Some factions of liberals, progressives, or whatever they call themselves these days, don’t seem upset that Donald Trump won the election. There is a disturbing jouissance over Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump despite the 100% certainty that he will destroy and undermine things they claim matter to them. They are celebrating her loss without sparing a thought for how Trump’s victory has driven historically despised and oppressed people into despair and terror. If they do acknowledge it, it is in a passing way or it is used as a cudgel against “identity politics.” Apparently, the only identity politics allowed is white identity politics.
One of the most disturbing parts of the post-mortem progressives and liberals are pushing is that had Hillary simply stopped defending minorities and focused more on the white working class, she would have won. This argument typically emerges from the mouths of white people, most often white men. These same people who called Hillary unethical are advancing the immoral and unethical proposition that the Democrats should ignore our society’s most oppressed, vulnerable, and despised people in order to appease those who hate them. What could possibly more unethical than that? What could possibly be more immoral and unethical than normalizing white supremacy? I seriously doubt that if any of the other Republican candidates had won the election that we would have seen the likes of Steve Bannon in the White House. I doubt that we would have KKK celebration rallies or white supremacist groups rebranded as “think tanks” and “alt-right” despite their use of Nazi phrases and giving the Nazi salute while chanting “Heil Trump.” I suspect they feel that this is an acceptable tradeoff because one major candidate teeing off on minorities and his opponent ignoring his exhortations to be violent, hateful, and bullying, wouldn’t have impacted their lives, safety, or alienation at all. Not only is this argument despicable, it ignores the history of the Democratic party and it ignores how fighting for those white votes would have depressed the minority turnout.
The Democrats made a choice in 1948 to adopt Civil Rights as part of its party platform knowing that it would loosen the “Solid South.” The Solid South was a voting bloc of all of the Confederate states plus some non-Southern states in the midwest. The coalition had been breaking down a little bit prior to that because the party embraced unions, which Southern voters especially, regarded as Communist organization run by Jews. FDR’s relationship with unions may have ushered in a trickle of the hateful water that would eventually blow up the dam. All of these states opposed any civil rights legislation and began to either abandon the party or become Dixiecrats. President Johnson was presented with a much larger and consequential long term electoral choice with his support for civil rights and signing the Civil Rights Act blew up the party in the South, as Democratic elected officials abandoned the party to become Republicans. Richard Nixon helped push this along with the Southern Strategy which has been effective for decades. The Southern Strategy picked off Democrats at the federal, state, and local levels. Would it have been better if LBJ had rejected civil rights for black people in order to keep that voting bloc in tact or did he make the right decision to be on the right side of morality?
The Democrats were faced with a similar dilemma in the 1980s. The white working class, especially men, were uncomfortable with the gains women, people of color, and the greater degree of cultural acceptance in entertainment of gay people. Pollster Stanley Greenberg did a seminal study of voters in Macomb county which was comprised mostly of white auto workers in unions. Sixty three percent of those voters in that county voted for Kennedy, their support for Democrats began to drop off, and then 66% of them voted for Reagan. The reason why those voters who voted for Obama and abandoned the Democrats for Trump said the switch was because they viewed the Democrats’ advocacy for the destitute, support of feminism, support for people of color, and extending a helping hand to those who couldn’t find work meant that the Democrats were fucking them over, not just ignoring or abandoning them.
There’s a big difference between feeling a party is ignoring you and feeling the party is screwing you by supporting people who’d been shut out of the American dream and economy since forever. That is not economic anxiety, that’s hate. If you jump ship from your party to support a man who declared his intention to run for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi and opened with the line, “I believe in states’ rights,” you cannot make the claim that you’re just feeling neglected. Philadelphia, Mississippi is notorious for being the place where three civil rights workers were lynched for daring to register black voters. Saying he believes in “states’ rights” was a dog whistle declaration that he believed that the Southern states should have been allowed to keep Jim Crow and oppress black people without interference from the federal government. Auto workers and white working-class voters may not have known the significance of where Reagan opened his campaign and how he declared it, but he sold or scratched the bigotry itch of those voters in the midwest and states above the Mason-Dixon in other ways. White people resented forced bussing (the reaction in Boston was something one would have expected to see in Alabama), they fled cities to get away from people of color, demonized black people, and resented Asian people. Sorry, but I don’t buy that pelting school busses with black children on them and calling them “nigger” is an expression of economic anxiety. If there was economic anxiety, it was resentment that they had to compete with other people in a labor market they’d once had to themselves.
This year brings us to a similar cultural flashpoint in the 1980s. In 2008, we had a black candidate whose race didn’t matter. Candidate Obama was non-threatening, he had a sunny personality, he offered “Hope and Change,” and, for some reason, some people thought his election would usher in an era of post-racial America. Just as it was during the 1960s and 70s, many cultural changes took place in America between 2008 and 2016. We had feminist fights on the national stage over access to birth control and reproductive rights. Marriage equality became the law of the land and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was scuttled. Gay, women, people of color, and religious minorities began to forcefully and vocally push back against “casual” bigotry, hiring discrimination, wage discrimination, and our right to exist. Terms like “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “mansplaining,” “microagression,” and “rape culture” became part of the national dialogue. This was a cultural clash and confrontation that made the white working class very angry.
White men are not used to being told to shut up, that they can’t do what they want, that they must speak respectfully to minorities, that women would no longer shut up about sexual abuse and harassment, and that we won’t accept cops killing or beating us. Donald Trump gave voice and power to this hate and resentment. He had the hate and the anger they wanted. I dare anyone who wants to run away from the fact that bigotry swung this election to watch Trump rallies. They are KKK rallies on steroids. Confederate flags, chants of “Jew-S-A,” “nigger lover,” “commie fag,” “lying press” in its original Nazi form, and “bitch” were part of the Trump rally lexicon. Attendees could purchase and wear t-shirts bearing such lovely phrases as, “Trump That Bitch” and “Hillary Sucks, but Not as Good as Monica.” Donald Trump encouraged violence and when he wasn’t giving his crowd the hate they wanted, they would shout out something about the wall or locking Hillary up, at which point he’d do his thing for them. There was no reaching them.
The people who want Democrats and minorities to shut the hell up so that we don’t hurt the feelings of white people often point to how Hillary lost white voters in certain precincts who’d previously supported Obama. White voters who supported Obama and defected to Trump are the ones who childishly believed that electing a black man president would usher in a post-racial America and absolve America of its worst sins. Black Lives Matter, which most Trump supporters find deeply offensive, blew that fairytale up. BLM is an unrepentant, unapologetic, disruptive, loud, and unyielding force in America. President Obama went from being the same guy who denounced his former pastor over statements the pastor made when Obama wasn’t even there and holding a humiliating “beer summit” for having dared say that Professor Henry Lewis Gates should not have been dragged out of his own home, all in an effort to sooth and appease white voters, became the man who said that Trayvon Martin could have been his son and declared that Black Lives Matter.
Between 2008 and 2016, white people who voted for Obama but switched to Trump saw the guy they voted for president who just happened to be black morph into the black president. He, along with Eric Holder, became avatars of black militance and disorder. Beyonce has gone from a universally loved celebrity who shunned controversy and racial politics to someone who is unapologetically black. Mizzou’s football team threatened to boycott a game unless the university president resigned and he did. Add all of that to the emergence of transgender people, the moral panic over their existence, businesses not having the right to discriminate against gay people in public accommodations, and women being more disruptive, and you’ve got 1980 all over again. No Democrat could have run on our progressive platform and appealed to those voters.
Bill Maher blamed Hillary’s loss on liberals responding to terrorist attacks being “be nice to Muslims.” SNL joked that having to deal with 37 gender identities cost Hillary the election. But, the truth is that a woman who said “Black Lives Matter,” embraced The Mothers of the Movement, dared mention systemic racism, promised to protect immigrants, denounced Trump’s deportation force, denounced his beloved wall, had the most progressive plan for environmental protection (his voters see protecting the climate as giving into a Chinese hoax and view protecting the environment as costing them their jobs), rectifying the mass incarceration the Democrats helped to create (Trump supporters wanted nationwide stop and frisk), and acknowledged trans people was never going to reach these people. She had great ideas for the economy but those voters weren’t interested in any of that.
Finally, I noticed during the primary that Sanders supporters and the candidate himself focused on overturning Citizens United. What I didn’t hear at all was a demand that Congress restore the Voting Rights Act. Turnout of voters of color was indeed down, but few have made note that this is the first presidential election in 50 years without the Voting Rights Act fully in tact. This is the first presidential election with voting restrictions in states like Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Virginia. In the rush to condemn Hillary, the DNC, and the voters who made her our nominee, there hasn't been any high profile progressives or think pieces from progressive outlets (save for The Nation) examining how, if, or why minority voter participation was down. Even if voters of color didn’t show up for Hillary because she didn’t move them, restoration of the Voting Rights Act should be atop the progressive agenda, not chasing after the white whale of white working class voters.
Chasing voters who hate our values, our diversity, and routinely vote for Republicans who decimate their communities is a futile effort and will only alienate the Democratic base. On election night, I felt like I never want to vote again and sometimes I still feel that way. The more I hear my self-professed allies call for legitimizing a white supremacist administration, white nationalism, and racial “fear” for votes, the more I feel that voting is futile and worthless. You can have me, and the other core groups that are the backbone of this party or you can have the white working class, but not both. I hope you guys who want to seize control of the party make the right choice or we will make it for you.