Tag Archives: bigotry

While Our Neros Fiddle…

In his Phoenix rally, Donald Trump doubled down on his appeal to racism–both through a self-serving (and inaccurate) defense of his remarks after Charlottesville and in a coy reference to a potential pardon for notorious Arizona racist Joe Arpaio. It was red meat for his supporters.

The question is: who are those supporters?

I have previously expressed my belief that Trump’s election owed much more to racial resentment than to economic distress. But I do understand the connections between cultural and economic anxiety.

It is true that Trump voters on average were better-off financially than Clinton voters (and it is also true, and worth repeating, that there were three million more of the latter than the former), but as sociologists will confirm, economic anxiety is not the same thing as economic deprivation. And multiple studies confirm that anxiety and insecurity trigger bigotries and other behaviors that are suppressed in less tumultuous times.

A recent Economist article describes an academic inquiry that illustrates the connection:

LAST year over 102,000 people died in nearly 50 armed conflicts across the world, according to the Peace Research Institute Oslo, a think-tank. Much of this violence is caused by tensions between ethnic groups—two-thirds of civil wars have been fought along ethnic lines since 1946. Yet historians differ over whether cultural differences or economic pressures best explain how tensions explode into violence.

A new study by Robert Warren Anderson, Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama suggests that, historically, economic shocks were more strongly associated with outbreaks of violence directed against Jews than scholars had previously thought.

The research cited an intriguing example: some 57% of people living in medieval England relied on farming, and a decline in average temperatures of only a third of a degree increased the probability of a pogrom or expulsion by 50% over the next five years. In other words, incidence of violence against Jews weren’t caused by religiously-motivated anti-Semitism. That animus was undeniably– and constantly– present, but its eruptions were triggered by social and economic ills.

Echoes of these patterns are discernible today. Many economists have linked the weather—particularly droughts and heatwaves in agricultural economies—to outbreaks of intercommunal violence in developing countries. Another paper published last year, by Carl-Friedrich Schleussner and his colleagues, found that between 1980 and 2010 23% of civil wars coincided with climate-related disasters in countries with deep ethnic divides. Global warming may worsen this problem further. The lesson of history is that better political institutions can help soothe tensions.

If better political institutions can soothe tensions, it stands to reason that worse political environments can encourage them.

The emergence of the so-called “alt-right” (and no, Mr. Trump, there really isn’t such a thing as an “alt-left”) is widely attributed to Trump’s barely-veiled encouragement of racism and other forms of bigotry, the expression of which was preceded by the years of GOP “dog whistles” that have become one of the party’s routine political tools in the wake of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

The success of that strategy required both pre-existing bigotry–mostly latent, but undeniably potent–and an increase in appeals to social and/or economic anxiety.

Social anxiety in an age of constant and accelerating change is a given. There isn’t much lawmakers can do about that. But they can ameliorate economic insecurity. Legislators can strengthen America’s porous and inadequate social safety net; they can expand access to healthcare; they can make the tax code simpler and fairer; they can raise the minimum wage; they can fashion rules to ensure that the water in our cities remains lead-free and drinkable and the air breathable (and they can require Scott Pruitt’s EPA to abide by those rules).

In short, lawmakers can remove a significant number of the uncertainties that feed economic anxiety. They can also act responsibly and constitutionally, sending a reassuring signal that America’s institutions are functioning properly. None of that, however, is happening.

Nero is said to have fiddled while Rome burned. Congress could give him lessons.

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Trump and White Christian Nationalism

The past few days, in addition to the spectacle of two immature, ignorant and nuclear- armed heads of state throwing verbal poo at each other, the media has been filled with images of torch-wielding White Nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia.

A “Unite The Right” rally organized by white nationalist Richard Spencer descended into chaos and violence Saturday in Charlottesville, as thousands of “alt right” activists, Nazis, KKK members, other assorted white supremacists, and armed militia groups fought with anti-fascist groups and other counter-protesters.

Thanks to Trump, the haters now feel confident “coming out.”

Donald Trump’s election was the culmination of years of seething White Christian Nationalist resentment, constantly fed by a conservative media harping on “those” people– immigrants, the LGBTQ community, blacks, feminists– and brought to a boiling point by Obama’s Presidency.

Evangelicals’ embrace of Donald Trump may seem incomprehensible to traditional Christians and certainly to the rest of us, but we shouldn’t confuse genuine evangelical Christianity with the White Christian Nationalism that has increasingly replaced it. As ThinkProgress explains:

Where did this cross-toting, flag-waving, and sometimes confusion-inducing form of Trumpian Christian nationalism come from, and why does it appear to resonate with throngs of Americans? And how in the world did Trump, hardly a paragon of conservative Christian virtue, end up as its champion?…

[T]he Christian nationalist scaffolding currently propping up Trump is … relatively new. It shares many theological ideas with the broader spectrum of evangelicalism, but adds a different brand of intensity and emphasis (especially domestically). Its origins are also more recent, beginning with the rise of the Religious Right in the 1970s, when leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Sr. and Pat Robertson characterized America as a “Christian nation” and urged their supporters to elect conservative Christian leaders who shared their rabid opposition to abortion, LGBTQ equality, and euthanasia, among other things.

The article traces the history of “dominionism,” a theology that has been described as a “strange fundamentalist postmodernism that denies that there is any such thing as objective reality.” That history–and the convoluted doctrine that allows some Christian Nationalists to insist that Trump was “chosen by God”– is well worth reading. In most cases, however, this “Christian” embrace of the president has more to do with his willingness to pander to them and promote their causes than with doctrine.

It also has a lot to do with the fact that Trump’s rhetoric makes their bigotry seem acceptable; he constantly demeans the “others” they hate, and steadfastly refuses to call them out.(CNN reported that Trump condemned hate “on many sides” in response to the violent white nationalist protests and terror attack in Charlottesville; the President did not even mention white nationalists and the alt-right movement in his remarks, and later called for a “study” of the “situation.”)

Analyses of data from the 2016 election have made it increasingly clear that the great majority of Trump voters–whether they self-identified as Christian Nationalists or not–were motivated by racism and traits associated with racism.  A commentary in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology reports that a majority of Trump voters displayed one or more (usually more) of the following social-psychological traits:

  • authoritarianism and social dominance orientation (authoritarianism is characterized by deference to authority, aggression toward outgroups, a rigidly hierarchical view of the world, and resistance to new experiences);
  • prejudice (racial prejudice as well as prejudice against immigrants and outgroups in general);
  • lack of intergroup contact (Trump’s white supporters report far less contact with minorities than other Americans); and
  • relative–not real–deprivation (Trump supporters feel deprived relative to what they erroneously perceive other ‘less deserving’ groups possess).

The horrendous spectacle in Charlottesville is only the beginning. We can see clearly now just what it is that motivates “Trump’s Troops,” and it isn’t Truth, Justice and the American Way.

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Accurate, Not Funny

A friend recently sent me the following “joke:”

The Republican Congress is preparing to pass a resolution adding an “S” to WASP.  The S will stand for STRAIGHT, and “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant will henceforth be “Straight White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.”

The Democrats in Congress will respond by creating  a new acronym of their own. MAGPIE will stand for “Minority Americans, Gays, Poor, Immigrants, Educated, Seculars.”

Clever word-play, but much too accurate to be amusing.

Count me among the many Americans who heard Donald Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” as a very thinly-veiled promise to “make America White Again.” Trump’s appeal was grounded in a notion of “true” Americanism that equated being a real American with being a straight white Protestant male. He appealed to nostalgia for a time when those white Protestant males dominated– and women and minorities “knew their place.”

That nostalgia, needless to say, is not shared by those encompassed by the MAGPIE acronym.

There are, as readers of this blog know all too well, many kinds of inequality. We tend to concentrate on economic disparities, and there is good reason for that—if you are a member of the working poor, unable to make ends meet even though you may be working two jobs, unable to afford adequate food and transportation, let alone health insurance—that lack of self-sufficiency hobbles you in virtually every other way.

People struggling just to survive don’t go to public meetings, rarely vote, and usually are in no position to assert their legal or constitutional rights. They lack the time (and too often the self-confidence) to complain about inadequate city services or substandard schools.

Economic equity is thus incredibly important. But as we all understand, in a society that privileges certain identities over others, the people most likely to be poor, the people most likely to be economically marginalized, are the people consigned to the “Other” categories. The MAGPIES.

One of the most depressing realities about Trump’s America is the increasing division of the population into tribes contending for advantage in what most see as a zero-sum game.

Rather than a liberal democracy in which elected officials work for their vision of a common good, America is rapidly devolving into a corporatist system where elected officials decide who they will favor with tax cuts, subsidies and other governmental prizes. (Those decisions, needless to say, are not made on the basis of what is good for all Americans—they are made in exchange for campaign donations and/or partisan estimates of what is good for the official’s “tribe.”)

From time to time, someone will repeat the old story about the Chairman of General Motors who reportedly said “What’s good for General Motors is good for the United States.” What he actually said was “What’s good for the United States will be good for General Motors.”

That recognition—that we are all in this together, that prosperity must be shared to be sustainable, and that sound management of any business requires a concern for the national welfare—is all but gone, replaced by Trumpism’s far more constricted and un-self-aware concern with the immediate prospects of ones own tribe.

The SWASPs.

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Telling It Like It Is

In the wake of the election, those of us who opposed Donald Trump are being told to “get over it.” News organizations are doing puff pieces that “normalize” a decidedly abnormal President-elect. Uncharitable descriptions of Trump voters are met with the sort of admonitions that liberals typically (and appropriately) offer when unpleasant characteristics are ascribed to an entire group of people.

If we had just emerged from a hard-fought election contest between sane candidates with different policy prescriptions, those responses would be appropriate. If a significant number of Trump voters could somehow have remained unaware of his core message, you could argue that economic distress or partisan loyalty prompted their support (although research confirms that most Trump voters were not economically disadvantaged, and that educated Republicans deserted him in droves.)

But this election was decidedly not normal, and refusing to acknowledge its implications is dangerous.

I think Jamelle Bouie, Slate’s political correspondent, got it right, when he wrote that there is “no such thing as a good Trump voter.”

Donald Trump ran a campaign of racist demagoguery against Muslim Americans, Hispanic immigrants, and black protesters. He indulged the worst instincts of the American psyche and winked to the stream of white nationalists and anti-Semites who backed his bid for the White House. Millions of Americans voted for this campaign, thus elevating white nationalism and white reaction to the Oval Office.

When Trump voters are accused of responding to racist demagoguery, nice people clutch their pearls. Michael Lerner, for example, wrote in the New York Times that “Many Trump supporters very legitimately feel that it is they who have been facing an unfair reality.” Lerner attributed the vote to  “people’s inner pain and fear,” and blamed liberals for failing to sympathize with those emotions. He acknowledged the racism, sexism and xenophobia employed by Trump, but insisted that the vote didn’t reveal “an inherent malice in the majority of Americans.”

I beg to differ. As Bouie points out,

Millions of Americans are justifiably afraid of what they’ll face under a Trump administration. If any group demands our support and sympathy, it’s these people, not the Americans who backed Trump and his threat of state-sanctioned violence against Hispanic immigrants and Muslim Americans. All the solicitude, outrage, and moral telepathy being deployed in defense of Trump supporters—who voted for a racist who promised racist outcomes—is perverse, bordering on abhorrent.

It’s worth repeating what Trump said throughout the election. His campaign indulged in hateful rhetoric against Hispanics and condemned Muslim Americans with the collective guilt of anyone who would commit terror. It treated black America as a lawless dystopia and spoke of black Americans as dupes and fools. And to his supporters, Trump promised mass deportations, a ban on Muslim entry to the United States, and strict “law and order” as applied to those black communities.

A voter would have to have been blind and deaf not to hear and understand Trump’s central message.

A vote for Donald Trump represented one of two things, both reprehensible: either the voter was attracted to Trump because of the bigotry, or s/he didn’t find it sufficiently offensive or problematic to justify withholding support. There is no other category.

We have all heard the stories about the good Germans who refused to see that what was happening to their country after Hitler took power was not “politics as usual,” who refused to call out the virulent anti-Semitism, who didn’t want to “rock the boat.”

And then it was too late.

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Facing Up to Reality

When something absolutely unforeseen challenges your worldview, it is probably prudent to take a step back and re-examine your assumptions.

After the shock of a Presidential election that successfully appealed to festering bigotries and primal hatreds that I naively thought had declined, and after a period of disbelief (and nausea), I made myself take that “step back.” You may or may not agree with my conclusions, but I’d ask you to consider them.

America’s democratic institutions and processes haven’t worked properly for quite some time. All of us can tick off evidence: a Senate that simply refuses to hold hearings on a Presidential nominee for the Supreme Court; legislators’ willingness to petulantly shut down government when they don’t get their way; the widespread, obstinate denial of science and rejection of empirical evidence in favor of policies based upon ideology and/or religious dogma; and of course, the toxic partisanship and racial resentments reflected in the decision of Congressional Republicans to block anything and everything proposed by our first African-American President, irrespective of the merits of any particular proposal. I could go on.

Had Hillary Clinton been elected President, she would have faced the same ferocious, partisan hostility that Obama has had to deal with–but on steroids. Irrational hatred of the Clintons, especially Hillary, is baked into Republican DNA. Not only would she have faced constant, repetitive Congressional “investigations,” several House members were already drawing up Articles of Impeachment. (Why wait for her to actually do something impeachable?)

Meanwhile, lawmakers in both parties continue to block policies seen as threatening to the interests of the oligarchs that effectively control our national and state legislatures. It is irrelevant that large majorities of Americans favor background checks for people buying guns, higher taxes on the rich, a discontinuation of obscene subsidies to oil companies or numerous other measures. Especially at the federal level, the policy preferences that count are those of the big donors as conveyed by their lobbyists–many of whom used to be legislators in the incestuous political stew that is Washington, D.C.

This is not the way a working democracy operates.

Although the self-dealing and the nastiness has unquestionably gotten worse, most of this isn’t new. It has become more visible in the Internet Age, but the inability of our governing structure to deal with a technologically integrated, inexorably globalizing, demographically diversifying modern world has been apparent for decades.

American government does not work as it should, and it hasn’t for quite some time. It certainly hasn’t ameliorated or addressed–or even explained– the dramatic changes that have created economic and social distress among so many of our citizens.

Dissatisfied citizens look for someone to blame. To the extent they blame the status quo in Washington, that’s probably fair enough. Given human nature, however, a lot of our fellow-citizens blame immigrants, African-Americans, Muslims, Jews, “uppity” women…the “other”…for cultural changes that disadvantage them or make them uncomfortable, and for a government that doesn’t work for them.

Social scientists tell us that the two strongest predictors of support for Donald Trump were racial resentment and misogyny.

So now we have a President-elect whose profound ignorance and incompetence is likely to deliver the coup de grace to creaky government institutions and even more likely to exacerbate the social divisions and bigotries he cultivated during the campaign. Whether he serves out his term, or we end up with Mike Pence (a rigid theocrat who is equally incompetent, equally uninterested in the mechanics of governing), all signs suggest we are on the cusp of an era of massive social upheaval.

The question is: when the incommensurate passions triggered by impending conflicts subside, will we be able to construct a fairer, more streamlined and responsive, more (small-d) democratic governing structure, one that is more adapted to the realities of the modern world?

Can we salvage the best parts of our governing philosophy, and create institutional structures that work for all our citizens? Or will four years of authoritarianism and continued exploitation of racial, religious and ethnic divisions leave the oligarchs and white supremacists firmly in charge?

What would a better, more trustworthy American democracy look like?

I have some ideas I’ll share tomorrow. I invite yours.

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