Month: November 2016

So, now what? (Part 1)

All right, so I am about two days late with the Michael Moore observation.  As I look at the pundits and the talk shows today, it is clear that “how did the Democrats lose the white working man” has become the dominant narrative.  Lots of self-flagellation by the coastal elites.  Lots of calls for compassion and understanding.  Russell Brand says we have to reach out to angry middle-American white men with love.  The Liberal Redneck says his audiences in northern college towns do not care to understand the issues and concerns of his Texas audiences.  Joe Scarborough shouted down all the men of color on his panel on November 10, accusing them of lack of compassion for the white woman in Flint with lead-poisoned children and a seething hatred for the system that allowed that to happen.  Bill Maher went on a rant in this direction last night — blaming “political correctness” and over-tolerance of Islam for the Democratic parties’ failures — and was asked in all seriousness by Wonkette Ann Marie Cox “Let me get this straight, the problem with American politics is we don’t cater enough to white men?”

Also, there is this:

And this:

So, there are limits to how far we are going to get with the Michael Moore analysis.  And, moreover, this (and every modern) U.S. election was so close that there is more than one “reason” and more than one way that HRC could have made up the difference and come up on top, even without white people (who, anyway, have voted Republican in every single presidential election since 1976):

  1.  If FBI director James Comey had not decided to re-open the investigation into HRC’s emails on October 28, eleven days before the election, that might have been enough.
  2. If HRC’s campaign had better polling and recognized that the rust-belt states were actively in play, directing their efforts into places like Wisconsin (which HRC never visited once during her campaign, believing it was “safe”) and Macomb County, MI, that might have been enough.
  3. If HRC had not said, on September 9, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it,” that might have been enough.
  4. If more people had voted (46% did not) or people of color had turned out in greater numbers, that might have been enough.

And many, many other factors, having not much to do with the abandonment of white, working-class Middle America, such as voter-suppression laws enacted by red states during the Obama Administration (and particularly after the judicial sunsetting of the Voting Rights Act), Russian hacking into DNC and HRC Campaign emails, the decision by Reince Priebus to put the unreserved effort of the RNC behind the election of Donald Trump, etc., etc.  The autopsy of the 2016 election and the Clinton Campaign will have to list multiple “immediate causes” of death, as the pathologists say, even if economic anxiety by working-class whites goes on the certificate as an important “underlying cause.”

And also, what does it really matter?  We all learn in middle school history that the harsh war reparations and other restrictions imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, as well as the Great Depression, created the conditions of desperation and instability that led to the rise of fascism.  Understanding that the people of Germany had been treated unfairly by the conquering powers after WWI, that they were desperate, and that they were in a vulnerable position to be exploited by a nationalist demagogue, helps us to answer some thorny historical questions about how so many average Germans came to embrace the Nazi ideology, but it doesn’t really tell us anything about how else those people might have been reached or how that nightmare outcome might have been avoided.  We already knew that economically-disenfranchised folks behave oddly in elections — not voting, voting against their self-interest, casting a worthless protest vote, and/or voting for the strongman — but knowing that doesn’t really help us understand how to direct our efforts, particularly in the wake of an election that has shifted power about as far away as it can be from liberal ideas and ideals.  That’s the question it seems like we need to be trying to answer now.

Who called it?

In trying to make sense of the election results this week, I have been looking around for someone who called it.  Because I certainly didn’t.  On Tuesday morning, I woke up believing that the American people would, in their collective wisdom, make the sensible choice.  I even entertained the idea (though this seems very naïve as I look back on it), that voters would deliver a rebuke to the party that had deformed so completely as to put a lying, boastful jackass up for nomination.  I was not the only person who thought this way.  A lot of people who try to pay attention were entertaining ideas earlier this week that the backlash against Trump by ordinary Americans could set the Republican party back by decades, and reasonably might be expected to cost them the Senate on election day as well as the presidency.   That is not at all what happened.  All of us got it spectacularly wrong.  So who got it right?

Two people — Trump himself (who said repeatedly that his campaign’s strategy of focusing on rust-belt states would tip the Electoral College vote in his favor, no matter what the polls said) and Michael Moore.  if you haven’t heard his essay, here he is reading it:

(I should note that it was very hard to find a link to this video from a non-right-wing source.  The people we used to call “tea partiers,” whom I guess we now should call “Trumpists,” loved this, even though it pretty clearly makes the point that pissed-off white people are preparing to act irrationally and in a way that could destroy the country).

And, having thought about it almost to the exclusion of anything else this week, and having looked at and read a lot of other explanations, I think Moore got it right.  That may be because, before I had seen the Moore video, I had been trying out a similar theory in my head — that, in every election since Clinton, the American people had always gone for whichever candidate seemed like the bigger “fuck you” (between the two options) to the establishment and Washington.  That rule seems to hold even in re-election campaigns (such as Bush v. Kerry and Obama v. Romney), where the “challenger” was in each case thought to be someone Washington was already quite comfortable with and would have no trouble assimilating.

Moore has a particular Michigan-centered perspective, and that helps give color to his larger point that working-class people in that state have gotten shafted for 20 years, which has caused (as he sees it) white people to not really care about the more frightening or crazy things Trump says and black people to not believe either candidate is particularly worth voting for.  Michigan and Wisconsin ended up being decisive in this election, so the Michigan-centric explanation is very useful, though you could see how the same kinds of anger and economic victimization could play out in other states that went for Trump, such as Pennsylvania.

What is compelling about Moore’s explanation is, of course, that it is not dismissive.  He holds up the perspective of a person whose first goal in voting for Trump was to piss off the privileged and powerful people who don’t give a shit that working three jobs isn’t enough to make a workable life.  That makes sense to me.  It resonates with me.  Some 61 million Americans voted for Trump, and while I absolutely believe that group includes racists, sexists, and xenophobes (including some of the self-loathing variety), it also includes a lot of decent and kind people who voted the wrong way.  There are also a lot of decent and kind people who didn’t vote at all for the same or similar reasons.  I don’t really understand them either.

I have more to say about this, but I should eat dinner.  First post — done!