We Can’t Afford to Learn the Wrong Lessons from 2016 (Pt. II)
[This is the second of two articles. Part I dealt with the proposed explanations for the 2016 election results, weeding out the bad or unhelpful explanations and fleshing out the better ones. This article will take these better explanations and apply them to possible responses and political action.]
In my last article, I identified some appropriate focal points of our frustration and blame in the 2016 election. Some of the most common explanations given in the immediate aftermath — namely: FBI Director Comey’s involvement; Russia and Wikileaks (usually lumped together like this); and third-party voters or non-voters — were either not able to explain the election results, or else were, I argued, better understood as being subsets of some larger explanations that require the bulk of our attention. These more comprehensive factors are: the role of the media and polling; the Democratic Party and its nominee, Hillary Clinton; bigotry; and structural flaws in the workings of American democracy. If we are, as the title of these articles hopes, to learn the right lessons from this election, we will have to examine these explanatory factors as the potential starting points of action and resistance — as possible answers to the question many are asking: What do we do now?
Media & Polling
It’s really hard to sell discomfort, unless it’s paired with a remedy that you’re also selling. For instance, exaggerated headlines and hysteria from news outlets is, in a way, selling discomfort, in that fear is uncomfortable — but they’re also selling the cure, which is: more “information” about that story. When a scary news story breaks, it’s useful for networks to make the story as scary as possible so that we’ll all keep watching. We can feel as though we’re up-to-date on this scary news, which brings with it a sense of control, and we can feel comfort in knowing that we’re experiencing this scary event with other people — also a good feeling. Similarly, when TV pundits rail against our political enemies, they are selling anger, but clearly there are also positive feelings associated with that product: the feeling of superiority, of being in the know, and, again, of camaraderie with our fellow, outraged citizens, against some real or imagined enemy. It’s a pleasant anger, a release — probably substituting for all sorts of other, more legitimate and less easily vented sources of anger the viewer is forced to endure in life.
This is all to say that some kinds of discomfort can be sold profitably, while others — whose remedies cannot be provided by the business itself — cannot. Political and social (or more simply: moral) issues which produce discomfort that can’t easily be relieved by the news anchors or pundits — issues that are too big, too urgent, too complicated or too depressing to lend themselves to simplistic dichotomies (of friend and enemy, or right and wrong, etc.) and, most significantly, issues which would place moral blame or responsibility on the viewers themselves — will not be shown in any depth unless they can be slanted and abridged into submission to a more profitable format.
In other words: When an organization exists to make profit, the customer isn’t simply always right: the customer is always good.
Some of the ramifications of this can be seen in the prevalence of polling in our election coverage. Whether reporting network-specific viewer polls (completely meaningless except as a metric of who’s watching) or professional polls of the public (also, we’re learning, somewhat meaningless), polls allow networks to focus on what people already believe, not whether they should or shouldn’t believe those things. We’re happy to see ourselves reflected on TV, not confronted by it. Political polls are usually more useful as marketing advice than they are to journalism itself.
So what’s to be done about this? The first and most obvious answer is to question the news sources you encounter, and to seek out better ones. Quite a lot of our news, unfortunately, comes from what we see on Facebook, and what we see on Facebook is very carefully controlled by Facebook. The Wall Street Journal put together a neat web project showing the differences in news stories for specific words like “President Obama” or “ISIS” that a conservative- or liberal- identifying user would find in their catered news feeds. It’s shocking. Probably an even greater influence on what news sources we see is our bubble of “Facebook friends” who are much more likely than the general public to share our opinions and perspectives. What news they share also ends up in your newsfeed. Melissa Zimdars, a communications professor at Merrimack College, put together a list of “fake news” sites, many of which I’ve seen shared by my own friends on Facebook. (Some of these, like Clickhole and Reductress, are excellent satirical sites, but people have apparently been sharing them as straight news, which itself is kind of hilarious.)
Beyond this, it’s important to recognize the very real and often harder to catch biases of more mainstream outlets. The problem isn’t so much with bias itself — in fact, I think it’s much more dangerous for a news outlet to pretend it and its writers have no biases, an impossible and unnecessary standard — as it is with the distortion that follows from it, either in the facts that are and aren’t included in stories, or the perspectives from which those stories are told. All of these are up to the discretion of the writer, and so all are points where bias can easily creep in undetected. That said, finding bias in a news story doesn’t mean you have to abandon the outlet altogether.
If Americans insist on better quality news outlets (and many of us are), and take steps only to consume news from those sources, it’s possible there won’t be as much of a market for comforting lies as before — or at least (and this is perhaps the most we can expect) there’ll be more demand for quality news as well. It’s a tricky subject, because as more money moves to a news outlet, it brings both resources (good!) and stronger profit interests (not good!). But all this means is that some good sources of news may in the future become bad, which shouldn’t be a problem if we’re watchful.
We also need to be watchful for encroachments on press freedoms, particularly under the incoming Trump administration (although it’s worth noting that President Obama already has an extremely troubling history of prosecuting journalists, a precedent now from which Trump could benefit). Trump has already pledged to crack down on journalists who report on him negatively and “unfairly” by “open[ing] up our libel laws.” What he means by this (libel laws are state laws, limited federally by the First Amendment) and whether he could do this remain unclear, but it’s still a worrying attitude for a president to take towards the press — particularly after a campaign that routinely saw press credentials revoked at Trump’s whim and reporters called out by the candidate for being dishonest, corrupt, etc. Slate’s Seth Stevenson writes:
Ever since the first Trump event I attended back in March, I’d wondered why his campaign was so intent on impounding us inside these press pens during his speeches. Was it to prevent us from speaking to rallygoers? If so, it was ineffective — you can chat with them all you want before or after the event or by beckoning them to the edge of the pen. Maybe it was meant to keep us from filming protesters up close? Again, didn’t work, as violent abuse of these dissenters was caught on camera again and again. The campaign itself has always claimed it was a security protocol, which made little sense, as everyone inside the venues has been swept by Secret Service — and if journalists can handle war zones, they can handle a little shoving.
Perhaps I’d been naïve, but it only now dawned on me, in the final week of the campaign, to my great horror, that the real reason they put us in the pen was so they could turn us into props. We were a vital element in Trump’s performance. He never once failed to invite his crowds to heckle us. He was placing us on display like captured animals.
If all this worries you, you can support (if you’re able) independent news outlets and organizations committed to protecting press freedoms. If we let up for a moment — if the press “gives Trump a chance” — that could establish the precedent for outliers to be prosecuted under new interpretations of the law. Legal precedent relies on historic context — our Fourth Amendment rights have been eroded to almost nothing because we’ve allowed threats to them to go unchallenged, and so these threats are already enshrined in common-law precedent. Good journalism can’t give President Trump — not known for gracefully welcoming criticism — a “first 100 days” grace period.
The last point I want to make here is about the inaccuracy of polling. As I said in the last article, we don’t need better polling, but less, and much less reporting of it and reliance on it. This applies to voting behavior, too. Now that we know how wildly inaccurate these polls can be, it’s important not to base your voting decisions — whatever they might be — on polling. Lots of people who didn’t support either candidate, but who especially didn’t want Trump to win, made the calculation that they would vote third-party or not at all if they lived in a non-swing state, and would begrudgingly vote for Clinton otherwise. (This is obviously not the only calculation made by third-party voters and non-voters, but it is a popular one.) We need to be careful about assumptions of what’s a “swing state” and what isn’t in the future, just as we have to be careful about assumptions of whether a candidate has an election in the bag or not. A lot of people still wouldn’t have been able to bring themselves to vote for Clinton, but plenty of people would’ve voted differently (or would’ve voted, period) had they known the election was closer than polls indicated it was.
The Party and the Nominee
The Democratic Party should be loyal to the people it represents, not the reverse. I only feel the need to say this because of what I’ve been seeing and hearing, not just since the election, but all throughout the 2016 primary and general election. Many people seem to think that “being a Democrat” is simultaneously a pledge of loyalty to the Party; an exclusive label of honor; and an indication that you represent all Americans, not just certain classes or groups of Americans. Not all of these can be true at the same time. Ideally, being a Democrat would mean the last of those — that you work for Americans generally — and would only include the first and the second if and when they were compatible with, and useful towards, the third.
In the primary, there was a lot of anger directed at Bernie Sanders and his supporters for “not being real Democrats” and while, I suppose, this is understandable from the perspective of the first and second understandings of “being a Democrat” — Bernie was an independent until recently, and many of his supporters still are — it is a completely undemocratic, and impractical, way of handling a primary. My proposal here is that Democrats should make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to vote in their primaries. That means, among other things, getting rid of “closed” primaries in which only registered Democrats can vote. Many more voters identify themselves as independents than either Democrats or Republicans — about 40.1%, compared with 30.4% and 23.7%, respectively — and preventing independents from voting in your primary only makes your nominee less likely to be one who appeals to the general electorate.
The second issue that needs to be addressed is the party’s leadership. The DNC, under the leadership of then-chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, allowed only six debates between Sanders and Clinton, whereas Clinton and Obama had twenty-five in 2008. Given that towards the end of the primary Clinton and Sanders were nearly tied in national polls, it seems inappropriate to discount the possibility that the small number of debates — fewer opportunities for a relatively unknown senator to appear on television debating possibly the most famous woman on earth — couldn’t have made a difference. Even if it wouldn’t have, the DNC shouldn’t be pushing for any candidate in advance. If anything, primary elections decide who exactly the Democratic Party represents — that is, voters who participate (if they’re allowed to) become the party — and so any top-down manipulation of that process is not to be tolerated. (Remember that this strategy of avoiding media presence was repeated in the general election: Clinton went more than nine months without giving a press conference. Whether she lost because of this or not isn’t clear, but it’s not a good sign when your nominee won’t face media scrutiny.)
Keith Ellison, who endorsed Sanders in the primary and served on the DNC platform committee as one of Sanders’ picks, is now in the running for DNC chair. It looks likely he’ll get it, given the endorsements he’s received. And today it was announced that both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will be in the Democratic senate leadership. I think party officials recognize the power of what happened in the primary, and the seriousness and self-reflection with which they have to face the election results. (It’s worth reiterating that Sanders absolutely crushed the youth vote in every primary, which seems like a good prospect for the party’s future.) Ellison’s run for DNC chair, among other indicators, will tell us how committed they are to changing.
While these changes are occurring, Democrats need to be ready to oppose Donald Trump’s administration before it even begins. As far as I’m concerned, “obstructionism” isn’t a dirty word when what you’re obstructing is white supremacy, or even economic extremism (Paul Ryan currently has his eyes on Medicare). Democrats need to be even more successful at this legislative obstructionism than the Republicans have been throughout Obama’s administration, and we need to hold them to this, as many of them have already signaled they’re “willing to play ball with the president-elect and use the filibuster sparingly.” At the same time, be on the lookout for Democrats “obstructing” Trump’s agenda by collaborating with the GOP (especially since Trump has taken positions on many issues that go against traditional Republican views). As long as Trump is in office, passing good legislation shouldn’t be as big of a priority as blocking bad legislation.
And the country is already hurting with the legislation we’ve got, which means we desperately need to take back the Senate in two years and the White House in four (the House would be nice too, but it seems out of reach right now — though remember, it was just a few years ago that the Democrats lost it). The changes to the primary process and leadership I’ve mentioned should help accomplish this.
Bigotry
Donald Trump won the election, in large part, because America is a violently racist, sexist, and xenophobic country. Hopefully this isn’t news to many people, although many who knew this before were perhaps still unaware of the enormity of the problem, or at least its ability to sway a presidential election.
The first thing we need to do in the face of such overwhelming hatred is protest. Yes, I support the protests. So many people who claim to be upset by what Trump’s campaign represents (and make no mistake about what it represents, because Trump supporters sure as hell know) are spending their time shaming protesters right now, saying that they’re “whining” because they “didn’t get their way” and trying to dismiss them by asserting that many of them probably didn’t vote (as if that matters for a protest’s legitimacy). These arguments, all of them individually specious, together also point to an underlying assumption about democracy: that it is entirely contained within the act of raising your hand every two or four years. What a small and small-minded view of democracy.
There are also people who say the protests have no purpose because Trump is going to be the president anyway and deserves our support.
Fuck that noise. Most protesters are not expecting to prevent Trump from taking office. They are establishing the political message, from the outset, that his rhetoric and policies aimed at marginalized Americans (those who are in the most danger right now, those who can least afford to “give him a chance to lead”) will not be tolerated. And we’re in a particularly strong position to make that message heard and accepted, not only because Trump lost the popular vote, but because voter turnout was lower than ever this year — meaning that Trump will take office a deeply unpopular president. We can’t allow him a grace period of several months while he tries to revive his reputation and make Americans forget the hateful campaign he ran.
In addition to protesting, those who can donate or volunteer their time to groups and organizations working to protect the Americans most vulnerable to a Trump presidency should do so, and encourage others to join them. Political involvement is possible outside of candidates’ campaigns — those protests are being organized by political groups right now, many of them doing all sorts of other good work in their communities.
It’s also incumbent upon us to recognize the Democratic Party’s failures on issues of bigotry and oppression — not only its complicity in, for example, mass incarceration and the “War on Drugs,” but also its superficial ways of dealing with issues of intolerance. In a great piece called, “Left-Wing Language for Your Right-Wing Needs!” Alex Press writes:
A while back, Clinton’s team produced a chart of “intersections.” Indecipherable, it invoked the necessary know-how of the language of intersectionality as a signal to voters: “Clinton’s with it,” it shouted. No matter that the chart was absurd and that Clinton’s policies have and will continue to reinforce, not undo, oppression. No matter that Clinton doesn’t even pay her interns, who more likely than not are overwhelmingly women.
As she asked at a campaign rally in February, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow…would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make immigrants feel more welcome?”
“No!” her audience responded, but this cheeky remark was to a strawman — no one, not Bernie Sanders, not even weirdos on the internet, claims it will. But it’s enough to know the language for Clinton, to “speak left” as [GOP strategist Frank] Luntz put it.
In this example, we also see Democrats performing a trick they’ve pulled off many times: using vague language and superficial commitments to identity politics in order to justify the social and economic status quo. If you’d be surprised to learn that 45 million Americans are currently living in poverty, then you must have believed Clinton when she said that “American Is Already Great!” But 45 million Americans are currently living in poverty.
Nevertheless, “poor” isn’t generally seen as an identity, and so politicians are able to pay superficial dues to identity politics while outright condoning economic oppression. Part of this is ideological. We’re taught to see poverty as a state of “temporary embarrassment” (to paraphrase John Steinbeck), not a likely-fixed and undeserved condition. Furthermore, Republicans have used economic language (such as “welfare queens”) as dog-whistle racism for decades — and many Democrats joined them — so now it’s very easy for Democrats and others to dismiss all economic talk as just that.
Nowhere do we see this more than in the many mocking references to “economic anxiety” (an excuse used to explain Trump’s support that notably and inexcusably omits racism) that you can see online or in the media right now. Much of this mocking is justified, but I’m afraid that it’s gone so far as to suggest that economic anxiety isn’t a real concern at all. (Just ask the person who started this joke.) Racism and sexism were absolutely integral to Trump’s rise, and many Democrats have jumped at this rare chance to dismiss complaints of economic oppression — to let themselves off the hook for not adequately addressing, for instance, college debt, healthcare costs, wage stagnation, etc. Plenty of nonwhite and non-male Americans living in poverty are also hurt by this now-reflexive and mocking pivot away from concern for the poor.
And the bar is so pathetically low for the “superficial dues” politicians can pay to identity politics. Pose for a photo or use a hashtag and you’re suddenly “pro-LGBTQ!” — without doing much beyond the symbolic to help, for instance, the many queer homeless teens who’ve been thrown out by their parents, or the many LGBTQ Americans who’ve been legally fired from their jobs. Actually championing any of these oppressed group requires anti-poverty activism running alongside anti-racist, anti-misogynist, anti-bigotry activism. We can’t let the deserved shaming of Trump supporters be used by centrists to avoid enacting reforms that might incidentally also help (gasp!) poor white men. Just as racist rhetoric shifted to economic rhetoric for cover, structural oppression can take refuge in our growing economic blindspot. That is, if we only confront the non-economic side of oppression, the easiest way to keep those groups down will be new economic pressures.
That said, it’s important to note: focusing solely on economic concerns quickly reproduces racism, sexism et al. on the left. (See: Žižek.) But it’s boggled my mind this entire election how easily center-left commentators see the demand to address both (more traditionally understood) identity and class concerns as an attack on the former at the expense of the latter. Some of this mistrust of economic talk is, as I’ve noted, understandable. But for the American left to ignore poverty is a disgrace.
Michelle Alexander illustrates the early historical link between American poverty and racism beautifully in The New Jim Crow:
Segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate effort to drive a wedge between poor whites and African Americans. These discriminatory barriers were designed to encourage lower-class whites to retain a sense of superiority over blacks, making it far less likely that they would sustain interracial political alliances aimed at toppling the white elite. The laws were, in effect, another racial bribe. As William Julius Wilson has noted, ‘As long as poor whites directed their hatred and frustration against the black competitor, the planters were relieved of class hostility directed against them.’ Indeed, in order to overcome the well-founded suspicions of poor and illiterate whites that they, as well as blacks, were in danger of losing the right to vote, the leaders of the movement pursued an aggressive campaign of white supremacy in every state prior to black disenfranchisement. (The New Jim Crow, pg. 34).
This helps, too, to explain the economic language in which so much racist rhetoric is spoken — not only because it’s safer to speak in abstracts (so that you aren’t seen as racist) but also because it’s easier to motivate people with racism by appealing to their most personal fears: “You don’t have low-paying jobs and mountains of debt because of how your elected representatives have been running the country! It’s… uhh… immigrants! They’re taking your jobs, and your government assistance.”
And the threat of racial harmony among the lower classes continued to be the biggest threat to America’s ruling class:
While dramatic progress was apparent in the political and social realms, civil rights activists became increasingly concerned that, without major economic reforms, the vast majority of blacks would remain locked in poverty. Thus at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, activists and others began to turn their attention to economic problems, arguing that socioeconomic inequality interacted with racism to produce crippling poverty and related social problems. […] Activists organized boycotts, picket lines, and demonstrations to attack discrimination in access to jobs and the denial of economic opportunity.
Perhaps the most famous demonstration in support of economic justice is the March on Washington for Jobs and Economic Freedom in August 1963. The wave of activism associated with economic justice helped to focus President Kennedy’s attention on poverty and black unemployment. […] The shift in focus served to align the goals of the Civil Rights Movement with key political goals of poor and working-class whites, who were also demanding economic reforms. As the Civil Rights Movement began to evolve into a ‘Poor People’s Movement,’ it promised to address not only black poverty, but white poverty as well — thus raising the specter of a poor and working-class movement that cut across racial lines. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders made it clear that they viewed the eradication of economic inequality as the next front in the ‘human rights movement’ and made great efforts to build multiracial coalitions that sought economic justice for all. (The New Jim Crow, pg. 38–9).
Racism, as she says, had to be forced on poor Americans — it is not the natural state of things. Racism is, fundamentally, a con-job. So tell your racist relatives they’ve been conned; nobody likes to feel cheated, and this reality is perhaps shocking enough that it can open up room for a change in perspective to slip in.
And our private conversations do matter. Not every Trump supporter is going to be receptive, and if they’re not, we’ll have to move on without them, trying only to isolate them politically as much as we can. But almost 61,000,000 people voted for Trump — we can’t afford not to try to change some of them, particularly those of us who are less physically at-risk in challenging them on it.
In public, too, we need to hold ourselves responsible for speaking up when we see bigotry, and standing in between bigots and people they’re physically or verbally threatening.
As far as being an ally goes, though, this is an important point: Listen to marginalized communities before you try to act as an “ally” for them. There’s been a lot of (mostly, I think, well-intentioned) promotion of the idea of wearing safety pins to signal that you’re an “ally” to people, and that they’re safe around you. For one thing, there have already been rumors of white supremacists taking advantage of this subtle (and really, why is it so subtle? Isn’t that telling?) symbolism to escape notice. But regardless, this doesn’t do much to help, and it does a lot more to relieve white people’s guilt and sense of responsibility in the aftermath of Trump’s election — which itself is dangerous.
People of color are used to white people declaring themselves allies while working against them. You don’t get to personally decide that you’re an ally. Being an ally is about constantly trying to act like one, not declaring yourself to have been one all along.
Structural Reform
Unfortunately this section has to be as short as it is, because this election was so catastrophic that Democrats aren’t really in a position to change any laws right now. Really. What structural reform we get over the next two years is going to have to happen either within the party (which was discussed above), outside the party (also mentioned), and through loud, unrelenting protests — warm bodies in the streets kinds of protests being the most important of those — at whatever the Trump administration and its GOP-controlled Congress try to do. That is plenty to do. Use whatever talents you have, and commit to keep using them.
This is literally life-or-death. Don’t lose your outrage or your hope.
