Today is a good day to go back and look at the piece I wrote on December 9th, 2015 called: Trump and the Missing White Voters. Compare it to the Monkey Cage piece currently running in the Washington Post: Resentful white people propelled Trump to the White House — and he is rewarding their loyalty.
When you’re done with those two articles, go read the piece I wrote just after last November’s election: Avoiding the Political Southification of the North.
What I’d like to focus on is not so much how this strategy worked. I’m interested in getting people on the left end of the spectrum to examine how they’re reacting to its success. The number one thing that’s happening is that it is causing stress. The left is developing factions that blame each other with increasing volume. The second thing that’s happening is that people are reacting much like puppets on a string, operating without a bird’s eye view that allows them to see how they’re being manipulated. People don’t acknowledge the stresses that others are feeling, so blacks feel like too many whites want to keep their distance from them and whites have trouble getting people to understand the significance of the erosion in their communities for the Democratic Party and the political implications of this if it doesn’t change or gets worse. People tend to interpret any effort to stem or reverse this tide as an excuse for selling them out, on women’s rights, gay rights, environmental policy, immigration policy, and so on. Everything becomes a debate over people’s preexisting ideologies, so the solution either lies in aggressive socialistic redistributive policies or it relies on abandoning whole regions of the country as lost causes in an effort to boost minority and blue area turnout.
What isn’t considered enough is that a very well-considered strategy was used to beat us. It was an unconscionable strategy. But it was successful. And in a lot of ways we participated in making the strategy work by behaving exactly as they knew we would behave. When we fight among each other on these terms, we’re really playing a part in their strategy.
Everything I’ve been trying to do since I wrote that post-election piece on the Southification of the North, has been aimed at avoiding these traps. Part of me believes the effort is hopeless and our fates are sealed because we are going to act according to our own nature, and nothing can change that. But I actually believe that the only answer for a situation like this where the enemy relies on us defeating ourselves and we can’t help but do exactly that, is to have extraordinary leadership.
To solve any intractable problem of this type, whether in Northern Ireland or Palestine, a leader has to convince people to see things from a broader perspective, to pause from the never-ending tit-for-tat and see how their enemies are relying on them not to change. And there will always be reasons that people can convince themselves that this leader is trying to sell them out. He or she is weak in the face of the enemy. They aren’t committed to non-negotiable principles. They favor one allied faction over another. This is why problems of this sort can last centuries, and also why the leaders who rise to resolve them tend to get killed, often by people from their own side.
So, yeah, this is no simple thing. But we can start by understanding exactly what they did to us and how we helped them succeed.
I have to say that I am more worried now than I was on Nov 09 2016. Mostly, it was because I had assumed that Democrats would recognize the failed strategy of 2016. Instead they seem to be doubling down on the failed strategy by focusing on 2016 results as the baseline and trying to twiddle with it to turn the 49-51 losses into 51-49 wins. So far that has resulted in a few closer-than-usual losses in the house and a lost governorship (WV).
They also keep portraying it as a POC vs working class white issue, when it was really an establishment vs youth issue with it being easier to drown out contenders among POC (especially lesser educated older southern ones) and big city machines.
Just a few comments on WV gov.
He was a rabid Republican but switched parties to win the Governorship as the “D” besides a name still means something. Didn’t change his politics much, even though the national party spent money on him. He is fighting with the Republican Legislature and just the day before, they were denouncing him as a no good….. Now that he switched, all forgiven.
Justice has a poor business reputation with the people who work for him or sell him goods and services. Local banks won’t cash his pay checks. Vendors have to sue to get paid, behind millions in fines. Just like Trump without all the press.
However, like Trump, he is going to reap the rewards for the huge rebound in WV economic growth. 2nd in the nation according to last surveys. As it was so low before, the return to work for miners has really pumped up the numbers.
Hopefully, he has learned from Trump’s problems and won’t seek higher office. If so, then all that dirt will come out.
Which Democrat did his entering the race stop? Or was it essentially an empty D spot and he was blocking the R candidate?
His Democratic opponents were a climate change affirming Bernie supporter, Senate Min. leader Kessler and former US Attorney Booth Goodwin (who prosecuted Don Blankenship to a misdemeanor for the death of 27 men).
Justice out spent them 5 to 1? 10 to 1?
His republican opponent was Cole, an even more rabid Right Winger and Charlotte Pritt, former Dem candidate, then a 3rd party offering.
Justice has a lot of Trump bombastic and business traits, with the distinction of being successful. I think he saw that going back to R might give a leg up in any future endeavors. But he may have jumped to a burning ship. WV, like KY has benefited the most from ACA. Any future election has to have that included and he would have to denounce the stated Repub. policies. Hard to affirm them when everyone in the state uses ACA or knows someone who does.
R
“…the failed strategy by focusing on 2016 results as the baseline and trying to twiddle with it to turn the 49-51 losses into 51-49 wins.”
I’m not surprised about the approach. Besides the ACA, the dems have pretty much abandoned going big for incremental approaches on policy and campaigning for some time now. Made me think of Al Gore’s post 2000 election strategy in Florida, where instead of asking for a recount of all counties, zeroed in on a few.
So glad you are still chewing on this problem. The passage I quoted is right on target. Too many allies have forgotten this and some are actively pourly fuel on the flames.
The demand of the times is for dramatic realignment and vetting of leadership. Prematurely jumping into campaign marketing will confuse the situation immensely. Thinking that Trump’s defects by themselves will sink him and take the Republicans with him is a dangerous illusion with respect to dragging down the GOP. Getting traction with opposition is going to be very difficult; regaining Democratic offices is more difficult still. And the bad habits are not devolving to the local level; black politicians locally increasingly depend on real estate developers for campaign support because that’s where the money is. In return, they refuse to raise taxes to support schools and other infrastructure and are easy zoning change and environmental permit votes. That creates serious division between the black community and the progressive community that have long been their allies in the local Democratic Party.
I suspect with Citizens United and the example of the Koch Brothers, this using money to create divisiveness in the Democratic, progressive, and left communities will only get worse.
Among the white lefties, the temptation will be to forget that identity politics ultimatesly plays out as class politics. And to dismiss all forms of identity politics as a distraction from the “class struggle”.
Among progressives, the temptation will be to keep riding the issues of the past two decades and see the “extremes” as unimportant to margins of victory.
The big picture that is common to all of them is the use of money to buy sentiment, political office, and suppression of votes. And the use of institutional power to try to make “conservative” changes (an oxymoron, if there ever was one) permanent parts of institutions. Democratic politicians have been too focused on immediate “show and tell” victories and have lost ground in their control of institutions. (Or as the wags would have it, their control of the institutions is exactly what they want to avoid accountability.) YMMV with respect to your cynicism.
The current information environment, which privileges slogans and dismisses thorough discussions of issues, does not help do what needs to be done. Nor does the large about of communications media that is essentially for hire to the highest bidder and the political awakening of the billionaires. People should start viewing the sub-35-year-old Mark Zuckerberg’s intentions with alarm. A smoother, more rational seeming, billionaire acting in his self-interest within a libertarian philosophy is exactly what Trump was feared to be and wasn’t. That prospect looks like the path to monarchy that Trump seeks but will not achieve.
What the opposition to that that pushes the promise of continued democratic constitutional government needs is leadership. See any that has the clarity of vision, the energy, the good judgment, and is younger than 50? Surely some of the Democratic candidates already mentioned can be vetted against these characteristics.
The sad reality of the present moment is that the question that will be asked (and possibly is important) about solid minority candidates is “Can they bring in new white voters?” And the question that will be asked (and probably is important) about women candidates is “Can they bring in male voters?” And most difficult of all, the questions that will be asked (and possibly are important) about minority women candidates are (1)) “Can they bring in minority male voters?”; (2) “Can they bring in white female voters?”; (3) “Can they bring in white male voters?”
And for all of them: “How many and in which precincts?”
That is because we live in a society hamstrung by racist and misogynist and homophobic institutions that seek to preserve their power over the political system.
That is a problem primarily because it is a denial of the constitutional principle of “Equal justice under law.”
It is also a problem because the encrustation of centuries of common law and judicial precedents creates huge inertia to preserve patterns of injustice.
That is the big picture that nit-picking tweet-storms and media inflammation ignore. Those have practical consequences for ordinary people whose names you will never know and frequently.
I remember August 4, 1964 and the news of missing civil rights workers registering voters in Mississippi. What struck me yesterday is that that now could happen in almost any state of the nation to anybody registering minority voters or advocating for positions that some extreme conservatives do not like. Enough jurisdictions will now look the other way. The response of the federal government today will be as unpredictable as it was in 1964. But it will be will, not courage that will be measured.
Yes.
“The big picture that is common to all of them is the use of money to buy sentiment, political office, and suppression of votes. And the use of institutional power to try to make “conservative” changes (an oxymoron, if there ever was one) permanent parts of institutions. Democratic politicians have been too focused on immediate “show and tell” victories and have lost ground in their control of institutions. (Or as the wags would have it, their control of the institutions is exactly what they want to avoid accountability.) YMMV with respect to your cynicism.”
I would say its the Right that is falling apart, not the left. The left is divided as it has always been – in triumph and adversity alike. But, we see the utter bankruptcy of Trumpism as a governing philosophy and the slow unraveling of that monstrous lie is having a salutary effect.
Our enemies cannot responsibly govern, even according to their own sick principles. All they can do is make symbolic gestures towards their most bigoted admirers. I’m sure this keeps Trump warm at night, all the adulation from his hard core cultists.
But, his approval rating wouldn’t be at 37% if his strategy was working. `Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.’– Napoleon.
Frankly, Democrats, liberals and leftists can and will bitch at each other. But, we have to gain power first. And compared to the early 70’s – I mean my God! This is nothing like the unraveling that occurred during the Nixon Administration!
That felt like free-fall into darkness. This feels more like the early stages of the Watergate Scandal with the White House already beleaguered, under siege and ineffective, lashing out with increasingly futile and self-defeating irrational outbursts.
Trump marched in like a terrifying figure that had in some incomprehensible manner won. And not a year later he’s failing at everything and haemorrhaging support.
Got me thinking about this Will Rogers quote: “I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat.”
Goes with the territory.
45’s become an even more cartoonish figure than W could ever hope to become. One potential worry: a national security threat practically gets dumped on 45’s lap. The 9/11 attacks transformed W from a likely middling to ineffectual one-term President into someone who could survive a re-election campaign.
And yet it doesnt matter. In the places that matter, narrowly lost districts he is rock steady. The lost ground is in super red and super blue districts. Tge Russia stuff doesnt matter for these voters.
In short, you’re wrong. Totally wrong.
Digby
.
Unfortunately, that’s some of the most dangerous analysis available to us right now, because it remains focused on one thing, and that’s winning a narrow Electoral College victory.
It ignores our problems in the states and in Congress. And it also fails by looking at the electorate atomistically instead of as a series of cultural enclaves that votes by collective sentiment more than by individual choice.
The problem I identify in the Southification piece is that northern whites were persuaded to vote on the basis of racial identity in a way that has not occurred in modern times. This is the core piece of Trump’s success, and it’s more powerful and longer lasting than Trump and can be carried out more successfully by a better politician with a better grasp on reality.
How anyone could look at WI/PA/MI and think that there weren’t a lot of Obama-Trump voters is beyond me. It’s nonsense. Especially Pennsylvania, where turnout was above 2012 (whereas it was down in WI and MI).
Look at the difference between Toomey and Trump! Especially in areas like Scranton.
Hard to discern the meaning there, but I assume color intensity represents degree of differential in support.
You know one flaw in that Milbank piece is that it basically says a few things that make little sense, such as:
To me, I don’t give a shit what someone calls themselves or how they’re registered. If they voted for Obama once or twice, they’re a potential vote for the Democrats in the future. A community that voted 50-50 for Obama in 2008 and 80-20 for Trump in 2016 has a lot of Obama-Trump voters no matter whether or not you want to consider them as ever having been “Democrats.”
When we let communities move away from us like that without a fight, we allow white identity politics to set in in the North where it did not used to exist and where it will devastate us for the near future, especially on the state and local level, and in congressional races.
Finding eleven thousand reasons to say we don’t need or want these people’s votes is doing their work for them.
Yes. Look at Wisconsin and you’ll see the same thing where there are a lot of Trump/Feingold voters in the west:
How do you know that they voted for Trump and Feingold? Did someone do a survey that has validated responses? A lot of these analyses of the election depend of very shaky inferences from data that is not personally identifiable.
That some Feingold voters might be pissed enough at Clinton to vote in a Trump/Feingold pattern is possible, but there is no way to know it as a certainty.
Each election is the result of a different sample.
This is not hard Tarheel.
Hypothetical town, Tossup, has 100 voters. Four years ago it also had 100 voters. Maybe 20 of them are different people.
If 50 voted for Obama and 80 voted for Trump, we know that there were at least ten Obama/Trump voters, and probably closer to thirty.
If Tossup had 50 Toomey voters and 75 Trump voters, then we know that there were at least 25 people who voted for Trump and also voted for McGinty.
In the real world, some people vote third party or leave ballot lines blank, but it’s not hard to judge a community as a whole in this way.
What happens is when the north votes like the south is that a whole community turns to one party and it’s fairly rare for people to vote differently from the majority in their community. Peer pressure and cultural consensus set in, and pretty soon the locality is a single-party place.
This is what happened in many communities in PA, OH, IA, MI, and Wi.
It’s actually what the plan was for the opponents of immigration reform who argued that they could win where Romney had lost.
Rove, the Bushes, Rubio, etc., argued that this would not succeed and was morally repellant in any case. They were crushed and proven wrong.
Therefore, even without Trump, future GOP candidates will pursue this strategy until it is proven not to work. But it will work unless we take active measure to stop it from working.
I accept this argument and the implications in the last paragraph.
From 1985 until 1994, briefly even a good bit of the South was not southified in these terms and some reliable Southern cities still aren’t (at least not yet).
The Republican Party in the South used to make a big deal of two-party states. No longer. Not hard to see why and how the corruption works.
There most definitely were a lot of Obama voters who switched to Trump. The New York Times published interviews with folks like that last fall.
My sense is that this analysis mistakes geography for voters. Geographies that swung from Obama to Trump are not necessarily voters who swung from Obama to Trump. Voter motivation and voter suppression can be of different voters.
What is the evidence that they are the same voters to any great extent or the same voters where Trump got his surprise electoral margins.
My argument all along has been that the results are from institutional suppression of Democratic voters and emotional and racist motivation of Trump voters. That makes a much harder situation to overcome in 2018 and 2020.
What I see is too many non-Trump voters seeking to normalize his behavior as a ordinary President, even with some predecessors, than see a dangerous and potentially authoritarian movement in play.
That Trump has turned out to be lousy at pulling it off does not mean that other Republicans might not like greater authoritarianism and will seek to succeed where Trump seems to be failing.
Your comment is on target, BooMan. We have some serious realignment problems to deal with that narrow focus on a just-enough victory likely will sabotage.
Maybe they’re not the same (exactly) voters, but it’s not just geography. I trust the Decision Desk people who have mapped every precinct (or close to it), and their analysis is the same as Booman’s. The question isn’t how many Obama-Trump voters there are but whether he can hold them (or bring them out) in ’18 and ’20. Dana Milbank and the people he’s citing seem intent on finalizing what happened.
“The problem I identify in the Southification piece is that northern whites were persuaded to vote on the basis of racial identity in a way that has not occurred in modern times.”
I don’t even think that’s accurate for all of them, it leaves out the economic factor.
I would say though, that Obama persuaded many whites to NOT vote on the basis of racial identity. And Hillary, oddly enough, did not.
Did I say “all”?
Does my argument depend in any way, even in a small way, on it being “all”?
No you didn’t, but a lot of the discussion that followed seemed to be based on that premise.
Digby, hell yeah:
“But the idea that they are the electoral holy grail has always seemed to me to be a convenient way to prove some prior assumptions about the 2016 election.”
“In any case, it’s worth wondering if Democrats should be so focused on this group of voters to the exclusion of some others who are at least equally important to mobilize for a 2018 victory. It’s not a zero sum game, but it does require that these Trump voters not be elevated to the level of all-important `super-voters.'”
The only chance at completely satisfying many of these Trump voters is to do a 1990s Bill Clinton triangulation Sista Souljah move on someone black voters may hold in high esteem, to mollify them that black voters are not more “important” to the party than they are. These voters still see politics as a zero sum game, e.g. what others may get, are things taken from them.
So is the approach that will sacrifice black votes, and it will, really smart when black voters are the most loyal constituency the dems have, and have shown they can put dems over the top nationally, when they are motivated to come out, which is what didn’t happen in 2016?:
“The black voter turnout rate declined for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, falling to 59.6% in 2016 after reaching a record-high 66.6% in 2012.”
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/12/black-voter-turnout-fell-in-2016-even-as-a-record-nu
mber-of-americans-cast-ballots/
To say the least, from a black perspective, to hear all this hand-wringing over the plight of the white working class and why something must be done to “save them” (read: have them vote democratic) when the damned BLACK WORKING CLASS is dealing with these issues and have been for some time:
“Unemployment among blacks was 9.5 percent during the third quarter of 2015 compared to only 4.5 percent for whites. While the discrepancy in unemployment has been volatile, the current gap is actually slightly larger than the one that existed 15 years ago or in the years directly preceding the recession.”
https:/www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/black-white-unemployment-gap/421497
“In 2014, the median household income for whites was $71,300 compared to$43,300 for blacks. But for college-educated whites, the median household income was $106,600, significantly higher than the $82,300 for households headed by college-educated blacks, the report found.”
http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/27/news/economy/racial-wealth-gap-blacks-whites/index.html
“Third quarter 2016, the black homeownership rate was 41.3% vs. the white rate of 71.9%”
http://time.com/money/4665272/mortgage-homeownership-racial-gap-discrimination-inequality/
“Median and average wealth by race: Average: white is $678,737; black is $95.261. Median: white is $134,230; black is $11,030.”
“Median wealth, by degree and race: white, college degree $180,500; black $23,400. White graduate or professional degree is $293,000; black is $84,000.”
http://www.epi.org/blog/the-racial-wealth-gap-how-african-americans-have-been-shortchanged-out-of-th
e-materials-to-build-wealth/
“If current economic trends continue, the average black household will need 228 years to accumulate as much wealth as their white counterparts hold today. For the average Latino family, it will take 84 years.” “A truly perverse aspect of this story is that just as past public policies created the racial wealth gap, current policy continues to widen it.”
https:/www.thenation.com/article/the-average-black-family-would-need-228-years-to-build-the-wealth-
of-a-white-family-today
White working class? Please, cry me an effin river.
If blacks had come out to vote at the levels they did there’s a good chance Clinton would be President.
Why not focus on the issues that drove out of desperation former and probable democratic voters to Trump in 2016, that also address those of black voters — working class issues, period. You talk about an opioid crises? Hell, blacks in urban areas had an opioid crises decades ago, the response to which was, lock ’em up.
The same maladies affecting the Great WWC affects blacks and others. We’re not just black, we work, support families, raise children and send them to college, would like to buy houses, have good health care and retire decently some day. Democrats would do well to pay heed to that, start thinking big to solve real problems that affect a MAJORITY and stop tinkering around the edges of issues trying to split the difference and end up holding the bag, time and again.
Thanks for quoting Digby. Her commentary was why I linked to ….her website.
‘Prior assumptions’, indeed.
It kind of connects up to some of the comments in the ‘”The Left” should gaze at their own navel’ diary.
White people get the benefit of the doubt whenever possible, POC not so much.
.
link
What they did was puke out a unprecedentedly unqualified loutish conman who ran an explicitly racialist campaign that told the white electorate that this was their “last chance” to hold onto control and dominance in gub’ment and society–whatever that exactly meant to them. To this was added the decade-old nationwide “conservative” vote suppression strategy and the usual billionaires bribery scheme. They succeeded in using the manifest defects of our failed constitution to achieve their victory.
They had tried this white racialization strategy with Rmoney in 2012 as well, remember, but in 2012 the polls turned out to be accurate. We had thought that their attempt to squeeze more and more votes from the white electorate was simply impossible, and that in any event it was a strategy that would only work against a blah candidate. Just wait for Hillary, haha! We’ll win Tennessee!
Well, that was wrong and now we face Booman’s Southification of the North or, in other words, the incompetentization of the national white electorate. Trump himself was not part of the Repub game plan as the conserva-turds lined up for their primary, but certainly the coaches of Team Conservative were on board with a race-based spite campaign, and obviously that was what Trump himself opted for VERY early in the process. If Repubs have to destroy the social fabric of the nation to win, thy are happy to do so. Party over country, etc.etc, duh.
The left as a multi-racial, pluralist movement of reality based individuals has no such option, of course. Nor does one really hear anyone saying throw this element of the coalition under the bus. The left for example is willing to defend transgendered people despite their tiny percent of the electorate, while for Trump and his Repubs they are just the latest defenseless group to throw to the spiteful lions of whiteness and fundamentalism.
About the only option is to continue on the path of rationality in policy and justice for all, despite its obvious failure as a means to achieve political power. A sort of noble lost cause, as it were. We are yoked with endemic Congressional gerrymandering and the newly-minted constitutional right of CEOs to throw elections–i.e. a systemic rigged playing field. We have our last two Repub prezes being the popular-vote-losing product of our failed constitution, as well as our last three supreme court justices (with a fourth soon to come). At the federal level the broken and rigged system has produced total control by a minority party.
We thus face a situation where the national government is democratically illegitimate in every corner, every branch, with the “will of the people” being completely frustrated. If this started to become the rhetoric of opposition, perhaps it could generate enough steam to blow the boiler. And perhaps the coming failures of “conservatism” (and it can only fail under objective measures) will bring about a Gotterdammerung which could alter the thinking and fears of a significant percentage of (now) incompetent white voters.
But since reason and public policy cannot possibly alter the minds of voters any longer, the question is what emotion could the Left try to harness to counter the ginned-up lizard-brain emotions of spite and racial tribalization used by the now triumphant “conservative” movement. A countervailing emotion seems the only answer….
Did you read/re-read the comments to your 12/2015 piece? A couple of commentators, who we haven’t heard from lately, hit the nail-on-the-head. Very directly by Deathtongue:
And didn’t Michael Moore predict it?
Even when Moore make a correct call, IMO it’s too impressionistic, scattered, and generally too late to be of use.
Doesn’t actually matter because the DP pays as much attention to what Moore produces as they do Thomas Frank.
If this is southification, then I think we have big trouble. Racism and fear of the other is like a cancer. Just look at the south for a century and a half now.
But a Pew Research report notes that Trump won the white vote by 21 points similiar to Romney who won by 20 points. Clinton won the black vote by 80 points compared to Obama who won by 87 points in 2012 and by 91 points in 2008. So that suggests that along with whatever racism there is, Clinton failed in the black community ( similiar in Hispanic). She did win the popular vote. The electoral college took her down.
I think there will always be an element of racism or southification in the elections. I continue to believe we simply did not have a message or a candidate to carry it. And this new shit of a ” Better Deal” needs some help. We need to show some enthusiasm and project more powerful economic messages. Otherwise the wise business man will always win it along with lies. And these fuckers are really good at dissembling. After all Trump still wants to lock her up to loud cheers over those thirty thousand e mails.
“Racism and fear of the other is like a cancer. Just look at the south for a century and a half now.”
Exactly.
“Southification” or racial appeals targeting white voters didn’t start in 2016 with Trump. The GOP has been doing that for some time, i.e. the “Southern Strategy.” And they work. Trump was as successful as he was because he made naked appeals to race, which resonated among some white voters who were convinced that the reason they had fallen behind was because the eight years of Obama were eight years of black and minority progress at their expense, of course.
“Clinton won the black vote by 80 points compared to Obama who won by 87 points in 2012 and by 91 points in 2008. So that suggests that along with whatever racism there is, Clinton failed in the black community.”
Indeed, and the answer is not an obsessive focus on the WWC represented by that one percentage drop in white voters from 2012 to 2016, but how to motivate black and other democratic constituencies to support a national candidate at the levels they did in 2008 and 2012. That should be the dems baseline. They need to start with a message that resonates with the base and independent voters, work on getting out the vote.
Yes and they very much need to show some enthusiasm and they cannot give long rambling speeches. if there is no reason to vote then some will not vote. Clinton had some of that problem.
I think this is doomed to failure. We’ll never have the first black president again and Obama was a tremendously talented charismatic guy. Democrats by their nature are not those type of people. If you rely on a 08 or 12 baseline its very unrealistic.
Are folks paying attention to the proposed changes in immigration law that Trump and a couple of GOP congressmen just announced? They want to cut total numbers in half (approximately) and eliminate (re)uniting families as a goal in favor of a meritocratic scheme (admit only immigrants with certain skill sets). I know there are arguments to be made in favor of a meritocratic system–and some other countries certainly have that type of immigration policy–but in the present context, I’m convinced that the proposed changes directly play to white nationalist/racialist sentiment. I’m going to make a guess that the large majority of people admitted for family (re)unification are of the non-white variety. You know, all those folks coming here, diluting our culture and so on.
I expected a move along these lines with immigration law. When I wrote about this in comments here earlier this year, some folks replied, hey, what you describe just happened: it’s the Muslim ban. Nope. The proposed changes to immigration law are far wider in scope than half a dozen Arabic-speaking countries, and they’re not be framed in the context of scaring people about terrorism.
I think about this issue a lot because my eastern European Jewish grandparents came to the United States only months before the GOP congress in 1924 passed legislation (signed by Pres. Coolidge, I believe) to drastically restrict immigration and impose quotas that explicitly favored northern European countries. That wasn’t reversed until the LBJ administration.
Think something along the lines of the 1924 law cannot be enacted again? When the GOP evidently sees its success as tied up with racialist politics?
Sure, and this is more red meat in the service of, as BooMan puts it, the Southification of the North.
Bottom line, the GOP’s policies are not widely popular. They cannot win without creating divisions, and in America, there is no more successful wedge issue than race.
Given that the current White House occupant and a number of his henchmen appear to buy into the spirit of the long-discredited “theory” of eugenics, their efforts to limit non-white immigrants has its own twisted logic. Heck, Sessions has spoken highly of the 1924 immigration law, which was passed at a time when eugenics was still all the rage in polite society (took Hitler to put the kibosh to that nonsense, and even now it still rears its ugly head from time to time). The laws passed in the name of eugenics at the time were nothing short of awful. That anything resembling those laws has even a fair to middling shot at passing is enough to be not only concerned, but outraged.
From a tactical viewpoint, I appreciate Mr. Longman’s perspective, as well as the views in the pieces to which he links. But this whole approach still leaves me in the gap between motivations to support Donald Trump and reasons to do so.
Millions of people were clearly motivated to support Trump — by “a distinctly racialized anxiety,” as the POST piece put. That’s not surprising, since all actions have motivations. The actions of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Richard Nixon, Elizabeth Warren, a public defender, and the town drunk all have motivations. But not all actions have rational, moral, and truthful justifications — “reasons,” as distinguished from “motivations.” And while I’ve seen endless explanations of the motivations of Trump voters, I have yet to see any explanation of their reasons.
As we’re now seeing, that distinction matters. White radicalized anxiety can elect people; but since our institutions are fundamentally Enlightenment structures that operate on rationality, the people so elected find it very hard to govern. They end up constantly fighting the basic restraints of the governance system, or trying to break through those restraints to authoritarian tyranny — which might further empower them, but still would not help them govern effectively. Authoritarian states have a poor track record historically, although they can create a lot of misery redundantly demonstrating that fact.
Democrats have no business trying to reproduce on their side the kind of “thinking with the gut” approach that Republicans have exploited. But rationality seems not to be a strong enough appeal. Is there a way out of this box — other than letting those who base their politics on gut appeals fail and picking up the pieces (again)?
“But rationality seems not to be a strong enough appeal.”
Problem is, dems have failed at expressing rationality effectively; they tend to get bogged down in pedantic, verbose tomes geared towards the wrong audience. They seem to think, if it makes sense to me and my crowd, which is not representative of the reality of the average democratic voter, then its “sensible.”
On the other hand, the “gut” appeals of the GOP are really nothing more than fear-mongering; fear of the other and of “those people.” They got white voters number, if you will, and play them like fiddles every election. They know what moves enough of them — race, and have been dog-whistling for years. Trump came along and figured out that, after eight years of the the socialist Kenyon Usurper Muslim appeaser, they were past dog-whistling and the prescription for the “we want our country back” cries was open bigotry of the throwback sort — “Mexicans” are rapists, murderers, on welfare, etc. By no means do I believe all white people are like this, but Trump touched the heart strings of enough of them (“the missing white voter”) in the right states to eke out a victory.
So now dems are running around clutching their pearls about how to appeal to the “white working class” voter, a mirage if ever there was one. And if they step out strategically and tactically on this in 2018 and 2020, they’re gonna lose again and again.
Firstly, these WWC voters and running on race didn’t start with Trump. The GOP has been plumbing hatred for votes for years. And yet dems put together winning majorities in 2008 and 2012. What happened in 2016?
(a) Democrats were content to rest on the political laurels of the President and did little to motivate, service and nurture the coalition that got them there, allowing it to crumble to the extent that all it took to lose was a bigoted moron up against an overly cautious and politically compromised candidate.
(b) Democrats elected a candidate who, for all of her virtues (and I am a fan) was not the right candidate for the times.
(c) The process by which the nominee was selected caused divisions and mistrust within the party.
(d) The campaign platform the dems stepped out with, though laudable, was too cautious and incremental and did not speak sufficiently to what voters wanted to hear. (Not that Trump did either)
(e) The candidate the dems selected was compromised on certain issues that left her in some cases in a hypocritical position and unable to effectively counter attacks.
(f) Lastly, democrats elected a candidate who would have been a great president, if not one of the best, but was not a good campaigner.
Some will say, well Hillary won (the popular vote) by 3 million votes and only lost due to a 77,000 vote deficit in certain states. But given the situation of the 2016 election — a popular President Obama, a great economy, an openly bigoted moron as an opponent, this was not just the democrats race to lose, Clinton should have won going away. And but for some clear tactical mistakes on the ground in those states, she would have won and won big.
Bottom line is, this doesn’t call for a sea change in strategy in terms of trying to appeal to the WWC voter, to the extent it becomes a priority over the constituency that got them majorities in 2008 and 2012.
Democrats need to:
(a) Go back to “Politics 101” and figure out what are the things that really matter to the voters, and create policies that appeal to them without trying to split the difference and appear “neutral” and end up with an incremental, cautious mess.
(b) Promote candidates that have broad appeal across the party’s base.
(c) Find a candidates that are passionate in their beliefs and can communicate that passion and excite and motivate the base.
(d) Find the courage and intelligence to effectively push back on the right wing nonsense and lies, wherever and whenever they pop up, develop a media strategy for this, for all of their members whenever in earshot of a microphone or camera.
(e) Go really big on voter registration and even bigger on countering and overcoming voter suppression tactics of the GOP.
And while I appreciate the work that Schumer and Pelosi have done over the years, trotting them out to crow about “A Better Deal” may not be the answer.
Yes sir. And please no more endless speeches that say about nothing anyone can remember five minutes later. And enthusiasm please, forget trying to triangulate your way around.