Anomie, Anoma, Life Goes On Brah!

Glenn Greenwald has found another Pete Buttigieg position he likes.

Typically thoughtful answer from @PeteButtigieg to @ThePlumLineGS about white nationalism, the causes of it, and the solutions for it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/19/how-democrats-can-defeat-trump-his-ugly-ideas-according-pete-buttigieg/

I've used up my free access to Washington Post articles for this month, but Greenwald included screengrabs of some excerpts, highlighting the bits he approved.  Buttigieg said:

As we see dislocation and disruption in certain parts of the country, from rural areas to my home in the industrial Midwest, and in the economy, this leads to a kind of disorientation and loss of community and identity.  That void can be filled through constructive and positive things, like community involvement or family.  And it can be filled by destructive things, like white identity politics...

At another point:

I don't want this to slide into the idea that some of these racist behaviors can be excused because they can be connected to economic issues.  But I do think it's easier to fall into these forms of extremism when you don't know where your place is. 

There's this very basic human desire that historically has been supplied by the workplace. It's been based on the presumption of a lifelong relationship with a single employer.  This isn't just a blue-collar phenomenon.

This is, I think, another iteration of the "economic anxiety" argument that was mooted in the wake of Trump's victory in 2016.  Buttigieg's aware of that, and tries to hedge by rejecting "the idea that some of these ideas can be excused because they can be connected to economic issues," but that's a straw man. There may have been some who "excused" Trump voters by pointing to the stumbling US economy, but the usual motive was explanation, not excuse.  In very much the same way, pointing to worldwide Muslim anger over US foreign policy was not intended to excuse the 9/11 attacks, so critics of Bush's wars tended to try to forestall attacks by saying things like "I'm not one to blame America for everything that's wrong in the world."  It never worked, of course

So yeah, economic anxiety is probably a factor in some racism, and policy should attempt to provide a strong economy, not to prevent racism but because it's what people need and it's the job of those who run the country to give people what they need.  But I dislike Buttigieg's talk of not knowing where your place is.  I mean, my place?  Who decides what my place is?  At best this is a very clumsy way of putting it; at worst it's feudalism, which is also a "lifelong relationship with a single employer."  Capitalism, by contrast, has always regarded workers as disposable materials, except when organized workers were able to force their bosses to do otherwise; but that is the exception that proves the rule.

And what about racial minorities?   Buttigieg, who's a bright fellow, must know that economic insecurity and anxiety have been the norm for African-Americans and other non-whites in the US.  They have not been immune to the appeal of racist nationalism, but they have lacked the numbers and power to oppress the majority. But white supremacy has been endemic in this country since the first whites arrived four hundred years ago; economic downturns may aggravate it, but it never goes away.  I don't know how to get rid of it, or if that's even possible, but I think it will have to be targeted directly.

Perhaps, instead of alluding to highbrow literary totems like Finnegans Wake, Buttigieg should try reading something like Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields' Racecraft or even Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind: the latter work would inform him that the fear of losing status, no less than money, drives the well-to-do and highly educated no less than Joe Sixpack.  A tanking economy can exacerbate and inflame racism, but I think it's our human nature as social critters, rather than economic anxiety, that produces the us/them dichotomy of which racism is one form.

So, "thoughtful"?  No, and not "heterodox" either.  Buttigieg's remarks are straight outa the Washington Post or New York Times op-ed pages: they're the slogans someone repeats before thinking, as a prophylactic against thinking.  While some of his positions, such as his endorsement of US-imposed regime change in Venezuela, are hateful, some are I suppose arguable, though I'm not seeing much argument.  But they're all totally safe among American elites, and it baffles me that Glenn Greenwald is impressed by Buttigieg.  Read as many of the comments under this tweet as you can stand, for example.  I'm reminded of the way so many people went nuts over Barack Obama a decade ago, and that really worries me.

Kicking Away Tiny Tim's Crutch Because His Father Voted for Trump

Just last week I realized that it has been less than a year since Donald Trump became President.  It seems like so much longer.  And we have at least three years more to go.

Today Corey Robin, whom I've begun following lately, posted this on Facebook, referring to this tweet from Eric Alterman.  (Doug Henwood also noticed the tweet.)  I'm glad I'm not the only person who's noticed the behavior he's talking about:

I'm surprised when liberal writers and journalists say they're fine with Trump voters losing their jobs, health care, access to potable water, and so on, because they had it coming to them. Since jobs, health care, and clean water are critical to one's survival, such calls are essentially an endorsement of death on the installment plan for one-half the country. Imagine the reaction of these very same writers and journalists if the radical left were to call for—or endorse—the death of their domestic political enemies.

Or if the radical right were to do so.  Recently my Right Wing Acquaintance Number One gleefully linked to an article about child malnutrition in Venezuela, sneering at that country as a "worker's paradise."  Of course, those children had voted for Chavez and Maduro, so they had brought their misery on themselves.  A day or so later RWA1 linked to a story about Roy Moore's attack on the gay son of his victorious opponent Doug Jones; RWA1 declared that Moore, like the late Fred Phelps, was of Satan.  I commented that RWA1 needs people like Moore and Phelps so that he can pretend to be a moderate while he does a happy dance at the plight of starving brown children.  I might also have pointed out that child malnutrition is a serious problem in the United States, thanks to the policies of both parties over the past few decades; but I doubt RWA1 cares about that either, since those children probably voted for the "aspiring Mussolini" Barack Obama.

Robin's post sparked some discussion, with a few people actually defending Alterman's remarks.  Some denied that anyone besides him had expressed such sentiments; a couple doubted that he or any other liberal could actually mean such a thing.  That excuse could probably be made for many Trump voters, though.  Later in the thread Robin added:

This country has had a large anti-democratic element since its founding. If anything, I would say the size of that element is considerably smaller (and less violent) today than it was the year I was born. I also think comments like the one I posted are not symptoms of populism; they're symptoms of tribalism. Party tribalism, where your team is the good guys and the other team is the bad guys. Even tribalism is too fancy: it's just groupiness and cliques. That again is why you see a lot of heated rhetoric from this quarter but no action.

I was glad to see that he too has noticed the limitations of the word "tribalism."  This, as Henwood noted, is why liberals are so popular, and as one of Henwood's commenters remarked, it's how to win elections.

Unlike Corey Robin, I'm not all that surprised by Alterman's sentiment, since I've seen so much of it already -- just extremely pissed off. But it also makes me feel a bit more hopeless, because it means that the people who are supposedly, nominally, on my side are really not, which means that there may be hardly anyone to make common cause with. In the US at least. As a result, I get called a nihilist, which is funny but stupid - and also depressing since it comes from people who are nominally on my side. Well, you live and learn.

Faith Is the Substance of Things Hoped For

There's a good new article at Politico on how people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, who voted for Trump feel about him now.  The headline pretty much says it all: "Johnstown Never Believed Trump Would Help. They Love Him Anyway."

There's nothing surprising in the piece, but it's worth reviewing anyway.  The first thing I noticed was that the defenses his fans offer for Trump are exactly, word for word, the defenses Obama voters made for him.

“I think he’s doing a great job, and I just wish the hell they’d leave him alone and let him do it,” Schilling said. “He shouldn’t have to take any shit from anybody.”

And:

“Everybody I talk to,” [Del Signore] said, “realizes it’s not Trump who’s dragging his feet. Trump’s probably the most diligent, hardest-working president we’ve ever had in our lifetimes. It’s not like he sleeps in till noon and goes golfing every weekend, like the last president did.”

Reporter Michael Kruse speaks up:

I stopped him, informing him that, yes, Barack Obama liked to golf, but Trump in fact does golf a lot, too—more, in fact.

Del Signore was surprised to hear this.
“Does he?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
He did not linger on this topic, smiling and changing the subject with a quip. “If I was married to his wife,” Del Signore said, “I don’t think I’d go anywhere.”

He added: “Some of these things are like that thing he said to Billy, Billy Bob, Billy Bud”—searching, unsuccessfully, for the name Billy Bush—“on the bus, that comment he made.” Del Signore shrugged. “He’s a human male. I’m glad he wasn’t saying, ‘Hey, I like little boys.’ You know? So he’s not perfect.”

That's how you do it: when you're confronted with an inconvenient fact, make a joke, change the subject.  (Barack ended the wars!  No, he didn't.  He fixed the economy!  No, he didn't.  Well, those Republicans keep picking on his wife and kids.  And he got Bin Laden.  Sure, he's not perfect; sure, he's a bit of a disappointment.  But at least he's not Bush.)

“They always say they want to bring the steel mills back,” Frear said, “but they’re going to have to do a lot of work to bring the steel mills back.”

He hasn’t built the wall yet, either. “I don’t care about his wall,” said Frear, 76. “I mean, if he gets his wall—I don’t give a shit, you know? But he has a good idea: Keep ’em out.”

He also hasn’t repealed Obamacare. “That’s Congress,” she said.
And the drug scourge here continues unabated. “And it’s not going to improve for a long time,” she said, “until people learn, which they won’t.

“But I like him,” Frear reiterated. “Because he does what he says.”

As she has already admitted, Trump doesn't do what he says.  But she likes him, just as Obama's fans like him, and that's what matters.

Next to Bala was a gray-haired man who told me he voted for Trump and was happy so far because “he’s kept his promises.”

I asked which ones.

“Border security.” But there’s no wall yet. “No fault of his,” the man said.

What else? “Getting rid of Obamacare.” But he hasn’t. “Well, he’s tried to.”

What else? “Defunding Planned Parenthood.” But he didn’t. “Not his fault again,” the man said.

I asked for his name. “Bill K.,” he said. He wouldn’t give me his last name. “I don’t trust you,” he said.

As Kruse says, "They don’t mind his intemperate tweets. They don’t mind the specter of scandal, which they dismiss as trifling nonsense. They don’t mind his nuclear saber-rattling with North Korea, saying they feel safer under Trump than they did under Obama."

Of course they don't mind those scandals, if they were real -- which they claim not to believe, because of the Fake News, but I think they believe them and like them just fine.  The sexy stuff is okay because it proves he's what they consider a normal man, a real man, but the scandals are mostly about money, and a rich guy who cheats and lies and gouges to get ahead is fine with them, as long as they can believe he's on their side -- and they'll believe it no matter what.  Even his failure to come through on his promises is not so bad, because they have plenty of bad guys to blame, and their sense of grievance is stoked some more.  (We've seen the same pattern with Clinton apologists for the past year: it's not her fault, it's the Russians, it's the she-devil Sarandon, it's Bernie Sanders the rootless cosmopolitan, it's the sexist Bernie Bros, it's traitors stabbing her in the back just to make a buck.)

So many people in so many other areas of the country watch with dismay and existential alarm Trump’s Twitter hijinks, his petty feuds, his penchant for butting into areas where the president has no explicit, policy-relevant role. All of that only animates his supporters here. For them, Trump is their megaphone. He is the scriptwriter. He is a singularly effective, intuitive creator of a limitless loop of grievance and discontent that keeps them in absolute lockstep.

That counts for even more.  Trump speaks for them, especially at his most obnoxious.  When liberals are outraged by his antics, his fans are delighted, not just because he said what he said, but because he made the Politically Correct liberal snowflakes mad.  Just as liberals got all excited when Obama did a little strutting and posturing on the campaign trail, or when some Democratic pol or pundit says something that shuts down the GOP, eviscerates them, schools them; when the Stupid Rethugs are angered and offended by hearing The Truth.  It's why they crow with joy over homophobic anti-Trump jokes; jokes about the size of his hands and the supposedly corresponding tiny wee-wee; jokes about cheese and orange and bad hair and how mentally ill he is.  If Obama was mostly more subdued, his fans put that down to how classy he was, but secretly they wish he had gone on Twitter and put the Rethugs in their place.  If he had, they'd be as thrilled as Trump fans are when Trump says something naughty, something provocative, something a schoolteacher would paddle him for saying in fourth grade.

I know that feeling too, and I'm not immune to it.  What disturbs me, as I've said before, is not so much the transgressive "humor" as that neither side has anything better to offer after they've let off steam.  And that won't help anyone or fix anything.  So, for example, it was educational -- I was totally schooled -- to read the comments under one of Marcy Wheeler's tweets yesterday.

Observation: A year ago most Dems swore all massive leaks from unknown sourcing were bad.

Care to reconsider in light of Paradise Papers?

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) November 6, 2017

Though she went on to clarify, "Do think there is difference bt ICIJ & WL. Not clear there is between ICIJ & Intercept. But people should have some basis for distinguishing", many of her commenters ignored it and attacked Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, confused the Paradise Papers with the Panama Papers, and generally dodged her request for a workable distinction between good leaks and bad leaks.  They also quibbled over how many Democrats had objected to Snowden, often claiming that Wheeler had said "all" instead of "most" Democrats.  (I don't know about even "most" Democrats, but I do know that both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton condemned Snowden, mostly dishonestly.)  And so on: these steely-eyed, reality-based types, probably well-educated and well-informed compared to the average American, could not grasp a simple question because it might have required them to engage in some self-examination.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose tweet led me to Kruse's article, remarked "Re: Trump and economic insecurity..."  I admit, I'm not sure what he meant by that.  It's true that Kruse found a fair amount of open racism among the Jonestown Trump voters he talked to.

Schilling looked at her husband, Dave McCabe, who’s 67 and a retired high school basketball coach. She nodded at me. “Tell him,” she said to McCabe, “what you said the NFL is …”

McCabe looked momentarily wary. He laughed a little. “I don’t remember saying that,” he said unconvincingly.

Schilling was having none of it. “You’re the one that told me, liar,” she said.

She looked at me.

The NFL?

“Niggers for life,” Schilling said.

“For life,” McCabe added.

That's just about exactly as funny as a joke about Mike Pence "taking a knee" for Donald Trump.  (What's funnier is Maggie Frear, who told Kruse, "if I was the boss of these teams, I would tell ’em, ‘You get your asses out there and you play, or you’re not here anymore.’ They’re paying their salaries, for God’s sake."  Those NFL players are not supposed to be playing when they're taking a knee, nor does Frear want them to: she wants them to genuflect properly to the holy flag, which has nothing I can see to do with playing the game.  Del Signore, whose remarks follow Frears', has equally irrelevant complaints.)

But here's the thing: Kruse also details the extent of "economic insecurity" around Jonestown, which is felt by the Trump voters he talked to.  Unemployment, for example, is relatively low, but still higher than the national average.  The heroin crisis is in full swing too, with 94 overdose deaths last year in the county.  Significantly, given many whites' complaints about entitled, lazy blacks,

Some of the later-in-life blue-collar workers who are still here can be loath to learn new trades. “We’ve heard when working with some of the miners that they are reluctant because they’re very accustomed to the mining industry,” said Linda Thomson, the president of JARI, a nonprofit economic development agency in Johnstown that provides precisely the kind of retraining, supported by a combination of private, state and federal funding, that could prepare somebody for a job in [Bill] Polacek’s [manufacturing] plant. “They really do want to go back into the mines. So we’ve seen resistance to some retraining.”

Bill Polacek, the manufacturer mentioned in that paragraph, told Kruse,

“Right now, if I could find 150 people, I’d put them to work,” ... He needs machinists. He needs welders. “But it’s hard to find people,” he said—people with the requisite skills, people who can pass a drug test.

“We just don’t have the workforce,” said Liston, the city manager. “If they are employable, and have a skill set, basically they already moved out of the area.”

I don't think I quite believe Polacek here: his complaints are typical for employers trying to excuse their failure to provide jobs, but in context his excuses seem reasonable enough.  So yes, racism and economic insecurity are in the mix.  I'm not sure how liberal/left homophobia relates to economic insecurity; maybe its apologists would like to make a case.  I don't think it's that hard to condemn the racism while trying to do something about the economy, but as Polacek indicates, it's not as simple as one could wish to fix the economy.  Trump has no interest in doing it, but neither did Obama or Clinton, except for themselves and their wealthy donors and cronies.  Just like the Trump voters, Democratic apologists were full of excuses and distractions, not to mention mere misrepresentation of Obama's record -- when they didn't just shoot themselves in the foot by touting record corporate profits and stock prices as evidence of Obama's economic greatness.  So it's not exactly surprising that even many working- and middle-class whites who'd voted for Obama decided they wanted a change; their self-deception is not greater than that of Democrats.

It's the Stupidity, Stupid!

Mehdi Hasan points to some important information and makes a good argument in this article at The Intercept.  The title sums up his claim: Trump voters were motivated more by racism than by the economy.  He's critical of Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and especially Bernie Sanders who've claimed the contrary.

His colleagues Glenn Greenwald and Lee Fang are somewhat skeptical, and Greenwald says that "there's a lot of debate - generally & at the Intercept - about this argument."  That's as it should be, but I think that even if Hasan is right about everything he says, he's accepting and fostering a confusion of issues that is all too common in American politics.

Here's an example from the article:

Both Sanders and Warren seem much keener to lay the blame at the door of the dysfunctional Democratic Party and an ailing economy than at the feet of racist Republican voters. Their deflection isn’t surprising. Nor is their coddling of those who happily embraced an openly xenophobic candidate. Look, I get it. It’s difficult to accept that millions of your fellow citizens harbor what political scientists have identified as “racial resentment.” The reluctance to acknowledge that bigotry, and tolerance of bigotry, is still so widespread in society is understandable. From an electoral perspective too, why would senior members of the Democratic leadership want to alienate millions of voters by dismissing them as racist bigots?

Sanders and Warren might disagree with me, but I don't see a problem here.  I think Sanders was constructing a false dichotomy, but then so is Hasan.  I have no difficulty accepting (if that's the word -- "acknowledging" is more like it) that millions of my fellow citizens are racist, but I don't think it's limited to Trump voters; many Democrats are also racist, and Democratic presidential candidates routinely pander to their racism.  I'm not surprised by Sanders's trying to downplay American racism, since like many Socialists he's always been weak on issues other than the US economy anyway.

It's important to point out, as Hasan does, that much of Trump's base wasn't suffering economically anyway:

Look, if you still believe that Trump’s appeal was rooted in economic, and not racial, anxiety, ask yourself the following questions: Why did a majority of Americans earning less than $50,000 a year vote for Clinton, not Trump, according to the exit polls? Why, in the key Rust Belt swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, did most voters who cited the economy as “the most important issue facing the country” opt for Hillary over the Donald? And why didn’t black or Latino working class voters flock to Trump with the same fervor as white working class voters? Or does their economic insecurity not count?

This reminds me that when Rush Limbaugh first became nationally famous at the end of the 1980s, he and his critics tried to cast him as the voice of disaffected blue-collar American whites, though his audience had an average income of $53,000 (which was worth considerably more then than it is now).  That was no surprise any more than Trump's fans should be now.  Much of the really toxic American Right is at least middle-class and college-educated, like Limbaugh himself, which is another reason to harbor skepticism about the efficacy of a college education.

According to Philip Klinkner, a political scientist whose research is Hasan's main source,

the best way to identify a Trump supporter in the U.S. was to ask “just one simple question: is Barack Obama a Muslim?” Because, he said, “if they are white and the answer is yes, 89 percent of the time that person will have a higher opinion of Trump than Clinton.” This is economic anxiety? Really?

No, claiming that Obama is a Muslim does not equal "economic anxiety," and I'm not sure anyone has actually said it does.  But it's not necessary to confuse these things.  (Especially if, as Hasan claims, voters who expressed concern about the economy, whether or not they were racist, voted Democratic anyway.)  Denying that racists are racists is a popular tactic, of course, and it's alarming when liberals and leftists try to use it.  I have friends on Facebook who are Trump supporters and racists; I challenge and criticize them on both matters as I see fit.  It doesn't seem that any of them are suffering much economically, and most of them are dependent on the Big Government Teat, but it's typical of the Right to poor-mouth themselves.

Ironically, though, many Trump-haters are just fine with thinking of his fans as low-rent white trash, often shading into overt racist stereotyping and imagery, and I find myself challenging them as often as I do the Trump fans.  It's not necessary to confuse racism and economic anxiety, but it sure is fun. This comment, for example, was posted on Facebook today under a post by a source one of my liberal friends relies on:

No one ever believed Trump...we know why the ones who voted for him did...Now they are at home looking at the news...chewing tobacco..drinking moonshine...rubbing their cousins ass....safe and sound...the wealthy ones waiting on the check to clear safe and sound...but people lives were taken...no human no matter what status you are life is more valuable than the next...He started with lies he will end because of lies...America is alot more fun...when we aren't divided by race so in the words of a great man......Fuck Trump

Democratic elites are also "waiting on the check to clear safe and sound," but it wouldn't do to remember that.

So, to repeat myself, toothless, cousin-marrying losers need to be able to find jobs and support their families.  They need a roof over their heads. They need health care to fix their bad teeth and good public schools to educate their children.  To say so is not to minimize their racism or other unseemly traits, any more than good economic policy justifies poor blacks' frequent criminality and bad beliefs.  Nor is it to recommend, as the New York Times did recently, that the Democratic Party should reach out to working class whites by pandering to their racism instead of ameliorating their economic plight.  Middle class and wealthy whites also have bad beliefs and are frequently criminal, but they aren't held accountable as poor whites and blacks are.  We have to distinguish between poor whites' racism and their economic and political rights, just as we do between poor blacks' misbehavior and their economic and political rights.  Empathy doesn't entail uncritical approval, just as you can vote for a corrupt neoliberal as the lesser evil while criticizing her relentlessly.  Martin Luther King Jr. knew this, as did black radicals of the late 1960s; if today's white liberals don't know it, and it seems they don't, then they are not part of the solution but part of the problem.

It's possible in principle, and I hope in practice, to push for good economic policy without pandering to white racism or other forms of bigotry.  As I indicated, we shouldn't justify good economic policy by claiming that it will eradicate bigotry.  It won't, but I'm not sure what will.  Without reliable employment, health care, education, and infrastructure, though, the country (and the world) will continue our agonizing slow downhill slide into immiseration; in which case people's energy to fight for a better world will be diffused into so many areas that they'll become hopeless.  Which, of course, is just what the rulers want.

Racism As We Know It Today

It was always safe to predict that when a Republican became President, Democrats and Republicans would switch places again.  Policies and actions that Democrats had denounced under Bush became not only acceptable but proof of Obama's greatness when he adopted them; now they will once more be proof of Republican evil.  What does feel a little odd to me -- once again I find I'm less cynical and more naive than I thought -- is watching so many liberal Democrats adopt Tea-Party-style paranoid conspiracy theories and McCarthyite red-baiting at such a peak of intensity, acting exactly as they warned Trump supporters would act if their candidate wasn't elected.

Since Election Day, Democratic stalwarts have exploded with rage at the white trash who voted for Trump, having honed their rhetoric while raging at their British counterparts who voted for Brexit a few months earlier.  Some liberal and especially left writers have pointed out just how badly off the working class, white and black, is nowadays thanks to the economic policies embraced by both parties.  Somewhere along the line the phrase "economic anxiety" caught on, and Democratic apologists jumped on it.

Yes, You're Racist, on Twitter, was perhaps the funniest, and also the most symptomatic.  He retweeted the following material, by an Igbo writer now resident in the US:

To be fair, he did not retweet Ms. Mbakwe's next post, which is an important addition to her thought:

See how selective quotation can skew a writer's intent?  (Shirley Sherrod would empathize, I bet.)  I think Ms. Mbakwe is mistaken here, though, because each group "is given the benefit of the doubt" by many Americans and "demonized" by others.  She's also mistaken in assuming that recognizing the grievances of a group equals either giving them the benefit of the doubt or justifying their bad behavior.  I recognize the grievances of elite Democrats, for instance, but I don't give them the benefit of the doubt or justify their bad behavior.

Since the 60s, at least, Democrats have never been very interested in the white working poor, except as punching bags.  (Republicans have mainly seen them as a hornets' nest of resentment they could exploit for votes, but they didn't care about their welfare any more than the Dems did.)  Democratic politicians' preference for "middle class" rather than "working class" was no accident; Bernie Sanders broke with that pattern, and now that I think of it, I'm surprised that his supporters didn't seem to realize who he was talking about.

It's especially ironic for Yes, You're Racist (henceforth YYR) to post Ms. Mbakwe's remarks, because he himself happily extends empathy to one group while demonizing the other.  "A riot is the language of the unheard," he replied to a tweet by a presumably white apologist for racism a couple of months ago, though it's certain that he would never say such a thing about riots by whites, and this remark goes beyond "extending empathy" -- it sounds like an endorsement.  But it's okay to be thoughtless if you're on the right side.

Anyone who knows anything about the history of American racism knows that white elites have often used racism to divide working-class and poor whites from working-class and poor blacks.  It's virtually a cliche.  Contrary to Robert Reich's optimistic declaration in that 2014 post that the strategy was "starting to backfire," it worked very well for Donald Trump.

So let's leave empathy out of it.  (I haven't read Paul Bloom's Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion [Ecco, 2016] yet -- should I?)  It's a valuable human capacity, but it's not the only one we have.  Just as Michael Neumann criticized "respect" (via), if empathy means not killing or starving people, fine -- but you shouldn't do those things even to people you don't empathize with.  American liberals are perfectly willing, indeed happy, to kill and starve people they disapprove of (or even, as in the case of Middle Eastern civilians, people who are too far away to be noticed).  It's easy to empathize with people who've been cast as worthily pitiful by a good propaganda campaign, as I've seen with the concern for Syrian children; and easy to ignore those who haven't: show liberals a picture of a starving Yemeni child, whose plight President Obama has worked hard to worsen, and they won't remember it five minutes later.

In the case of the white working class and working poor, many white liberals have gone beyond merely switching off their empathy into explicit punitive fantasies.  It has been pointed out that racism is too simple an explanation for Trump's election, that working class whites voted for Obama but not for Clinton, but leave that aside.  It doesn't matter.  Even if all those who voted for Trump or simply didn't betake themselves to the polls to vote for Clinton were racist, it remains true that bipartisan domestic policy of the past several decades has hurt working people of all colors and both sexes.  Since both Republican and Democratic elites have continued their destructive policies while knowing full well the effect they had, they can't claim they were unaware of their effects or that they deeply cared (empathized?) with the people they were hurting; they just cared more about the wealthy, and they empathize deeply with them.

Our society and our government owe to all citizens the resources to earn a living, to support themselves and their families, even if many of those citizens are bad people.  Many of them are.  I've noticed before how liberals tend to flounder when white racists justify racism by pointing out that poor black people often break the law, live improvidently, try to anesthetize themselves with drugs and alcohol, and engage in violence against each other.  Of course, poor white people do exactly the same thing, and they serve the same function for white liberals.  There's a heroin epidemic right now in the Midwest which affects whites no less than blacks, and the stereotypical meth user in liberal discourse was a poor white person; rather than stimulate empathy, this stereotype was used to justify contempt for poor whites, who were obviously just a bunch of toothless, cousin-marrying losers, not worth bothering about.  Memes featuring obese, badly dressed white people shopping at Walmart are a staple of white liberal Facebook pages, and they were invoked on the Internet well before memes became a thing.

Toothless, cousin-marrying losers need to be able to find jobs and support their families.  They need a roof over their heads. They need health care to fix their bad teeth and good public schools to educate their children.  To say so is not to minimize their racism or other unseemly traits, any more than good economic policy justifies poor blacks' frequent criminality and bad beliefs.  Nor is it to recommend, as the New York Times did recently, that the Democratic Party should reach out to working class whites by pandering to their racism instead of ameliorating their economic plight.  Middle class and wealthy whites also have bad beliefs and are frequently criminal, but they aren't held accountable as poor whites and blacks are.  We have to distinguish between poor whites' racism and their economic and political rights, just as we do between poor blacks' misbehavior and their economic and political rights.  Empathy doesn't entail uncritical approval, just as you can vote for a corrupt neoliberal as the lesser evil while criticizing her relentlessly.  Martin Luther King Jr. knew this, as did black radicals of the late 1960s; if today's white liberals don't know it, and it seems they don't, then they are not part of the solution but part of the problem.

It has already been largely forgotten that Trump's political success, like that of the Tea Party before him, signified a revolt against the Republican Party establishment.  Everyone who mattered expected Jeb Bush or someone like him to be the GOP presidential nominee.  Republican elites were as horrified by the trash who were supporting Trump as Democratic elites were.   The corporate media tried hard to establish an equivalence (see item 5) between Trump's supporters and Bernie Sanders's, and that was correct in that both appealed to people who didn't want to vote for another entitled rich person who was comfortable with the current economic and political situation in the world.  Discontent with the status quo is considered unforgivable by those who are satisfied with it.  It looks like a safe bet that Trump will disappoint those who voted for him in the hope that he would break with economic business as usual, as he packs his Cabinet and administration with corporate hacks -- just as Obama did before him, and as Clinton would have done had she been elected.  If that plays out as I expect, I'll feel Schadenfreude as much as any Democrat, but I'll also know that it means things are just going to keep getting worse.  Who will come along in 2020 or 2024 to capitalize on people's disappointment with Trump?