This diary is a continuation of a discussion I’ve had with Greg Dworkin over the past several months, about the the appropriateness (or lack thereof) of publicly shaming anyone who voted for Trump, continues to support him, or dismisses the importance of his despicable conduct.
In his Abbreviated Pundit Round-up yesterday, Greg cited this article by Kathleen Parker from the Washington Post, about responding to Trump’s disgusting tweets directed at Mika Brzezinski:
Brzezinski is wonder woman — smart, strong, wealthy — and engaged to marry her best friend. I seriously doubt she has been wounded by Trump’s pathetic second-grader taunts. But I get it. The most one can hope for these days is that enough Republican men can be shamed into defending Brzezinski, a woman many of them know personally — and who has thumbs-down power over potential guests on the show everybody in Washington watches. (emphasis added)
There is more than a little disgust and frustration coming through in Parker’s statement ‘the most one can hope for’; she’s wryly noting that the point at which Republican men who claim not to be misogynists to simply say something, to express revulsion at what we are all witnessing, without needing to be told why it is repugnant, is long past. Parker is highlighting that it says something about the person who needs to be shamed in order to elicit the appropriate response to the blatant harassment of a woman who is as successful as Brzezinski. Imagine the effect of that kind of harassment on women who don’t have her celebrity, her resources, her platform to respond. Imagine the effect on young women and girls who hear this sort of thing every day, and then see how the each of us choose to respond, if at all.
What Parker’s observation makes plain is that it is not acceptable to sit silently when confronted by conduct such as Trump’s, and if it only registers with Republican men (and others) that they have an affirmative responsibility to denounce harassment of women by shaming them, then shaming is precisely what is required.
Trump’s harassing tweets this week are only the most recent iteration of the abhorrent conduct we have witnessed for the past eighteen months, by him and his supporters. But the message that we should refrain from shaming began almost as soon as the votes were tallied.
Not long after the election, Jessica Valenti wrote this for the Guardian:
‘Vote shaming’ Trump supporters is fair. What they have done is shameful.
The same people who wear shirts that read “fuck your feelings” and rail against “political correctness” seem to believe that there should be no social consequences for their vote. I keep hearing calls for empathy and healing, civility and polite discourse. As if supporting a man who would fill his administration with white nationalists and misogynists is something to simply agree to disagree on.
Absolutely not. You don’t get to vote for a person who brags about sexual assault and expect that the women in your life will just shrug their shoulders. You don’t get to play the victim when people unfriend you on Facebook, as if being disliked for supporting a bigot is somehow worse than the suffering that marginalized people will endure under Trump. And you certainly do not get to enjoy a performance by people of color and those in the LGBT community without remark or protest when you enact policies and stoke hatred that put those very people’s lives in danger.
Being socially ostracized for supporting Trump is not an infringement of your rights, it’s a reasonable response by those of us who are disgusted, anxious, and afraid.
Jamelle Bouie wrote this for Slate:
There’s no such thing as a good Trump voter.
Millions of Americans are justifiably afraid of what they’ll face under a Trump administration. If any group demands our support and sympathy, it’s these people, not the Americans who backed Trump and his threat of state-sanctioned violence against Hispanic immigrants and Muslim Americans. All the solicitude, outrage, and moral telepathy being deployed in defense of Trump supporters—who voted for a racist who promised racist outcomes—is perverse, bordering on abhorrent.
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It’s worth repeating what Trump said throughout the election. His campaign indulged in hateful rhetoric against Hispanics and condemned Muslim Americans with the collective guilt of anyone who would commit terror. It treated black America as a lawless dystopia and spoke of black Americans as dupes and fools. And to his supporters, Trump promised mass deportations, a ban on Muslim entry to the United States, and strict “law and order” as applied to those black communities. Trump is now president-elect. Judging from his choices for the transition—figures like immigration hardliner Kris Kobach and white nationalist Stephen Bannon—it’s clear he plans to deliver on those promises.
Whether Trump’s election reveals an “inherent malice” in his voters is irrelevant. What is relevant are the practical outcomes of a Trump presidency. Trump campaigned on state repression of disfavored minorities. He gives every sign that he plans to deliver that repression. This will mean disadvantage, immiseration, and violence for real people, people whose “inner pain and fear” were not reckoned worthy of many-thousand-word magazine feature stories. If you voted for Trump, you voted for this, regardless of what you believe about the groups in question. That you have black friends or Latino colleagues, that you think yourself to be tolerant and decent, doesn’t change the fact that you voted for racist policy that may affect, change, or harm their lives. And on that score, your frustration at being labeled a racist doesn’t justify or mitigate the moral weight of your political choice.
It’s worth noting in the months since Bouie wrote this, the justifiable fears of what Trump’s administration would do have been shown prescient. If anything, his administration has been able to act with less constraint in targeting immigrants than some had predicted (the ‘wiser adults will rein him in’ argument).
There is an element of basic morality that is lost when civility and comity are held as higher priorities than directly challenging bigotry or harassment. Egberto Willies, in a diary Friday, provided excepts of comments by Joy Reid that address this point:
So we're seeing the erosion of people's personal sort of morality in favor of Trump allowing him to get away with things they'd never tolerate in their workplace or in their home…
"I'm not sure that a party can change it. I think Americans need to take a lot more responsibility for the morality of their vote and the morality embedded in it…
I think you had a lot of people who for whatever reason decided to set aside all the things we've known about Donald Trump for thirty plus years, and that's something that they need to reckon with. I don't think a party can make them change. (emphasis added)
We can’t expect that individuals will make the sort of moral reckoning of their choices, if they are not confronted with the immorality they displayed in making it. That is, without moral condemnation— shaming— their choice is merely, as Valenti observed ‘something to simply agree to disagree on’.
But of course supporting a patently bigoted autocrat, tacitly or explicitly supporting his views and conduct, is not just ‘a different way of seeing things’. To not label Trump’s conduct correctly— to simply call it boorish, or juvenile, is to minimize it— it is a form of sexual harassment, part of a cultural landscape of male violence against women. To fail to denounce it explicitly, to fail to renounce one’s support of the man, is to condone this culture of violence. This aspect— how failing to condemn, not just the conduct, but the perpetrators of the conduct— serves to endorse and embolden the perpetrators, is highlighted in a remarkable report by Jessica Horn for the Institute of Development Studies, which focuses on gender politics within progressive social and economic movements. This report raises uncomfortable questions about how progressives can, through their silence, tacitly support violence against women, effectively disempowering women within progressive movements, and in society generally:
In addition to activism by members, it is important for movements to take explicit stands against gender-based harassment and violence in any spaces where the respective movements lay out ethical and political principles, such as in organisational or physical spaces created by movements, and in their publically articulated political visions and codes of conduct where these exist. Standing up against internal discrimination is important in principle and may also help open space for frank discussions and change in movement practices. This can include interventions to ensure women’s physical safety in collective spaces, and solidarity with people who are violated, while also challenging impunity in bringing perpetrators to account or in silencing claims made by people targeted. (pg. 76, emphasis added)
Confronting the misogyny, racism, homophobia and religious intolerance broadcast by Trump and his supporters is not optional, it is at the core of progressive politics, just as moral condemnation and shaming have been instrumental in challenging bigotry throughout the history of social justice movements. It may not be comfortable to acknowledge this, but when people are still harmed by bigotry, none of us should be too comfortable. In a prior diary, I expressed it this way:
You can’t confront bigotry without confronting bigots.
I’m not sure how you define success in addressing racism with this approach:
I’m not calling YOU a racist, I’m calling your behavior/words/actions/voting racist. Do you see that you are making the same arguments racists make?
It may be that you observed people behaving in less racist ways when they were around you, because you made them aware of your views. How many stopped behaving in racist ways generally? How many later came to you and said ‘You we’re right, I didn’t see it, I didn’t want to believe it.’?
I’m skeptical that softening the semantics (‘I’m not calling YOU a racist’) produces as much openness to hearing our message as many progressives wish, and in a very important way, I think it is actually harmful to our efforts to oppose bigotry and discrimination— it sends the message to the bigot that they are not responsible for what they do, or the harm they cause others. It’s not you I’m upset with, it’s only those things you do. Where in this formulation is a sense that adults are responsible for their choices, their actions, and the effects of these on others?
There are many ways in which bigotry and discrimination can be compared to abusive behavior. Would we say to the abuser ‘I don’t want you to feel bad about assaulting your partner, I just want you to consider why I might not agree with you assaulting your partner’?
I mean this quite seriously— bigotry and discrimination always involve some form of verbal, emotional, physical or sexual violence. It causes real harm to real people. One cannot be innocently complicit in violence or abuse, nor can one disavow responsibility.
Without recognizing that bigotry is shameful, harmful to others, and deserving of our contempt, the bigot can continue to believe they are not the problem. But they are the problem. Bigotry in the abstract is not what we’re fighting, it’s people who hold bigoted views.
Bigotry and discrimination are perpetuated by bigots, they don’t exist as some amorphous cultural phenomena, disconnected from the individuals who perpetuate them, or tacitly support and facilitate them.
