Breaking America Down

Donald Trump must not become President of the United States.  That must be glaringly obvious to anyone whose reason has not been overcome by partisanship or bitterness or rancor.  He’s a bigot who elicits and encourages the worst impulses of his followers; he’s an authoritarian with little respect for individual rights or democratic institutions; he’s a foolish extremist, advocating, for example, abandoning NATO, and deporting millions of illegal immigrants; he’s utterly and willfully ignorant of government, policy, or the Constitution; he’s rankly dishonest and corrupt; and – most damning – he’s a huge, smelly pile of crazy.  A President Trump would be an unimaginable disaster, for the country and the world. 

He represents what’s worst in ourselves, particularly the worst of our popular culture.  He’s vulgar, boorish, thoughtless, shallow, materialistic, self-absorbed.  And he represents the worst instincts of the conservative base.  He traffics in putrid racial and religious hatreds dredged up from the far-right fever swamps.  He indulges the most brainless conspiracy theories.  He yearns for the days when white Christian men received the deference that was their due as the only real Americans, and he encourages those same yearnings among his followers. He scorns all the correct pseudo-Americans: liberals, blacks, feminists, Muslims.  If Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh could make a baby they’d make Donald Trump.

But, he also represents the legitimate grievances of white working people.  They’ve been derided by cultural elites, exploited by economic elites, impoverished by mass immigration, off-shoring, de-industrialization, downsizing.  They are genuine victims, disdained, disowned, disheartened.  They feel betrayed because they’ve been betrayed, by an American elite that feels little obligation to them.  And Trump represents their darker impulses in response, the impulse to lash out, to destroy, to burn to the ground.  He is their revenge.  But, also, in a strange and inarticulate way, he is their hope, the hope that America can be made to work again, to sustain and nurture them rather than exploit and discard them.  At this moment there is a great struggle going on within them, but by voting for Trump they’re choosing their lesser collective self.  No matter who wins today we must not forget about these people, their alienation, their disenfranchisement, their despondency, their self-destructiveness, their fears, their hopes.  They are fighting desperately to be acknowledged, and we owe them that. They are, after all, us.

Meanwhile, Hillary represents all that’s wrong with our elites.  She’s an epitome of the new aristocracy; an aristocracy of education and profession, delineated by manners, condescension, technocracy, urbanity, even eating habits.  It’s an aristocracy possessed by the sanctimonious, globalist, multicultural, cosmopolitan distaste for anything tainted by American patriotism or the retrograde notion that American policy should particularly benefit Americans.  But a nation without leaders working in its interests is a nation without leaders.  Soon, it won’t even be that.  Trump almost gets this one right, but he’s too crude to understand that blacks, Muslims, liberals are part of the nation too.  And this is the heart of the Trumpian catastrophe: whites went looking for a leader for America, but they settled for a leader for White America.

The paradox of Hillary is that despite her vague post-American-ness she nicely embodies what’s so good about America.  Like most ordinary Americans, and unlike Trump, she’s hard-working, inclusive, and hopeful in the best way.  She really thinks America can be made to work for everyone, and she’s eager to put in the effort to make incremental changes in that direction.  She is, more than anything else, pragmatic, and that’s something very much needed in our current situation.  Indeed, the pragmatic willingness to tone down ideology and to compromise with reality is a cardinal American virtue.  It’s too bad that her post-patriotic sensibilities diffuse her abundant energies; properly focused they might have greatly helped her own people.

And it’s too bad she’s so corrupt.  Hillary’s sins are those of political connection: using high office for her own enrichment, evading professional responsibilities, nepotism.  But Trump’s moneyed birth has allowed him to systematically evade responsibility too: regularly stiffing contractors and employees, claiming bankruptcy.  His celebrity and extreme clinical narcissism have even enabled his outright sexual predation.  Both candidates have taken advantage of unearned privilege, but he’s been dishonest and corrupt in ways Hillary can only dream of: he’s tied to the mob, he’s been involved in all sorts of fraudulent schemes, he’s connected to Russian oligarchs.  And did I mention he’s a big stinking slagheap of whack-job?  She is a deeply flawed politician, but he is a nightmare.

Happily for the safety and sanity of us all, Trump probably won’t be elected President.  And once he’s lost, and goes creeping back to his gaudy, gilded towers and his cringe-worthy TV appearances and his rancid tweets, it will be tempting to dismiss his followers and their concerns.  But consider right now the very real and terrifying possibility that he might actually win!  Let yourself feel the full weight of the disaster that may be about to engulf us.  A frightening demagogue, an ignorant and irresponsible buffoon, a colossally absurd joke of a person is actually within a few percentage points of being handed the nuclear codes.  And now take very seriously how profoundly dysfunctional our politics must be to have delivered us to this moment.  The system is broken, and we can’t ignore it any more.  Once Trump has lost – if there is a God in heaven! – think back to today and remember how stark and undeniable that brokenness was made by the near-election of this one-man wrecking crew.

At that point all our energies must be directed toward healing our country.  That may require more generosity and forgiveness than we’re capable of.  In all candor, it’s probably not possible.  The system is so broken, and the rancor and mistrust and alienation it so plentifully dispenses just break it more.  America may really be on the path to irrevocable decline.  We’re all obligated to fight the brokenness, to not give in to it.  Trump’s gift to us is to make us appreciate the depth of the brokenness.  He’s here to tell us we may not have much time left.

And that must be the starting point for any serious post-election reconciliation and healing.  All those people out there are mad as hell, so mad they’re blindly rushing themselves over the edge in a blind fury.  But despite their staggering irresponsibility, we have to remind ourselves that they’re mostly good people, and we must acknowledge that if they’re so willing to put America through this torture then things must be much worse than we had previously thought.  We know why they’re angry: they’ve been dismissed and exploited and propagandized and disappointed and discouraged.  The system isn’t just broken, it’s breaking them too.  It’s breaking their hope, and their generosity, and their common sense.  And Trump, whether he wins or loses, is breaking them – and us – even more. 

The Devouring

I am ego, hear me roar!

Donald Trump is actually quite a simple person.  All he cares about is his ego.  He knows he’s just so amazingly awesome!  And he has the garish wealth and the hot babes to prove it.  Is there another way to measure a person’s value?  To him the world is only raw material waiting to be consumed, just a collection of objects to be possessed and people to be dominated.  And anyone who declines is an enemy to be crushed, a small person who can only be motivated by petty spite and envy, a loser.  This simplicity is sometimes lost in the blizzard of his abusive and blustering speech, but it’s always his essential motivation, his bottom line.  Everyone must worship him as he worships himself.

And that leads to his defining feature as a public figure: his utter disregard for anything else.  The demands of his ravenous monster-ego are so overwhelming that he literally can’t stop to consider any other principle, including civility, or reason, or truth.  And this gives him a kind of grotesque transparency.  He seems to have no ability to censor himself, to control his impulses, to consider the consequences of his actions.  All that matters is that his ego be sated, which, of course, it never can be.  But his comprehensive irresponsibility also gives him an advantage in any confrontation with critics, since words utterly unconstrained by meaning or consequence are tough weapons to fight against.  It’s hard to argue with someone who doesn’t care about anything but winning.

Let’s consider some of the things he doesn’t he care about.  He quite obviously feels no responsibility to civility.  He crudely denigrates Mexicans, Muslims, disabled people, etc.  He brags about how beautiful women are toys created for his pleasure, and how less attractive ones rightly earn his scorn.  Their feelings, their hardships, their dignity – those matter nothing.  Trump has even encouraged violence among his followers.  He doesn’t understand that civility matters because society cannot function if we don’t respect each other, even when we vigorously disagree.  That’s ridiculously obvious, yes.  Well, to you it is.

He feels no responsibility to the Republican Party.  When that tape appeared in which he makes dehumanizing comments about women and brags about sexually assaulting them, party leaders urged him to do everything he could to control the damage.  They begged him – in his own interests and those of down-ballot candidates – to fully apologize, to drop the issue, and to not dredge up similar actions by Bill Clinton.  Instead he doubled down, holding a press conference with Bill’s accusers from the 90’s and before, even giving them seats in the audience at the second debate.  In response, many of those party leaders, notably House Speaker Paul Ryan, have publicly distanced themselves, out of varying degrees of self-interest and moral revulsion.  But Trump’s responses throughout were never in doubt: he went on the crude offensive, first against Bill Clinton, then against those unhappy party bosses, attacking them as weak, pathetic, disloyal non-leaders.  This is an egotism so overwhelming that it can’t even get out of its own way!  A shrewder nominee would have conceded some small amount of stature by being conciliatory with his fellow party members.  But Trump can’t do that, even though it would help him win the presidency.  His narcissism is so short-sighted that it even subverts itself!

And that’s a recurring theme. There was, for instance, absolutely no electoral advantage in deliberately and repeatedly denigrating the Hispanic judge in his fraud trial, or an overweight Hispanic beauty queen from the 1990’s, or the father of a slain Muslim American soldier.  Indeed, in each of these three feuds he came off as bullying a sympathetic figure, and in each case he persisted in his attacks, thereby keeping the story alive in the public mind long after it would otherwise have died.  In each case he was incapable of doing the smart thing: ignoring the criticism and moving on.  And that almost certainly lost him votes with minorities, and probably with moderate whites as well.  But that just wasn’t as important as protecting his vanity.  His ego simply would not let him back down or let it go.

And there’s another recurring theme, his inability to apologize, to consider that he’s done anything wrong.  That is, he feels no responsibility to morality.   Right and wrong are for suckers, they are only distractions from winning.  Consider his leading part in the birther conspiracy.  For years he spread vicious rumors based on flimsy non-evidence that Barack Obama was not born in America, and was therefore unqualified to be president.  He continued to do so long after Obama released his long-form birth certificate proving he was born in Hawaii.  And when in this election year the pressure to recant grew too great, he made a mealy-mouthed non-apology in which he falsely blamed the 2008 Hillary campaign for starting the rumors and took credit for finally laying them to rest.  He took no responsibility for the damage he had done to race relations and to our political discourse more broadly.  He just blithely acted as if none of that had ever happened.

And this may be the worst of all: he feels no responsibility to the truth.  To Trump words need not correspond to reality; they’re only tools for achieving whatever his goal is at that moment (and it’s ultimately always the one goal).  Consider his remarks last August in which he called Obama and Hillary “founders” of ISIS.  When interviewing Trump, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who understood it made no sense to take Trump’s bizarre locution at face value, tried to prompt him to be a little more circumspect in his word choice:

Hewitt: Last night, you said the President was the founder of ISIS. I know what you meant. You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace.

Trump: No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS. I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton.

Hewitt: But he’s not sympathetic to them. He hates them. He’s trying to kill them.

Trump: I don’t care. He was the founder. The way he got out of Iraq was that that was the founding of ISIS, okay?

He doesn’t care.  And why should he care about trivialities like meaning? He casually contradicts what he said last month, or yesterday, or five minutes ago, or even earlier in the same sentence.  He contains multitudes!  He emits his unacquainted-with-reality verbiage and smirks at the camera defiantly, as if sneering at the truth, “You can’t make me care.”

We could go on like this all day and all night and all day and all night tomorrow.  Consider: By telling Hillary he will put her in jail if he’s elected, and by inviting an unfriendly foreign despot to interfere in the election, he shows he doesn’t care about democracy. By repeatedly promoting false crime statistics that wildly overstate black-on-white violence he shows he doesn’t care about racial harmony.  By celebrating waterboarding for its punitive value, and advocating the summary killing of the innocent wives and children of terrorists, he shows he doesn’t care about humanitarianism or justice.  By pre-emptively warning that he can only lose if the Democrats cheat, he shows he doesn’t care about public trust.  By refusing to prepare for the debates, and by stubbornly maintaining ignorance on even the most basic subjects, he shows he doesn’t care about expertise or competence.  Everything he says and does shows he feels no respect or responsibility for anything.

Except maybe the forgotten white working class, and their understanding of America. Trump at times seems to genuinely care about these people and the way conservative economic dogma and liberal cultural disdain have wounded them.  He sees them the way they see themselves, as hard-working people fighting a system that’s working against them, and in his dismissal of all the normal considerations of politics he is their defiance, and their denial.  His supporters are mostly good people wronged by their own elites, and in those moments when he champions them he rises a little above his own squalid vanity.  He comforts them with the same fairy tale he tells himself, that his amazing awesomeness will conquer all.  He extends to them his own irresponsibility, licensing their bitter refusal to face up to the realities of modern America, and to their part in our continuing racial discord.  His ego devours them, too!  And when push comes to shove and his concern for them conflicts with the demands of that implacable ego, he casually hurts their cause by undermining his own electoral chances.  Ultimately he doesn’t really care about them, at least not enough to deserve their support.

And in the end he doesn’t even really care about being president.  Does anyone actually believe he’d like to hold all that responsibility?  He would love the power and adulation, of course.  But he would be incapable of evaluating heavy decisions, or making concessions to unfriendly realities, or controlling his impulses when his buttons are pushed.  That is, he can’t really be the President, and he knows it.  He seems to have decided to run for president partly to avenge Obama’s insults against him over his birther-ism, maybe even on a dare.  If his ego trumps even his own self-interest, is there any reason to think it won’t trump American interests as well?  This is not someone who should be let within a hundred miles of the presidency.

Obviously, anyone whose policy preferences run conservative would find it hard or impossible to vote for Hillary, even in the grim face of Trump’s blithering unfitness.  On policy, Hillary is a fairly standard professional-class liberal, with all the knee-jerk cosmopolitanism, acquiescence to inequality, and condescension toward working whites that that implies.  She’s more slippery than the average politician, but that makes her less so than a constant dissembler like Trump, just as being more corrupt than the typical politician makes her less corrupt than a dirty Manhattan real-estate developer.  And she is capable of controlling herself, of considering the consequences of her actions, of understanding her own motivations, of learning and growing, of weighing multiple considerations, of compromise, of conciliation, and of responsibility.  She is an adult; he is a screaming baby.  The choice for an honest conservative must be hard, and that conservative can only choose Trump over Hillary if he believes her policies will be so harmful to the country that they out-weigh Trump’s monumental and destructive foolishness, immaturity and irresponsibility.  And that’s a hard argument to make.

It’s not clear how Trump became the genuinely toxic character he is.  It seems likely he was born with narcissist tendencies and 70 years of yes-man sycophancy and moneyed unaccountability have drilled that narcissism deep down into the bedrock of his psyche.  But he is, in a strange way, to be pitied, like a compulsive psychopath, or a Kardashian.  He’s the bellhop of the world’s most superficial and tyrannical ego.  He’s a lost little boy at the mercy of a reality-devouring monster, and whatever was once human or touching about him is long, long gone.  There is no hope for the little Donald, his ruthless ego enslaves him and ruins him.  But it’s quite easy to keep it from ruining us.  Don’t vote for it.

The Deploring and the Deplored

Not every racist is deplorable, though racism always is.  That’s what Hillary overlooked when she dismissed so many Americans as “deplorables” at a recent fund-raiser (italics added):

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

To be fair, she did label only some of them as “irredeemable”, and she did immediately follow up with expressions of empathy for those driven into Trump’s arms by economic and cultural malaise, rather than by bigotry.   And she later apologized for characterizing so many of his supporters as deplorable.  Undeniably, Trump has come as far as he’s come partly by appealing to white racial, religious and sexual animus, and a significant part of his support comes from those motivated by varying degrees of that animus.  But that doesn’t necessarily make them bad people.  It doesn’t even necessarily make them bigots.  Seriously.

Let’s consider the categories of white racial hostility, particularly.  But before we do, let’s resist the overwhelming contemporary practice of misusing political language; let’s clarify our terms.  The word “racism” means the belief that people of other races are inherently and irredeemably inferior, morally or intellectually.  And, clearly, a “racist” is someone who holds such beliefs.   Obviously, many white Americans are racist; anecdote, empirical study, and everyday observation all bear that out (though how many is in hot dispute).  And given the monumental horror that racism has visited upon our nation, we’re all obligated to aggressively and zealously fight against it.  But there are subtleties lurking here as well.

But let’s start with the unambiguous category, the organized racists, those whose social and political lives center on their conviction that non-whites are indeed inferior, and who actively work to implement policies predicated upon that perception.  This category obviously includes those members of explicitly racist organizations, like Stormfront, or the Klan, or the alt-right.  These people are indeed deplorable and contemptible.  It doesn’t matter whether they’re otherwise hard workers or good parents or responsible citizens; if they’ve dedicated their political lives to subjugating millions of their fellow human beings, if they explicitly and consistently act on their unjustifiable hatreds, then they’ve consigned themselves to moral illegitimacy.

Next are the decided racists, those who are convinced that whites are superior and that the races should be kept separate, but who don’t make those beliefs central to their personality or their politics.  These are people who prefer to live and associate only with other whites.  They think American culture is superior because whites and Christianity are superior, and they think only white Christians (and possibly Jews) can be real Americans.  They generally vote for conservative politicians out of vague fear and hostility toward the Other, but they agree that organizations like the Klan are beneath contempt.  We all know someone who fits in this category, and we all know that their racism doesn’t define them or completely negate whatever good qualities they otherwise have.  Until just a couple of generations ago, almost every white American was squarely in this category.  Of course, by now everyone should know better, and willful ignorance is deplorable, but in and of itself it doesn’t make one a deplorable person.

That’s because every person is a moral mixed bag; none of us is pure.  Racism is an irredeemable evil, but so is greed, or selfishness, or callousness in the face of suffering, etc., and we are all guilty of all of them.  It’s the degree to which we are racist or selfish or greedy or callous that makes it fair to characterize us as good or bad people, as admirable or deplorable.  Racism is different from those more pedestrian evils in that it’s a social artifact (like race itself), not a natural part of human life, and therefore could conceivably be eradicated. But when assessing a given individual’s moral worth there’s no real reason to treat it so different from other, more universal evils.  And let’s be clear, that’s how Hillary meant to assess those people: as individuals, not merely as political actors. Regardless of how many people she was referring to, to her they’re “deplorables”, individuals to be discounted. But is it fair to morally dismiss all the decided racists as casually as the organized ones?

But it’s in the last and most numerous category of white American racial hostility that the most subtleties and confusions lie.  These are the racially resentful, those who feel as if society – the government, the media, the academy, elite opinion – favors non-whites over whites, that it condemns white failings but condones black ones, that it celebrates blackness but disdains whiteness.  Note that this is actually not racism per se.  It’s entirely possible to feel your own race is being treated unfairly without thinking another race is inferior.  In practice, however, many in this category suspect that blacks are more prone to irresponsibility and immorality and violence.  But even this is not necessarily racism.  Since there’s nothing racist in perceiving a culture as dysfunctional, it’s possible to believe African-American culture simply fails to sufficiently inculcate responsibility and self-control, and that if blacks could be raised in the supposedly superior white culture they would be just as virtuous as whites.

It’s possible, but it doesn’t happen very often.  That is, most people in the resentful category are deep down quite suspicious about the inherent shortcomings of black folks.  But typically those suspicions are unconscious.  The resentful don’t consider themselves racist at all, and they don’t intend harm on any race.  Most of them are good people, as good as people anywhere.  Their views on race are foolish and wildly wrong-headed – the notion that blacks have it easier than whites is just laughable, for instance.  But believing such absurdities makes them neither deplorable nor irredeemable.

What it makes them is American.  That is, when it comes to race the vast majority of white Americans are a little bit racist.  None of us is without racial sin.  But it’s only fair to say that if we stipulate that it’s almost entirely unconscious, and it’s only true in the technical sense.  We defined a racist as someone who believes in racism, but maybe that wasn’t such a clear definition after all.  It just doesn’t seem fair to call someone racist for having vague, fleeting, unconscious negative reactions to people of color, especially if he or she on a conscious level concedes that racism is intellectually and morally bankrupt.  The stupid and destructive racial fears imparted by the overwhelming weight of 400 years of racial horror do not negate whatever other admirable qualities those people possess.  What seems to separate conservative whites from their liberal counterparts is the degree of their unconscious racial fear, plus the unwillingness to honestly face that history, and its ongoing effects.

But that doesn’t mean all their resentment is unfounded.  Elite society actually does generally disdain less-than-affluent whites, treating them as rednecks, rubes, white trash, etc.  And it’s true that liberals do tend to excuse any bad behavior by African-Americans – even violence and looting.  And programs like affirmative action do advantage blacks at the expense of whites, within limited contexts.  On the whole, being white in America still brings with it enormous advantages, but working-class whites can’t be blamed for resenting these other things.  Neither can they be criticized for resenting the way globalization, de-industrialization, off-shoring, and loose immigration policies have decimated their wages and economic conditions. They understand – viscerally and accurately – that the people running the country not only don’t care about their values and interests, but positively consider them illegitimate.  They have become starkly alienated, they feel themselves a “forgotten tribe . . . strangers in their own land.”  They know they’re rejected, discounted, deplored.

Conservative ideologues dismiss their economic concerns while liberal ones dismiss them.  And now they’ve found a champion in Donald Trump, who speaks directly to their fears and their alienation, who tells them they are the backbone of the country, and that they can be made great again.  He tells them that they and their concerns are paramount.  But he also incites their anger, and inflames their worst fears regarding suspect groups: African-Americans, Mexicans, Muslims.  This is the true deplorable: the politician who exploits racial fear and anger for his own gain, who gives license to our worst instincts, who would destroy America in order to save it.  His followers are so much better than he is.

Neither perfect nor deplorable

But they have some responsibility here too.  They need not let their irrationalities rule them.  Trump may be the only national figure who directly speaks to their pressing concerns, who has made a real pitch to be their leader.  But they didn’t have to follow.  By choosing to support a race-baiter, they’ve made themselves more complicit in our national sin.  Embracing a candidate because of his racial animus (or failing to reject him for it) is a definite moral failure, one much worse than merely consciously or unconsciously harboring racial animus oneself.  But these are the fruits of denial.  Most of his supporters are in the resentful category; they’re not real racists like the decideds or the organized.  But their stubborn refusal to confront both our sordid racial history and their own subtle biases has left them vulnerable to exploitation by a slimy demagogue like Trump.  He pushes buttons they’re convinced they don’t even have!  They may not be real racists, but by attaching themselves to a man who so inflames racial hostility they’re starting to act like ones.

But liberals like Hillary aren’t giving them any real alternative – almost deliberately!  Liberal sanctimony and condescension – epitomized by Hillary’s “deplorable” comments themselves – only drive resentful whites further away.  They resent being called racist when they’re really not, at least not in the virulent way the decideds or the organized are.  They correctly understand that most liberals consider them irredeemable, enemies to be crushed, not constituents to be induced.  Liberals and white populists seem to be coming to an agreement that the essence of liberalism is contempt for the white working class. 

And contempt for any dissent regarding race.  There’s nothing at all racist in opposing multiculturalism or affirmative action or identity politics or immigration or Black Lives Matter, and there are plenty of honest (and compelling) arguments to be made against them and plenty of honest people making them.  That some people make bad faith arguments doesn’t change that.  There’s a whole lot of space between David Duke and campus leftists.  But liberals have indulged in deploration-creep, labeling as racist and bigoted even the smallest criticism of their officially sanctioned racial views.  This is liberals’ worst instinct: perceiving themselves as saints ridding the world of sinners. It’s simple Puritan witch-hunting, but sporting radical chic and spouting post-modern alibis.  And it doesn’t really do anyone much good, this Politics of Shaming, but it’s so much more self-satisfying than the thankless drudgery of building coalitions and making good-faith arguments.  Crusading is so much more fun than persuading!  Conservatives may be in denial about our racial problems, but liberals seem to have given up on any idea of actually solving them!

And that’s a disaster of the first order, because a more constructive and less self-righteous liberalism is the only thing that can possibly save us.  American racism unfortunately has both a long history and a promising future, and only liberals fully appreciate the enormity of the challenge it represents.  But the fact that we’ve come in just a few decades from a nation of mostly organized and decided racists to one that is mostly racially resentful should be seen as tremendous progress!  Explicit and conscious racism has been almost wiped out.  It’s time for the witch-hunt to stop.  That’s not to say that the foolish and horribly destructive racial attitudes remaining should not be called out and condemned – we are all obligated to do just that.  It’s to say that those harboring and expressing those attitudes should still be respected as individuals and as citizens.  We cannot indulge the racial sin, but we must love the sinner.  We really have no choice.  We’re all Americans, the Black Lives Matter activist and the Trump supporter alike.  We work hard and hope for the future and try to do well by ourselves and our children and our fellow countrymen.  None of us is going anywhere, and no real solutions will exclude any of us. 

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 Third Party

These people are not conservatives

Conservatism is dead.  If you don’t believe me, listen to the man who killed it.  Here’s Donald Trump at a recent Republican event in California:

I’m a conservative, but at this point, who cares?

Let that sink in.  Since at least the time of Ronald Reagan the GOP has been the furiously self-proclaimed party of conservatism.  And in the last few years Tea Party grassroots conservatives have crusaded against their own Republican establishment for being insufficiently fanatical in ideology and tactics.  But now, when given the opportunity, those same grassroots true believers have chosen for their nominee a man who not only diverges markedly from conservative doctrine, but who explicitly dismisses conservatism as irrelevant!  What gives?

Trump’s triumph has rudely revealed that there are really two Republican Parties, both of whom think of themselves as the true conservatives and the other as traitors to the cause.  What we think of as traditional conservatism, the conservatism that has dominated the party for decades, the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan, is a program of free markets and free trade, scaling back the welfare-regulatory state, and maintaining American supremacy in the world.  Think of Reagan crushing the air-traffic controllers union or George W. Bush attempting to privatize Social Security.  The conservatives have a libertarian view of the federal government and a Social Darwinist view of capitalist success and failure.  Their core constituency is the investor class, and for decades these Reaganite conservatives have run the Republican Party, and they’ve run it for the benefit of that class, with the casual assurance that what benefits investors will eventually benefit everyone else.

But it turns out that much – perhaps even a majority – of the Republican constituency means something very different when they call themselves conservative.  For them conservatism means the blind conviction that America is the best country on Earth.  They see everyday, straight, white, Christian, American men, with their simple moral toughness, as the backbone of society and the best people in the world.  Some of those men regret the demise of the traditional American social structure, in which racial, sexual and religious minorities deferred to them, while some simply worry – not entirely without reason – that they’re now disdained and despised by American elites; and in practice the two perceptions readily blur together.  But either way, for decades the basic premise of this conservatism is that the social status of those men is unfairly under assault, and they’ve looked to the Reagan conservatives to protect and assert it. 

These white working class conservatives weren’t really interested in lowering capital gains tax rates or cutting Obamacare subsidies, though they made a good show of caring about such things.  Indeed, these conservatives actively support the welfare state; they’re all too anxious to receive the Social Security and Medicare benefits their Reaganite masters yearn to curtail.  And they particularly object to the free trade and lax immigration policies of the Reaganites, policies that send good jobs overseas and drive down wages at home.  But, for decades the conservative intelligentsia, in the think tanks and the magazines, on talk radio and Fox News, underwritten by big money, has worked to indoctrinate the grassroots in the intricacies of conservative dogma, while enforcing ideological rigidity among conservative politicians.  The populists may have been dissatisfied, but they couldn’t very well vote for liberals.

But Reaganite conservatism hasn’t kept its promises. Trump hasn’t really killed it, it was killed by its own abysmal failures, particularly the War in Iraq and the Great Recession.  It couldn’t survive its comprehensive inability to protect the interests and values of white working people.  It’s actually been dead since 2008, but tricked out to appear healthy with hefty doses of donor money, media bombast, and undying populist aversion to cultural liberalism and its racially and sexually suspicious beneficiaries.  What Trump has done is kill the illusion of conservatism.  As a man ignorant enough to overlook ideological considerations, rich enough to be indifferent to movement money, and self-assured enough (to put it mildly!) to dismiss received notions of propriety, he was perfectly constituted to override the conservative establishment and express and exploit the blunt instincts of those unhappy white populists, instincts he precisely shares.

And now that he’s exploited those instincts all the way to the nomination, they constitute the new conservatism.  The old conservatism, however, came to own the party through a very different strategy.  The Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatives had to fight for years against the moderate Eisenhower establishment Republicans who controlled the party in the post-war years, and who had made their peace with the New Deal and Cold War stalemate.  Convinced that both the welfare state and international communism could be aggressively rolled back, they worked the grassroots, the media, the think tanks, the elections, etc., as they slowly took over the party from the inside.  Their first big triumph was the nomination of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964.  In 1968, segregationist and Democratic Alabama Governor George Wallace pulled white southern conservative populists out of the New Deal coalition when he ran for president as an independent, and they never went back (not at the presidential level).  Richard Nixon – who brilliantly straddled

Governor Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door to 
prevent the enrollment of black students 
at the University of Alabama, 1963

the moderate vs. conservative divide – added them and their white northern collaborators to his own coalition four years later.  At the same time, northern moderate and liberal Republicans – i.e. Eisenhower, Rockefeller and Lindsay Republicans – left the GOP for the Democratic Party.  And though Goldwater badly lost his general election, Nixon’s and Reagan’s cynical and skillful campaigning brought the white populists securely into the conservative movement and the Republican Party, leaving the Reaganites in charge.

But conservatism has now split in two, or rather it has reverted to its two naturally antagonistic groupings, with each side considering itself the heirs of Reagan and seeing the other as the successors of the hated Eisenhower-ish moderate establishment.  Both groups are technically conservative, given their belief in innate natural hierarchy.  And that means that neither group is really libertarian, or classically liberal, though some conservatives perceive themselves to be; in practice they don’t defend individual freedom against social coercion.  And neither group is Burkean, or classically conservative in the aristocratic European sense, in that neither affirms pragmatism or conciliation; both groups are intensely idealistic, even utopian, consisting of righteous, low-church crusaders working to create the City of God on Earth.  And both groups hold to a Social Darwinism that sees society’s winners as virtuously deserving their winnings.  It’s just that Trumpians believe that the natural aristocracy consists of those aforementioned straight, white, Christian, American men, while the Reaganites believe it’s successful capitalists.  Trumpism is about identity, Reaganism is about money.  And the Trumpians are less principled, more expedient, more willing to play dirty to advance the interests of their tribe.  Such is the logic of tribalism.

We can agree – with Donald Trump! – to call the Reaganites the True Conservatives, since they’ve claimed the title for so long, and they probably are closer to the classically conservative Burkean ideal, with their worship of plutocrats as aristocrats born to rule at home and abroad.  A true Burkean would condemn Reaganite worship of free markets as destabilizing and intemperate.  But a true Burkean would even more forcefully reject Trumpian recklessness and thoughtlessness; as he would reject Trumpian majoritarianism, not because it fails to respect liberal individual rights, but because it fails to defer to its rightful aristocratic masters.  So even with their right-wing inegalitarianism, it’s fair to call the Trumpians Populists, since they share much substance with left-wing populists, in particular instinctual embrace of the popular and the everyday, and animosity toward the rich and powerful.

Given these ideological incompatibilities and conservatism’s abject policy failures, it was quite likely that something like Trumpism would come along and topple Reaganism from its precarious perch at the top of the GOP.  But the Trumpian revolt, unlike the Reaganite overthrow of the moderates, has occurred in one fell swoop.  That’s because they didn’t have to conquer someone else’s party; they didn’t have to convert anyone, or bring in like-minded outsiders, or drive out ideological opponents.  The party has been theirs for the asking all along.

Of course, the Reaganites fought against the Trumpian takeover tooth and nail, caucus vote by delegate count, negative ad by convention rule.  They’ve been on top so long, and they’ve spent so much time and energy convincing themselves they’re America’s ordained saviors, they can’t let go of the political party meant to be the instrument of that salvation.  And there are still Reaganites among the grassroots; that’s who voted for Ted Cruz.  Some have accepted their new subordinate status within the exotic new right-wing order and are supporting Trump as an evil lesser than Hillary.  But some diehards are promising to sit out the general election, some are working to deny Trump the presidency, some are considering a true conservative third-party campaign, and some are so unhappy with Trump they say they’ll even vote for Hillary!  Of course, much of the Reaganite opposition to Trump has less to do with the Trumpian program and more to do with the man himself, with his flagrant irresponsibility and doltish ignorance.  Though it’s hard not to wonder if some of those never-Trump folks would so adamantly oppose an irresponsible and doltish nominee who toed the Reaganite line.  After all, most of them defended Sarah Palin.

But Trumpism – with or without the man himself – is here to stay.  Reaganism is dead.  Because of its complex of think tanks and media outlets, the Reaganites will continue to make noise and influence the discourse for some time to come.  But for a long time to come, no GOP nominee will be openly advocate free trade or looser immigration policies.  And many supposedly conservative politicians and media personalities have already happily pledged support for Trump, demonstrating that they were really populists – or shameless opportunists – all along.  Even some of the right-wing media and think-tank crowd have turned out to be populists.  Some politicians, like Paul Ryan, are trying to finesse the differences.  Rush Limbaugh has shown himself just as brilliant at straddling the present-day Reaganite-Trumpian divide as Nixon was at straddling the Eisenhower-Reaganite divide of his day.  When there are full-fledged, self-consciously right-wing populist think tanks to confront the Reaganite ones, the dying roar of Reaganism will wind down to a whisper.

In the grand history of the United States, it may turn out that the ultimate role of modern conservatism will be to give birth to a powerful and resentful white populist nationalism.  Nixon and Reagan thought they had stolen Wallace’s power, but maybe all they really did was unleash it.  It’s likely that Trump is the Goldwater of right-wing populism, not it’s Reagan, and he’ll come in for a solid defeat in November.  But a smarter, shrewder, more presentable Trump is waiting in our future.  We may be saved from that coming populist Reagan by the continuing demographic shifts transforming our society, shifts that seem likely to make white nationalism an electoral dead end (at least at the presidential level).  But can anyone – other than demagogues, fanatics, and fools – desire greater racial polarization and animosity?  A popular white nationalist movement, even one with no chance of winning the presidency, can bring nothing but division and destruction and horror.  And, for the moment, it’s a white nationalist movement with a reckless sideshow clown as its leader. We stare, more starkly than we have in a long time, into the sinister side of our collective unconscious; we walk dangerously close to the edge of the deep, dark American abyss, with little more than Hillary and her bland, neo-liberal platitudes to keep us from falling directly in.