A More Orange Shade of Pale

Sarah Paulson's character getting the election night news on American Horror Story: Cult

If you're hearing this for the first time from Unspeakable (as heck) you might just need to expand your internet horizons a tad, but almost a year later, journalist and author (and comic book writer) Ta-Nehisi Coates has written at The Atlantic perhaps the definitive piece on the source of Donald Trump's support in the last election and beyond.

Some very choice quotes summarize the argument:

[Trump's] political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.

 Coates provides a catalog of statistics to bookmark for future discussions:

Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won whites ages 18–29 (+4), 30–44 (+17), 45–64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19). Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt’s New Mexico (+5). In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent. Hillary Clinton’s did, in states as disparate as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky. From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to nascar dads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant. According to Mother Jones, based on preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a toss-up or unknown.

The payoff:

And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs—the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase grab ’em by the pussy into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.

I have only a minor quibble with Coates' presentation.  The article rather boldly misses the point in my view of Bernie Sanders' stance with respect to the "white working class".  As I see it, Sanders emphasis is appropriately on the second and third words in the phrase.  He consistently chose to combat the very real problem of racial polarization within the working class as a whole by frankly confronting the problem makers directly on their terms and admirably without judgment (something I find very hard to do myself).  Given widespread identification with whiteness among the white working class as Coates's own numbers attest, Sanders was carving a niche in appealing directly to their better angels-- and was to a great extent successful at it. Nothing inconsistent with basic socialism.  Will it work in the long run in bringing white workers back into the fold of labor from their seduction away from it by racialist manipulations in the other direction?  I don't know but at least Sanders is entitled to try.

But Coates' main point is well taken that for every demographic of age, gender, income and education, the white contingent across the board preferred the most openly racist and misogynist, anti-other reactionary, and in spite of the tan from a can, the whitest candidate perhaps in history.

Screen Capture from opening credits of American Horror Story: Cult

I know a lot of white people, and few who (openly at least) voted for Trump.  But this was a political year for contrariness in all quarters.  For me, the essay articulates what had been inchoate feelings about the election, especially in conversation with those who, unlike me, felt the luxury of voting their conscience, perhaps to the point of attacking what struck me as the only realistic option for anyone hoping to prevent the horrifying outcome we're now living with-- i.e., voting for the lesser "evil".  Given the admittedly unappealing major party alternative in November (that is, the popular vote winner), it was to be expected that a certain segment of white progressive voters would feel emboldened to choose anyone else, casting (in some states decisive) numbers of votes for the distantly fourth place Green party instead.  Maybe as was frequently suggested to me in the weeks leading up to the election, and even for some time after, the mood and condition of the country demanded that we vote for progress and for change.  Wasn't that why both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, two candidates as outside the mold of either of the two major parties as could be imagined, had exceeded anyone's expectations?   Could that explain the sudden overlap of vocabulary for what to react against -- status quo, neoliberalism, deep state-- from both sides advertising freedom from voting for the "inevitable" candidate?  Sure Trump was a lying, perverted conman, but what would be the worst that could happen if the "most qualified candidate for president ever" was denied the crown?   Only one outcome would "heighten the contradictions" and thereby bring about conditions for revolution.  But maybe, given the likely consequences of a white progressive defection from voting Democratic, this wasn't the right time for antifascists to be principled.  Maybe change and progress did not necessarily go hand in hand.  Maybe the prevailing mood among the largest bloc in the country was regressive.  That certainly turned out to be the case.

Throw into the mix of influences on the last election Russia, which I will use as an abbreviation for what should more specifically be termed the Russian counterpart to the American oligarchy.   Evidence of their activities may not yet include outright tampering with votes and polling outcomes, but it does include propaganda in the form of tampering with messages consumed by voters."Hacking" may be a ridiculous way to characterize what we know so far to be Russia's part in the culpability for our current predicament.  How about "dicking"?

Russia has a problem with nationalism, a problem which it shares with a number of other nations with regressive elites making a resurgence in power -- Turkey, Hungary, Poland come to mind, and Britain, France and Germany have active factions making sometimes successful stabs at it as well.  Nationalism, which made our modern world a few centuries back, is traditionally the notion that a people deserve dominion over a territory, and that the natural order demands a kind of ethnic purity in the makeup and outlook of local society.  Nationalism in its contemporary form is a romantic ambition to make your province great again by attempting to rewind to when it went off the rails due to imperialist overreaching.  The resurgence of nationalism is an oligarchic response to what had been a more socialist track for the planet's future. In nearly all of the countries in which Nationalism is making a foothold, including Russia, a dominant ethnicity actually exists.  America is unique in that is the only country experiencing a resurgence of nationalism in which there is rather explicitly no dominant official ethnicity (setting aside the Anglo-Saxon faction whose mouths are watering for a return to 1863).  But there are Russians here who have observed that whiteness confers on them a claim to the American national character.   And with a long history of propaganda and agitprop at their disposal, I have no trouble believing messages originating in Russia that were crafted for Trump and against Hillary hit their marks across the American political spectrum.  I see Russia's participation as a symptom of an American inspired, global "white ethnic delusional" virus.  And if Russia was not the primary force behind the November success of white Nationalism in America --and perhaps at injecting successful anti-Democratic propaganda into the discussion and helping to set a progressive agenda non-injurious to Trump for malcontents on the left end of the spectrum-- at least emblematic of how uniquely vulnerable from inside and outside white Americans are to messages evoking perceived threats to their non-existent ethnicity.

Whiteness, like blackness, is merely a skin tone shared by people who have nothing else automatically in common.  Whiteness is taking credit for things we had nothing to do with.  It is unearned status.  Whiteness as a construct exists only to contrast the racially privileged with the racially oppressed, but we know who we are, based on which box we tick on the census. And the numbers do not lie: we took a pass this time on our responsibility to our planet and our fellow humans to take one for the skin tone, or if we're honest to "restore" the continued privilege it bestows on us.