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Tag: white voters
Trump Is Trying To Panic White Voters — About Black People

Trump Is Trying To Panic White Voters — About Black People

Reprinted with permission from DailyKos

On Wednesday, Donald Trump confessed that he had lied to the American public—over, and over, and over, and … you get the idea—about the danger posed by COVID-19. By doing so, and by purposely refusing to provide coordinated testing, or a national strategy, Trump deliberately condemned 200,000 Americans to die and 6 million others to suffer through the disease.

But, says Trump, there was a reason: He had to keep the country "calm." He had to "avoid panic." Except, in the case of COVID-19, telling people the truth would have allowed them to understand that this was far worse than the flu, that it wasn't going to go away, that it would be months before the situation improved, and that reopening schools and businesses was not safe. Telling people the truth would have kepttens of thousands more Americans alive.

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Donald Trump, white voters

Trump’s Support Declines Among White Voters, Recent Polls Show

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

If President Donald Trump is to be reelected in November, he will need a heavy and enthusiastic turnout among white voters — especially older white male voters in swing states and red states. But Greg Sargent, in his Washington Post column, discusses what could prove to be a major problem for Trump in this year's election: decreasing supporting among whites.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, according to Sargent, has been cutting into Trump's white support. Sargent notes that "a new analysis by Nate Cohn of the Upshot, and some new Post polling, shed fresh light on why" Trump's white support "might be failing — and on what it means that Trump's alchemical powers are deserting him."

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The End Of ‘Identity Liberalism’? It Can’t Happen Too Soon

The End Of ‘Identity Liberalism’? It Can’t Happen Too Soon

Amid the climate of disbelief and fear among Democrats following Donald Trump’s election, a fascinating debate has broken out about what’s called “identity politics” on the left, “political correctness” by the right.

And about damn time, I say. The kind of race- and gender-based moral bullying prevalent on many college campuses and in certain media outlets has been extremely damaging to the Democratic Party.

My only fear is that the argument will be too polite. Sometimes, people just need to get smacked right between the eyes. Anyway, the whole thing was started by an essay by Columbia University historian Mark Lilla called “The End of Identity Liberalism”in the New York Times.

“In recent years,” Lilla writes “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” Instead of the Democratic Party’s core message of inclusion—all for one, and one for all—we’re fed a seemingly endless list of grievances and a litany of blame.

That certainly wasn’t the message Hillary Clinton wanted to send. Her traditionally Democratic campaign slogan, after all, was “Stronger Together.” On the stump, however, she most often directed her rhetoric to discrete categories of voters:  African-American, Latino, LGBT, women, etc. Anybody, it sometimes seemed, but the one group that can’t be named.

They noticed. “If you are going to mention groups in America,” Lilla warns “you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class.”

Bill Clinton used to bore pundits and attract voters with great laundry lists of specific policies addressing their needs. Hillary spent her energy and advertising dollars warning against the impending catastrophe that is Donald Trump—something this column also did plenty of. One result, however, was that ordinary voters across wide swaths of the country concluded that she had nothing to offer them. They’re wrong, but you can see how they got the idea.

Just so you know what we’re up against, here’s how the top-rated comment about Lilla’s article on the Timeswebsite began: “This article is insulting to people who are not cisgendered, heterosexual white men. Identity is not something which can be quietly set aside in pursuit of common goals, since historically those goals were set by and for white men.”

Sorry, professor, you lost me at “cisgendered.” That’s academic cant for somebody with hair on his chest who thinks he’s a man. (And no, I can’t be sure the author’s a professor, but it’d be more alarming to think that anybody capable of emitting such gibberish had escaped the campus and wanders at large.) Too often, an obsession with tolerance has created an intolerance of its own.

If you don’t understand how such nonsense is creating young Republicans by the truckload, you’re not paying attention. As one of my smarter friends has observed, it also “tends to paralyze young Democrats. How can you work for social change when everybody is limited to their own class/race/gender?”

Well, you can’t. My own experience has been that trying to reason with identity-obsessed social justice warriors is like being mobbed by crows—not so much harmful as exhausting. In practice, there are few ideas more illiberal than the notion that demography is destiny.

Try reading Until Proven Innocent, Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson’s book on the infamous Duke University lacrosse team rape hoax, for a scary example of this kind of thinking in action. To a noisy minority of Duke’s faculty, the falsely accused athletes were guilty simply by virtue of being, yes, “cisgendered, heterosexual white men.” Most held to that conviction long after the lacrosse players’ complete innocence became clear.

One unintentional result of such episodes, as Michelle Goldberg writes in Slate, has been “the politics of cultural revenge delivered by a billionaire in a gold-plated airplane.” She worries that Trumpism will lead to a new Dark Age descending over America’s racial and sexual minorities, and that “the focus of left-of-center politics in the dark years to come must be on protecting the groups of people who are targets precisely because of their identities.”

Maybe so, although I suspect such fears are overblown. I’d never deny that being a straight white man has eased my way. But I didn’t create the world either, and I’m a Democrat precisely because I do believe we’re all in this together. A politics rooted predominantly in race, gender and cultural identity invariably leads to tribalism—the great enemy of democracy.

As Lilla reminds us, “the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan.”

He’s correct: to succeed, Democrats need to address “Americans as Americans,” as citizens sharing common interests and the necessary protections of the rule of law.

IMAGE: U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton takes a selfie with supporters during a campaign rally in Kissimmee, Florida, U.S. August 8, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Keane

5 Reasons White Working-Class Voters Are So Scared

5 Reasons White Working-Class Voters Are So Scared

Why do data journalists keep missing the political story of the year?

That’s the challenge posed by the Washington Post‘s Dave Weigel to FiveThirtyEight‘s Nate Silver and The Upshot’s Nate Cohn, two key numbers maestros who have continually predicted the demise — or understated the rise — of Donald Trump.

The political story of the year is that Trump has consolidated non-college educated white Republican voters in a way nobody expected could happen. His appeal is driven largely by these voters’ anxieties, manifested as racism and xenophobia.

We see this in the way his campaign lifted off after his attacks on Mexico and Mexican immigrants in his announcement speech. And his further ascent, which comes after weeks of lying about “thousands and thousands” of American Muslims celebrating 9/11.

Reckoning with Trump’s very classy bigotry is tough for many who seem reluctant to accept that it is the animating force behind his rise. It feels inappropriate to ascribe those motivations to millions of Americans, years after the Supreme Court declared that we’d pretty much solved racism.

This political story of the year is just a comically exaggerated version of the crackdown predicted by analysts like The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent — and the GOP autopsy itself — if Republicans didn’t pass immigration reform. It’s the tragedy of California’s conservative backlash against immigrants from the 1990s, repeated as farce.

Decades ago, white voters in California felt the changes that much of the country is now experiencing. Demographic shifts combined with the natural consequences of conservative economics sparked a partisan crucible of bad intentions —  which resulted in California’s GOP winning some pyrrhic victories that have given way to a general decimation of the party.

There are some unabashed racists who support Trump, but his larger support is the sign of a seriously troubling phenomenon that cannot be ignored. Aging white voters — especially those who have no college education — feel an acute loss of status, opportunity, and security. To deflect their angry anxiety away from the conservatives who have engineered the hollowing of the middle class, they’re being encouraged to rage against ethnic minorities.

Race baiting is a potent distraction, and one that has been either an undercurrent or a driving force of American politics for centuries. Given that the demographic shifts we face are inevitable, we need to take seriously the concerns of these voters, in the hope that they can direct their concerns more constructively.

Here are five reasons why scared white voters can be tricked into sucking up to a billionaire who thinks they’re overpaid.

1. They’re dying faster.
White anxiety has literally become an existential crisis. “Since roughly 1998, disease and death rates for middle aged white men and women has begun to rise,” Josh Marshall wrote in a recent post about a Princeton university study from Angus Deaton and Anne Case on mortality rates. Marshall says you can’t understand politics without understanding this study. His hypothesis about why people are dying at increased rates? “Let’s put this clearly: the stressor at work here is the perceived and real loss of the social and economic advantages of being white.” He doesn’t think the anger at this loss is driving Republican “nihilism.” He thinks both emerge from a common cause. That cause could be the loss of economic strength and hope.

2. They’ve lost bargaining power.
As union membership rates decrease, middle-class incomes shrink
Conservatives want to destroy labor unions. They have no problem admitting it and campaigning on it. Coincidently, as union membership decreases, so do incomes. If there’s no one to lobby for your interests or to bargain from a position of equality, your ability to demand better wages deteriorates. And that works for people who own businesses, while leaving those among us who grew up in an age of growing incomes feeling as if we’ve been denied a natural right.

3. They’ve lost job security and pensions.
Mother Jones‘ Kevin Drum took a look at the same mortality study and finds that all white people from 30-65 are seeing more deaths from preventable causes like “suicide/alcohol/drugs.” One factor directly addressed by the study’s authors is the loss of financial security for workers: “The United States has moved primarily to defined-contribution pension plans with associated stock market risk, whereas, in Europe, defined-benefit pensions are still the norm. Future financial insecurity may weigh more heavily on US workers, if they perceive stock market risk harder to manage than earnings risk, or if they have contributed inadequately to defined-contribution plans.”

4. America is changing quickly.
Backlash politics thrives on a sense that the world is going to hell all around you. Whether its same-sex marriage, a black president, a possible woman president, any sense that the old order would endure — and the belief that America would exist forever in its prejudices (but with jet packs) — is nearly gone. While these things seem positive to the ascending majority of America, they terrorize those who’d been promised that they’d be better off than their parents. We cannot overstate how much the demographics of America will change in the next few decades and how disturbing that is to “traditionalists. This passage from pollster Stanley Greenberg makes these monumental changes vivid:

Consider that nearly 40 percent of New York City’s residents are foreign-born, with Chinese the second-largest group behind Dominicans. The foreign-born make up nearly 40 percent of Los Angeles’s residents and 58 percent of Miami’s. A majority of U.S. households are headed by unmarried people, and, in cities, 40 percent of households include only a single person. Church attendance is in decline, and non-religious seculars now outnumber mainline Protestants. Three-quarters of working-age women are in the labor force, and two-thirds of women are the breadwinners or co-breadwinners of their households. The proportion of racial minorities is approaching 40 percent, but blowing up all projections are the 15 percent of new marriages that are interracial. People are moving from the suburbs to the cities. And in the past five years, two-thirds of millennial college graduates have settled in the 50 largest cities, transforming them.

The world middle-aged white Americans were born into bears almost no resemblance to the one where they are dying. And unfortunately conservatives have convinced them that the promise of immigrants who we desperately need to grow our economy and fund Medicare and Conservatives is nothing more than a threat.

5. The right wing media thrives on fears.
It’s no coincidence that some of the right-wing media’s biggest advertisers are companies marketing gold, survival gear, and miracle cures that the scientists don’t want you to hear about. Keeping you focused on all the wrong things is essential to the conservative project. And it’s even more important for the conservative media project. The right’s ability to shape narratives — and harass the mainstream media into accepting them — has no parallel in modern life. No matter how many people in the “objective” media may vote or lean left, it’s no match for the nation’s most popular news channel and nearly all the most popular talk radio shows serving as perpetual commercials against the Democratic Party and the unmitigated evil of compromising with liberals. Every day millions of white Americans wake up to find out what they should be terrified of today — a time of unprecedented peace globally and some of the lowest violent crime rates in generations at home. And the right wing media never disappoint them.

Photo: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the USS Wisconsin battleship in Norfolk, Virginia October 31, 2015.  REUTERS/Joshua Roberts