Retail Politics and Trumpism

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

“I don’t care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.”—saying attributed to various American authors, pols and humorists.

“Promise her anything, but give her Arpège.”—Old, long-running New Yorker Magazine advertisement for a now forgotten perfume.

While Trump tries to steal the election, pols, pollsters, and pundits are pondering four questions. How did one of the least effective leaders and the vilest human being ever to occupy the White House attract 71 million votes? How did he do so after four years of empty promises, an interstellar vacuum of concrete policies, and incessant lies, bigotry, hate, insults, division and discord? How did he get working families to vote for his oligarchy and against their own long-term economic interests? And how did he actually gain voters among racial and ethnic groups that he spent four years repeatedly bashing so he could solidify his “base” among resentful whites?

After two weeks of angst and anguish, some plausible answers are emerging. Jamelle Bouie wrote, “It’s the money, stupid.”

Before the pandemic, the economy had been roaring. Never mind that it was just the Obama recovery continuing but slowing down. People had jobs; their pay was increasing in real terms for the first time since the seventies. Life seemed good for many workers.

When the pandemic came, the experts fudged their response at first, because good science takes time. But relief money came long before the election and on Trump’s watch. It had his name on the checks. Think how much that matters to people who live thousands of miles from the Beltway, rarely read a newspaper, get their news from Fox or Rush, and decide for whom to vote a day or two before the election.

After the money, what I call “hit-and-run” promising came next. Most of Trump’s empty promises hadn’t much more substance than the rest of his 22,000-plus lies. But as Simon and Garfunkel sang, “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

Trump’s hit-and-run promises were tactically brilliant. What happens when one party has a fifteen-point plan, several points of which are hotly disputed, and the other’s leader simply says, “I’ve got your back and will bring back your jobs! And I’m going to wallop China”? Whom would you support?

Trump even promised to help Midwestern farmers after his blunderbuss tariffs caused China to retaliate against them by purchasing fewer soybeans. And then he actually delivered with substantial relief money. He promised a wall and strong disincentives for illegal immigration (including putting children in cages). That won him Latinos in the Rio Grande Valley, many of whom work for ICE or have land crossed by undocumented immigrants. Trump even promised federal recognition to the Lumbee Native American tribe, at the border of the Carolinas. His doing so helped him win both states.

Like a good Mafioso, Trump is brilliant and generous in handing out favors, or in seeming to do so. Whether he actually delivers doesn’t matter much. Sometimes his failures, as with infrastructure jobs, don’t show up until long after the election. (He still has no infrastructure plan, only more empty promises!) Sometimes he makes his promises to people who’ve never attracted much serious political attention before, as with the Lumbee.

Which brings us to racism and bigotry. The Dems have spent literally decades debating the fine points of racism, microaggressions and white privilege. But when it came to specific policies to help Black and Brown people, the Dems—except for appointing a few to high positions—have been mostly a day late and a dollar short. The mandatory-minimum-sentencing and “three strikes” laws, which led to a plague of unfair and family-destroying incarceration, were just one example of Dems’ propensity to take the high road in intellectualizing while failing to provide practical down-to-Earth solutions.

But this time the Dems got lucky. They profited from something awful.

Along came a spate of unjustifiable murders of Black people that culminated (but hardly ended) with the police murder of George Floyd. It had two effects. First, those murders (and the Trumped-up backlash to protests against them) caused Black voters to rally around the party that had traditionally shown them the most sympathy, despite the absence of widely successful policy initiatives. Second, by overplaying their hand with draconian military reactions and appeals to “law and order,” Trump and the GOP alienated minorities as much or more than the fear he incited got him a few extra votes among whites.

Then there were the means. Trump correctly understood that the vast majority of voters—unlike pols, pundits and even bloggers like me—doesn’t follow politics on anything like a daily basis. Exploiting the first headpiece quote above, Trump kept his name in the news with incessant lies, boasts, exaggerations and Tweets, understanding that most voters ignore the chaff and recall only what they want to hear.

As the election approached, Trump upped his hit-and-run promises, occasionally actually delivering, as he did with farmers’ relief. Finally, by making his rallies puerile and repetitive to the point of terminal boredom for reporters and the well-educated, he was able to slant his promises to key groups without the media noticing.

What sentient and rational reporter had the patience to pay careful attention to Trump’s mostly deranged or formulaic tirades at his rallies? So his rallies provided a key means to deliver different messages to different groups without him being called out for inconsistency. His whole shtick was inconsistency, so who would notice him playing a different tune to different constituencies?

As a result, while Mitt Romney got skewered for doing much the same thing on national media in 2012, Trump won big in 2016 and even increased his appeal, although losing, in 2020. Add all that to the power of spectacle and the rousing of crowds through in-person social feedback, and what we saw was the most talented demagogue since Julius Caesar.

Our Founders were idealists. They hoped that election campaigns would be honest debates among true public servants vying for voters’ minds and approval. In contrast, Trump treats elections like wars, to be won by any and all means, fair or foul. Hit-and-run tactics matter infinitely more than strategy, let alone any strategy for how to govern if you win.

That was how Trump won in 2016. That was how he almost won again this year, despite having had much of the “establishment” of his own party committed against him, plus an overwhelming monetary disadvantage.

So let’s call Trump what he is. In the form of “total political war” that he’s introduced to America, he’s as brilliant a tactician as Caesar. Then how do you fight him? Surely he won’t be the last of his kind. Just as surely, those who follow him may be smarter and more disciplined: Pompeo, for example. (It would be hard to be less disciplined than Trump.)

Without resorting to the “solution” of ancient Rome’s Senators to Caesar’s rise, I see at least two ways to deal with Trump and his ilk. The first is Stacey Abrams’ way: retail, door-to-door politics.

You don’t have to make complex arguments or subvert media. You don’t have to formulate detailed policy plans, which anyway will never survive the vicissitudes of politics, ever-changing economics and chance. You don’t need to go big on Facebook or on Twitter, where 10% of the users produce 90% of the Tweets. You don’t need to make waves or headlines. You need to make friends, as neighbors do.

You need to do the hard work of getting to know your neighbors, showing them, person by person, how politics can improve their lives. Then you demonstrate how, in elections from city council, up through the statehouse and the state senate, and finally to our grossly malapportioned national government.

This is hard, tedious work. It doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a lifetime or a career’s investment, at least by a core group of committed and talented people. It’s called “organizing,” and it never ends. It’s how President Obama cut his political teeth.

At the end of the day, this sort of retail politics is more effective than advertising on TV and on social media. In two years from the standing start of her narrow 2018 loss in the Georgia governor’s race, it let Stacey Abrams flip Georgia.

Sure, she did so with the help from the most despicable president in our nation’s history and one of the most experienced and decent candidates ever. But she did it. She wrought the first Democratic win of a presidential candidate in Georgia since Bill Clinton’s 38 years ago. If you look for a non-Southern Democrat—not Clinton or Carter—winning a presidential race in Georgia, you’d have to go back to JFK in 1960. That was sixty years ago, before Nixon’s racist “Southern Strategy” ever lost the South to Dems.

Not only is retail politics more effective than a big presence on mass media and social media. It’s also less expensive. Why? There’s no profit involved. You’re not paying private, profit-making media that, like arms dealers in a cold war, exploit the needs and desperation of both sides.

The people who do organizing need only enough money to provide a decent middle-class living and to continue their good work. They don’t do it for profit; they do it for love.

Organizers’ love of country and democracy is as pure as that of our soldiers who fight for us abroad, whom this president called “suckers” and “losers.” Maybe if Jaime Harrison had had someone like Stacey Abrams behind him organizing in South Carolina, he could have won the state for a lot less than his reported $57 million third-quarter haul (to which I contributed).

Let me now interject an important distinction. The phone-banking that the Democratic Party and Daily Kos does is not the same as grass-roots organizing. Nor does using cell phones, texting, or even hand-written letters or postcards make it so. Grass-roots organizing requires people in or from the community, with on-the-ground knowledge, who take the time to develop lasting personal relationships with neighbors. It’s the political equivalent of the once wildly successful business Amway, which sold tupperware and other household goods through social circles of ladies in communities across America. It requires personal contact and takes time and long-term commitment.

Before leaving the subject of retail politics, let’s look at Latinos in Florida. Specifically, let’s look at the estimated 480,000 people of Puerto Rican origin eligible to vote in Florida. That’s nearly a third more than the 370,000-plus votes by which Trump won Florida this time. Yet when I tuned in to a Webcast by DNC Chair Tom Perez in early spring, Puerto Ricans in Florida barely got honorable mention. Much later, I read that Michael Bloomberg threw some money at them, probably in mass-media advertising late in the game. Could a real grass-roots organizing effort among them have flipped Florida, too? We’ll never know. (Paper towels, anyone?)

As for the “mainstream” media, they’ve been helping but can do much more. The best way they have helped—and can help more—is by diversifying their news staff and especially their pundits. It was the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart whose podcast interview first introduced me to Jaime Harrison, leading me to watch his debate with Lindsey Graham and discover Harrison’s stellar talent. Yesterday, it was the New York Times’ editorial page that introduced me to Marisa Franco and her Mijente organization, as well as several other Latino organizing groups she mentioned.

So as I look back at my record as a donor in the 2019-2020 election cycle, what do I see? Biden won, thank God for our democracy! Mark Kelly won. Reverend Warnock is still standing and in the fight of his life, hoping along with Jon Ossoff to give the Dems control of the Senate in Georgia’s January runoffs.

Yet the four other individual candidates to whom I donated all lost. Meanwhile, the nine grass-roots organizations to which I gave are all alive and well and continuing their good work. Best of all, they are operating mostly under the radar of the opposition and national media. They are talking with and convincing actual voters, one by one.

It’s a slow process. But at the end of the day, I’m a practical guy. I believe in cause and effect. That’s why I mostly wear two masks—an N95 and a cloth cover—every time I leave the house. That’s why I think that Tweets and Facebook posts are poor substitutes for in-person neighbor-to-neighbor organizing. That’s why, to me, big bucks spent on big media are mostly wasted. And that’s why, in the future, I’m going to support grass-roots organizers that work year-round, all year long, not just during the runup to critical elections, and not mostly with big media buys.

Roman Senators thought they’d done with Caesar when they stabbed him to death. But they were wrong. The political forces Caesar had set in motion led to a series of Pompeian Civil Wars that converted Roman democracy permanently into The Roman Empire. The Empire lasted centuries more but never attained its former level of democracy, let alone justice for ordinary people. Roman emperors chiseled their predecessors’ names off of statues in the Forum and wrote in their own, just as Trump has tried to erase President Obama’s legacy.

If we are to duck ancient Rome’s fate, we have to do better. The solution won’t come from the top, let alone from the next “savior” on a white horse. Nor will it come from the Internet, which has only supercharged propaganda and lies. If we want to rebuild our democracy, we’re going to have to do it from the ground up. We have to start with the people.

Endnote—My Grass-Roots Donees: Here, in alphabetic order, are the nine grass-roots organizations (including a few umbrella organizations) to which I contributed during the 2019-2020 election cycle: Black Voters Matter, Daily Kos, Democracy for America, The Democratic National Committee, Fair Fight Action (Stacey Abrams’ group), New Georgia Project (led by Stacy Abrams’ protege Nse Ufot), The People Campaign (Texas), Progressive Turnout Project, and Voter Protection. I’m still looking for an organizer of ex-Puerto Ricans in Florida. If we can flip the whole South as Abrams did Georgia, we’ll have a whole new country, no matter where the upper-Midwest goes.

ERRATA: An earlier version of this post put JFK’s 1960 election at eighty years ago, not the actual sixty. I regret the arithmetic error. Also, an earlier version of this post put Jonathan Capehart at the New York Times. He’s actually at the Washington Post. I regret that substantive error, the more so because Capehart has one of the few, if not the only, podcast I listen to.

Permalink to this post