Howdy.
This diary isn’t about relitigating the primary. It sucks that I even have to open with that disclaimer, but — sorry, I do. So if you’re reading this and loading your ammo to blast people who were on the other Democrat’s support group in 2016, stop it. Just stop it. Stop. And please, leave now. I’m serious. I’ll wait.
If you’re still here, can we talk for a minute about racism?
I’m a racist.
It’s ugly, it’s awful, and I’m totally ashamed of it, but it’s true. I’m a racist.
I’d like to describe myself as a recovering racist, in that I’ve had the good fortune to learn how foolish I was to accept the cruel terminology and viewpoints I heard so casually used in Mississippi and Tennessee as a boy, and try very hard to be a better person, as best I’m able. I do try.
But I don’t get to dodge it. I don’t get to walk away unsullied. I don’t get to unspeak words that came out of my mouth, or unown ideas that polluted my young brain. I don’t get to say, “I’m all better now, so my past doesn’t count.” Because that’s escapist bullshit, and the people I wronged — the people my society has wronged — deserve a hell of a lot better than that. Black folks, brown folks, native American folks — they all deserve better.
I have to say these things, because I’m about to speak in judgment of others who are currently, actively, proudly racist — and I need to make my own place clear. I’m not standing in some ivory tower, so pure I sparkle. I know these people because, to a lesser but still relevant degree, I was one of them. It matters.
Okay, about those Trump supporters. More poignantly, about those Republicans — because let’s be serious, the people I’m talking about, and that the article I’m going to link to talks about — they didn’t get this way because Trump.
Trump got this way because them.
Take that in for a second.
Racism in all its ugly shadings and degrees is as baked into American history as apple pie and the national anthem. Period. Anyone who denies this is blind, wilfully ignorant, or selling something.
So about those conservatives and Republicans who supported Trump.
They wear their racism in various ways. Some of them will tell you they “held their nose” to vote for Trump, because reasons. Some of them aren’t even that reserved. They’ll tell you they were proud to vote for him. And I can assure you, they were.
This isn’t just why we fight. This is what we fight.
The Intercept’s Mehdi Hassan comes right across the plate with his first pitch:
It isn’t only Republicans, it seems, who traffic in alternative facts. Since Donald Trump’s shock election victory, leading Democrats have worked hard to convince themselves, and the rest of us, that his triumph had less to do with racism and much more to do with economic anxiety — despite almost all of the available evidence suggesting otherwise.
There follows some writing about Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren which is going to be very inflammatory for some readers. This is why I put in the primary disclaimer. Don’t skip those paragraphs, please, but do try to read them as dispassionately as you can. This diary isn’t about Liz and Bernie — it’s about racism, and the understandable but potentially dangerous fear of openly discussing and confronting it.
Citing Phillip Klinkner, Hassan makes his point unsubtly (all links are live from here on):
The new ANES data only confirms what a plethora of studies have told us since the start of the presidential campaign: the race was about race. Klinkner himself grabbed headlines last summer when he revealed that the best way to identify a Trump supporter in the U.S. was to ask “just one simple question: is Barack Obama a Muslim?” Because, he said, “if they are white and the answer is yes, 89 percent of the time that person will have a higher opinion of Trump than Clinton.” This is economic anxiety? Really?
But lest we quickly revert to the safe stance of simply dismissing low-education, low-information rural voters as unreachable, consider the following, again from Mehdi’s piece (emphasis mine):
For Sanders, Warren and others on the left, the economy is what matters most and class is everything. Yet the empirical evidence just isn’t there to support them. Yes Trump won a (big) majority of non-college-educated whites, but he also won a majority of college-educated whites, too. He won more young white voters than Clinton did and also a majority of white women; he managed to win white votes regardless of age, gender, income or education. Class wasn’t everything in 2016. In a recent essay in The Nation, analysts Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel point out that “income predicted support for McCain and Romney, but not Trump.” Their conclusion? “Racial identity and attitudes have further displaced class as the central battleground of American politics.”
I am pushing fair use in citing a fourth paragraph, and those more experienced than I are welcome to call me on it and request an edit. I feel these words are important enough to post for those readers who don’t continue on to the full article (be honest, you know you’re out there). Emphasis mine:
Look, if you still believe that Trump’s appeal was rooted in economic, and not racial, anxiety, ask yourself the following questions: Why did a majority of Americans earning less than $50,000 a year vote for Clinton, not Trump, according to the exit polls? Why, in the key Rust Belt swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, did most voters who cited the economy as “the most important issue facing the country” opt for Hillary over the Donald? And why didn’t black or Latino working class voters flock to Trump with the same fervor as white working class voters? Or does their economic insecurity not count?
Mehdi uses blunter and more direct language in his final paragraph, which I’ll have to ask you to click through and read for yourself.
Racism is a horrible, ugly, sick-making topic. I got, no exaggeration, slightly physically queasy writing this diary, just remembering my own faults and failings, and looking through Mehdi’s citations.
This is ugly, painful stuff.
But it has to be faced. And I don’t think that tacitly accepting silence is a safe or useful answer. If ever it was, it can’t be any more.
I hold up neither Mehdi himself, nor The Intercept overall, as an unimpeachable source, and I fully admit my own confirmation biases, with which Mehdi’s article agreed. I still believe it’s a valuable perspective, and one I hope this community can discuss and digest.
Discussion is welcome. Thanks for reading, as always.