I suppose it is inevitable that the Democratic postmortem on the debacle of 2016 is ricocheting between the dominant wings of the party. We need to double down on the traditional messages and constituencies of the party! No wait! We must do away with “identity politics” and focus on distinguishing ourselves from the corporate interests and fat cat donors who funded the Clinton campaign; we have to be the party of the American working class! We must listen to and cater to working class discontent! No wait! The entire problem was because we didn’t have a full time chairperson with no other obligations!
The attempts at further parsing who actually voted for whom and why are generating lots of heat but very little light. Was it the rural / urban divide? Coastal elites vs rural bumpkins? Exactly what change did these voters have in mind? Aren’t they embracing policies manifestly against their self-interest? What are we to make of Clinton’s growing margin of victory in the overall popular vote? The neo-Nazi and KKK types are fringe nutcases; it was a coalition of disparate voices who aren’t necessarily racists but who chose Trump as the vehicle to express their frustration. Nah, they are just uniformly wretched people; maybe victims of globalization, opioids, or whatever; but wretched nonetheless.
I say poppycock to all of it. I’ll direct everyone to a piece in VOX, “Taking Trump Voters’ Concerns Seriously Means Listening to What They’re Actually Saying”, published three weeks before the election, wherein Dylan Matthews examined everything then known about Trump voters, discarded (rightly, I think) the economic and “real America” arguments and ended up in the only place that actually makes sense of it; white angst and resistance to the racial and cultural globalization of the world. In other words, racism.
The message this research sends is very, very clear. There is a segment of the Republican Party that is opposed to racial equality. It has increased in numbers in reaction to the election of a black president. The result was that an anti–racial equality candidate won
the Republican nominationthe election. [my edit]
I’ll take it a step further. This election was a specific response–from a significant segment of the population–to the Obama Presidency. It is no different from Mitch McConnell’s response to Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court vacancy. It was the color and heritage of the black man in the White House.
This was about globalization only to the extent it impacts the whites-only club some (including Mitch McConnell, a racist extraordinaire) believe America should be. And, this is not just about the incursion of non-whites into our contemporary world for contemporary reasons; it is also about the long festering wound of slavery and the Civil War that is our birthright (ugh). Muslims are just another population to add to the hate list.
That explains the voters. Still, these people are a numerical minority. The result, then, is easily explained with one word, gerrymandering. Trump’s people clearly understood the fine points of how various districts were gerrymandered and took advantage of that to win the election. Maybe Stein’s recount will uncover genuine skullduggery. More likely, this was spreadsheet politics with a racist bent.
Is it gerrymandering on the basis of race, or just party affiliation (see the Federal Court decision in Wisconsin)? That is a distinction without a difference. The fundamental difference between GOP and Democratic Party affiliation is largely a matter of attitudes about race and culture—the economic arguments always boil down to resenting “those people.” This is nothing new in American politics. You find its origins in the Democrats embrace of Civil Rights after WWII, and Nixon’s successful “Southern Strategy.” No matter how much we want to be “post racial,” we end up in the same place.
Despite the elevation of the arch demon of whitishness, Steve Bannon, and the suggestion that Jeff Sessions would make a swell Attorney General, we are being treated to the usual denials that racism had anything to do with a campaign that was all about race. Give me a break. Even the Evangelicals broke with their usual insistence on faux piety and “family values” to vote for the most impious, amoral and irreligious candidate in modern history. Obviously Trump said what they wanted to hear.
The deeper mystery may well be why Obama voters in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest did not show up at the polls. Was Comey’s play that effective? Perhaps. Out here in Nevada, Obama voters came out in force, their ranks swelled by the latest arrivals at this frontier of the New West. Hillary Clinton won here and we even sent a new Latina Senator to Washington. Elsewhere, some of the Obama coalition clearly did not show up – enough so that the gerrymandered districts took the race. That, I believe, explains why we were surprised by the actual result.
While I think we should worry about the American worker, we Democrats already know the issues but have been powerless (or unwilling? Not sure on that point.) to stop the erosion of worker power. Wringing our hands about that is useless unless we are prepared to fight to restore the power of unions—with improvements to combat corruption that did occur in the past. I’m not hearing anything like that. I’m hearing a bunch of nonsense about identity politics that has nothing to do with it unless people are actually saying that Democrats should stop caring about the issues of minorities. That would be absurd. This election proves that American politics is all about identity.
The thing I and others who have lived in the South or Midwest understand is that racism is baked into the American pie; it’s the crust that holds the social order together. It has been passed down, from generation to generation, as first the belief that Africans were not fully human, then as resentment for the Civil War and its upending of the slave economy and social order. When you see Confederate battle flags, or hear phrases like “war of Northern aggression,”“Southern Pride” and “Southern Heritage,” you hear the echos of an old battle that is still being fought many generations after it began. Our belief that the Civil War settled things is naive and unfounded. ISIS is just a new excuse for an old war.
My point will likely be dismissed out of hand by some. Having grown up in the 60's I’d hoped we’d moved on; but experience since then says otherwise. All I can say is that if you don’t understand that racism is deeply embedded in our society, you’re not paying attention.