Ronald Reagan and the Meaning of Trump

So, it sure looks like Donald Trump is going to seize firm control of the Republican primary tonight. His eventual victory and nomination will be, pretty literally, unprecedented: there's been nothing remotely like it since the 1970s primary reforms, and pretty much by definition there couldn't be prior to then, because party elites literally picked the nominee themselves. This means we can't really avoid talking about, y'know, what exactly the whole Trump phenomenon means. Is it the break-down of the Republican Party? Is it a rise of bigoted, authoritarian sentiment? What's going on?

Here's my take, and it's a relatively optimistic one. The key thing about Trump's campaign is that the guy running it is Donald J. Trump. Or, to give him his full title, "businessman Donald J. Trump." That's right, his title doesn't even get capitalized! Unlike "Senator" or "Governor" or "Secretary" or whatever. He's a not-politician, or rather he's a dilettante politician. And this matters because we really have seen a fairly similar campaign before. It's basically Ronald Reagan's campaign. Reagan was a celebrity who had been a liberal Democrat for decades, switched to more conservative views in the 1960s (alienated by the Civil Rights Movement, perhaps?), had a brash demeanor on the campaign trail, did not have the world's most sophisticated understanding of public policy, and openly appealed to racial resentment and white identity politics. Remember "welfare queens" and their Cadillacs?


In a lot of ways, Trump is running the Reagan campaign. Why does it feel so different, then? Why is it so different? Because I do think it is different. And I think it's different because Reagan was a real politician, Governor of California before even his first unsuccessful run for the White House. Back in 1968, and 1976, and especially in 1980, this was a campaign you could run and win with. Nixon ran something similar, and won with it, in '68 and '72. Republicans ran a somewhat more polished version of the same play in the elections directly succeeding Reagan. But then something changed: the demographics. White identity politics is not going to be a strong enough force in American politics for very much longer to actually deliver the Presidency. There just won't be enough white people.

And all the real politicians can see this coming. They saw it coming a mile away in 2013, when they tried to get away from the white nationalist image with immigration reform. Didn't work. Its champion is falling relatively flat in the primary. And that's because, while white nationalism is in decline, there's still enough of it to dominate a Republican primary--and it's been seriously inflamed by a Mr. President Barack Hussein Obama. Actual politicians know they need to try to get away from this, but of course they still need it to win the nomination. And so we get Rubio, awkwardly trying at once to broaden his party's base and to pander to the existing base. He's in a bind.

Donald J. Trump is in no such bind, because he's not a politican. He has no commitment to the Republican Party; he doesn't give a damn about the future. Running a forthright version of Reagan's old campaign is plenty to win the nomination, and so he's blundered in and done it. And it's working, so far at least; I still believe, and/or hope, that there aren't enough of these guys left to win a general election, and that Trump won't be able to reinvent himself with Hillary running the "I don't know anything about white supremacy" clips on a loop 24/7. It's certainly got him closer to the White House than he deserves.

And so this, I think, is the real meaning of Trump. It's not about the rise of bigotry, but its decline. The Republican Party has always (in its current incarnation at least) basically been a "wars and tax cuts" agenda supported by, in large part, racist sentiments in the electorate. Romney and Rubio have tried to keep on playing that same old game, but it doesn't work anymore, because now all the real politicians know that they have to jettison many of the things that made their party attractive to the racists. They lose too many votes among non-whites, and there are too many non-white voters, to afford it. But the racist voters ain't happy about it. They were happy to go along with wars and tax cuts so long as the people they voted for defended America's white Christian identity. What they're not okay with is compromising on that national identity. The Republican Party knows it needs to make that compromise, eventually, in order to survive; that identity is dying. And that's opened up a space for any idiot willing to reject the compromise.

Enter Trump.

This is, of course, a hopeful story. It suggests that the current alignment of American politics really is shifting, that the alliance between the white nationalists and the Republican agenda is coming undone. There's any number of ways that could go. Perhaps we'll see a genuine split within the current Republican coalition that will persist for several elections, until something puts one side or the other out of their misery. Perhaps we'll see, in effect, a few cycles of "grand coalitions" behind Democratic Presidents while the rump Republican Party works through the dying throes of its dedication to racial resentment politics, unable to reach the median voter in a new, more diverse nation. Or perhaps the racial conservative faction will at some point concede defeat and splinter apart as a political force. They're not really united by commitment to conservative principles; some of them might find their way back into the Democratic Party, willing to support its pro-working class policies even though they're not thrilled with its stance in the culture wars. I can't say which of those is going to happen; I can say that we've known for a long time that the Republican Party as we know it had an expiration date, and it looks like Trump has come along to upset the apple-cart a little earlier than any of us had really dreamed.

It's Not About Race, It's About Racism

I try not to watch much Fox News these days. Well, any days. I mean I've never watched any Fox News, except for that one time when Stephen Colbert went on the O'Reilly Factor. But in general I try to keep my exposure level to Fox, and to conservative media in general, to a minimum. That's the kind of thing that gets you rather criticized in some parts, but seeing a few clips of Fox's coverage of the Ferguson situation has reminded me why I have this policy. It... was kind of shocking. And disturbing.

But anyway, one of the themes of the rantings of the people on Fox was that it was wrongful of liberals generally to make Ferguson and the shooting of Michael Brown about race. So here's what I have to say about that: it's not about race. It's not about race at all. Michael Brown's shooting is not outrageous because Michael Brown was black. It's outrageous because a young man was murdered. (Yes, that's conclusory, but as far as I can tell there's no reason to think it was anything other than murder, except that the perpetrator was an on-duty cop and there seem to be people who increasingly think that it's just a logical impossibility for an on-duty cop to commit murder). It's doubly outrageous because the murderer was a member of the government, of law enforcement, sworn to protect the people. Which, you might think is a bit inconsistent with murder. And the outrage is compounded by the fact that this happens a lot. And it pretty clearly doesn't have to: other countries simply don't experience significant numbers of murders by their police officers (and also don't suffer rampant violent crime by the thus-emboldened criminals).

So where does race enter the story? Because essentially all the victims of police murder in this country happen to be black. Or to put it another way, race only enters the equation because racist, violent police officers put it there. Michael Brown's death was an outrage simply because he was human and he was murdered. The point is that he was murdered because he was black, as an awful lot of other people have been. So it's really not about race, and it's certainly not really about his race. It's about racism, and the racism which seems to spawn most of the police violence and brutality in this country. This is also, of course, why you see lots and lots of white people every bit as outraged as any black person about Ferguson (or at least very nearly; I wouldn't want to presume that those of us who don't live under this threat can quite understand just how terrifying it is). The conflict here isn't white against black, it's racists against non-racists. The former are a rather large subset of white people; the latter are a coalition of non-whites and white liberals. And those of us in the not-racist coalition are all equally outraged about Brown's death, and about the conservative indifference to his death (sorry, did I say conservative? I meant racist, it's so easy to get confused these days). We'd be equally outraged at the shooting of a white person by cops, except that, well... that doesn't happen so much.

Any guesses why that might be, Fox contributors?

::crickets::

Yep, We Wanted to Destroy Your Way of Life

I just had the delightful experience of reading an essay about antebellum (white, male) Southern ideology. Specifically this article tried to link the inegalitarian pro-slavery ideology with the more broadly inegalitarian philosophy of Southern life as a whole, particularly as it related to women. In the course of the article you really get a sense of how repulsive this culture was. I particularly love the quotes from Southern politicians talking about how abolition of slavery would just be the thin end of the wedge, and once the North had managed that change they'd soon destroy all of the relationships upon which a proper Christian-republican society rested. The Northerners weren't just coming for slavery, they warned, they were coming for the entire Southern way of hierarchical life.

Yep! Or, if we weren't then, we certainly should've been and are now. The antebellum Southern social structure sucked! In many ways and on many levels! Millions upon millions of people were treated like dirt, and if not, it's because I'm being unfair to the way we treat dirt. The oppressive nature of marriage in the antebellum South needed abolishing every bit as much as slavery. So did the oppressive nature of parenting. It was just an oppressive sort of place. Southern society, at least insofar as it was defined by that oppression (and I think it was defined pretty far by that oppression), needed to be destroyed wholesale.

Prove It

Apparently Paul Ryan and Haley Barbour have endorsed Herman Cain's nonsensical 9-9-9 plan. This would appear to be a sign of the non-joke nature of the Caindidacy. (Oh, lame Herman Cain puns will not go away until he does.) This is very surprising. But it is not at all unwelcome. Here's my message to the Republicans, and in particular to the Tea Party Republicans, about Herman Cain:

You know how we liberals keep saying that y'all just oppose Obama because he's black? And you keep saying that we're the real racists and it's all about small government principles? Prove it. Make Herman Cain your nominee in 2012 and I will officially admit that your opposition to Obama is not a cipher for racism. And then I will laugh, very heartily, during the months of the general election campaign, while Obama tears through your woefully incompetent candidate. Go ahead, I dare you.

Does No One Remember the Southern Strategy?

Jon Chait has a piece arguing that, while the Tea Party genuinely does not pursue a racist political agenda, Tea Party members do hold a distinctive and deeply regressive set of opinions about racial issues. They think, for example, that anti-white racism is as big a problem as anti-black racism much more than other people, or that too much has been made of the problems facing black Americans. But, Chait says (and as far as I know he's right about this), they don't push the racial part of their ideology very much at all as a part of their public agenda.

Uh, obviously.

That's the whole point of the Southern Strategy. When Nixon decided to make an explicit play for white Southern racist voters in '68, and especially in '72, the point was not to talk about race. Rather, it was to talk about other things like welfare or crime or whatever. To the untrained ear, this sounded like it was just Nixon pursuing his conservative, law-&-order agenda. But to the racist, it sounded like what it was meant as: "let's go get those welfare-dependent, law-breaking ******s!" Dog-whistle politics. The way to do racist politics is to not talk about race, but subtly hint, in a way that those who are racists themselves will recognize, that you will pursue anti-black policies, or just that you sympathize with the racists, or something.

So consider the Tea Party. Its members hold anti-black views much more than the general populace does. Their leaders like to spend a lot of time talking about how our President, who was born in Hawaii and spent most of his life in places like Chicago, is actually a foreigner and there's been a massive conspiracy to pretend he's an American. Or that our President, who both describes himself as Christian and appears to be much more comfortable than other recent Democrats when discussing his own faith, is in reality a secret Muslim. Both are claims that would never ever in a billion years be made against a white President. Sure, people made crazy accusations against Clinton, like the whole "murder" thing, but you can tell by the fact that the specific tone of Obama's crazy accusations that they're racially derived.

Finally we have the Tea Party's agenda. The thing about the Tea Party's agenda is that it's incoherent. The only constant that I've ever seen is that anything at all that President Obama supports is evil wicked socialism that will destroy the world, and must be opposed to the utmost. Giving states increased flexibility to implement health-care laws three years earlier than would otherwise happen, a proposal that there is literally no coherent argument against? Nope. Oppose it. Never mind that it literally is a Republican proposal, right now, let alone in 1994 or even two years ago. It's all a part of the creeping tyranny. To my mind, that kind of agenda suggests strongly a personal animus against Obama himself, and a very strong one. Hmmm, what might that animus be?

And, of course, to the extent that the Tea Party does actually have an agenda or an ideology, it's a carbon copy, if not a distillation, of the same old dog-whistle issues. To the brain of a racist, "let's cut government spending" means "let's cut government handouts to black people."

The birtherism stuff is racist. The "party members" themselves are relatively speaking racist. The agenda is designed to appeal to racial animus. In what way is this not a racist movement?

(Standard disclaimer: many who identify with the Tea Party are not racist at all; it's a large movement (in absolute terms) and therefore contains a large amount of variety and, well, okay, not much diversity, but you get the point. I'm talking in the aggregate here.)