I have to say, for the first time in my life, I feel shame at being an American. I could understand how half of America could support someone like George W. Bush, and I could better understand how half of America could support someone like Mitt Romney, but I cannot, for the life of me, understand how half of American can support someone like Trump. Are we so benighted? so puerile? that we cannot see him for what he announces himself to be? Although I believe, and many others believe, this elections should be about the economics of state, more and more and more it appears to be about something else entirely -- a referendum on race and ethnicity. A good deal of time an effort has been expended on trying, as Zack Beauchamp recently pointed out in Vox, that "The conventional wisdom is that the economic losses suffered by working-class people throughout the developed world explain the rise of [Donald Trump and] this new right. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are estimated to have been lost due to free trade pacts in recent decades, with industries like manufacturing absorbing much of the pain." A good deal of vituperation has been leveled at the "elites" of both parties, my own included, but the economic order they brought into being and helped to perpetuate contributes to the malaise, but is not the culprit -- race and our resentments around race explain it much better.
We have had a national holocaust museum for some time, and on our last visit to Washington, Lora and I visited it. It was a profoundly moving experience -- particularly looking on the pile of shoes taken from the victims, some of them children's shoes not unlike our granddaughter's shoes -- it was, however, an experience tinged with sanctimony. At the time, looking on, I could believe "never here." I could believe the American people were "special" and would not fall victim to our own hatreds, but the Trump campaign, more than anything else, has disabused me of that wildly idealist picture of America. Our own national museum for the holocaust sees fit to have on its home page, the film "Anti-Semitism Today" and we have Samantha Power (US Ambassador to the United Nations) reminding us that "it would be a grave mistake to view antisemitism as something that merely affects the Jewish people. Antisemitism is a form of discrimination against citizens that affects all of us. You do see antisemitism correlating with an intolerance generally. That is fundamentally going to constitute a threat to the kind of discourse and tolerance that are the bedrock of our democracies." One need only peruse the web sites of the far right, or the comment section of Breitbart, or the tweets and re-tweets of the Trump campaign, and it becomes clear enough that a more "traditional" anti-semitism has joined hands with an anti-muslim and an anti-immigrant sentiment to produce the likes of Trump.
Yesterday, president Obama dedicated America's first national museum for black history. It is, perhaps, telling that the holocaust museum came before the national museum for black history, but one can say better late than never. The photographs of the jews in concentration camps still has the power to shock today, and the conflict with the nazi's of Germany is still a living memory, though it persists among an ever diminishing score of increasingly elderly veterans, but the horrors of our own slave trade and the civil war that ended it are now over a century and a half in the past, and there are very few photographs to commemorate its horrors. Perhaps the museum will help begin to heal our deepest national wound, perhaps not, but it is instructive to read the full text of Obama's dedication. It's moving and erudite, and reminds me how much I will miss his voice. At one point he tells us, the museum and our national history "reaffirm that all of us are America ― that African-American history is not somehow separate from our larger American story, it’s not the underside of the American story, it is central to the American story. That our glory derives not just from our most obvious triumphs, but how we’ve wrested triumph from tragedy, and how we’ve been able to remake ourselves, again and again and again, in accordance with our highest ideals." After, one suspects, a pause for emphasis, he adds, "I, too, am American." It seems to diminish the statement, but I'm sure Obama was cognizant that it would be heard against the backdrop of the so-called "birther" campaign perpetuated by Trump, the reminder that African-Americans did not begin as full citizens of this nation, and that, even after 150 years of halting progress and the election of our first black president, we must doubt that president's citizenship, as though he were carried over on a slave ship from Kenya.
The day Obama was elected Lora and I were proud of my country. We kept the front page of the Chicago Tribune as something to show our granddaughter. Though she was too young to fully appreciate its significance, and it has long since faded from her memory, to remind her that she was alive and witnessed that day. We were that proud, on that day, before the relentless and conspiratorial assault to "take back the country" began, before the abject middle-school puerility of this election cycle with its talk of penis size and how "hot" the respective wives were, before the threats to "the kind of discourse and tolerance that are the bedrock of our democracy," before we seemed to abandon "our highest ideals." One expects a measure of petty bickering in a campaign, ascendency by "gotcha," but this campaign sets a new low, at least within my living memory. Both Lora and I are military veterans, but I will let Roger Angell speak for us. He endorses Hillary Clinton, and recites the familiar litany of Trump's malignant statements, but pauses and says 'I stick at a different moment—the lighthearted comment he made when, in early August, an admiring veteran presented him with a replica of his Purple Heart and Mr. Trump said, 'I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.'” Like Angell, neither Lora nor I saw combat, though we came close on a couple of occasions through out combined 25 years of service, but I share Angell's incredulousness. "What?" he asks, "Mr. Trump is saying he wishes that he had joined the armed forces somehow ... and then had died or been scarred or maimed in combat?" Perhaps he didn't know what the purple heart represented and thought it represented an award to servicemen for successful battle against STDs. Regardless, whether ignorance or narcissistic indifference, "it impugns the five hundred thousand young Americans who have died in combat in my lifetime, and the many hundreds of thousands more whose lives were altered or shattered by their wounds of war." The only acceptable response, and the response I would have given, is this: "I am not deserving of this award."
Neither is Trump remotely deserving of the presidency. While one would like to blame his rise on economic factors, "a vast universe of academic research" as Beauchamp points out, "finds that, contrary to what you’d expect, the "losers of globalization" aren’t the ones voting for the likes of Trump and elsewhere. What unites far-right politicians and their supporters, on both sides of the Atlantic, is a set of regressive attitudes toward difference. Racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia — and not economic anxiety — are their calling cards." Unfortunately, recent events here have exacerbated the racial divide. We are all aware of the events surrounding the killing of Keith Lamont Scott. His death follows the killing of several other armed and unarmed black men, none of whom seemed to be a direct threat to the police who shot them, at least one of whom was shot while physically restrained, face down, on the ground. As I write this, we are into the seventh day of protests in Charlotte, and like many Americans, I am conflicted. As the Huffington Post reported, benignly, "Protesters rallied outside a Carolina Panthers game in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Sunday, marking the sixth straight day of demonstrations." Although police were present in riot gear, for the most part the protests were peaceful, and "some football fans expressed solidarity with protesters, while others jeered and seemed to intentionally bump into them on their way to the stadium. Lance Tzlaff, a Vikings fan from Minnesota, said he had no issues with protests as long as they didn’t involve destructive activity. 'They can do whatever they want as long as you don’t interfere with others' he said. Bryan Chacka, another Vikings fan from Minnesota, agreed and said protests lose their power if they turn violent. 'They go fuck shit up and they lose their case. You lose the power behind the movement,' he said." How can one disagree when "at least one person died in a related shooting, and several officers and residents were injured?" How can one disagree when "several stores in downtown Charlotte were vandalized, prompting Gov. Pat McCrory (R) to declare a state of emergency and the mayor to declare a curfew on Friday?" Of course, it's easy enough to think "they go fuck shit up" when one is not subjected to the daily bumps and indignities of systemic racial disparities. When they begin breaking glass and targeting police, when they lose the aura of "civil disobedience" and become actual threats to community, such protests cannot help but seem self-defeating and self-destructive. It justifies calling forth the police in riot gear to defend, as one protester put it, "a system that was created for white men by white men," or as our presidential candidate calls it, "law and order."
Racial profiling itself is real, and the fear, the resentment and the rage born of racial disparities in the justice system are also real. For the police, the fear makes any black man a threat to their safety and the resentment and rage makes them a pre-emptive target for violence. Conversely, for the black community, instead of being there to protect and serve, the police themselves become at best a source of harassment, at worst an oppressor, but in either case a threat to their safety and well being. The daily bumps and indignities turns resentment into rage, turns the "protector" into a pre-emptive target for that rage. As another protestor put it,"it’s a thing ― and just because others haven’t experienced it doesn’t mean it’s not real. We live it every day, so it needs to stop. No lives will matter until black lives matter, too.” Racial profiling will do nothing to stop the violence, and yet, we have a presidential candidate calling again for the very embodiment of racial profiling, the very embodiment of racially motivated policing, stop and frisk. The New York Post suggests that "the hyperventilating about Trump’s comment still says a lot more about his critics than him," though just what I'm not sure, given his tendency to racially motivated bombast. There are perhaps good reasons to be concerned about stop and frisk, not least the effects on policing itself. If we're honest with ourselves, stop and frisk is not a policing technique that we are advocating for ourselves, and let's be especially honest, the white community would be outraged if police suddenly started doing random traffic stops for no apparent reason, ordered them out of their vehicles and began searching their persons invasively. It's a technique that we're advocating for "them," those who live in poor and mostly non-white communities -- those who live in neighborhoods characterized as a place where "you get shot walking down the street." As Jesse Singal reports, however, "for years, civil-rights and community advocates had complained that stop-and-frisk had effectively turned some neighborhoods — usually poor and nonwhite ones — into occupied territories rife with unnecessary, tense interactions between neighborhood residents and the police." While the increased presence of police in declining neighborhoods can be helpful, as Singal goes on to point out, "if the neighborhood’s residents are scarred from their stop-and-frisk experiences, are they going to welcome an incoming wave of police who look just like the police who were hassling people for peaceful stoop-drinking not too long ago, who made getting to the bodega and back unmolested a roll of the dice? There’s a reason smart, progressive crime and policing experts often talk about the importance of trust, of building bonds with the community being policed. People don’t want to live in high-crime neighborhoods. They want to help. But it makes it harder for them when they feel like their own dignity or safety is being threatened by the very people there to protect them."
And so we have the black-live-matter protests, and so too we have the very predictable backlash. While the Huffington Post among others report and decry the police violence, Breitbart News reports "at least one Black Lives Matter protester in Houston was reported to yell 'F**k blue lives' while others chanted 'Pig, pig, bang, bang.'" It is perhaps not surprising that police too feel themselves under siege. The Huffington Post showed at least one protester, holding up a sign reading "it ain't a crime to be armed," and he was in fact openly carrying a side arm, while in the background another protester sported a t-shirt emblazoned with "fuck the police." Such will do little to win over the hearts and minds of the typical "deplorable," those who exist in the echo chambers of their own bigotry, but then why is it the responsibility of the black minority to "win over" the worst exemplars of the white majority? Openly or implicitly threatening gun violence, likewise, reinforces the already acrid sense of threat, and will bring a predictable response, more police violence against the black community, armed or unarmed. Unlike the white majority's possession of guns, THEIR possession of guns, is a problem. The white majority defends the right to "self-defense." Against thieves. Against thugs. Against rapists. Although there is a radical fringe of the white majority who see the police as a threat -- the federal police, not their local sheriff -- most of the white majority would find it inconceivable that one needed a weapon for self-protection against both the criminals, who have guns, and the police, who have guns. In the black community, the prevalence of guns ARE a problem. Eric Konigsberg of New York Magazine ran a story about "Brownsville, murder capital of New York City" where he pointed out the stop and frisk encounters between citizens and police were intended "most urgently meant to get guns off the streets." Nevertheless, it was not a particularly effective tactic. "In the more than 50,000 stops since 2006, the police recovered 25 guns," surely a small percentage of the guns floating around Brownsville. Nevertheless, we live in a country where indeed "it ain't a crime to be armed," We live in a country where the Breitbart readers who are most alarmed at the implicit violence of anti-police rhetoric are the same Breitbart readers who most vehemently defend unlimited gun rights. Missing the point that police are supposed to bring living souls to justice, missing the point that police aren't really supposed to shoot anyone, criminal or not, one Breitbart reader suggested "criminals shoot innocent people, cops aren't supposed to. Some of the dead blacks were criminals, some weren't. Everyone should want the police to stop shooting innocent people." Another immediately responded, "shoot 'em all and let God sort them out." We live in a country where the innocent are "collateral damage" are caught in the crossfire between the presumptively guilty.
So again, I would like this election to be about economics, and there is good reason to be hopeful about the state of the economy. Patricia Cohen headlines a story "millions in U.S. Climb Out of Poverty, at long last," and goes on to write "Poverty declined among every group. But African-Americans and Hispanics — who account for more than 45 percent of those below the poverty line of $24,300 for a family of four in most states — experienced the largest improvement." Why? "Government programs — like Social Security, the earned-income tax credit and food stamps — have kept tens of millions from sinking into poverty year after year. But a main driver behind the impressive 1.2 percentage point decline in the poverty rate, the largest annual drop since 1999, was that the economy finally hit a tipping point after years of steady, if lukewarm, improvement." Although we might wish that african-americans had less than a 24.1 percent poverty rate and the hispanic-americans had less than a 21.4 percent poverty rate -- both in excess of the 13.5 percent overall rate -- it nevertheless brings into questions that our black communities are in the "worst shape ever, ever, ever." Better incremental progress than no progress. It also brings into question that a majority of blacks live in crime-ridden, drug-addled, welfare-dependent squalor when 75.9 percent are above the poverty line, some considerably above if Ben Carson is an exemplar. Still, many WANT to believe and consequently WILL believe that nearly all blacks live in chaos, and why? In part, no doubt, because it re-enforces a sense of white paternalism. In its benign form, of course, it justifies those "government programs" that help shield people from the worst effects of poverty, but in its less benign forms it justifies the oppressive measures that are signaled by language like "law and order." In its less benign forms it leads someone like Cliven Bundy, to pontificate on video,
I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do. And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.
And so, in the mind of Cliven Bundy and many others like him, there were two great mistakes in our history of race. The first was the civil war and the emancipation of the slaves, the second was civil rights and great society legislation. There are critiques one could level at the "great society" imagined by Johnson, not least the moral hazard associated with welfare dependency, but it takes a hugely benighted view of American history to think that slaves had "a family life" and were happily "doing things" like picking cotton or that "government subsidy" is somehow worse. I doubt that Cliven or his acolytes will ever set foot in the new national museum for black history -- in part because he would see it, I'm certain, as just more "government propaganda" -- for those less provincial, however, maybe-possibly-perhaps, the new museum will help minimize the number of those holding such malignant misconceptions.
If we really want to appreciate rise of Trump, however, we need to look past the tax plan or the bluster on trade. It doesn't hurt him, and some pundits felt that his strongest forays in the first debate against Clinton were his rants on trade agreements, but even more "we need to appreciate the role of resentment: the feeling of injustice on the part of a privileged portion of society when it sees power slipping into the hands of a group that hadn't previously held it ... a change in the legal and political status of majority and minority ethnic groups." Indeed, one might even argue that his rants on trade were an expression of resentment, the sense of lost national power, in the form of jobs, slipping into the hand of the Mexicans and the Chinese -- a sense reinforced by the legal and political status of the trade agreements. Trump's apocalyptic view of American decline is predicated on resentment through and through -- resentment of the "political hacks," but mostly resentment of the changing political status of minority populations. If Obama had simply moved in next door, there still remains the possibility of white flight, because, as someone I love put it, blacks are "like locusts. They move in and destroy neighborhoods." There will be no shaking this belief, in part because she witnessed it in Detroit as she grew up. Obama, however, moved into the White House, and there's no moving away from that, and no reason for many to believe that he isn't doing for the nation what blacks have done for the neighborhoods of America. Beauchamp suggests that "members of dominant groups simply believe they deserve to be the dominant force in their societies, and resent those challenging their positions at the top of the pyramid." He cites the academic, Roger D. Peterson, who suggested that "any group that’s been dominant — well, it’s not that easy for them not to be dominant anymore." Far from ushering in a "post-racial era," as some of us had so naively hoped for his election, he simply gave a face to the resentment already simmering throughout America -- he exemplified in the most amplified way possible the changing political status of minority populations and the felt sense of improbability and injustice that accompanied it.
And so, round we go round we go round, with no apparent way to break the vicious circle. We are an armed camp of resentment, and if anything will bring this nation to its destruction, it will be our inability to move past the civil war and break the cycle of resentment.
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