24 August 2016
What the hell do they have to lose...?
There are glib answers at hand from left and right to Donald Trump's question to black voters, which to my knowledge he's not yet had guts enough to address to a predominantly black audience. To Trump, I suppose, something's the matter with blacks the way something's the matter with Kansas in Thomas Frank's eyes. Trump must believe it self-evident that blacks will be better off economically with him in the White House than they would be with Hillary Clinton there. It's not so self-evident, however, if you don't take for granted, as Republicans do, that reducing regulations and taxes will create more jobs, or if you simply don't know how Trump is going to compel people to build factories in this country. That aside, unless Trump agrees with what most of his supporters no doubt believe, which is that what blacks have to lose is their lazy ease, he must assume that some irrational intangible stops blacks from realizing how good he'd be for them. He may realize that many blacks think him a racist, while most know that most of his supporters are. He may also think that all it'd take to win blacks over would be to say "I repudiate racism." It can't be that simple, however. First would have to come some acknowledgment and denunciation of racism among his own supporters, but I'm not sure whether he believes that any of them are bigots. Beyond that, things get more subtle. It comes down to what Trump means about "taking our country back." Just as with the "Make America Great Again" slogan, there's a suspicion that white conservatives want to take the country back to a time when blacks (and not just President Obama), not to mention women (and not just Hillary Clinton) had less power and influence in society. The suspicion, rational or not, goes deeper than that. Many Americans believe strongly that white males long ago forfeited the right to unilaterally set the terms for what an American is, to think of themselves automatically as "average" or "normal" Americans, or to tell other Americans to go somewhere else if they don't want to live as straight white Christian males do. Those millions don't believe that they have to prove to straight white Christian males that they're "real Americans" as defined by straight white Christian males. They will not accept tutelage from straight white Christian males on how to be Americans, or how to make America great again. They demand recognition of their essential American-ness on their own terms, which may require some rethinking by straight white Christian males of what it means to be an American. For all the controversies over racist policing and other inequities in this country, most women and racial minorities in the U.S. probably now feel more indisputably American under President Obama than they had in the past. What they have to lose, then, is this feeling of unconditional belonging. This feeling can be excessive, since it does not follow that the election of a white male President will once more marginalize non-whites or further marginalize women. Nor should people rush to repudiate the whole intellectual tradition on which this republic is based by association with "dead white European [not to mention straight] males." But if women and nonwhites have that intellectual responsibility, then white men like Trump have their own responsibility to help dispel generations of suspicion that their ancestors earned for them through the ideology of whiteness and the whole world's sexism. I'm not sure how Trump is supposed to pull this off, but he might start by challenging his base's "I never got a break" self-pity and their belief that, so long as their lives have been miserable, everyone else's should be miserable in the exact same way, forevermore, or else they, the poor whites, will be shown up as fools. Why not take a chance on that approach. After all, Trump has these people in the bag, given how they hate Hillary Clinton. What the hell does he have to lose???...
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4 comments:
"For all the controversies over racist policing and other inequities in this country, most women and racial minorities in the U.S. probably now feel more indisputably American under President Obama than they had in the past."
I have to assume that is merely a hunch on your part, as I'm not sure how such a statement could even be quantified.
"What they have to lose, then, is this feeling of unconditional belonging."
Given their lack of conformity to the mainstream, I don't think a "feeling of unconditional belonging" is what any of these people want. Here's the thing, you cannot simultaneously be a non-conformist and also demand that the conformist accept you. You either conform or you accept you will always be an outsider. That is how it works. Rather, I think what these people want is the "power" they perceive of the "white heterosexual conservative male" possesses, without having to earn it the way white heterosexual conservative men originally did. Unfortunately for them, that is NOT how things work. If you want power, you either work hard for it within the existing establishment, or you take it by force, but it is NEVER simply handed over, unilaterally, because you whine - no matter how loudly you whine. That, in a nutshell, is the reality of the situation and reality does NOT bend to the fantasies and delusions of the "dispossessed".
By "unconditional belonging" I meant belonging without conditions set by any self-styled "mainstream," i.e. a requirement to conform. Meanwhile, you're definitely right that a sense of having power is at stake in the election, though whether the "dispossessed" really have more power under Obama is debatable. What matters is that they feel that they share in it somehow -- and that it was, indeed, "handed over" to them through a democratic election. The presumption is that power is handed over through voting, not whining. The whining starts when they realize that voting alone may not suffice in the face of fanatic obstructionism from an electoral minority (at least in presidential elections) that still sees itself as the real "mainstream," as opposed to a crooked establishment. To some important extent the 2016 election is going to be a referendum on who actually makes up the "mainstream" for the immediate future.
Actually, I'm mainly jabbing at the "SJW" and "post-modern feminist" movements. Who want an end to the "patriarchy" and, presumably, the power they allegedly possess handed over to the aforementioned whiners.
Basically, I guess I'm referring to the "millennials".
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