Hope Means Calling Out Bigotry

[NOTE TO READERS: I first wrote the following essay in October 2017, in the ninth month of the Demagogue’s presidency. But apparently I never published it. Another essay entirely now appears under the same title I then gave this one, namely, “Why this White Geezer is Looking for Black and Brown Pols to Support.”

I don’t remember why I chose to rewrite this one almost completely. But on rereading it, I now see some ideas that are even more relevant now than then. So I’m publishing it here, with a few minor revisions, mostly to reflect the passage of time. It suggests that Republicans are not the only ones who lack courage in calling out evil.]

One big theory tries to explain why Donald Trump became president. It holds that America’s middle class, consisting largely of white skilled workers, had been left behind by automation, “corporate governance,” and globalization.

The good jobs and comfortable, secure lives that members of this class once enjoyed had evaporated, along with many of their factories and factory towns. Their disappointment and distress turned to reckless anger, which fueled Trump’s rise to power. At the same time, their despair led to our national opioid epidemic. The two phenomena—reckless anger and self-destructive despair—were effects of a single cause: economic isolation and ruin.

I call this view the “economic resentment” theory of Trump’s rise. I’ve endorsed it on this blog in several essays (See 1, 2 and 3), including one (the third) that tries to explain Brexit similarly. This theory supports an analogy—albeit still a weak one—to the anger of German workers, crushed by the Weimar Hyperinflation and post-World-War-I collective punishment of Germany, who fueled Adolf Hitler’s rise.

Unfortunately, this theory has some holes. The most glaring and obvious is that little Trump did while in office—and only one thing he had ever promised—had any rational hope of alleviating the economic causes of our middle class’ anger. Depriving millions of affordable health insurance, cutting taxes on the rich, deporting undocumented, largely Hispanic workers and building a Wall to keep more from coming in—none of these would bring lost jobs back. Nor would stemming the flow of legal immigrants, the “brain drain” in our nation’s favor that gave us or raised men who founded or fueled Amazon, Apple, Google and Tesla.

The single thing that Trump even promised that might actually have mitigated our skilled workers’ pain was a massive and much-needed program to rebuild and improve our nation’s infrastructure. But Trump put that program on the back burner. He even seemed to favor selling our infrastructure to the rich, which would further isolate and impoverish our once-middle class. Yet as these facts became clearer and clearer, and as the good jobs that massive infrastructure repair could bring became more and more illusory, Trump’s consistent support by a fraction of our voters held firm.

So the economic resentment theory is, at best, only partially true. America’s workers have had their delusions and false enthusiasms from time to time, often sparked by demagogues like Huey Long, Father Coughlin, Rush Limbaugh and Fox. But they aren’t stupid. Trump’s hard-core support failed to falter as his incompetence, ineffectiveness and utter neglect of workers’ real interests became crystal clear.

So what accounts for the hardness of Trump’s core support, even as realistic hope of his bringing good jobs back faded to black? We need another, better theory.

Ta-Nehisi Coates gave us one. He’s a brilliant thinker and writer—the most recent addition to our nation’s fast-waning group of public intellectuals. In a must-read article in The Atlantic magazine, he tried to explain the inexplicable.

The title of Coates’ article hints at his theory: “The First White President.” Coates wrote that Trump’s presidency is, in large part, a product of the perception of loss of privilege, power and position among our white middle class. Its members see people of other races, nationalities and creeds as rising while they fall. The result is a tribal anger that can’t be assuaged by economic promises or programs alone. Trump rose, Coates reasoned, in large measure on the back of white tribal resentment.

Coates’ theory proved hard to accept for many. But facts are stubborn things. We had a president who is all emotion and little Reason. He rarely gave reasons, let alone convincing ones, for anything he did. He changed his capricious mind often.

In his single term in office, he did little with the faintest rational probability of alleviating the economic misery of those who voted for him. On the contrary, he did a lot that had a realistic prospect of increasing their misery, by enriching the already rich and failing to reduce globalization. So something other than economic rationalism on the part of skilled workers hurt by automation, “corporate governance,” and globalization must have been responsible for the hardness of his core support.

In 2017, Richard H. Thaler won the Nobel Prize in economics for founding the field of behavioral economics. He theorized that we can explain much of the bizarre and previously inexplicable in modern economics just by dropping the chief assumption of classical economics: that people are rational economic actors.

Even when handling our own money, we humans are psychological, not logical. That’s why financial markets endure bubbles and stampedes. If that’s true when handling one’s own money, how much more true is it when handling our votes? And how much more likely is it when demagogues and propaganda organs as skilled as Trump and Fox seek, every day, to magnify the irrational in our thinking?

Coates’ proffered reason may not be the dominant reason for the otherwise inexplicable durability of Trump’s support, but it seems to be an important one. Nevertheless, I don’t think Coates’ hypothesis alone adequately explains the political whiplash of the Obama-Trump years.

Eight years before, the same nation that put Trump in the White House had put Barack Obama there. We had put him there not just by a fluke of the Electoral College, but by clear and uncontested majorities in both the Electoral College and the national popular vote. We did so again in 2012.

So what happened in the interim? Did millions of white skilled workers suddenly wake up and grab their white privilege as if grabbing their wallets? Did Rush’s and Fox’ vile propaganda, which had been running for well over a generation, suddenly reach critical mass? Coates’ theory seems to suggest that the presidency of a half-Black man and the GOP’s incessant opposition and demagoguery did cause it to reach critical mass.

That’s certainly possible. But we are analyzing small effects here. We are talking about shifts of 2% or so in the national electorate and somewhat larger shifts—maybe 4%—in the so-called battleground states. When analyzing such subtle shifts, we must probe every corner, including the less explored ones.

One such corner, I think, has been badly neglected in our political analysis. This is the motivation of minority voters. We are a generation and a half away from a majority-minority electorate. Yet many pols and their analysts still act as if the only things that matter in elections are the white Christian majority and its factions, including its fringe groups.

Let’s be honest. I was as surprised and pleased by Barack Obama’s election in 2007 as most. I have written an essay describing my emotional reaction as I sat on the couch with my now-ex wife and watched his electoral votes go over the top. If an old white guy like me felt unbridled joy and vindication so strongly, I can only imagine how strongly every African-American felt, after four centuries of disrespect and oppression.

What made that stunning victory possible was hope. The hope was not confined to African-Americans. It spread, by analogy, to the Latino-American community, to the then-barely-recognized Muslim-American community, and to every traditional American who roots for the underdog. That hope drew minority voters to the polls who had never voted before. It turned several red states blue.

Many, if not most, of the new minority voters recognized the significance of white voters’ support, in numbers high enough to elect America’s first minority president. That gave them unprecedented hope and brought them to the polls in unprecedented numbers. This phenomenon was particularly evident in 2017, as Obama won primary after primary, letting skepticism give way to hope.

That, I think, is the winning combination for progressives for the immediate future, until 2043. We must form a grand coalition of progressive, egalitarian whites and similarly-minded minorities: African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims and Jews. We must stick together for the greater good.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. I don’t for a moment believe that either Bill or Hillary is a racist. But both played the race card in political campaigns—Bill with Sister Souljah, and Hillary in several ways that I have described in two essays (See 1 and 2). It goes without saying that their opponents did, too. Bush Senior had his racist Willie Horton ad. McCain’s campaign against Obama was so outrageous that McCain (an ever-honorable man) apologized after Obama’s election. Romney had his talk about “takers,” which, as I have noted, he got exactly backwards.

For people living in a cocoon of white privilege, all this was no big deal. It was just a few more bits of dirty, disgusting political sleaze in a cynical age. It was yet more evidence that nothing in our celebrity-obsessed society is sacred—not even our most basic credo of human equality.

But for minorities considering whether to bother to register and vote for the first (or an occasional) time, it may have been a big turn-off. If we white progressives want their votes, we are going to have to learn both to walk the walk and talk the talk, and to do so consistently.

Unfortunately, we haven’t done so. We’ve allowed the Black Lives Matter movement to become a political football, grossly mischaracterized in the press. We’ve allowed Mexican and Islamic immigrants to be vilified relentlessly as dangerous criminals or terrorists. Instead, we should have declared, loudly, clearly and repeatedly, that Black Lives Matter is a courageous quest for reform of a violent, bigoted, out-of-control policing system, and that the vast majority of Mexican and Muslim immigrants are peaceful and productive. And we should have kept shouting these truths from the rooftops until we got hoarse.

None of the candidates we considered to face Trump did this. Not Hillary, not Bernie, not Elizabeth, and not even Cory, who is Black himself. None gave the Black Lives Matter movement the public respect it deserves, or expressed a fraction of the outrage at Trump’s bigotry that it deserves.

In the Democrats’s 2016 National Convention, Cory Booker, who once ran into a burning building to save a woman’s life, blew his big speech with a lifeless, abstract delivery that resembled a college term paper. The only one who dared to give a punchy, moving speech was Michelle, who wasn’t running for anything. This is courage? This is leadership?

So what can we white progressives do? We have, it seems, a bunch of candidates without spines on issues of equality, bigotry and racial justice. Unless they catch the wave and change, they will fail to inspire the hope among minorities that we progressives need to flip key states from red to blue.

One response to this dilemma, I think, is to nurture, support and vote for progressive minority candidates. It’s a sad fact of life, but it’s true: they may not have to talk the talk because they carry their credentials in their identity. (Just so did Barack Obama motivate many minority voters with his unusual name and background, although he was as cautious in speaking about race as almost any progressive white pol.)

What true progressives want is candidates who make things work, respect science, are suspicious of Wall Street, want our immigration doors to remain open and the global “brain drain” to continue in our favor, believe in giving those who are down a helping hand, and will be ever-faithful to our national credo that all are created equal. Perhaps minority candidates meeting this description have the best chance of being elected, especially in areas of strong minority presence, because they foster hope among the previously hopeless. And hope is our most powerful emotion, surpassed only by fear and love.

One last point. The GOP and Trump are brilliant at only a few things. Among them are distraction and misdirection. Like teenage boys in a macho club or proto-gang, they deride the things they most fear. Dubya and McConnell derided the community organizing skill that gave President Obama his start in politics. Sarah Palin derided “that hopey, changey thing” that put him in the White House.

As for hope and change, won’t the one lead to the other? Give our oppressed minorities hope, by nominating candidates that look like them, and they and we progressive whites can form a winning coalition that can persist until majority-minority demographics make it permanent around 2043.

Similar reasoning applies to the NFL players’ “take a knee” protests, made while our national anthem played before football games. Those protests were among the most quiet, respectful and dignified that I have ever seen. What could be more moving than Black and white players silently kneeling together, while our national anthem plays, and then dutifully going to work?

Those protests didn’t delay the games or harm anyone. They offended no one but bigots and the duped. But they gave people like me, who have little or no interest in professional sports, hope that some day we will cure the evils that the players were respectfully protesting. How much greater was the hope they gave the victims of those evils?

That’s why such peaceful, dignified protests should continue and expand. That’s why Colin Kaepernick is a national hero who someday, like Rosa Parks, will be recognized as such. The hope that peaceful and dignified protests inspire is what scares the bigots and the bosses by urging the victims of bigotry to act. That’s why demagogues work so hard to mischaracterize peaceful protests as crime.

The owners couldn’t fire all the NFL players, or there would have been no more games. So the more the players stuck together, the more influence their “taking a knee” had. Their kneeling sent a gentle signal suggesting a grand coalition of white and minority progressives that could change this nation forever.

Today progressives have a short history of heady victories. With minority support fueled by hope, we put a half-Black progressive in the White House for eight years. In my view he was our most inspiring president since JFK, maybe since FDR.

With that hope, we can do something similar again. And again. We can turn the solid “red” South blue and, by so doing, take back our Congress. Then we can change this nation and the world forever.

White progressives can help form this dominant political coalition. All we need do is to ignore our white privilege, put it on the shelf, and support the most skilled and progressive minority candidates. That coalition can last until the deluded and distracted among us whites wake up, along with the less hopeful among minorities, to a better, richer, more equal nation in a new world. We can make this new coalition last until majority-minority demographics, estimated for 2043, finally make bigotry politically ineffective.

permalink