This Is Not Eight Years Ago

Eight years ago, I published what I considered to be a stirring post-election manifesto.  Partly it critiqued racism and sexism.  A chunk of urged readers  to support those who face bigger obstacles than straight, white, middle class men like myself.  Mostly it was a rallying cry about how to move forward in the face of Donald Trump’s victory.

But early on, the piece also alluded to a 2,500 word screed I’d decided not to publish.  That one was way more critical.  Specifically, I lambasted white people: middle class liberals and Trump voters.  Both barrels blazing.  But I did not publish it because I thought it might be a bit too harsh.

Eight years ago, we didn’t know what to expect, so I didn’t want to lay it on too thick.  Now we know exactly what to expect.  Eight years ago, Donald Trump was inexperienced and probably intimidated by the presidency, so he agreed to keep people around him whose purpose was to restrain him.  And to some degree they did.  This time he will face no constraints.  Eight years ago, Democrats were able to hold up large parts of Trump’s agenda.  But with the GOP about to control both houses of Congress, the only tool the Democrats will have is a Senate filibuster, and Trump will get more of what he wants, as will Republican congressional leaders.  Eight years ago, the Supreme Court was still salvageable.  No more.  Trump will likely replace two justices.  SCOTUS will continue to be a retrograde institution for at least a generation to come.  Perhaps longer.

So fuck it.  I hereby present the post-election screed I wrote in November, 2016.  It is in its original form.  Eight years later, there are a couple of things I might write differently now, but for the most part, I still stand by it, and present here unedited except for tyopos.  And maybe I should have published it eight years ago.  But I didn’t.  This isn’t eight years ago, but what needs to be said still needs to be said.

Fuckin’ White People, Man (2016)

Nobody suffers like white people.

That, so far as I can tell, is this nation’s big takeaway from 2016.

Prior to this election, whites on the wrong side of globalization finally found their champion, a knight in orange armor to give them voice, to legitimate their grievances, and to standup for them, the poor downtrodden beneficiaries of social welfare and racial privilege who suffer like no one else.  So Donald Trump took up the banner of diminished white people, openly embracing and spewing so much foul racism that he was eventually endorsed by the KKK.  So over sixty-two million people, the overwhelming majority of them white, went to the polls, pulled the lever for this marmot, and thought to themselves: Finally, it’s our time!

And now, in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, there is a deluge of white, middle class Trump opponents who are horrified at how awful this is for, you know, themselves.

Jesus fucking Christ.

I realize I’ll never know what it’s like to be a black or brown person.  But I’m starting to feel alienated from most of white America despite my own pasty complexion.  And so I’m going to discuss why both sides of America’s Caucasian coin are tarnished.  Let’s start with the Liberals.
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Everyone needs to go into their room and cry once in a while.  This election was one of those moments for many people.  Good, let it out.

And people can often be parochial in their concerns from time to time.  This is fine in private settings, among friends and family who indulge us once in a while, and rightly so.  The people who love us are there for us, and we’re there for them

But when we take to social media, more traditional media, classrooms, or other public venues to make public statements and take public stances on the major social issues of the day, we need to recognize that our personal problems are relatively minor.  This is particularly true for most white people who are middle class or wealthier, although gender complicates things significantly.

For most of these people, the Trump victory is a real gut shot.  Believe me, I get it. I’m there with you.  But the truth is, this isn’t going to punish us directly very much.  We’re not the real victims here.

Yet sure enough, following Trump’s election, middle class white liberals found ways to make themselves the victims.

Nobody suffers like white people.

An example of this was the self-indulgent public meme of middle class white liberals asking: “How will I explain this to my children?” [2024 Note: This was a very common meme shared by white parents on social media after the 2016 election]

Wow.  Really? That’s you’re biggest concern right now? That’s what you’re publicly aggravating over at this moment?

Hows about you just tell your kids the ugly truth.  Yes, the new president’s an asshole, but they’re actually gonna be fine.  They’re middle class and white.  They’re gonna be okay.  Mommy’s gonna be okay.  Daddy’ gonna be okay.  Middle class white people are always gonna be okay.

It’s everyone else who’s got real shit to deal with because of this.

And yes, there will be some long term damage that affects everyone, and which their generation more than any other will likely have to cleanup, and that’s a genuine bummer and very unfair.  So give them a book about growing up in the depression and fighting WWII, and then recite that Tolkien quote about us not getting to choose the times we live in, only what we do with them.

But if that doesn’t sound like good advice, and quite frankly it might be really rotten advice cause what the hell does a selfish, childless prick like me know about raising kids, then here’s an idea.

Why don’t you just ask a black parent?

You can even stay within your comfort zone and only talk to a “safe” middle class one.  Because guess what? They gotta explain really difficult stuff to their kids all the time, no matter who the president is.  They’ve got more experience with this than you’ll every know.

Yes, I’m being bitchy.  And no, of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with people fretting about talking to their kids . Just responsible parenting, right? People should worry about their kids for all kinds of reasons, including this current moment, and they should dialog with each other about parenting issues of all sorts.

But there’s a way in which lots of white people publicly worrying about how they’re going to explain Trump to their kids is awfully tone deaf.

Instead, white middle class liberals need to be talking publicly about how they’re going to offer sanctuary to Latinx families that might get broken up through deportations.  They need to be making shows of support to black and brown children and families who feel way more cornered by this than they do.  They need to loudly exalt the degrees of acceptance LGBTQ people have achieved during the past quarter-century.  And white men in particular need to step up and trumpet their zero tolerance for sexism and their advocacy of women’s rights.  That’s what the white middle class memes need to be about right now.  Sadly, too often they have not been.

But the truth is, middle class Liberals can be every bit as provincial as the rural and exurban whites who voted for Trump, which is truly shameful given how much more formal education, financial resources, cultural capital, and global experience they have as a group.

In fact, given all their advantages, middle class urban and suburban whites can appear relatively more ignorant and bigoted than the average white woman Trump voter who rarely leaves her rural county and barely finished high school.

White middle class Liberals are the people who make jokes about flyover country and trailer parks.  They’re the people who use Republican racism as a shield to hide from their own subtle, fear-based racism.  These are the same people who voted for Hillary Clinton for a lot of reasons, one of which is that she represents a status quo that actually works really well for them.

But you know, it’s not working very well for a lot of other people.  The growing disparity in wealth is real.  The decline of good paying blue collar jobs, particularly for semi-skilled laborers, is real.  Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, that bastion of middle class white liberalism, has spent between 30–50 years, depending on how you measure it, abandoning and even abusing poor people.  And the Clintons in particular have been really awful in this regard.

Nobody cozies up to Wall Street like the Clintons.  And of course there’s their record of punishing the poor and working class with policies that dismantled welfare, ramped up the drug war, promoted mass incarceration, and, yes, shipped manufacturing jobs overseas.

All the while, middle class liberals largely ignored the slow fade of America’s working class by prioritizing social issues like gun control, gay marriage, and abortion, all of which and many more are tremendously important in their own right, but none of which, quite frankly, help poor people overcome being poor.  And yes, abortion rights are more important for poor women, but they don’t directly address economic issues like jobs and wages; when poor people get mad about being poor, they don’t say, Well at least I have abortion rights!

The point is that the middle class, by definition, doesn’t suffer the same economic pitfalls and setbacks that poor and working class people do.  So unless your black or LGBTQ, it’s a class privilege to prioritize very important social issues over very important economic issues.

No wonder the white working class responded to a right wing populist demagogue.  Can you blame them for doing that? Yes, 100%.  But can you understand it? It’s really pretty straightforward in some ways.

So listening to white, middle class Liberals bitch and moan right now reeks of Nobody Suffers Like White People.

It’s a bit much too, given that what the white middle class faces is so small compared with what minorities and poor people are going through.

But what makes it really rich is the irony.  If anyone embraced the theme of “Pity poor me” during this election, it was Trump’s white supporters.

Nobody suffers like white people.  Today it’s urban and suburban middle class whites moaning now.  Before November 8thIt was rural and exurban whites.

So let’s move onto these self-pitying bastards.
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Some Trump voters are racist, sexist cretins.

Some Trump voters don’t think of themselves as racists sexist cretins, but they were willing to accept Trump’s racism and sexism as collateral damage, which means they really are racists sexist cretins and are just deluding themselves about it.

And some Trump voters are genuinely disturbed by Trump’s racism and sexism, but they like him for other reasons, and managed to convince themselves that he’s not actually racist or sexist, and was just putting on an act.  These people aren’t necessarily racist/sexist cretins themselves.  But they are suckers and/or have horrific values and are absolutely not to be trusted.

The truth is, there are plenty of legitimate, non-racist, non-sexist reasons why a person might have voted for Trump.  But since Trump himself is openly racist and sexist, and since racism and sexism were vital components of his campaign, even the non-racist, non-sexist people who voted for him are responsible for advancing racism and sexism.  Trump voters had to come to terms with his racism and sexism one way or another, because racism and sexism were central to his campaign.  That means they either agreed with it, excused it, or denied it.

Yes, an individual voter might abhor Donald Trump’s racism and sexism.  But voting for him still makes that person culpable in the rise of racism and sexism that follows.

I’m sorry, but no matter how kind and generous you are, when you vote for the candidate endorsed by the KKK and other white supremacist organizations, there is metaphorical blood on your hands, my own family members included.  And if shit goes down, they can’t be allowed to hide behind a fantasy that says wasn’t their fault.  White nationalists are coming out from under their rocks and becoming normalized as a result of Trump’s victory, and if you voted for him, you share the blame for that.  Your parents or grandparents fought and maybe died to defeat the Nazis, and now you’ve voted for a candidate who is supported by neo-Nazis.
[2024 Note: This was written before Charlottesville].

My point is that everyone who voted for Trump, including the women, is either actively or passively supporting his racism and sexism.  They are complicit, whether or not they admit it to others or themselves.

Is voting for a candidate tacit approval of everything they have said and done in their life? Of course not.

But it is tacit approval of everything they’ve said and done during their campaign.

No one’s perfect, we all have flaws.  Which flaws can you live with in a candidate and which ones can you not?

And yes, of course people compartmentalize their vote, and that’s precisely the problem.  People who made deals with the devil.  People with a mouth full of “but.”  People who think they can vote for Trump for a variety of very legitimate reasons and not be complicit in his racism and sexism.

People are endlessly capable of compartmentalizing and rationalizing.  Sadly, many human beings can normalize and justify almost anything.  People lie to themselves all the time.

Think of the abused spouse who tells herself he does it because he loves her or because she deserved it.  Or more to the point, the small percentage of blacks and 1/3 of Latinos, and very sizeable percentage of women (granted, overwhelmingly white) who all voted for this guy.  Unless we want to fall back on some dubious theory of self-loathing, we have to accept that people are often full of contradictions.  They’re capable of believing in opposite things at the same time, and acting in contradictory ways, all the while living in a state of self-denial about it, convincing themselves they are consistent.

But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter much why they did it.  The Why is only important for explaining why he won and how he can be defeated next time.  This is about people having blood on their hands, regardless of their motivations and whether they realize it or not.

Donald Trump was not was subtle about his sexism and racism.  He didn’t rely on dog whistles like Nixon (The Southern Strategy), Reagan (“welfare queens”), and Bush I (Willie Horton).  He was open and blatant from day one, claiming most Mexicans were junkies and rapists.

So no matter the non-race, non-sex reasons people voted for Trump, and there were quite a lot, they’re still complicit in his racism and sexism.  They had to make a corrupt bargain.  Maybe they thought Trump wasn’t really so sexist and racist, that he was just saying things he did believe to get attention.  Maybe they thought he’s kind of racist and sexist, but he won’t really act on it.  Maybe they ignored all reason and just denied that racism and sexism were even coming out of his mouth.  Maybe they put their hands over their ears and went mmmm, I can’t hear you!  But one way or another, Trump supporters had to actively justify voting for an overtly racist sexist candidate.

People can have other reasons for why they voted for him, but that doesn’t wash the blood off their hands.

Every Trump voter has crossed a moral line.

And yet, if you listen to them, they’re the victims in this scenario.

All the white people, winners and losers alike.  They’re the real victims.  Just ask them.  They can’t wait to tell you.