessimism.  Indeed, it only heightens their desire to see racism ended!  The pathologies of their movement – over-sensitivity, incivility, intolerance – flow from the intense desire to make the pain stop while knowing that it cannot stop.  If the pain can intrude into even the leftish-liberal-controlled college campus, then there is no respite, no haven, no safe space.  For years, liberal college administrators have – somewhat disingenuously – told black students that not only could they have such a safe space, they had a right to it.  Then Ericka Christakis – somewhat disingenuously – told them to stop wanting it.  And that reminded them it isn’t really achievable.  Thus, anger.  It is the profound and earnest disappointment that the impossible has not arrived that explains why this movement has come so far off its hinges.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s an 60’s had definite, objective goals in mind: the end of legal segregation, the restoration of political rights, equal treatment in public places.  To a large extent those procedural goals were reached; thankfully, they were reachable.  But the fight for substantive equality foundered, partly because changing minds and culture is much harder than changing laws, and much more subtle.  But the understanding that minds cannot be changed by force is the bedrock of the historical liberal project, and the comprehensive inclusion the students desire requires a degree of control over thought, expression and action that is itself intolerable.  Painfully, American racial pessimism is a perfectly defensible position, but it’s one that should remind anti-racists to tread more lightly, not more heavily.

As a white man – who, despite my best attempts, ultimately knows so little of lived black experience – it’s easy for me to urge caution and prudence in the fight against racism.  But part of what’s gone wrong with the racial inclusion movement is its insistence that the content of an opinion is not as relevant as the background of the person holding it.  In this view, the pain of racial exclusion cannot truly be understood or appreciated except by those who have lived it; therefore, the analysis and actions of those victims should not be questioned. But this is a reasonable premise taken to an unreasonable conclusion.  Even though whites can’t fully understand the black experience they can still make genuine contributions to the racial conversation; they can still make cogent judgments about the state of race relations.  It is possible for a black person to be mistaken about race.

But leftist thought has been heavily influenced by post-modernism, particularly by the doctrine that there are no universal truths, only limited, parochial, and self-serving ones.  Truth with a capital “T” is merely an instrument for settling arguments in favor of the powerful.  That is, discourse which fails to account for cultural presumptions in favor of traditionally dominant groups only appears to give minority arguments their due, in reality it merely perpetuates the domination.  The post-modernist solution is to allow each group its own unimpeachable narrative; since there is no honest objective truth, let all the subjective truths flourish, none with a greater claim on our credence than any other.

Once again, this is a healthy idea taken to an unhealthy extreme.  Being white, male, heterosexual, etc. obviously can make one oblivious to the concerns of those who are not, and that distortion must be guarded against, partly by appealing to minority subjective experience.  But that doesn’t negate the need for objective analysis as well.  It’s reasonable to worry whether black students feel unsafe, but it’s just as reasonable to consider if they’re justified in feeling so.  It’s possible to feel unsafe and simply be mistaken.  We should be more open to minority views on what is or isn’t offensive, but we should also consider whether those arguments are in themselves convincing.  Being a victim of racial injustice obviously can give one special insight into the nature of that injustice, but it does not exempt one’s arguments from fair scrutiny.

But many liberal whites, in effect, believe otherwise.  At root, the post-modern elevation of previously marginalized groups is an attempt to spread social power to those groups.  In other words, this is ultimately about white guilt.  Liberals work so hard to appreciate the staggering horror of America’s racial sins, and rightly so; but they’re so afraid of blaming the victim that they bend over backwards to avoid condemning any black sins.  So liberals earnestly sacrifice their intellectual independence on the altar of racial atonement, hoping as fervently as their black allies that the American soul can be washed clean.  They make themselves scapegoats, vessels for America’s bad conscience on race.  Post-modern rejection of objective judgment simply provides the perfect alibi for rejecting one’s own judgment in deference to the greater racial good.  And it inoculates white liberals against the creeping suspicion that any bits of racism are still lurking within their own souls.  After all, isn’t every American at least a little racist?  Clearly, their hearts are in the right place; their greatest wish is to end racism.  But this post-modern extremism is really disguised penance, white liberal ritual for purifying their own dirty white souls.

There is no longer any white racial politics that’s actually reasonable and constructive; it consists of either masochistic self-denunciation or angry denial.  By the latter, of course, I mean conservatives, the term of art for that group that finds the reality of American guilt too painful to accept.  If white liberals hold that blacks can do no wrong, white conservatives hold that racism is only a quaint historical artifact, an unfortunate detour on the noble road to American greatness, an unimportant detail of our past best forgotten lest it stir up racial problems we’ve happily solved.  In effect, both liberal and conservative whites concede the enormity of American racial criminality and both consequently suffer crippling racial shame, which they’re frantic to escape.  Liberals do so by purging their own souls and projecting all sin onto conservatives, who in turn protect themselves from the tiniest possibility of racial introspection by generously wrapping themselves in the American flag.  The point, of course, is that both are left pure.

But as liberal guilt forgives the worst black transgressions, conservative guilt can’t forgive the smallest.  This is the real danger, that the bullying mob on the left may be met by the vengeful mob on the right; worse, a vengeful mob in the guise of a repressive state.  Blacks are a minority after all, and a mobilized angry white majority can do far more damage than the racial radicals are doing now.  And nothing can bring forth latent conservative impulses in otherwise reasonable people as quickly as an angry black crowd.  Conservative over-reaction to the present campus excess is visibly boiling up.  Even a generally calm-headed conservative like Rod Dreher is eager for a reckoning, oblivious to the danger that it could all-to-easily become violent.  And there’s a lot of unreconstructed hate out there on the farther right; it’s not even that far.  We’re not sobering up; we’re becoming more drunk.

That’s why I urge caution; but by the same token I don’t remotely urge complacency.  We’re all obligated as Americans to resist and overcome racial exclusion.  But the current leftist program is much more likely to cause more damage.  Real progress can happen only if we respect differing opinions and the people who hold them; if we stop dismissing all opposing views as bad faith; if we consider thought and action on the basis of its content and not just the color of its author; if we remember the terrible fallibility of all people, ourselves and our opponents alike; and if we squarely face both the necessity and the impossibly of our fight.  American racism will probably never be eradicated.  It is a sobering thought.  But it is sobriety which we most need at this moment.  There are no safe spaces, nor should we work so hard to procure any.  We can make our country better, we can make our colleges better, we can make ourselves better.  But we can’t do so by silencing, or denouncing, or purifying, or demonizing.  Four hundred years of racial bitterness must be fought, but not with more bitterness.  It must be fought inside each one of us, freely, candidly, and with humility and charity.  The safe spaces that need to be nurtured are those inside our own heads.  And we do that by renouncing false hope, and embracing the real thing.