President Barack Obama gave a powerhouse speech this Tuesday in Johannesburg, South Africa, in honor of Nelson Mandela’s 100th birthday. Most of the coverage has focused on his warnings about “strongman politics,” his criticisms of nationalist hatred, and his arguments in favor of pluralism and democracy. Without mentioning any names, Obama thoroughly rebutted the ideas and policies promulgated by the Man Who Lost The Popular Vote. As Jelani Cobb summarized it: “[Obama] offered the sharpest possible contrast between himself and his successor—between statesman and demagogue—and, crucially, the distinction between a man who grasps history as the living context of our lives and one unburdened by the knowledge of how we arrived at the present and what that means for the future.”
Let’s focus here on some other remarks made by our 44th president, ones that reflect his long-standing, highly nuanced views on the topic of racial and cultural resentment, in particular the resentment exacerbated by anxiety and fear about demographic change and the increased diversity that results therefrom. Although he didn’t use the words “white anxiety” or “white resentment,” or talk about why so many racially and culturally anxious and/or resentful white Americans voted for Trump, Obama did address those phenomena and explained how economic displacement that resulted from increasing globalization has exacerbated those ethno-cultural anxieties:
From their board rooms or retreats, global decision makers don’t get a chance to see sometimes the pain in the faces of laid-off workers. Their kids don’t suffer when cuts in public education and health care result as a consequence of a reduced tax base because of tax avoidance. They can’t hear the resentment of an older tradesman when he complains that a newcomer doesn’t speak his language on a job site where he once worked. They’re less subject to the discomfort and the displacement that some of their countrymen may feel as globalization scrambles not only existing economic arrangements, but traditional social and religious mores.
[snip] Within the United States, within the European Union, challenges to globalization first came from the left but then came more forcefully from the right, as you started seeing populist movements — which, by the way, are often cynically funded by right-wing billionaires intent on reducing government constraints on their business interests — these movements tapped the unease that was felt by many people who lived outside of the urban cores; fears that economic security was slipping away, that their social status and privileges were eroding, that their cultural identities were being threatened by outsiders, somebody that didn’t look like them or sound like them or pray as they did.
Look at what Obama did—and did not—do here.
First, he clearly acknowledged that the anxieties were ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural, and not purely economic in nature—although he rightly pointed out that the “fears that economic security were slipping away” connect to the fears about “cultural identities … being threatened by outsiders” and the loss of “privileges.” Second, he didn’t call anyone deplorable. And yes, that matters a great deal. As Diane Hessan, hired by the Clinton campaign to help them “understand undecided voters in swing states,” wrote after the election:
There was one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice. It wasn’t FBI Director James Comey, Part One or Part Two; it wasn’t Benghazi or the e-mails or Bill Clinton’s visit with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac. No, the conversation shifted the most during the weekend of Sept. 9, after Clinton said, “You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”
All hell broke loose….Things were not the same after that, at least with my voters.
Hessan summarized the take of one voter from Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, as follows: “Clinton ended up being the biggest bully of them all. Whereas Trump bullied her, she bullied Wilkes Barre.”
I bring this up not because I enjoy criticizing Hillary Clinton, whom I supported wholeheartedly, but because Democrats need to learn from our mistakes. Notice that Obama didn’t call that “older tradesman” a bigot: he simply recognized his resentment and diagnosed its source not in the moral failings of that person, but in the larger forces that brought that tradesman’s resentment to the fore.
President Obama named the real villain, in moral terms: the “right-wing billionaires intent on reducing government constraints on their business interests” who are behind right-wing “populist movements.” Not only do I believe that to be an accurate reading, it’s also a politically winning message. The right wing wins more elections by dividing more working- and middle-class Americans against each other by race, therefore progressive campaigns should avoid playing into their hands.
We see some preliminary confirmation of the strategic value of a message like Obama’s in a survey done of Minnesota voters. The survey found that a message that emphasized how conservatives look to pit voters of different races against each other in order to win power garnered strong support among both voters of color and whites—including whites who had shown some initial receptiveness to racially divisive rhetoric. Read the whole article to get a sense of what the Minnesota survey found.
Going back to the Obama speech, in another section he said something else worth emphasizing—sentiments that, while they may be obvious to us, reflect ideas that reachable, a.k.a., “Obama-Trump” voters need to hear again and again in each campaign season:
Madiba [Note: another name for Mandela, one that shows both affection and respect] understood that we can't say we've got a just society simply because we replaced the color of the person on top of an unjust system, so the person looks like us even though they're doing the same stuff, and somehow now we've got justice. That doesn't work. (Cheers and applause.) It's not justice if now you're on top, so I'm going to do the same thing that those folks were doing to me and now I'm going to do it to you. That's not justice. "I detest racialism," he said, "whether it comes from a black man or a white man."
The reality is that there are white voters out there who believe it’s at least possible that’s what Democrats want to do. It doesn’t matter that that fear is unfounded, or that eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency should have disabused them of that notion. Winning political strategy doesn’t deal in what people should believe. It deals in what people do believe, and tries to convince them that a candidate or party’s beliefs and values fit with their beliefs and values—as well as their interests.
On a related note, every time some progressives dismiss economic anxiety among whites as a motivating factor for how they vote, we feed right into the fear that we don’t understand, or don’t care about, their concerns. People can feel insecure about their economic prospects going forward even if they are doing well in objective terms today. That doesn’t make the fear any less real to them, and certainly doesn’t stop that fear from making them more likely to give in to other anxieties and resentments, ones centered on race and culture. It certainly doesn’t stop any of those fears from leading them to shift their vote from a Democrat in one election to a racist demagogue Republican in the next one. The question them becomes what to do about it. Obama addressed that as well:
Now, we have to acknowledge that there is disorientation that comes from rapid change and modernization, and the fact that the world has shrunk, and we're going to have to find ways to lessen the fears of those who feel threatened. In the West's current debate around immigration, for example, it's not wrong to insist that national borders matter; whether you're a citizen or not is going to matter to a government, that laws need to be followed; that in the public realm newcomers should make an effort to adapt to the language and customs of their new home. Those are legitimate things and we have to be able to engage people who do feel as if things are not orderly. But that can't be an excuse for immigration policies based on race, or ethnicity, or religion. There's got to be some consistency. And we can enforce the law while respecting the essential humanity of those who are striving for a better life. (Cheers and applause.) For a mother with a child in her arms, we can recognize that could be somebody in our family, that could be my child.
As Obama said, we have to find ways to lessen the fears of those who feel threatened—not demonize them because they express concerns about immigration, either in terms of border security or the importance of maintaining a common language and culture. Obama rightly urges us to convince them that they don’t have so much to be afraid of. When Democrats speak the way he does, we help accomplish that goal, and help elect people who will implement more humane policies toward immigrants.
There’s strong evidence from multiple sources that emphasizing to whites that they will soon be a minority in the U.S. makes them more likely to vote for Trump and/or support conservative positions on issues like immigration, and that, unsurprisingly, doing so provokes more anger among Republican voters than Democrats. Talking positively about cultural integration and emphasizing the desire of immigrants to integrate—as well as their success in doing so—is crucial here. The right wants to stoke white fears about demographic changes. Obama recognizes the danger those fears cause, the threat they pose to our democracy, and so wants to help lessen them. He believes it is possible to change people’s minds:
Madiba reminds us that: "No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart."
These remarks by Obama have prompted some criticism—healthy, reasonable criticism—from progressives, but I believe they are off the mark. For example, here’s Zack Beauchamp at Vox:
It’s less that economic struggles are making people racist, and more that developments that threaten white privilege — such as large-scale nonwhite immigration and the election of one Barack Obama — has sparked a racist backlash.
[snip] A universal basic income might well be a good idea as a matter of economic policy — I personally think it’s a great one — but it’s unlikely to make European Christians much friendlier to Muslims. Nor is it going to persuade hardcore Trump supporters that mass Latino immigration is good for the United States.
[snip] His impulses are admirable; to have gone through eight years of the presidency without losing your ability to see the best in your opponents takes a strength of character I’m sure I wouldn’t have. But Obama’s politics of compromise isn’t enough in a moment that calls for a politics of combat.
First, Obama is talking about winning over those who supported his “opponents,” not the opponents, i.e., politicians, themselves. Second, he’s not talking about somehow magically winning over “hardcore” Trump supporters, or bringing over a huge percentage of them. I don’t claim to be some kind of ‘Obama Whisperer,’ but my reading is that he’s offering advice on how to win over enough of them to, for example, have turned the Electoral College in Hillary Clinton’s favor. Moving 0.8 percent of voters in each state would have given us Madame President. 1.25 percent would’ve put her over 300 electoral votes. 4 percent would’ve given her 334, or two more than Barack Obama won in 2012 in a decisive victory.
The former president’s advice was not primarily about governing, but about how to campaign and how to interact, on a personal level, with our fellow citizens. It was about how to talk to one another. And he believes his way of talking to one another is more likely to produce victory at the ballot box, and thus progress on these issues.
Obama offered some other nuanced remarks about race that can also help, by further countering the notion that he—and by extension, Democrats—are somehow anti-white:
And such a view of the world — that certain races, certain nations, certain groups were inherently superior, and that violence and coercion is the primary basis for governance, that the strong necessarily exploit the weak, that wealth is determined primarily by conquest — that view of the world was hardly confined to relations between Europe and Africa, or relations between whites and blacks.
Whites were happy to exploit other whites when they could. And by the way, blacks were often willing to exploit other blacks.
Finally, Obama criticized a particular idea for being incompatible what what “democracy demands,” namely the idea that “those who aren't like you—because they're white, or because they're male—that somehow there's no way they can understand what I'm feeling, that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.” Such an idea violates one of his very deepest values, his commitment to the concept of empathy, that everyone can—and should—try to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Someone such as the aforementioned resentful tradesman, for example.
Does Trump do this kind of thing, try to appeal to members of all groups? Actually, he does, sort of. He does it every time he pretends to care about Americans of color, for example. Trump is a cynical hatemonger who understands that he can’t just say openly and directly that he wants to stick it to certain groups. He can say there are “fine people” on both sides of a neo-Nazi, white supremacist protest and then say he condemns white supremacy and he thinks that’s enough to cover him. The difference is that Obama is sincere in caring about all Americans. He preaches love, not hate.
It’s not just that I like Obama because he was a great president, or because he’s a liberal. I’ve long admired his philosophy and approach to matters of identity and pluralism, his understanding of the importance for any multiethnic society (as virtually all societies are) to cultivate a sense of peoplehood, or national community that binds together the people who share a land and who govern themselves together. I’ve read just about everything that he’s written and said—if it’s been published, at least. Barack Obama gets it on these issues in a way no other politician or public figure in this country has. We need his wisdom—not just the progressive movement, but America overall, and, going farther, the world.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).
