Is there any way to explain the outrageous and provocative “Skittles” tweet by Donald Trump Jr. yesterday? “If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem.”
Was it misspeak? The words of someone unschooled in the art of politics? A campaign messenger going off-message? An overzealous son?
None of the above, in my opinion. This was calculated, planned, and cynical. And it wasn’t the first time that Trump Jr. has taken on the assignment of saying something that goes beyond the pale of human decency and the boundaries of the permissible in politics.
That it triggered an avalanche of media criticism around the country and world was no surprise to the ringleaders of Trump’s campaign. They assumed it would. But they also assumed that it would be music to the ears of many of Trump’s most loyal supporters.
In the remaining weeks of the election, we will hear and see more of this from Trump’s surrogates. They will — with rightwing talk radio and Fox News giving loud amplification — throw out rhetorical red meat to the meanest and most backward of Trump’s supporters. Meanwhile, Trump himself will strike a different posture and tone down his inflammatory side.
It is hoped in Trump’s camp that this division of labor will serve two purposes going into the home stretch.
One is to make Trump sound presidential, and thus electable. There are, after all, lots of voters, including Trump supporters, Trump-leaning voters, and undecideds, who wonder if he has the necessary temperament and experience to sit in the Oval Office. The other purpose — and it is here where the over-the-top rhetoric of his appointed firebrands comes into play — is to keep his most zealous and backward supporters in the game and revved up, while Trump himself pivots towards the mainstream of U.S. politics.
Whether such a strategy, resting on deception, duplicity, and demagoguery, will work is another matter. My guess is that it won’t. And I would be willing to stake an evening at a bar of your or my choice on it.
First, undoing the widespread perception that Donald Trump is a loose and dangerous cannon is easier said than done. Once a negative image becomes embedded in popular consciousness, it is difficult to dislodge. Especially if it’s the candidate’s own doing, as is the case with Trump. Out of his mouth has come a steady stream of hate, threats, taunts, insults, lies, and outlandish proposals. While it got him the nomination of the Republican Party and normalized to a degree racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, and other forms of hate and division, it also fixed in the minds of millions that Trump is unstable, divisive, and dangerous — a powder keg who, if elected president, could erupt to calamitous effect. Shit sometimes sticks, and in this case, it won’t easily wash away.
Second, it isn’t easy for megalomaniacs, like Trump, to stay on message. His overweening sense of self and contempt for people, and especially for people of color, immigrants, and women gets in his way. Every time his enablers assure the public and Republican Party leaders that he is going to clean up his act, he goes wilding.
Third, the biggest social constituencies — labor, communities of color, and women, and many others — that educate and mobilize voters will not be fooled by the efforts to sanitize Trump. From the moment he announced his candidacy, this coalition understood that Trump was a real danger to everything that they hold sacred, and his end-game verbal gymnastics won’t change that.
Of course, it will still be a dog fight. But I strongly believe that despite many obstacles — the Republican Party’s painting of Hillary as dishonest and unlikable, the innumerable ways that sexism has burrowed into people’s thinking, and the inability of some who should know better to appreciate the larger dynamics of the moment — she and the people’s coalition that supports her will make history on November 8 and set the stage to move to higher ground.
According to some on social media, the election is a contest between neoliberalism on the one hand and the descent into fascism on the other. But this strikes me as wrongheaded for a number of reasons. But for this post, I will mention only one: Many of the underlying assumptions and practices of neoliberalism have been discredited.
So much so that many of the advocates and practitioners of that particular form of governance in the past have become its critics today. Hillary Clinton is one of them. She hasn’t jettisoned that mode of governance entirely, but by the same token she doesn’t embrace now some of its defining features such as fiscal austerity, de-regulated labor and financial markets, tax breaks to the wealthy, downsizing and privatization of the “welfare state,” to name a few.
Moreover the disenchantment with neoliberal policies extends broadly into the Democratic Party, especially its progressive and growing group of elected representatives, many of its caucuses and interest groups, and its multi-racial working class social base. No longer is it the Democratic Party’s incontestable “common sense.”
Finally, the attitudes and actions of millions of people – reflected in the the primary campaign of Bernie Sanders, the scaling up of several mass movements, and innumerable public opinion polls – are another bellwether that suggests neoliberalism is neither the inevitable nor likely political mode of governance on the other side of Election Day, assuming, of course, Hillary and other Democrats down the ticket win.
To say otherwise, I would argue, misses the changing political dynamics of the present moment. It is also an implicit and negative, if unintended, critique of the power and influence of today’s working class and democratic movement. Admittedly, the present day, loosely constructed people’s movement (coalition is probably a better word) doesn’t yet possess the political and practical capacity to fundamentally transform social relations across the board, but it is nonetheless on an entirely different level than it was in the heyday of neoliberlism in the Reagan and (Bill) Clinton years.
Hillary Clinton’s observation to a private meeting of financial backers that the majority of her opponent’s supporters are “a basket of deplorables” triggered a tsunami of commentary. Some admonished her; others defended her. Still others advised her to move beyond Trump and lay out a positive vision for the country. And a few to their credit, New York Times opinion writer Charles Blow being one, made mention of the rest of her remarks in which she spoke of the “other basket” of Trump supporters in complex and nuanced ways.
I should elaborate on Blow’s observation, and perhaps I will later, but in this post I will do what others did: focus on the term, “basket of deplorables,” but from a slightly different angle.
The political constituency that catapulted Trump to the top of the Republican Party heap didn’t materialize overnight, nor is it the product of mainly economic distress. There are, after all, a lot white working people who are unhappy with the slow, uneven, and unequally shared economic recovery that don’t show up at Trump rallies or sign on to his politics.
While some new faces, including some traditional Democratic voters and white workers on the losing end of economic change, are in Trump’s camp, the majority of his supporters have long associated with Republican Party candidates and politics. A few surely go back to Nixon’s Southern strategy that carried him into the White House in 1968. Others to Ronald Reagan’s successful presidential campaigns. Still others to the right-wing evangelical movement that climbed on the political stage three decades ago and remains there. And a good number likely had a hand in the Republican takeover of the House in 1994 and the campaign to impeach Bill Clinton a few years later, while even more for sure threw their support to George W. Bush in his successful presidential bids. And, of course, the rise of the Tea Party in 2010 became the political baptism for a new wave of right-wing voters and activists who now find in Trump a kindred spirit and captivating voice for their deeply felt resentments.
In other words, most of Trump supporters – sections of big, medium, and small sized capital included – were the electoral base and motor of the ascendancy of right-wing extremism – an ascendancy that began four decades ago with a mission – still to be realized – to impose on the country a particular brand of neoliberalism that is raw, mean-spirited, bellicose, and anti-democratic in every sense. If anyone is a rookie here – as dangerous, erratic, reckless, hate-mongering, and demagogic as he is – it’s Trump.
Many things provided the adhesive to bind this motley multi-class, far-right coalition together in its battles against its center-progressive opposition, but nothing figured larger than the language and practice of racism. Racism energized the base, as it submerged otherwise competing class and social interests within this heterogeneous political bloc. It’s enough to recall such tropes as “law and order,” “reverse racism,” “welfare queens,” the “Bell Curve,” Willie Horton, “culture of pathology,” War on Drugs,” “post-racial society,” and “voter fraud” to to be reminded of the powerful and enduring function of racist discourse in the unification and mobilization of a grassroots right-wing constituency – and the pushing of U.S. politics to the right – over the past half century.
In recent years, we have seen a surge in racism and racist discourse (more on what triggered this surge in my next post). One of its distinguishing features is that the language (more covert) of “color blind” racism and “dog whistle” politics has increasingly yielded ground to racist rhetoric that is unrestrained and unapologetic. Language that was once spoken in hushed tones and confined to small circles has invaded the public square.
And, no one has done more to amplify and legitimize this surge than Donald Trump. He has no inhibitions in making vile racist pronouncements, no matter what their destructive and deadly consequences. In fact, he takes delight in mocking “political correctness,” and then turns it into his entry point to peddle an unfiltered raw racism as well as sexism, anti-immigrant nativism, homophobia, big power chauvinism, and white supremacy. In doing so, he has become the leader of a loose right-wing populist movement to turn back the clock to times that we thought were long past as well as the poster boy of the Ku Klux Klan and other openly white supremacist groups – the “alt-right.”
Which brings me back to Hillary Clinton. It’s to her credit that she is calling attention to this racist, reactionary, and well financed cancer growing in our body politic and the imminent danger it presents to our democratic rights, institutions, and governance. Late last month, her speech in Reno shined a bright light on this danger in a way that no other politician in the mainstream, including President Obama and Bernie Sanders, has.
And her comment a few days ago that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables” may have been a bit injudicious, but there is no doubt that she bravely put her finger once more on a truth that should be sobering and disconcerting to most people. For this we should thank and defend her as well as step up our efforts to register, educate, and mobilize people in our communities to elect her – the first woman president in our country’s history. Much hangs on the outcome!
Sexism was in “fine” form last night as NBC host Matt Lauer grilled and interrupted Hillary Clinton in his interview of her, while giving Donald Trump in most instances a free pass when he quizzed him. I would like to say I was surprised, but sexism toward Hillary has a long history and in the current elections it is widespread. It’s a core element of Trump’s talking points and campaign strategy, but it also finds expression in the mass media, other points on the political spectrum (the left included), and in “guy” talk. When I mentioned this in an earlier conversation this morning with a woman who is a keen observer of gender relations, she replied, “On some molecular level, men don’t like women in authority. And to think that sexism doesn’t operate in this election, in which a woman could be elected president for the first time, is incredibly naive at best.”
