I’ve found myself disturbed about a variety of ways in which rhetoric about White nationalism, white supremacy, conservatism, Trump, and economic populism over the past few days has introduced what we in the academic business like to call “slippages” in the public discourse, places where a sliver of doubt is introduced and where a thing that is unequivocally one thing begins to shade itself over into something else.
We get, for instance, a variety of revisionist histories circulating in the media. Many of these seem perpetuated accidentally, through journalists reaching for a convenient phrase or two on the fly to accentuate the “hot take” they are engaged in, or just out of a momentary intellectual laziness.
One of these sites of revisionist histories is the phrase “Party of Lincoln.” It pops up out of a laudable impulse among journalists and (some) GOP officials to try to hold the contemporary Republican party accountable for its failure to measure up to the moral compass laid down by Abraham Lincoln; that Trump in particular needs to be called out for his failure to match up to the legacy of the “Party of Lincoln.” The difficulty here, of course, is that the GOP has not been the party of Lincoln for some time. What goes unmentioned is the decision of Strom Thurmond and many other dyed-in-the-wool Dixiecrats to move their allegiance over to the GOP when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law in the mid-1960s. The modern GOP — which has built its political fortunes on one racial dogwhistle after another — does not get to invoke this history; not, at least, without calling it ancient history.
Another site of “slippage” is in the ease with which Hugh Hewitt sought to frame Trump as “not a racist.” It actually came in the midst of another laudable TV moment, as he sought to emphasize that there can be no ambiguity in the treatment of neo-Nazis in the public discourse, that they must be condemned absolutely and unequivocally. Nevertheless, he then went onto argue that Trump “was not a racist”— he knew! He had met him several times! Not once did he say anything racist! — but that he had an unfortunate habit of ignoring the incendiary import of his language on race.
The difficulty here is that one would have to have ignored the entirety of Trump’s behavior since 2012, if not long before that, to arrive at Hugh Hewitt’s conclusion. Birtherism — and there can be no ambiguity here; Birtherism was a campaign of racist delegitimization levied against a black President — laid the groundwork for Trump’s presidential campaign, and then that campaign, infamously, was launched in Trump Tower in summer of 2015 with Trump descending an elevator at Trump Tower and launching into a rant about Mexicans all being drug dealers and rapists. Then there was the proposed Muslim ban, the “Wall,” the anti-immigrant red meat, the conspicuous non-denunciation of white supremacist support for his campaign, and the countless instances of Trump whipping up a language of white racial animus that can only have its origins in the positing of some malevolent and threatening racial “Other.”
None of that was accidental. Trump would not have advanced to the Republican nomination without that rhetoric, and sadly, his very ascendency to the Presidency is probably attributable to that politics of racial animus. This is another thing that cannot get papered over.
Then there was the extraordinary slippage at work in the reasoning of one young Mr. Peter Cvjetanovic, who sought to argue that his own advocacy of white nationalism, his own brandishing of a citronella torch and his own chanting of phrases like “Jews will not replace us”— that despite all of that, “I’m not the angry racist they see” in that picture where he is howling into a whirlwind of bile.
His reasoning is worth quoting at length:
“I came to this march for the message that white European culture has a right to be here just like every other culture,” Cvjetanovic opined. “It is not perfect; there are flaws to it, of course. However I do believe that the replacement of the statue will be the slow replacement of white heritage within the United States and the people who fought and defended and built their homeland. Robert E Lee is a great example of that. He wasn’t a perfect man, but I want to honor and respect what he stood for during his time.”
[. . .]
Cvjetanovic added: “As a white nationalist, I care for all people. We all deserve a future for our children and for our culture. White nationalists aren’t all hateful; we just want to preserve what we have.”
Here, again, is a kind of slippage, an effort to gently push apart tightly affiliated discourses (ie., white supremacy and “white nationalism), to introduce a sliver of daylight between them so as to create doubt. Cvjetanovic is not a racist; he is simply wanting to “preserve what [white people] have.” He sees the Confederacy not as a monstrous racial state built upon chattel slavery and the commodification of human beings, but as a “homeland” that white people had to “defend.”
All of this, you will note, depends upon a willful misreading of all the readily available historical evidence. It depends upon an aggressive “Lost Cause” campaign, initiated in the years following the war’s end, to soft-pedal the war’s connection to slavery and to reframe the whole enterprise as a War of Northern Aggression pursued by the North in contravention of State’s Rights. He is worried, too, that in a nation where white people enjoy every privilege imaginable — see themselves flatteringly represented in the nation’s culture, its laws, its economic dispensation — that we are somehow seeing the slow “replacement of white heritage” by some more insidious multicultural melange.
This is an especially dangerous site of rhetorical slippage, because it attempts to make the unreasonable seem reasonable. I remember when a white supremacist group came to my campus in my second year of college, back in the early 1990s; they made their claim to a right to free speech, and when they spoke, they avowed that they were not racists, that they were simply “proud of who they were,” that they were worried at the loss of their “heritage.” This stuff is dangerous, because you can see the more credulous folks begin to nod along, unaware of the bill of goods they were being sold. We’ve got to watch for that stuff.
And, of course, on top of it all, there is the President of the United States, who has become one of the first Presidents in decades to be unwilling to unequivocally denounce white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the Klan. (Here, too, though, there are ironies: it was interesting watching historical footage of George H.W. Bush denouncing neo-Nazis on the Rachel Maddow show the other night, knowing that he was not above using dogwhistle politics for political advancement; Lee Atwater’s Willie Horton ads are a stain on the recent legacy of Presidential campaigns.)
During his Tuesday night press conference, the slippages in Trump’s discourse were legion, and they kept multiplying the longer he rambled at the podium, the longer he interrupted incredulous journalists. There was apparently, now, an “alt-left” that was equal in evil perfidy to the “alt-right”; apparently, too, violent thugs on the left interrupted a “very very quiet” protest by white nationalists (screaming racist bile at the top of their lungs). There were good people “on both sides” of the conflict; that somewhere underneath that exterior of chanting racist rage pumps a heart of gold.
Trump’s slippages are almost unquestionably the most dangerous, because he operates from the bully pulpit of the Presidency; his words — simply by virtue of his position — acquire a patina of moral authority that in no way squares with their actual content.
We progressives are going to have many fires to put out over the coming weeks and months, but these kinds of slippage are going to be among the most important.