It has become conventional wisdom that Democrats are to blame for our staggering losses in the previous two voting cycles because we were too mean to Trump supporters. Those of us who dare say that bigotry, or, at the very least, being unbothered by bigotry is what put Trump in the White House are now scolded and told that unless we embrace the bigotry of the “white working class,” we’ll continue to lose. The thinking is that had we just shut the fuck up every time they bashed Muslims, blamed “Mexicans” for their every woe, cheered on Trump’s misogyny, defended Trump’s bragging about sexual assault, found no problem with his running mate wanting to subject gay children to “curative” or “therapeutic” shock therapy, courted anti-Semites, played footsie with white nationalists, and refused to denounce the KKK and David Duke, they would have voted for Hillary and other Democrats. Even if this were true, it is a stunningly immoral argument to make. At a time when people of color, Muslims, LGBT people, immigrants, (some) women, environmentalists, young people, disabled people, people reliant our already threadbare social safety net are genuinely terrified, traumatized, suicidal, and already being victimized by Trump supporters, so-called progressives are out here denouncing that anyone ever spoke up in defense of the vulnerable or oppressed in the first place.
In addition to blaming victims and our allies for asserting our humanity and demanding we be treated with respect, the Sanders wing of the party, privileged white men like Glenn Greenwald, Jill Stein supporters, and everyone else whose hatred of Hillary mirrors that of the right, they are also blaming people of color for having supported her overwhelmingly during the primaries. When people say “it’s the Democratic party’s fault for putting up such a flawed candidate,” what they are really saying is that it is the fault of black, Latinx, and Asians for choosing Hillary over Sanders. Let’s be clear: Hillary beat Bernie by over three million votes. He did not speak to voters of color. Before Super Tuesday, his campaign held a poorly attended seminar called “How to Talk to Black Women” which actually lead by a white woman. Millennials of all ages may have been captivated by Bernie, but the vast majority of his votes came from white people. Hillary didn’t get the nomination because of superdelegates supporting her before the primary truly got under way. Pretending that voters of color, and other historically oppressed groups based our votes on superdelegates is insulting and ignorant. Bernie never captivated voters of color and he knew it. He never truly campaigned for our votes and he abandoned the more diverse states (yes, I know Hawaii and Alaska are majority minority states, so no puerile #BernieMadeMeWhite snark, please) in order to win undemocratic caucuses. He knew we weren’t going to vote for him, so he spent his resources where he could win. If you’re going to blame the candidate who emerged victorious from the primary, just come out and say that you blame us. The DNC didn’t put it’s thumb on the scale enough to produce three million more voters for Hillary. Most of us had our minds made up before she even announced her candidacy. She won it fair and square because she had the votes of the backbone of the Democratic party and Bernie had white people. We outnumbered you in the primary. Also, when citing our lower turnout in the general election, can you please bother to mention that this was the first presidential election since the Roberts Court decided that racism is over and gutted the VRA, that legalized voter suppression was in place in states Obama won but Hillary lost, and that we also have reports of illegal voter suppression? You all seem totally uninterested in the fact that certain people were kept from voting by laws enacted by Republicans. A federal court said those laws were designed with “surgical precision” to suppress the black vote and, indeed, a Republican operative was bragging on Election Day about how successful it was.
The election reaffirmed what many of us always knew which is that America is a white supremacist country dominated by white men, but the aftermath revealed or, for some, reaffirmed, that those who claim to be our allies are anything but. We are being asked to shut up, have sympathy for, and court the very people whose children are serving Latinx students with mock deportation papers, telling their black classmates that they are going to be slaves, some have been beaten up, building human walls to block Latinx students from entering school or classrooms, and marching around in school hallways chanting “White power” while carrying Trump signs. Trump supporters reenacted Kristalnacht on the streets of Philadelphia by smashing shop windows, spraying painting swastikas on those storefront shop windows they didn’t smash, and spray painting anti-Semitic slurs and Nazi slogans on the pavement. Muslim women have had their hijabs ripped off of their heads, at least one was the victim of a strong-arm robbery in San Diego by a Trump supporter, and clerks at 7-11s or other such convenience stores are reporting the same threats of violence and harassment from Trump supporters that we witnessed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. A gay couple in North Carolina woke to find a note on their car bearing a homophobic slur and a declaration that the author was eagerly anticipating Trump’s taking the oath so that their marriage would be dissolved (I have the same fear for my own marriage). People some belligerent Trump supporters have deemed “Chinese” have also reported being accosted, menaced, and confronted will gleeful pronouncements from his goons that, “We won and you have to get the fuck out of our country.” There is no shortage of these stories and they keep on coming. Yet, the Bernie Sanders wing of the party is stridently demanding that we are to blame for these racist outbursts and that until we shut up about their bigotry or coddle bigots, we’ll never win elections. To all those who have embraced this deeply immoral stance, can YOU please shut the fuck up because you’re adding to the terror many of us are feeling right now. We already know that half the country either hates us or is indifferent to our suffering, so we don’t need you to add to the assault on us by demanding shut up and suck up to our oppressors. We are already hurting and we don’t need your lectures on top of the ass kickings, threats, vandalism, and aggressive behavior from Trump’s voters.
Anyone siding with Trump voters should announce or at least accept that by doing so, they lose their claim to progressive causes. Here’s a list of causes and movements you disavow when you align yourself with them:
1. You cannot embrace them and say you support the Black Lives Matter movement. Trump voters, his surrogates, and the man himself find the BLM movement offensive. They hate it, they hate the protests, they hate the protesters, and often use racist terms like “chimpout” when referring to protests. This is the #BlueLivesMatter team. These are the people who raised millions of dollars for Darren Wilson and other cops who killed black people. George Zimmerman is a hero in that cohort for killing Trayvon Martin whom they call a thug who got what was coming to him. Defending these people means you are defending their beliefs that black lives don’t matter, that black people need/deserve whatever violence the police dish out to us, and that the only right thing to do is to raise money for killer cops. You can’t stand with both sides.
2. You are not opposed to anti-black racism if you stand up for Trump supporters. A survey showed that more than half of them think black people are inherently violent, less intelligent than white people, and are lazy. These are racist beliefs and in no way linked to the alleged economic anxiety.
3. All of you so-called environmentalists can also drop the act. Trump supporters don’t believe in climate change or think that we should persist/resume environmentally destructive behavior if it means being more economically competitive or bringing back jobs in coal. Indeed, many of them think we should treat pollution the way China does which means they think that we should have 4,000 people dying every day from cancers, heart disease, and lung disease caused by pollution. They voted for the man who maintains that climate change his a Chinese hoax, they support his pledge to tear up the Paris agreement on his first day in office, and his promise to shut down the EPA. Nothing you can say will change their minds on this. If they voted for Trump, they believed in his flagrant and obvious lies. Making excuses for them means you care more about their feelings and indulging their ignorance on a quixotic mission to get their votes.
4. You are not pro-union or workers’ rights if you take up cause with Trump voters. Please remember that Wisconsin elected notorious union buster Scott Walker. When presented with the chance to vote for candidates who promise to dismantle unions and turn their states into “Right to Work” states, they do so with enthusiasm.They always vote for candidates who promise to destroy unions and make their states “Right to Work” states. Every union busting candidate runs on the promise that s/he will enact policies that decrease union membership which, in turn, always undermines the rights of workers. That these same voters have been voting for Republicans running on a platform of union busting should give you a clue that they aren’t truly concerned with their economic positions or they prioritize other things over their rights to good wages, job security, fair treatment, and benefits.
5. Trump supporters support a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women, has said women who are sexually harassed should just get new jobs, call pregnant women inconvenient, said that women need to be treated like shit, viciously called a lactating woman “disgusting,” has said that women should be punished for having abortions, and has promised to install anti-choice justices in the federal courts. Defending the people who voted for a man who ran on these positions totally disqualifies you as a feminist, an ally of women, a supporter of reproductive rights, and a person devoted to ending rape culture.
6. Trump supporters voted for a man whose running mate advocates for shock therapy to “cure” gay children of being gay. Trump has also vowed to appoint judges who will overturn marriage equality and says the laws should be kicked back to the states, thus reaffirming his opposition to the Full Faith and Credit portion of our constitution. So long as you silence us from calling our homophobia and stand with these people, do not call yourself an ally to LGBT people. I know that my marriage, and all the rights with it, will be dissolved under the Trump administration. You are not my ally if you expect me to be a bystander and spectator to my own oppression or try to find common ground with people who say should be a second-class citizen.
7. If you support Trump voters and you want to silence people who advocate for immigrants, you are opposed to the rights of immigrants. One of his most popular policies was his promise to form a deportation force to expel 11 million people. His poll numbers were bolstered by his promise to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. When he failed to bring up the wall at one of his rallies, someone in the crowd would call out for it and he would reassure them that “Mexicans” will be thrown out, the wall will be built, and Mexico will pay for it. That was and remains part of his appeal. Also, calling Mexicans rapists and violent criminals was a pillar of his campaign which means you support racism against Latinx people because denouncing those beliefs and those who hold them is now wrong in your eyes.
8. You do not support Muslims, their right to live here, or their right to religious expression. Trump’s popularity shot up when he proposed his ban on Muslims and there is no denying this.
This list is by no means exhaustive, but it does cover some of the main concerns alleged/former progressives. There is no negotiating these issues. Even if you don’t declare that you’ve abandoned your concerns or advocacy for these issues, the apologias for Trump supporters, silencing of their critics, and demanding we empathize with their wretched views declares it for you. You’re just like racists who say they aren’t racists.
I have a different take on why Trump was so successful. It was not, as so many delusional Sanders supporters are telling us, because they had their feelings hurt because we had the audacity to demand that minorities be treated like human beings. I am sure that I will be accused of living in a liberal bubble and being totally blind to what people who voted for Trump think. That may be true for some white people, but trust me when I say that while Hillary’s defeat was devastating and shocking because of the polling, none of us were surprised that America is a racist country. You see, black people, or people of color in general, do not have the luxury of living in an all black liberal bubble where we never have encounters with bigots. White people can go days or even months without seeing or having any sort of meaningful interaction with a person of color. We don’t have that option. We are exposed to white people all day, everyday. And while some white people manage to live their lives only encountering people with their shared professed liberal and progressive values, people of color do not.
People of color and other historically despised minorities get exposed to the whole range of white opinions and attitudes regardless of whether we live on the coasts, work in elite institutions, or learn in elite institutions. At lunch I can sit with my liberal white wife, but at that same lunch, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t get a table if I were alone or that the waitstaff would ignore me or treat me with contempt. I am not immunized from this maltreatment because I have money and it shows. My black skin is an indictment and not every white person is willing to hide that s/he has judged me guilty of being inferior or undesirable in some way. People of color in “liberal” cities like New York, LA, or San Francisco, or Boston are shot by cops, strangled to death by cops, accosted just for daring to be black or brown, followed around stores, spat on, racially harassed, denied taxis, rejected from jobs, mistreated at work, denied housing, and generally mistreated by white people every single day. That liberal bubble you accuse so many Democrats or liberals of living in? We don’t have access to that bubble. And, even if some of us did have access to it, we have friends, family, or victims of violence on the news who have stories and experiences outside of that bubble. You think we don’t know or understand Trump voters but we do. We’ve known them and the way they think since they were our overseers on plantations or the ones charged with the task of selling us at auction. Their roles in our lives have evolved over the centuries but the contempt, violence, hatred, harassment, and being targets of their rage have never changed. Those who were once our overseers on plantations are now prison guards. It is no coincidence that when the Marshall Project did a poll in Attica, the guards supported Trump and the inmates supported Hillary. When you ask yourselves, “Who knew this country was so racist?” maybe you should listen to us when we say that we knew. I should also add that being a lesbian, I also don’t live in a bubble where homophobia, misogyny, and the specific type of misogyny black women face, don’t exist.
I am sure many of you will still be resistant to this message and dismissive of the lived experience of many of your fellow Democrats as biased because we haven't gotten to know Trump voters on an intimate level as neighbors or relatives who have good hearts but are just down on their luck, feeling left behind, and suffering economic anxiety because of a decline in manufacturing and the hollowing out of their towns and communities. President Lyndon Banes Johnson called bullshit on this. LBJ was a son of the south. He knew the people in these small towns. He knew working class and middle class white people. He is no mean source when it comes to explaining the state of mind of the Trump voter. He said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice when you pick his pocket. Hell, give him someone to look down, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Look at how Trump profited from spreading the lie that President Obama isn’t a citizen. He did that because he knew that by making the claim that he wasn’t born here, it would mean he illegally occupied the office of president. He gave them someone to look down on, just as the right-wing entertainment complex gives its viewers, who are living in hollowed out and economically depressed areas, something and someone to look down on when they talk about black communities in Detroit, Chicago, or Baltimore. Their concern for economically depressed and decaying communities only extended to their own because so long as there was a black neighborhood or city with crime, they felt good. How, again, are we to build solidarity with people who hold people of color in contempt?
LBJ was absolutely right and he too spoke from experience because he spent more time with these types of people than the white liberals who gentrified Brooklyn stomped into Hillary’s campaign headquarters to throw a tantrum on their behalf. LBJ’s experience with them is similar to black people’s experience with them except he was on friendly terms with them. That is why when I hear people explaining away the bigotry of Trump’s white voters as downtrodden people suffering from globalization, the knowledge based economy, outsourcing, income inequality, Wall Street corruption, banks, wage stagnation, or corporations going overseas, I call bullshit. They support Republican candidates who run promoting these issues. This was not about change, either. They sent most Republican incumbents back to office and liberal darlings like Russ Feingold lost. Roy Blunt, a Washington insider whose entire family work as lobbyists, beat Kanter despite not being a Washington insider and his speaking to the concerns of the white working class the Sanders wing thinks the Democrats win. Their concerns may be the economy, but not in the way “Zach” the Brooklyn Tantrum Thrower thinks.
The economic stability Trump voters are troubled over is the currency of whiteness. Indeed, so many white women were willing to vote for him despite his sexual violence toward women, harassment of women, belittling of women, insulting women, and litany of misogynistic remarks is that given the choice between retaining white privilege and preserving white supremacy in this country or gender equality, they will and have chosen the former every single time. In this case, it is in their economic interest to support and maintain white supremacy because being white means you have more opportunities, have more wealth, get paid more, and have a greater chance of getting hired. As unethical as it is to support white supremacy and privilege, it is nonetheless correct to say white voters choosing to maintain and uphold it are acting in their economic interests. These voters are angry because white skin and, in the case of men, a dick, no longer confer upon them the leg up it once did. It is true that in the unsustainable post-WWII boom that a white guy didn’t have to get an education and could still have a good job manufacturing job, a home, a wife who stayed at home to care for his kids, a car, send his kids to school (or at least count on the same job being available to his kids), and take vacations. You all are content to let them rail against Mexicans, blacks, and Asians because correcting them is offensive to them, therefore it is offensive to you. You all are content to let them believe the lie that an authoritarian white strongman will bring these jobs back even though we all know it isn’t true.
I find it hilarious that the DLC and the Clintons are denounced for trying to win the votes of white working-class voters via centrism by the very people who are encouraging the rest of us to court the racist right win voters. Don’t call the Clintons racists ever again or denounce their centrism because your tactics are more cynical and sinister than theirs were. If your progressive appeal to outsiders and class-based movements were so enticing, then why did Zephyr Teachout, a woman with a progressive populist message who had the support of Bernie Sanders, lose to a slimy lawyer? Her Republican opponent smeared her for being a professor which resonated with those voters and many of those voters said they would have voted for Bernie (a man), but they couldn’t vote for the woman who embodies all the progressive and class-centered campaigning Bernie did. You are living in a fantasy world if you think these voters are going to join or support a diverse party. Our diversity and social progressivism offends them. Apparently, it now offends some of you. Just as you will not convince these people to accept your economic message while you maintain your socially progressive ideals, the oppressed will not collaborate with you, Trump, Bannon, and the neo-Nazis to wax rhapsodic and elevate your beloved noble Herrenvolk.