(2017-12-08) The Nationalists Delusion

The Nationalist's Delusion

*THIRTY YEARS AGO, nearly half of Louisiana voted for a Klansman, and the media struggled to explain why.

It was 1990 and David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, astonished political observers when he came within striking distance of defeating incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator J. Bennett Johnston, earning 43 percent of the vote.*

Duke picked up nearly 60 percent of the white vote. Faced with Duke’s popularity among whites of all income levels

*While the rest of the country gawked at Louisiana and the Duke fiasco, Walker Percy, a Louisiana author, gave a prophetic warning to The New York Times.

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking David Duke is a unique phenomenon confined to Louisiana rednecks and yahoos. He’s not,” Percy said. “He’s not just appealing to the old Klan constituency, he’s appealing to the white middle class. And don’t think that he or somebody like him won’t appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens.”*

During the final few weeks of the campaign, I asked dozens of Donald Trump supporters about their candidate’s remarks regarding Muslims and people of color.

What I found was that Trump embodied his supporters’ most profound beliefs—combining an insistence that discriminatory policies were necessary with vehement denials that his policies would discriminate and absolute outrage that the question would even be asked.

These supporters will not change their minds, because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of.

Nearly a year into his presidency, Trump has reneged or faltered on many of his biggest campaign promises

But his commitment to endorsing state violence to remake the country into something resembling an idealized past (Golden Age) has not wavered

This all occurred before the eyes of a disbelieving press and political class, who plunged into fierce denial about how and why this had happened.

both supporters and opponents usually stop short of calling these policies racist

That the legacy of the first black president could be erased by a birther, that the woman who could have been the first female president was foiled by a man who confessed to sexual assault on tape—these were not drawbacks to Trump’s candidacy, but central to understanding how he would wield power, and on whose behalf.

The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal.

Americans act with the understanding that Trump’s nationalism promises to restore traditional boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality. The nature of that same nationalism is to deny its essence, the better to salve the conscience and spare the soul.

Among the most popular explanations for Trump’s victory and the Trump phenomenon writ large is the Calamity Thesis: the belief that Trump’s election was the direct result of some great, unacknowledged social catastrophe.

Perhaps the most prominent data point for the Calamity Thesis is a pair of recent Brookings Institution studies by the professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton, which showed that life expectancy has fallen among less-educated white Americans due to what they call “deaths of despair” from drugs, alcohol, and suicide.

This explanation appeals to whites across the political spectrum. On the right, it serves as an indictment of elitist liberals who used their power to assist religious and ethnic minorities rather than all Americans; on the left, it offers a glimmer of hope that such voters can be won over by a more left-wing or redistributionist economic policy

The studies’ methodology is sound

But the research does not support the conclusions many have drawn from it—that economic or social desperation by itself drove white Americans to Donald Trump.

Voters making less than $50,000, whom Clinton won by a proportion of 53 to 41, accounted for only 36 percent of the votes cast, while those making more than $50,000—whom Trump won by a single point—made up 64 percent. The most economically vulnerable Americans voted for Clinton overwhelmingly; the usual presumption is exactly the opposite.

If you look at white voters alone, a different picture emerges. Trump defeated Clinton among white voters in every income category

The nature of racism in America means that when the rich exploit everyone else, there is always an easier and more vulnerable target to punish.

Equally strange is the notion that because some white voters defected from Obama to Trump, racism could not have been a factor in the election; many of these voters did, in fact, hold racist views.

the mainstream-media consensus

Even before Election Day, that consensus was reflected in the reaction to Clinton’s most controversial remarks of the campaign. “You know, to just be grossly generalistic,” she said, “you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of Deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.”

The defenses of Trump voters against Clinton’s charge share an aversion to acknowledging an unpleasant truth. They are not so much arguments against a proposition as arguments that the proposition is offensive—or, if you prefer, politically incorrect.

No one wants to think of his family, friends, lovers, or colleagues as racist. And no one wants to alienate potential subscribers, listeners, viewers, or fans, either.

Even before Trump, the Republican Party was moving toward an exclusivist nationalism that defined American identity in racial and religious terms, despite some efforts from its leadership to steer it in another direction. George W. Bush signed the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, attempted to bring Latino voters into the party, and spoke in defense of American Muslims’ place in the national fabric. These efforts led to caustic backlashes from the Republican rank and file

Whites who hold more negative views of immigrants have a greater tendency to support Republican candidates

While that finding may seem obvious, it isn’t simply a description of existing Republicans, but of the trends driving some white Democrats into the Republican Party.

War nationalism always turns itself inward, but in the past, wars ended.

But the War on Terror is without end (Pure War), and so that national consolidation has never occurred

In 2012, according to Tesler’s numbers, only 13 percent of voters who believed Obama was Muslim said they would not vote for Obama because of his race. But 60 percent of those voters said they wouldn’t vote for him because of his religion—a frank admission of prejudice inseparable from their perception of Obama’s racial identity.

“I think you can draw a straight line between Obama and heightened racialization, and the emergence of Trump,” Tesler told me

The nature of the partisan opposition to Obama altered white Republicans’ perceptions of themselves and their country, of their social position, and of the religious and ethnic minorities whose growing political power led to Obama’s election.

Birtherism is rightly remembered as a racist conspiracy theory, born of an inability to accept the legitimacy of the first black president.

In this sense only, the Calamity Thesis is correct. The great cataclysm in white America that led to Donald Trump was the election of Barack Obama

Americans tend to portray defenders of Jim Crow in cartoonish, Disney-villain terms. This creates a certain amount of distance, obscuring the reality that segregation enjoyed broad support among white people

Four-time Alabama Democratic Governor George Wallace lost his first gubernatorial race when he ran as an economic populist against a candidate with a segregationist platform, and famously vowed never to be “outniggered again”—and he never was. He declared, “Segregation now, segregation forever!” as he took the oath of office in 1963.

I don’t mean to suggest that Trump’s nationalism is impervious to politics. It is not invincible. Its earlier iterations have been defeated before, and can be defeated now.

Nothing is inevitable, people can change. No one is irredeemable. But recognition precedes enlightenment.

white nationalism has and always will be a hustle, a con, a fraud that cannot deliver the broad-based prosperity it promises, not even to most white people. Perhaps the most persuasive argument against Trumpist nationalism is not one its opponents can make in a way that his supporters will believe. But the failure of Trump’s promises to white America may yet show that both the fruit and the tree are poison.


Edited:    |       |    Search Twitter for discussion