What Follows the Lie: America After Trump and the Unmasking of a Nation

Kori Higgins
Aug 23, 2017 · 9 min read
Courtesy: Getty Images

The verdict is in. America is undergoing a severe threat to the fundamental democratic principles for which it stands. This is not an identity crisis, it is an exercise in identity redefinition, and it is certainly not a drill. At this point, 8 months into a new presidency, we have exhaustive evidence to conclude that a wide swath of Americans are content with a government that more closely resembles populism than democracy, and which at times comes dangerously close to resembling fascism. If we are to be faithful to truth, we as objectors need to resist the urge to blame President Trump for this seismic political shift. Many of these dark undercurrents in America have existed in various forms since before the founding of the country, with the head of political oppression cautiously rising out of the water every now and again for much of the last few decades. Now that white nationalism has come back in fashion in the form of an elected leadership structure sympathetic to its political agenda, the political animal can finally breach. President Trump did not cause what happened in Charlottesville, but both his Presidency and the surfacing of violent white nationalism share the same fundamental seeds. If we have any hope of fighting back against this tide of dangerous rhetoric and increasing boldness, we must come to terms with the uncomfortable realities of who we are as a country, and change the fundamental nature of how we are engaging in the political arena.

Immediately following the election, there was a proliferation of articles emphasizing the plight of the Average White Family. An empathetic narrative was spun of a large constituency ignored by beltway policymaking over the past 8 years, not welcomed into the architecture of American 21st century culture (built by those in the liberal and largely affluent enclaves like New York City). This group was, it was argued, large enough to have gained a majority of representatives in both the House and the Senate, as well as the Electoral College. It was led by the struggling, predominantly white, male, underemployed citizen, with no vehicle by which he can express his plight, and so maligned that he and his compatriots are forced, en masse, to vote in the most extreme candidate possible in order to send a message. Democrats lost the election because Hillary did not connect with these voters, the argument goes.

This was a very convenient explanation. I do not doubt the stories of the millions of Americans who have been summarily left out of the growth that the rest of the country has experienced in the last 8 years. Their voices deserve attention, respect, and advocates at the table as we construct our economic priorities. But they are not the ones who won this election for Trump, not alone, anyway. Better statisticians than I am have painstakingly analyzed the exit polling statistics, and I encourage you to look up those statistics. The numbers show trends that do not completely align with the narrative, and what’s more, a careful review of those trends provides more meaningful context to help explain the political events we’re currently living through.

Instead of wringing our hands over the struggling white Ohio farmer who voted Trump, let’s concentrate on the 49% of white college educated voters who also did, a 4% edge over those who went for Clinton. Another illuminating bit is that voters in the $50,000-$99,000 annual income bracket voted for Trump by a margin of 50 to 46. $50k for an individual is nearly five times higher than the federal poverty level. At any amount below that, the polling numbers shift towards Clinton, refuting the notion that Trump won solely from courting the economically underprivileged. What about voters who are making more than 100k annually? Interestingly, after the 100k point, income ceases to be a determining factor, with the numbers split more or less evenly between the candidates.

This election, if Republican voters wanted to elect a representative that would cater even specifically to middle America, there were plenty of other options. John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and others were among those tailoring their policies around this specific electorate. Every single one of them was less racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and more experienced than the candidate who was eventually elected. Even if we accept the premise that a silent group of beaten down, out-of-work white men wanted to vote for a candidate to send a message to Washington, there were plenty of choices who did not reliably insult women, minorities, or have a long history of criminal business activity. Among all the ways you can slice the voting demographics, given the predominance of the clear racial and anti-immigrant invective, and the ties to white nationalism, perhaps the most relevant fact is that the overwhelming majority of white people voted for Trump, 58% to Hillary’s 37%. 58% of the country’s white people were not bullied into a corner. Perhaps many of them had just finally found their candidate.

This is not to say that a vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election was a blanket signifier of support for the growing white nationalism movement; plenty of registered Republicans have alternative (and reasonable) narratives of their own experiences and decision-making around the election. However, we need to stop pretending that a large percentage of Americans voted with their eyes closed, and accidentally ended up with the candidate whose single differentiating factor besides inexperience was his publicly articulated racist and misogynistic views. It is time we treat those voters as adults, and recognize that the majority of them were not tricked into this vote, and what’s more, that they don’t represent a small minority of the country. The White House’s response to events like the horrible confrontation in Charlottesville is patent refusal to label white nationalists or neo-Nazis as the side who is disrupting American democracy; the best we as an audience will get, as far as an ethical stance on conflicts involving white nationalists, is a badly articulated gesture of peace that renders both sides morally equivalent, with the grand takeaway being that everyone should accept blame. That’s fair judgement if each side of a conflict is debating which flavor of ice cream is best, but when the debate is over whether or not America has space for a neo-Nazi movement, a conscientious arbiter is morally required to choose a dog in the fight.

America has a long and dark history of inequality and discrimination. Through our own continuing moral education, as well as the heroic work of activists, we’ve inched closer to embodying the values that we say we stand for, as a country. Events like Charlottesville show that historic power structures are developing even deeper cracks in the foundation. Unseating a powerful majority can provoke violent reactions. There is a large group of Americans who feel threatened by the social progress made in the previous decades, and as history has taught us, when people in power are made to feel vulnerable, they will sometimes lash out with devastating and brutal consequences. Examples of this are manifold, but we can look to our own history books for illustrations.

Take for instance, the massacre of black Americans in the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, the cause of which is now largely attributed to white resentment towards the residents in the thriving black neighborhood of Greenwood. Or look to the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, in which the Colorado National Guard and the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company attacked a camp of 1,200 coal miners who were on strike demanding an 8 hour workday and adherence to safety regulations by camp management. It was the culminating event in what’s now known as the Colorado Coalfield War; dozens were killed.

Perhaps this is why so much of conversation around the left has centered around our own growth and development rather than in how to engage with the other side; it’s safer both psychically and physically to navel gaze ad nauseam than it is to try and engage with the party across the aisle, particularly when your opponent has the political upper hand in all three branches of government and an increasingly aggressive constituency. However, this has become a fight for the soul of America, and it is far past the time for self-dissection, while bullies take over territory that we have fought for decades to gain. Analyzing ourselves to the point of inaction and concentrating our efforts on our own internal failures is a catastrophically bad strategy. We are simply running out of time, and must start taking greater risk and stronger stands if we have a chance at turning the ship around.

In the media, as a general rule, liberals are afraid of coming across as mean or unfair. This is the flip side of the debate over politically correct speech; while many Conservatives complain about the Democratic policing of language while continuing to use offensive or incorrect language, meanwhile, Democrats self-censor to not appear unsympathetic or mean. This leads to the avoidance of terms that call the truth for what it is: delivering a statement to the public that is knowingly untrue is a lie, though that is a word rarely mentioned in political context, perhaps from fear of wounding the subject’s dignity. Why do we continue to care about the feelings of racists or bigots? When did we handcuff ourselves with politeness? When Democratic politicians do speak in language that is more blunt than we are used to — Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” speech comes to mind — fellow liberals lead the charge to publicly eviscerate them.

Here, we can borrow from the Republican playbook: instead of denouncing and abandoning our leaders when they run the risk of offending the other side, we lean in to support them. We liberals have a strong enough moral foundation to publicly support our politicians when using more direct language without becoming sycophants. Now, seeing the waves of violence, invective, and threats to democracy that have risen since the election, we know that Hillary Clinton was right — even when she spoke, we had the statistics to prove that there was a critical mass of Trump voters who supported white nationalist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and sexist policies and views, among the many classes of discrimination. Think of the potential political reality if we as a political base had rallied around Clinton and had driven home the position that as Democrats voting in the next election, we believe that yes, being a white nationalist is, in fact, deplorable.

The core liberal values of compassion and compromise have come to characterize leftist deliberation. The constant search for understanding is a character strengths for which we should be quite proud. But those same traits put us in a horrible negotiating position when dealing with an opponent who is not playing by the same rules. Time and again we see liberals seek to find understanding in the course of an argument, only to be flattened by the end of it, not by logic or reasoning, but by volume or sucker punches. Our job right now is not to figure out how to be better listeners, or how to compromise with crypto-fascists. We need not negotiate with terrorists; if you meet a bully in the middle, you’ve lost more territory than they have. We have ceded much of our presence in the political arena, but we do have the advantage when it comes to sheer number of supporters. If things evolve badly, we may not have that upper hand for long, either due to losing those in our ranks to the other side, or from supporters going quiet out of fear.

This lack of direct engagement unfortunately dovetails with the fact that liberals, especially younger liberals, are known in political circles for being passionate about political issues but for not showing up when it counts, particularly when compared to conservatives. We’ve historically provided lip service to progressive causes without providing reliable boots-on-the-ground support. However, recent events from our compatriots across the aisle show us that things can change, and can change quite dramatically. Whether it means attending protests, financially supporting causes, running for office, having uncomfortable conversations with friends or family, or simply supporting our candidates in the interest of greater party unity, our immediate job is clear at this point. Luckily it is a simple one. The first step is to assert our ideological presence with conviction in the spaces we travel through. In short, we need to start showing up.

There is no easy way to enact a course correction when you feel as if your country has taken a sharp turn down a dark and dangerous moral path; unfortunately there is no handbook we can turn to for a quick fix, and with a lack of clear direction, it is far too easy to be absorbed into a cloud of frustration and powerlessness. Despite this, we are morally obligated to engage with our present political reality in whatever limited way we are able. There is no game plan for extracting ourselves out of our current situation, but the first step is taking a hard look at the truth of where we now find ourselves. It is only after we have assessed exactly where we are as a country that we can begin to piece together a path forward.

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