Politicians, pundits, political scientists and your crazy uncle all have their explanations for the election of Donald Trump, and most of those explanations have at least a germ of truth–or at least, plausibility.
Misogyny certainly played a role. Racism was a huge and undeniable factor. Hillary was a weak/divisive candidate. Bernie supporters voted for third-party candidates. The Electoral College overweighs rural votes. Russian disinformation was effective. Millions of Americans didn’t vote. Etc.
In his view, Trump is a striking result of that process. Like most other political scientists who concentrate on political party politics, Abramowitz sees the GOP as a conservative party in the sense meant by William F. Buckley: It is “standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!'”
Abramowitz writes that “while Trump won the election by exploiting the deep divisions in American society, he did not create those divisions,” and they won’t go away regardless of what becomes of his presidency. He provides an abundance of compelling, detailed evidence, most of which has been lying around in plain sight — in the American National Election Survey (ANES), the results of presidential and congressional elections, etc. But as with the story about Columbus and the egg, you can stare at something for a very long time before someone else shows you the obvious.
Most fundamentally, Abramowitz argues that the New Deal coalition “based on three major pillars: the white South, the heavily unionized northern white working class, and northern white ethnics” was eroded by post-World War II changes that have transformed American society. Those resenting the changes have become increasingly Republican, those welcoming them, increasingly Democratic.
Abramowitz asserts that racial polarization and the rise of negative partisanship were not only crucial to Trump’s election, but also explain his conduct in the White House “which can be described as governing by dividing.” The thesis of the book is that today’s strongly partisan electorate is deeply divided along racial, ideological, and cultural lines.
Rosenberg asked Abramowitz to identify the three most important–and misunderstood– realities of American politics today. His response:
That because of the rise of negative partisanship, we are in a new age of party loyalty and straight-ticket voting — despite the negative feelings of many voters toward the parties and the popularity of the “independent label.” That the divisions within the electorate are primarily racial and cultural rather than economic. That tinkering with electoral rules will not have much impact on partisan polarization because its sources are deep divisions within the society.
I find this analysis persuasive. And I realize that it is important to understand where we are and how we have gotten here. But the road to 2016 has now been pretty thoroughly plowed, and the more important questions are: where do we go from here? and how do we get there?
As a lawyer I once worked with like to say, there’s really only one legal question, and that’s “what do we do?” That axiom is equally applicable to politics and governance.
I’m waiting for the book that tells us how to resist and overcome the racism, misogyny and inequalities that drive our divisions–the book that tells us what we must do to build a better, kinder, fairer society.
The book that tells us how to calm the fears that make our fellow-citizens hate.
The basic line of demarcation between pro-Trump and anti-Trump partisans is now too clear and too well-documented to misunderstand. As my youngest son has maintained since the election, there were two–and only two–categories of people who voted for Trump: those who agreed with and felt validated by his too-obvious-to-ignore racism, and those for whom that racism was not disqualifying.
Pundits and political observers on the left were deeply uncomfortable with that reality. “Nice” people looked for other plausible reasons for those votes: economic distress, hatred of Hillary, partisan affiliation. But as research on the vote has emerged, even polite formulations (“racial anxiety”) and studies conducted by academics noted for their rigor and lack of political agendas have confirmed the degree to which racism predicted support for Trump.
If any dispassionate observer still doubts that conclusion, the behavior of the Trump administration, its supporters and its propaganda arms should dispel those doubts. The fixation on immigration (from the southern border, not the north) and the fact-free demonization of brown immigrants is a clue too obvious to ignore.
A ProPublica analysis.. found that, under Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the department has scuttled more than 1,200 civil rights investigations that were begun under the Obama administration and lasted at least six months. These cases, which investigated complaints of civil rights violations ranging from discriminatory discipline to sexual violence in school districts and colleges around the country, were closed without any findings of wrongdoing or corrective action, often due to insufficient evidence….
ProPublica also found that the Office for Civil Rights has become more lenient. Under Obama, 51 percent of cases that took more than 180 days culminated in findings of civil rights violations, or corrective changes. Under the Trump administration, that rate has dropped to 35 percent.
ProPublica noted that the Trump administration has largely shelved investigations of systemic violations, opting to look instead at individual complaints.
One long investigation terminated by the Trump administration took place in Bryan, Texas. As ProPublica previously reported, the Dallas bureau of the federal civil rights office spent more than four years investigating whether disciplinary practices in Bryan discriminated against students of color. Federal investigators found at least 10 incidents where black students received harsher punishment than their white peers for the same conduct.
Weeks before Trump’s inauguration, federal investigators and the district were on the cusp of a settlement that would have required more than a dozen reforms. But after DeVos took over, the case and the pending settlement were scuttled, with no findings of wrongdoing.
In late April, OCR also shelved the investigation into school discipline in DeSoto County, where 852 students — more than half of them black — received corporal punishment in 2015.
Shelia Riley, the chairperson of DeSoto’s school board, told ProPublica that OCR’s decision was appropriate. “I read the [parents’] claims and I just felt like we were fair in our disciplinary decisions,” she said.
The Civil War may have ended slavery, but America’s “original sin” has persisted. Honest observers can no longer ignore it; “nice, polite” people can no longer pretend that grandpa just has “policy differences” with dark people. Trump owes his election to the voters who couldn’t abide the presence of Barack Obama in the White House–and who rewarded the bigot who remains willing to “tell it like [they believe]it is” in the ugly world they inhabit.
We aren’t in Kansas any more, Toto–and we’ve gone way beyond dog-whistles.
Sometimes, it’s hard to know what aspect of current American political life is most depressing.
Children are taken from their parents at the border. Regulations meant to protect clean air and water are eviscerated. The President’s delusional mental state becomes more obvious–and frightening– each day. Congress does nothing about anything. (Case in point: despite polls showing 90% of Americans want them to protect Net Neutrality, the House refuses even to vote on the issue.) Trump attacks our allies and embraces our enemies….it goes on and on.
Perhaps worst of all, this Administration consistently panders to toxic attitudes that have always been there, but had mostly been banished from polite society. His rhetoric has encouraged the growth of overt racial and religious animus.
Nowhere has that animus been more poisonous than in debates around social welfare programs. The odious “makers versus takers” construct permeates the country’s already punitive approach to social programs, as the Guardian recently reported.
Endless paperwork. Dirty looks on the checkout line whether you are buying Skittles or pricey organic kale. Hours spent in tedious training for non-existent jobs. Urine tests, supervised by creeps. Unclear requirements, mandatory appointments without regard for lack of transportation or childcare, arbitrary deadlines that are undisclosed until you run afoul of them.
And, after all that, the skimpy benefits obtained don’t begin to cover expenses.
These are just a few of the ways the American social safety net aims to deter aid seekers, ensuring that unworthy “takers” don’t get unearned crumbs from the mighty “makers”.
And, as the article goes on to detail, it is about to get worse. Far from moderating efforts by the Administration to cut back most programs for the poor, Republicans in Congress are positively eager to cut the heart out of social programs. Their justifications smack of moral judgment and “deservingness,” and betray a deeply-held conviction that being poor is itself a sign of immorality–or at least prima facie evidence that bad choices must have been made.
In Trump’s America, one of those bad “choices” is having been born black or brown.
White Americans are increasingly critical of the country’s social safety net, a new study suggests, thanks in part to a rising tide of racial resentment.
The study, conducted by researchers at two California universities and published Wednesday in the journal Social Forces, finds that opposition to welfare programs has grown among white Americans since 2008, even when controlling for political views and socioeconomic status.
White Americans are more likely to favor welfare cuts when they believe that their status is threatened and that minorities are the main beneficiaries of safety net programs, the study says.
(The irony is that these cuts actually hurt more white Americans, who–despite racist memes about welfare– comprise the majority of Medicaid and food-stamp recipients.)
In the reported study, researchers analyzed 10 years of data on attitudes toward race and welfare. Between 2008 and 2012 in particular, they found a rise in opposition to welfare. That opposition rose among all Americans — but it rose far more sharply among whites. White Americans also began scoring higher on racial resentment scales during that period. (I’m sure the fact that we had a black President was coincidental….not.)
In order to confirm the link between racial attitudes and positions on welfare, the researchers investigated further.
White Americans called for deeper cuts to welfare programs after viewing charts that showed they would become a racial minority within 50 years. They also opposed welfare programs more when they were told that people of color benefit most from them.
I keep telling myself that the re-emergence of these attitudes–attitudes of fear and resentment that largely explain support for this morally reprehensible President–are a temporary reaction. Loss of white privilege is threatening to people who grew up believing it was their due–especially if they don’t have much else going for them, but I keep telling myself this ugly time will pass.
There is a robust argument among pundits and scholars over the comparative contributions of economic insecurity and racial anxiety to Donald Trump’s election. It is an argument that rests on an ahistorical “either-or” approach to voter motivation (anyone who has studied German attitudes in the period after the first World War understands that economic fears fed the not-so-latent anti-Semitism.)
That said, we make a mistake–as I have argued previously–if we minimize the role racism played and continues to play in America’s electoral politics. One aspect of the uncomfortable discussion we need to have focuses on the history and persistence of racism in Evangelical Christianity.
I spent the first 15 years of my career as a scholar studying American evangelicals and race, and in my view, the failure to consider motivations rooted in anxieties about race and gender as an explanation of evangelical Trump support represents a striking omission. The history of American evangelicalism is intensely racially charged. The persistent approval for Trump among white evangelicals ought to prompt far more critical self-reflection within the evangelical community than we’ve seen so far.
Evangelicals’ tenacious affection for Donald Trump is not a bug driven by expediency. Instead, it reflects defining features of American evangelicalism that become clearer when we examine the historical record. Doing so reveals that when white conservative evangelicals feel threatened by cultural change, the old demons of racism and misogyny, which lurk at the heart of the American evangelical tradition, return with a vengeance.
Wadsworth recounts–and dismisses–analyses by Evangelicals who find the support for Trump to be “transactional.” She also takes issue with aspects of Michael Gerson’s more nuanced and widely-read critique of Evangelical Trump supporters.
Michael Gerson lays out a particularly condemnatory, yet nuanced, version of the Christian anti-Trump lament in a lengthy, elegant essay in the April issue of the Atlantic. He frames Trump loyalty as “the last temptation” that could forfeit evangelicalism’s future and despoil a long legacy of positive contributions to American culture.
Cheerleading by second-generation Christian right figures like Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham, Gerson writes, is “not mere gullibility; it is utter corruption.” Allowing hatred of their political enemies to “blind” them to Trump’s attacks on people of color and women is a tragic mistake, he suggests.
Gerson offers a 150-year summary of evangelicals’ positive work in the public sphere to make the case that, despite some missteps along the way, white evangelicals have mostly been on the right side of moral and social issues, historically. But his history is strikingly lopsided, reflecting a characteristic amnesia among evangelicalism’s boosters.
Wadsworth reminds readers that Europeans considered the indigenous people they encountered when they came to America to be uncivilized “heathens”–a belief anchored in a white Christian worldview employed to justify various forms of missionary conquest.
On the question of chattel slavery, evangelicals do not just appear as the abolitionists Gerson cites approvingly. The institution had millions of champions among conservative Christians who drew on Scripture and Curse of Ham theology to defend white supremacy and black subordination. Gerson fails to mention that every major evangelical denomination split along regional lines based on divisions over the slavery question. In fact, the vast bulk of Southern white evangelicals defended slavery, clung to the Lost Cause, fought Reconstruction, and designed and defended Jim Crow.
As the Kentucky General Baptist Association put it in 1860:
Among the white race in the Southern States there is no difference of opinion upon this subject: all are united in the opinion in reference to the political, intellectual, and social inequality between the colored people and the white races. And the people of our Commonwealth generally feel that the present condition of the colored race in this country accords both with the Word and the providence of God.
The entire article is eye-opening for those of us previously unaware of this history. Racism truly is America’s original sin. We will not eradicate it–from Evangelical Christianity or from any of the other constituencies in which it holds sway–until we confront the major role it has occupied, and continues to occupy, in our common life.
Last night, I spoke to the Lafayette chapter of Indiana’s ACLU. They asked that I address immigration. This is the talk I delivered.
It’s tempting to dismiss Trump’s emphasis on immigration—and especially his wall– as both stupid and racist: Stupid, because most people who are here illegally have flown in and overstayed their visas—something a wall would neither address or prevent—and illegal entries from Mexico, which were already diminishing, have declined some 45% since Trump’s election (along with tourism from pretty much everywhere); racist, because that wall he wants is only between us and Mexico, not us and Canada. And he’s made it clear he’d put out the welcome mat for those blond immigrants from Norway….
In fact, a significant element of racism infects the entire immigration debate. My own son-in-law is an immigrant; he’s been in the U.S. on a green card for nearly 40 years, and in all that time, he has encountered exactly zero anti-immigrant hostility. He’s not from Norway, but he is a very pale Brit who hasn’t entirely lost his cute English accent.
Trump’s emphasis on immigration is of a piece with his appeal to White Nationalists generally, but in all fairness, this administration didn’t invent the debate over immigration, nor is it the first to stoke the tribalism that infects that debate. I know facts are out of fashion these days, but it is instructive to look both at our history and the actual impact of immigration.
In a January column on the subject, David Brooks of the New York Times recognized that—when you look at that history and those facts, they point to one inescapable conclusion. Here’s what he wrote:
The case for restricting immigration seems superficially plausible. Over the last several decades we’ve conducted a potentially reckless experiment. The number of foreign-born Americans is at record highs, straining national cohesion, raising distrust. Maybe America should take a pause, as we did in the 1920s. After all, that pause seemed to produce the cohesive America of the 1940s that won the war and rose to pre-eminence.
Every few years I try to write this moderate column. And every few years I fail. That’s because when you wade into the evidence you find that the case for restricting immigration is pathetically weak. The only people who have less actual data on their side are the people who deny climate change.
There has always been a nativist streak in America. If you go to the East Side Tenement Museum in New York, you’ll see that Ellis Island was first established to keep “undesirables” from entering the country. The poem we all quote on Lady Liberty—the “give me your tired, your poor, your masses yearning to breathe free”– was Emma Lazarus’ response to the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Know-Nothing Party (which today’s GOP seems to want to emulate, if not eclipse) was formed largely by people who feared that Irish Catholic immigrants would take jobs from God-fearing Protestant “real Americans.”
The persistent inability of Congress to pass immigration reform is one of the reasons the Executive Branch has been exercising more policy authority—Obama’s efforts to protect the Dreamers, for example, were a response to continued inaction by the legislative branch.
What are the facts—as opposed to the xenophobic fears—about immigration and immigrants?
Immigrants themselves make up about 14% of the U.S. population; more than 43 million people. Together with their children, they are about 27% of us. Of the 43 million, approximately 11 million are undocumented, and as I noted previously, after Trump took office, Customs and Border Protection reported a 36% drop in crossings from Mexico. Since 2007, individuals who flew in and overstayed their visas have outnumbered those who cross the border illegally by 600,000.
What anti-immigrant activists are calling “chain migration” is actually family re-unification and it applies only to close relatives; of the people granted permanent residency in 2016, about two-thirds fell into that category.
Immigrants made up 17% of the U.S. workforce in 2014, and two-thirds of those were here legally. Collectively, they were 45% of domestic workers, 36% of manufacturing workers, and 33% of agricultural workers. Those percentages help to explain why state-level efforts to curb immigration have come back to bite them: in Alabama a few years ago, as many of you will recall, the state passed a draconian new immigration law, and crops rotted in the fields. Farmers couldn’t find native-born residents willing to do the work, despite offering to pay more than minimum wage.
Despite the hateful rhetoric from the Rightwing fringe, most Americans consider immigration a good thing: in 2016, Gallup found 72% of Americans viewed immigrants favorably, and as many as 84% supported a path to citizenship for undocumented persons who met certain requirements. Another poll showed that 76% of Republicans supported a path to citizenship, and it’s worth noting that such support was higher than the 62% who supported a border wall.
What about the repeated claims that immigrants are a drain on the economy? The data unequivocally shows otherwise. As the Atlantic and several other sources have reported, undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars into Social Security for benefits they will never receive. These are people working on faked social security cards; employers deduct the social security payments and send them to the government, but because the numbers aren’t connected to actual accounts, the worker cannot access their contributions. The Social Security system has grown increasingly—and dangerously– reliant on that revenue; in 2010, the system’s chief actuary estimated that undocumented immigrants contributed roughly 12 billion dollars to the program.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that approximately half of undocumented workers pay income taxes, but all of them pay sales and property taxes. In 2010, those state and local taxes amounted to approximately 10.6 billion dollars.
The most significant impact of immigration, however, has been on innovation and economic growth. The Partnership for a New American Economy issued a research report in 2010: key findings included the fact that more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Collectively, companies founded by immigrants and their children employ more than 10 million people worldwide; and the revenue they generate is greater than the GDP of every country in the world except the U.S., China and Japan.
The names of those companies are familiar to most of us: Intel, EBay, Google, Tesla, Apple, You Tube, Pay Pal, Yahoo, Nordstrom, Comcast, Proctor and Gamble, Elizabeth Arden, Huffington Post. A 2012 report found that immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans. As of 2011, one in ten Americans was employed by an immigrant-run business.
On economic grounds alone, then, we should welcome immigrants. But not only do we threaten undocumented persons, we make it incredibly difficult to come here legally. If there is one fact that everyone admits, it is the need to reform a totally dysfunctional and inhumane system. Based upon logic and the national interest, it’s hard to understand why Congress has been unwilling or unable to craft reasonable legislation. Of course, logic and the national interest have been missing from Washington for some time. And compassion went with them.
Which brings me to DACA, and the willingness of this administration and Congress to use the Dreamers as hostages and pawns.
On September 5thof last year, Trump terminated the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. As you all know, Dreamers are children who came to the U.S. with their parents; most of them know no other home. A significant number speak only English. There was no particular reason, other than his fixation on immigration—nothing had happened that required or justified an out-of-the-blue termination of a program that huge majorities of Americans favored. At the time, Trump announced that it was the responsibility of Congress to pass legislation by March 5 to avert the crisis he had just caused. That has not happened.
In January, a federal court entered a preliminary injunction requiring the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to receive and adjudicate DACA renewal applications from young people who previously received protection under the program. A second court entered a similar injunction weeks later, and on February 26, the Supreme Court declined the federal government’s highly unusual request to hear their appeal—and bypass the U.S. Court of Appeals.
So where are we?
Since its inception, more than 800,000 young people have applied for and received DACA status. Thanks to the injunctions, these individuals can apply for additional two-year work permits and protection from deportation. But the injunctions don’t protect other DACA-eligible individuals. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the overall total number of individuals who may have been eligible to apply for DACA or who may have become eligible by aging into the program or obtaining additional education was slightly more than 1.8 million.
Now, because Trump ended DACA, they are locked out of protection.
There are also an estimated 120,000 individuals among that 1.8 million who were unable to apply because they weren’t yet 15 years old when Trump ended DACA.
In addition to potentially DACA-eligible individuals who either did not—or could not—apply under the program before its termination, there are an additional 285,000 Dreamers who came to the United States at a similarly young age as DACA recipients and have lived here for even longer, but who were entirely cut out of DACA from the beginning, because the program excluded otherwise eligible individuals who were 31 or older as of June 15, 2012, when the program was announced.
The irony is that these older Dreamers have the longest and deepest ties to U.S. families and communities, since they arrived here as children at least 20 years ago. Bipartisan legislation, such as the Dream Act of 2017 and the USA Act of 2018 would get rid of the age cap entirely, remedying this situation, and would extend protection to Dreamers who, years ago, arrived in the country before the age of 18. They are currently excluded from DACA because they arrived after their 16th birthday.
It is so obvious where justice lies for these children that even our broken Congress was able to come up with a bipartisan bill—but despite his promise to sign whatever Congress came up with, Trump rejected it. Meanwhile, the media is filled with heartbreaking stories about families being torn apart, by the deportation of longtime residents who have been important, law-abiding assets to their communities—despite Trump’s rhetoric about focusing on the “bad hombres” among them.
Law is important. There should be consequences for ignoring it. But we can protect the rule of law without destroying families, sending children “back” to countries they know nothing about, and spitting on American ideals.
Over the past several months, we have seen escalating reports of horrible behavior by ICE and Homeland Security. Let me just share one such report, from a Washington Post article a few weeks ago, about the increasing practice of separating children from their mothers:
There is no allegation that the little girl, known in court filings only as S.S., is a terrorist, nor is there any suggestion her mother is one. Neither was involved with smuggling, nor contraband, nor lawbreaking of any other variety. Rather, S.S.’s 39-year-old mother presented herself and her daughter to U.S. officials when they crossed the borderfrom Mexico four months ago, explaining they had fled extreme violence in Congo, and requesting asylum.
A U.S. asylum officer interviewed Ms. L, as the mother is called in a lawsuit filed on her behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union, determined that she had a credible fear of harm if she were returned to Congo and stood a decent chance of ultimately being granted asylum. Despite that preliminary finding, officials decided that the right thing to do was to wrench S.S. from her mother, whereupon the mother “could hear her daughter in the next room frantically screaming that she wanted to remain with her mother,” the lawsuit states.
The Trump administration has said that it is considering separating parents from their children as a means of deterring other families, most of them Central American, from undertaking the perilous trip necessary to reach the United States and seek asylum. Now, without any formal announcement, that cruel practice, ruled out by previous administrations, has become increasingly common, immigrant advocacy groups say. In the nine months preceding February, government agents separated children from their parents 53 times, according to data compiled by the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.
Make no mistake: Ms. L and S.S. could have been placed together in a family detention center. There has been no explanation of why the determination was made to separate them; nor is there any allegation that Ms. L. is an unfit parent.
This administration sees nothing wrong with calling DACA children criminals despite the fact that their parents brought them here when they were too young to legally form criminal intent. It sees nothing wrong with separating children from their parents while their applications for asylum are pending. It sees nothing wrong with arresting and deporting upstanding, otherwise law-abiding unauthorized immigrants who have lived and worked here for decades are the parents of U.S.-born children.
This profoundly corrupt administration has no concept of the rule of law, no compassion for the people whose lives it is ruining, no understanding of the long-term damage it is inflicting on this country, and no competence for managing the affairs of state. The longer the “party over country” Republicans in Congress facilitate this President, the more damage is done to America at home and abroad.
If there isn’t a “blue wave” in November, the damage may be irreversible.
