When I asked South African playwright Athol Fugard his opinion of race relations in the United States, he replied:
Man! It’s not as easy to identify the enemy here, as it is back home, which makes the struggle vastly more complicated. At home the enemy is immediately identifiable — simply because of the institutionalization of racism. Whereas in America the enemy wears many disguises.
That was more than 30 years ago. Well, the disguises have come off, and now a white racist ideology in the U.S. has been institutionalized — or as some might say, re-institutionalized.
“Whoever thought the Ku Klux Klan would endorse a major-party candidate?” says political historian Allan J. Lichtman, who correctly predicted the election of Donald Trump. Furthermore, with Trump headed to the White House, Lichtman reminds us:
If the Republicans control everything, it will almost be as if Obama didn’t exist for eight years. They can wipe out every part of his legacy: climate policy, immigration reform, liberal jurisprudence, the Affordable Care Act.
“But contrary to all the pundits,” Lichtman adds,
Donald Trump won not because of Donald Trump and his campaign, but despite them. Hillary Clinton wasn’t to blame for this loss. The Democrats are already a shattered party. They hold nothing. They would further undermine themselves and pulverize themselves if they blamed Hillary Clinton for this loss. She didn’t do anything wrong. She won the three debates. But she was up against a bigger force.
What constitutes that “bigger force”? The usual suspects — fear of immigration, hostility to free trade, repudiation of elite Washington insiders, economic despair, so forth and so on. But let’s not kid ourselves.
R-a-c-i-s-m tops my list of suspects. It’s what underpins all those issues, in my humble opinion, and put the American personification of Brexit over the top.
Postscript: Columbia law professor Tim Wu thinks Trump won because, through the media’s “free advertising” of campaign coverage, he was able to amplify his message “like many fascist leaders in the past” — not that his views are comparable to theirs, oh no, who could possibly think that? But like them he understood “the best way to attract attention and inspire intensity in your audience is to make them afraid.” He merely “tapped into the unconscious fears and hatreds of his supporters by overstating the danger the United States is in, and creating enemies much greater than reality supports.” I take the point, of course. Many others have made the same point. But those “unconscious fears and hatreds” certainly sound like r-a-c-i-s-m to me.
Crossposted at IT: International Times.
PPS: April 17, 2017 — Analysis: Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism.
I like Naomi Klein’s argument in the Guardian that it was Hillary’s adherence to neoliberalism that caused her to lose.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/rise-of-the-davos-class-sealed-americas-fate
Since this blog is about media, I would also like to mention the problems with the major pre-election polls. How could all of them has been so completely wrong? The NYT gave her a 92% chance of winning. If the electorate had known that Trump had a strong chance of winning, a massive resistance would have evolved. Instead, we were led to believe that the election would essentially be a victory lap for Hillary. We thus let our guard down and were sucker punched.
I’ve long distrusted the American media, but this poll business takes the cake. How can we take anything these papers and broadcasters say seriously when they can screw up something that important so badly?
BTW, there was another prominent person who said a few weeks ago that Trump could win: Micheal Moore. His focus on the Rustbelt tuned him in to what the coastal pundits and pollsters refused to see.
Yes, Naomi Klein puts it all out there. She’s got all those reasons right — all those conscious reasons, which I will admit are just as weighty in her telling as the “unconscious fears and hatreds.”
I intended to add a postscript to my earlier reply, but my day job (for which I’m actually paid) intervened. Before seeing your latest comment, I was going to say that Klein’s beautifully clear explanation of the issues doesn’t clarify why the electorate that voted for Trump presumably believed his words but ignored the facts of his actual record. How did they square his so-called genius for business with his multiple corporate bankruptcies? Was it because they, personally, didn’t lose investments in his enterprises? I don’t think so. Did they really believe he represented the working stiff when, as was widely reported, he stiffed so many contractors and underpaid so many of his employees? They’re not that dumb. How could they believe a self-proclaimed billionaire who imported steel from China for his construction projects because it was cheaper than U.S. steel yet claimed he’d put domestic factories and miners back to work? Good question. Didn’t they realize that his not paying millions of dollars in taxes, as he boasted he’d done, was damaging to the public good and therefore to them? Why would they vote for a fraud who cheated people out of their tuition at his phony Trump University? And why wouldn’t they recognize that his populist rhetoric was a lie? It could be that they admired his bigotry and needed a way to rationalize it. So 50 million bigots voted their unspoken — and, in some cases, outspoken — fears and hatreds.
Bill Moyers:
“With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived. Like Nixon and Sarah Palin before him, Trump ran against the media, boomeranging off the public’s contempt for the press. He ran against what he regarded as media elitism and bias, and he ran on the idea that the press disdained working-class white America. Among the many now-widening divides in the country, this is a big one, the divide between the media and working-class whites, because it creates a Wild West of information – a media ecology in which nothing can be believed except what you already believe.”
Whole article here: http://billmoyers.com/story/farewell-america/
That’s a quote from a piece by Neal Gabler posted on Bill Moyers’s website. FYI in case anybody gets the idea it’s by Moyers himself. It also emphasizes the same thing I’ve been saying about the unleashed hatred of bigots. Thanks for tipping me to it.
Thanks for the correction. Here’s an array of various poll numbers that support your idea that racism was the main factor in Trump’s success.
http://www.vox.com/2016/9/12/12882796/trump-supporters-racist-deplorables
Perhaps the most simple and to the point is the analysis by Daniel Byrd and Loren Collingwood which found that 81% of Trump’s supporters harbor racial resentments. Sadly, so did 60% of Clinton’s and 58% of Sanders’. I wonder how economic stress in the Rustbelt and racial resentment might correlate.
I was just in the States for 7 months, but in a very progressive small town in the Rocky Mountains. I had no occasion to speak to a single Trump supporter, so I have little direct sense of who these people are.
Why would Ohio elect Obama twice and then elect Trump if racism were the central issue? Similar story for MI and WI. These states aren’t thought of as especially racist places. Why is it that the Rustbelt turned the political tide?
Or is it as Gladwell says in the article I listed, they did their good deed by voting for Obama, and now feel entitled to show what they really think? Not sure that adds up either.
I’ve long had the impression that working class people, and especially whites, don’t mind a crook in office as long as he’s representing them and presumably using his deviousness for their interests. I think, for example, of Jimmy Hoffa heading the Teamsters. In the eyes of the working class, politicians are by nature crooks, so they want a crook, a sly sharpie who speaks to their worldviews and interests, a Trump or a Hoffa. A simple bigot who isn’t a crook, like George Wallace, wouldn’t do.
But then, things get really complicated when one sees that 49% of white college grads voted for Trump, and only 45% for Hillary. (See the link.) Are 49% of white college grads racist — a sudden shift from the Obama years? That seems a stretch to me, but who knows? As I say, I’m baffled. And I’ve been an expat for 37 years, so what do I know? The numbers in this exit poll are astounding:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0
All the same, I think you might be right about racism being the major factor. Most Americans don’t really think a lot about neoliberalism, if they’ve even heard of it.
Shortly before the election, Malcolm Gladwell suggested that the negative views of Hillary stem principally from sexism, and that the USA is far less open to women in leadership positions than it would like to think.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/malcolm-gladwell-us-election-the-national-trump-clinton-1.3838449
It’s interesting to see a nation living in delusion finally having to face what it has become.
In the weeks before the election, it was interesting to read the NYT and WP just to see how many ingenious variations on Trump bashing their excellent writers could come up with. Journalistic impartiality was simply thrown overboard (and one can’t really blame them.) This raises some interesting questions, at least for me:
1. Do these highly esteemed papers really have so little influence over Americans outside of some of the larger coastal urban areas? (Were the major broadcasters also so anti-Trump?)
2. How badly will the astoundingly false poll predictions affect the credibility of the media? This seems far worse than other scandals like Judith Miller’s Iraq War reporting or the fake stories by Jason Blair. Will this disaster and its effects simply be forgotten, or will meaningful changes be made? What will those changes be?
3. Given the NYT’s and WP’s open contempt and hostility toward Trump, how will they be able to impartially report about him as President with any credibility? They were clearly not planning on this unthinkable contingency.
4. How will our society be changed if our major media outlets present Trump’s views in an unbiased manner? Is their a moral level the supersedes the dictum of journalistic impartiality?
5. What happens to journalism when the government that provides its context implodes? Paul Krugman has said that America is perilously close to being a failed state. What happens when *mainstream* journalism detaches itself from the political norms of the electorate and country?
I am so baffled. Or maybe this is nothing new. Perhaps we’ve always just faked along.
Sorry for yet another post, but this topic is so interesting. An enlightening article about the NYT and its loss of touch with “the people who just elected the President.”
http://deadline.com/2016/11/shocked-by-trump-new-york-times-finds-time-for-soul-searching-1201852490/
This passage is especially interesting: “By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called ‘the narrative.’ We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line. […] The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: ‘We set the agenda for the country in that room.’”
The author suggests that this narrative created a reductive and comforting stick man version of Trump supporters. The Times thus missed the deep discontent in the heartland and the complex array of reasons why they supported Trump.
Anyway, I notice that the Times is back to business as usual, and writing standard fare journalism about Trump the Prez as if nothing ever happened between him and the paper. I can’t find the words to describe this. It’s as if journalists are trained in playing theater games. Simply put on a new face, and continue pouring out “the narrative…”
Why sorry? Your comments here and on other AJ blogs are the most incisive and probing that I read. They often cite data, i.e.: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0
and elaborate from that, which is terrifically informative.
To the subject of the NYTimes that so bothers you: I never worked there, but I know reporters who did and who still do. I don’t know Cieply, never knew him when he worked at the LA Times either (where I did work), but I used to read his articles about the movie industry, religiously, because I trusted his reporting. As a seasoned journalist wise to the ways of the news industry, Cieply scores some serious points. I’m puzzled, however, when he tries to debunk the notion that the NYT sets the news agenda for the country as though it was a peculiar conceit that shocked him. Continuing the passage you cite, he writes:
Having lived at one time or another in small-town Pennsylvania, some lower-rung Detroit suburbs, San Francisco, Oakland, Tulsa and, now, Santa Monica, I could only think, well, “Wow.” This is a very large country. I couldn’t even find a copy of the Times on a stop in college town Durham, N.C. To believe the national agenda was being set in a conference room in a headquarters on Manhattan’s Times Square required a very special mind-set indeed.
Though it may show a “special mind-set,” the NYT does in fact set the news agenda — not for small-town newspaper readership of The Times itself but for editors of other news organizations and especially for TV news producers. I’d bet my bottom dollar that Cieply knows that. So his attempt to debunk the notion because he couldn’t find a copy of the paper in Durham surprises me.
There’s no denying that NYT editors are a privileged elite and that the paper reads like it’s intended for a readership that is also a privileged elite — never more so when you check out the print edition ads and special sections (these days more than ever targeted to the moneyed class). But what would we do without the NYT as a news operation? Its absence would be a huge deprivation for everyone not just the elite because, for all its many flaws, nothing comes close to The Times in daily depth and breadth of information. And the distribution of that info through other news organizations that use it or try to match it is no small part of what happens. You can name some other papers — The Guardian and The Washington Post these days — that may have a competitive daily national report. But it’s a short list. (And if there’s a major paper with national pretensions to complain about for its elitism, how about The Wall Street Journal, which on top of being skewed to corporate minds has become in its news coverage a hollow shell of its former self?)
Did The Times get the election wrong? Yes. But if there’s a complaint to be made about a “narrative” and “theater games” that “simply put on a new face,” how about what happened at the White House yesterday when Obama and Trump murmured sweet nothings to and about each other and to the rest of us, viz (once you get past the commercial):
How’s that for galling?
Furthermore, to the matter of bigotry. I’m not a fan of Charles Blow’s NYT column, so I don’t regularly read him. But I just saw this one:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/opinion/america-elects-a-bigot.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share
He writes: “Businessman Donald Trump was a bigot. Candidate Donald Trump was a bigot. Republican nominee Donald Trump was a bigot. And I can only assume that President Donald Trump will be a bigot.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (and many others) are now saying that the people who voted for Trump did so in spite his bigotry not because of it. OK, they had their reasons for wanting “an unrepentant bigot” to lead the country, “drain the swamp,” (ha: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/us/politics/trump-campaigned-against-lobbyists-now-theyre-on-his-transition-team.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share), so forth and so on. But Blow doesn’t really buy the idea. Neither do I.
It’s probably true that the NYT sets the agenda for the journalistic world (I wouldn’t know,) but they definitely didn’t set the agenda for this election, though they did everything they could to do so. Perhaps Cieply is raising a question about how much the paper, and the coastal press (for lack of a better term,) actually influences average working class or non-elite Americans. With the decentralization created by the web and cable, perhaps the game has changed. It looks like Fox News is setting the political agenda these days.
In addition to Blow’s article, the Times includes one by David Brooks who argues that we fail to accurately understand the people who elected Trump if we simply define them as racists without considering the other factors that motivated them. He seems to suggest that this ignorance only makes their opponents (the more educated classes) more politically vulnerable. Know thy enemy.
Brooks goes on to suggest that both the Repubs and Dems are now infested with the Brexit disease. He argues that Sanders and Warren now define the future Dems. So he adds that we now need a third party to continue the globalist agenda (i.e. neoliberalism.)
Whatever “narrative” the Times will now try to set, I suspect it will be the continuation of neoliberalism (which might be a major reason they oppose Trump so strongly.) The Brooks piece is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/opinion/the-view-from-trump-tower.html?_r=0
Still, I’m inclined toward your view that racism, more than anything else, shaped Trump’s success.
That’s a good way to put it: “racism, more than anything else, shaped Trump’s success.” Good because more qualified than saying, as I did, that all 50 million Trump voters are racists. Another way to say it might be that it was racist to vote for him, even if those who did had other reasons. At least the majority of the American electorate voted against him, but it’s hardly a consolation given the outcome. As for Brooks’s column, I saw that one. I generally find him unreadable. He tends to offer more pap than I can stand.