Elizabeth Warren gets it. And she knows how to sell it (Yes, I’m paraphrasing The American President. I do it any chance I get.). That’s why she drew a crowd of 20,000 supporters to her rally in Washington Square Park, in lower Manhattan. Jen Hayden’s post has all the fun details about the selfies, and Warren’s amazing stamina. Four hours after the speech, the last person got their selfie with her—and from the looks of this video, I’d say Warren could have gone another four hours after that.
And yes, of course, Trump carped about the size of Warren’s, er, crowd: “I think anybody would get a good crowd there,” he began, before veering hard right, over the cliff into insanity, “I think you have a good crowd there if you don’t even go there, just say you’re going and how many people are in the park.” Ladies and gentlemen: the president of the United States.
Back in the land of the coherent, the Massachusetts senator’s speech centered on the theme of corruption, and highlighted the activism—led by women such as Frances Perkins—sparked by the deaths of 146 people on March 25, 1911, in the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. They died as a direct result of their horrifically unjust work environment. Those who died were mostly young immigrant women and girls. How could such a thing have been allowed to happen? How did its owners get away with running a factory under the conditions that all but condemned these workers to death? Warren laid it out plainly:
Instead of changing conditions at the factories, the owners worked their political connections. They made campaign contributions and talked with their friends in the legislature. They had greased the state government so thoroughly that nothing changed. Business owners got richer, politicians got more powerful and working people paid the price. Does any of this sound familiar?
Warren explained that the same thing happens today, whether the issue is health care, guns, or climate change. Then she put a name to exactly what is going on:
When you see a government that works great for those with money and connections and doesn’t work for much of anyone else, that’s corruption plain and simple and we need to call it out for what it is! Corruption has put our planet at risk. Corruption has broken our economy, and corruption is breaking our democracy.
The senator pointed out that, as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire makes clear, corruption has a long history in this country. It certainly predates the current occupant of the White House. However, she wasn’t going to let him off the hook either. And in calling him out, she expanded her analysis beyond economic populism in a way that is of vital importance.
Donald Trump is corruption in the flesh. He’s sworn to serve the people of the United States, but he only serves himself and his partners in corruption. He tries to divide us, white against black, Christians against Muslim, straight against queer and trans and everyone against immigrants. Because if we’re all busy fighting each other, no one will notice that he and his buddies are stealing more and more of our country’s wealth, and destroying the future for everyone else.
It’s not just that Trump is racist. It’s that he uses the politics of division—whether based on race, culture, or another form of identity—to win the white, straight, Christian, native-born who make up the overwhelming majority (likely north of 80%) of those who voted for him. Fear and division are central elements of Trump’s strategy to get the votes of people who are harmed by his actual policies, i.e., anyone who is not wealthy. Warren puts this at the heart of her pitch to win at least some of these voters back, and in particular those who voted for Barack Obama.
Warren has been talking this way for years. Just take a look at her remarks from Netroots Nation in 2018:
The rich and powerful profit when government doesn’t work for working people. And they have learned that the best way to stop us fromchanging the system is to set working people against each other. So they have become the experts at the politics of division. Frankly it might be the one thing that Donald Trump is really good at.
[snip] Trump and his pals tell working people a story about what’s gone wrong with their lives. This story is not about big banks cheating customers, or insurances companies discriminating against people with preexisting conditions. Nope, that is not the story. . . . It isn’t even about billionaires who get out of paying their fair share while we hold back on rebuilding our roads, subways, and power grid. Or about lobbyists who write tax bills so that the corporations that they work for get special breaks, while the average family in America gets nothing.
Nope, those aren’t the stories that Trump tells. In Trump’s story, the reason working families keep getting the short end of the stick isn’t because of the decisions that he and his pals are making in Washington every day. No, according to Trump, the problem is other working people—people who are Black or brown, people who were born somewhere else, people who don’t worship the same, dress the same, or talk the same as Trump and his buddies.
And it comes in all sorts of flavors: racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia. It comes in all sorts of forms: nasty personal attacks, trolling on Twitter, winking at white supremacists. It all adds up to the same thing: The politics of division. Politics that tries to pit Black working people against white working people so they won’t band together. Politics of division that tells Americans to distrust each other, to fear each other, to hate each other.
Because while we’re busy doing that, Mitch McConnell gets to raid the Treasury and give a trillion bucks to their rich friends, destroy healthcare for millions of families, and wipe out Social Security and Medicare. They want us pointing fingers at each other so we won’t notice their hand is in our pockets.
Well, it stops here. It stops here. It stops now. It stops with this movement and this moment and this election. It is time for us say no! to the politics of division, to say no! To the ugly use of bigotry and fear.
We say, No, you will not divide us! We are here to bring working families together, to demand a government that works for all of us. That’s why we’re here.
What Trump is doing is not new. It’s an updated version of the old Southern Strategy deployed by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, among others. Trump prepared for the 2016 campaign by drawing on what he learned from talk radio—namely, how to whip people into a frenzy over the issue that became Trump’s signature: immigration. As Gabriel Sherman reported, the “deep dive into talk radio” done by Trump’s staff prior to the campaign “had shown him that this was the sort of thing that would resonate with a certain segment of the Republican base.”
As I laid out in my new book, Rush Limbaugh spent the eight years of the Obama presidency hammering the idea that “illegal immigration” was part of the liberals’ sinister plan to transform America demographically, to turn white Christians into a minority who would end up being outsiders in the land they once thought of as theirs. This kind of race-baiting rhetoric paved the way for Trump, who hyped fear of immigrants above all, right from the start of his campaign—which he announced by screaming about those coming over from Mexico being rapists, criminals, and drug dealers.
It’s all about raising the level of white racial and cultural anxiety, and activating the sense of white identity among voters. If they are focused primarily on being white, and thus most concerned with which party will protect them as white people, they will be more likely to vote Republican, and Donald Trump knows this. However, white voters who prioritize their economic situation over being white are more likely to vote Democratic.
That crucial insight is backed up by actual data and research. There’s a new book by Ian Haney López, a Berkeley Law School professor, coming out on Oct. 1 called Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America. I’ve written about López’s research before, and next Sunday I’ll be posting a review of Merge Left and an author interview with López, so I won’t go into too much here about the book.
Suffice it to say that, according to López’s research, Warren’s approach—which unmasks Trump’s race-baiting as a direct effort to fool economically vulnerable whites into voting their race rather than their class—will gain the most votes among both those whites and the voters of color who will rightly be skeptical of any progressive who ignores right-wing race-baiting completely. This is different from simply saying “Trump’s a racist and that’s why you shouldn’t vote for him.” Such a message is simply not as effective, either among the group López identifies as “persuadable whites” or among voters of color.
It’s also important to note (and Warren does this in both of the speeches I’ve cited above) that she specifically cites white people, along with Americans of color, as victims who suffer from the effects of racial divisiveness. López cited two important things research has shown:
1) People are worried about racial division. They want messages that touch on this, and they respond positively to messages that expressly communicate that all racial groups, whites included, will do better by coming together.
2) What tends to lose the persuadable middle is naming racism solely in terms of harms to communities of color in a manner that implicitly excludes and perhaps even faults whites.
He continued:
For nonwhite politicians and for organizers of color, this is important. It suggests they may gain rather than lose credibility with white audiences by talking about racism, but only when framed as a divide-and-distract weapon against all racial groups, whites included. Naming whites as beneficiaries of cross-racial solidarity also increases support from people of color.
Recall that we tested this statement: “We need elected leaders who will reject the divide-and-conquer tactics of their opponents and put the interests of working people first.” And then we tested it again, adding at the end “whether we’re white, Black, or brown.” Looking at the racial breakdown, support for the racially inclusive version went up by 8 points among whites. It shot up by a remarkable 21 points among African Americans.
Why might people of color respond more positively to a message of cross-racial solidarity that emphasizes benefits to whites in addition to themselves? People of color seem to have more confidence in cross-racial solidarity when they understand why whites have their own clear stake to join in coalition.
This is going to be an ugly campaign. That’s because The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote knows he has no shot to stay in the White House if he doesn’t make it one. Whether our nominee is Elizabeth Warren or someone else, the Democratic message needs to center on the kind of rhetoric she has been using, rhetoric that has been proven, through research, to resonate with all racial groups.
Democrats cannot employ messaging that, in appealing to white voters, turns off voters of color. Equally importantly, our message can not be one that energizes voters of color at the cost of turning off whites. Fortunately, we know that there is a formulation that works. And Elizabeth Warren is using it.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)