In a recent column for the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson asks THE question: how on earth is this election close?
The choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump should not be a tough call. Harris is a former prosecutor; Trump, a felon. Harris gives campaign speeches about her civic values; Trump rants endlessly about his personal grievances, interrupting himself with asides about sharks and Hannibal Lecter. Harris has outlined a detailed set of policy proposals for the economy; Trump nonsensically offers tariffs as a panacea, describing this fantasy in terms that make it clear he doesn’t understand how tariffs work.
Also, Harris never whipped thousands of supporters into a frenzy and sent them off to the Capitol, where they smashed their way into the citadel of our democracy, injuring scores of police officers and threatening to hang the vice president, in an attempt to overturn the result of a free and fair election. Trump did.
This is the conundrum that drives most rational people crazy. Even without January 6th, 32 felonies, multiple sexual assaults and the horrified testimonies of people who worked in Trump’s administration, who listens to the childish rants of a mentally-disturbed man with a third-grade vocabulary and thinks, “Yep, that’s the guy who should have charge of the nuclear codes.”? Who wants this ignorant name-calling bully to be a role model for America’s children?
How can this election possibly be close?
Robinson suggests some possibilities. First, Kamala Harris is a woman, and many Americans harbor a deep-seated misogyny. He notes that Trump desperately wants to have a fight over gender and race–and that Trump and Vance “are trying hard to win the votes of men who equate manhood with cartoonish machismo — men who somehow feel that their status and prospects are threatened because they are men.”
Another reason might be that the 71 million people who voted for Trump in 2020 are loathe to admit that they backed a loser, let alone an embarrassing buffoon utterly unfit for office. (Large numbers of these voters, after all, still believe the “Big Lie.”)
And Robinson notes that Trump does best among uneducated Whites–the demographic most responsive to his vicious demagoguery on immigration — “the lies he keeps telling about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, for example.” He constantly tells working-class Whites that immigration is a threat to their jobs and communities. As Robinson says, those tribal appeals aren’t likely to win over many new voters, but will likely motivate turnout of his base.
Still, though, how does any of this overcome Trump’s manifest unfitness? How does any of it erase his pathetic performance in the debate? How does it nullify the fact that he awaits sentencing by a New York judge after 34 guilty verdicts in a criminal trial? If the answer is buried somewhere in some poll, I can’t find it.
I have wrestled with the question Robinson poses, and I consistently return to one answer: the “through” line in Robinson’s analysis is bigotry. Racism. A yearning for patriarchy. A simmering hatred of the Other.
Robinson identifies anti-woman, anti-immigrant strands of what we have come to identify as White Supremacy or White Christian Nationalism, but–at least in this essay– he fails to connect the dots, fails to call out the intense White grievance that lies at the heart of the MAGA movement.
When Trump won (barely–and only in the antiquated Electoral College), a number of pundits attributed economic motives to his voters. Research has soundly debunked that assumption; numerous studies confirm the association of “racial resentment” with support for Trump and MAGA. I have previously quoted my youngest son’s observation that there are two kinds of people who vote for Trump–and only two kinds–those who share his racism, and those for whom his racism isn’t disqualifying.
Beginning with that first campaign, Trump jettisoned “dog whistles” in favor of explicitly hateful, racist rhetoric. He asserted that there are “very fine people” who chant “Jews shall not replace us.” He tried to keep Muslims from coming into the country. He said Black immigrants came from “shithole” countries (unlike those nice White folks from Norway…) His supporters want to roll back gay rights, and they persistently wage war on trans children.
This election isn’t about the economy, or national security, or other policies. It’s about culture war.
His MAGA supporters agree with the only clear message Trump has delivered: making America great again requires taking America back to a time when White Christian heterosexual males were in charge, and the rest of us were second class citizens.
This election is close because too many voters share that worldview. The rest of us had better turn out.
Comments