There’s a few things that have happened in current events that have a common thread- either implicit or explicit racism. About a week ago, Viceroy Donald Trump twitted against liberal (and black) Congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland, referring to his district in Baltimore as “rat-infested” and going on to say that black people were “living in hell” because of Democratic politicians like him.
I think this is one of the areas that I can sort of agree with Trump, actually. The last time I was back East with my brother and my aunt and uncle, my brother took me on a drive through central Baltimore, while on another day, my uncle took me through the more suburban-style neighborhood where he and my aunt grew up. And when I was with my brother, I was looking around, and going, “I hear they call this place Charm City. It sounds like they’re overcompensating for something.”
You might as well call it, “Baltimore: The City With A Nice Personality.” Or, “Baltimore: The Camera Adds Five Pounds.”
I think to some extent, Trump is trying to appeal to people like my family back East, who were born and raised in Baltimore in the old days but for various reasons moved out. My brother was a surgical assistant years ago, and he spoke very highly of Dr. Ben Carson when he was at Johns Hopkins. Well, Carson, as Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, wanted to have a press conference in Baltimore defending his boss on July 31, but attempted to stage it on a church property, which asked them to leave, because they hadn’t sought prior permission. A technicality, to be sure. But I don’t think the church would have been so eager to enforce the rules if they had seen association with Dr. Carson, or any association with this Administration, as a positive.
I’m pretty sure Trump doesn’t care. The political incentives of our “two” party system are such that there is little reason for Republicans to seek common ground with Democrats and every incentive to antagonize them, with Trump in particular hoping that he can get just the right people in just the right states to win the Electoral College votes he needs to repeat his 2016 victory. He is also betting that the same polarization will oblige liberals to move in the opposite direction and thus alienate the center, which liberals have been more than eager to do, with candidates at the first set of Democratic debates enthusiastically endorsing the idea of decriminalizing border crossings, which most Americans are not on board with. That is why the strategy has worked so far, and why Republicans in general prefer Trump to the more inclusive approach recommended in their 2012 “post-mortem” after Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama. For their part, Democrats have yet to figure out that if you’re only allowed to vote for one of two parties in this system, that makes them the default NotRepublican Party, which means that in addition to all of the self-consciously woke “progressives”, they have to get the votes of all the other people who are not leftist, including people who might otherwise be Republican if not for the Party’s current attitude.
The flip side of that is that while Democrats risk alienating people who could vote for them, the problem with the Republican approach is that there was a surprising number (as in, above zero) of black and Hispanic people who voted for Trump, and who share the generally conservative, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ethic that used to define conservatism. But “conservatism” is no longer defined by such ethics, or any ethics. As I’ve said, in the Republican Party, it no longer matters how anti-tax, anti-abortion, or pro-Israel you are. All that matters is if you can predict the color that Donald Trump says the sky will be today. And Donald Trump, by both temperament and cynicism, has chosen to divide the country rather than unite it, and in this he not only threatens to alienate white people who have those old conservative values more than they are alienated by the Democrat Left, he has already made it clear that people like Dr. Carson are anomalies in a party that has chosen to antagonize black and Hispanic people, which means that such people will become even more rare in the Republican Party, and such people who still had a place in it will leave.
The current position of the Republican Party on race is that much more critical given another bit of news from the last week. On July 30, The Atlantic had an article about a tape just released from the archives of the Nixon Library, where President Nixon had a phone conversation with Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California in 1971, discussing the United Nations vote to admit the People’s Republic of China, and Reagan referred to the African delegates, saying, “those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Which of course got a big laugh from Nixon.
Look: I liked Ronald Reagan. To some extent, I’m willing to say that I still do. But I wasn’t blind to the problems with his Administration or the Reagan Republican Party in general, so my reaction to this is “disappointed, but not surprised.” After all, Reagan had Lee Atwater as an advisor, and Atwater, as a plotter of the infamous “Southern Strategy” was that much worse. But in the Atlantic article, Tim Naftali, a historical expert who helped review the National Archives tapes and recommended their release, said: “This October 1971 exchange between current and future presidents is a reminder that other presidents have subscribed to the racist belief that Africans or African Americans are somehow inferior. The most novel aspect of President Donald Trump’s racist gibes isn’t that he said them, but that he said them in public.”
Just as the demographic of NotRepublicans intersects with but is not subsumed by the demographic for woke progressives “of color”, the demographic of NotDemocrats is not – or was not – synonymous with actual Klansmen and other white nationalists. Reagan and even Nixon knew this. Mr. and Mrs. America might have felt threatened by people who didn’t look like them, but they weren’t motivated by hate, and they weren’t on board with the other aspects of the racist movement, which is basically neo-fascist. I would dare say that Reagan’s comments are more consciously racist than Trump’s, since Trump is barely conscious of anything, but by the same token, Reagan was conscious enough not to base his appeal in racism. It was “Morning in America”, not “American Carnage.” Plus which, if you wonder why anyone liked Reagan, we were coming off a Carter Administration with double-digit inflation and interest rates, with both our economic and foreign policy in crisis. In fact, it makes me question the judgment of Trumpniks who act like Obama was the “worst president we’ve ever had” (especially since some of them voted for Obama once). The economy and foreign policy under Obama had problems, but not nearly so much as with Carter. Reagan could appeal to a large number of people who thought the country was on the wrong track, but those people weren’t just the white nationalists. And this also meant that however much people like Reagan and Atwater might have agreed with racists, they didn’t try to exclude the rest of the country, because they needed the rest of the country. Trump tries to exclude the rest of the country because the Republican strategy (not just under Trump) has been to cater to the people who come out and vote no matter what, and to find legal barriers to discourage votes in minority neighborhoods and demographics like young college students. Put another way: Whatever their feelings, Reagan and Nixon did not align with outright racists because it did not make political sense. Hell, in 1999, Donald Trump refused to endorse a Pat Buchanan presidential campaign, saying: “He’s a Hitler lover. I guess he’s an anti-Semite. He doesn’t like the blacks. He doesn’t like the gays. It’s just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy. And maybe he’ll get 4 or 5 percent of the vote and it’ll be a really staunch right wacko vote.”
And now Donald Trump, and the rest of the Republican Party, align with that vote because it does make political sense.
Two more points on the subject of Reagan: First, anyone who thinks Reagan is bad hasn’t read what Winston Churchill said about Mahatma Gandhi.
Second, we didn’t actually KNOW how racist Reagan was toward black people until Trump became president.
I’m just saying.
In any case, the racism of people who are long dead is not as consequential as the encouragement of racism in the here and now. This Saturday August 3, a 21-year old from Dallas shot up a Walmart in El Paso, killing (at this count) at least 20 people with at least 20 more hospitalized. The murderer, whom I am going to refer to as the Asshole in El Paso, was identified by authorities as the author of an anti-Hispanic essay online, and referred to the mass murder at a New Zealand mosque. And last Saturday, the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California was attacked by a shooter who left his own online statement asking people to read a book from 1896 called Might is Right, endorsing “Social Darwinism” and a pseudo-Nietzchean ethic.
And just this morning, (shortly after 1 am) another shooter attacked the nightclub district in Dayton, Ohio, killing nine (including his own sister) and wounding at least 27 before being shot down by police. We do not know if he had the same “alt-right” motives as the Gilroy shooter or the AIEP.
I am personally skeptical of how much gun laws can do to reduce these situations, especially since, as in the case of the Dayton shooter, investigations of the weapons used reveal that they were purchased legally. Guns don’t kill people. Psychotic assholes who want to kill people kill people, and guns are just the most efficient way to do so. We don’t need gun control as much as we need psychotic asshole control, and unless we develop precrime technology, I don’t see how that’s going to happen.
But that raises the question: What is creating all the psychotic assholes?
I took time out of my Sunday to see Bernie Sanders give a town hall meeting at Cheyenne High School in North Las Vegas. Now, I don’t agree with everything Bernie says. Or even most things. Like, in this event, he said that health care is a right (I don’t agree) and that the “health care industry” is not designed to provide all Americans with health care in a cost-efficient way, but is designed to maximize profits for the insurance and drug companies (which is a lot harder to argue with). But the reason I followed his campaign in 2016 and why I remain interested is that he, much more than Donald Trump, actually is a threat to business-as-usual politics in this country, and that includes the mindset that politics is a business. In that regard, one of the points Sanders made today is that not only does the Senate need to return to session to take up gun bills already passed by the House, the country needs to confront the influence of the NRA on American politics. To the extent that there is a public consensus for gun control – and there has been a movement since at least Sandy Hook – it is stymied entirely by a Republican Party which in this one case is that much more synonymous with a private lobby, and because the NRA is technically more a private industry lobby than a political action committee, its priorities are that much more commercial. But to boost the gun industry, the NRA has a similar emphasis to other conservative media: you are a beleaguered individual opposed by an entire political wing out to destroy your way of life, and the only way to deal with Those People is to have a gun.
This has little to do with the Second Amendment per se, especially since the NRA in Governor Reagan’s day actually supported gun control, at least as long as it involved the Black Panthers. As with the Republican Party’s effective embrace of white supremacy, it is a mutual dynamic of their audience turning to a more radical agenda and the institution responding by becoming more radical in order to bolster itself. Either way, the culture becomes more bigoted and violent because certain people want it to be more bigoted and violent, and they want this because they see a benefit to them that they did not see before.
So if you want to change the laws that allow these sorts of things to happen – or you know the laws don’t matter as much as changing the political culture that encourages these things to happen – then you know what to do.
And you know what day next year you need to do it.