What can we learn from these stories?
“Unanimous Decision Leaves Nation Divided: Public Finds Little Common Ground”
That was the headline in The Washington Post on October 4, 1995. The decision it referred to was not the outcome of a long and intensely watched presidential election but rather the verdict in a long and intensely watched trial: the not-guilty verdict of O.J. Simpson for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
That day, and in the days and weeks that followed, the nation and the world were deluged with images revealing a stark divide between black and white America. It was a divide every bit as vast and bewildering as the current rift between blue and red America. In restaurants, schools, and workplaces; on streets where people watched TVs through shop windows, photographers caught African-Americans leaping to their feet in joy, and white Americans staring — faces drawn in disbelief, equally confounded by the outcome as they were by their own confusion about it. How could so much of black America be willing to look past specific facts (motive, opportunity, bloody shoe prints, DNA) to want and cheer this man’s acquittal?
On Wednesday, blue voters wept on subways and wept watching Hillary’s dignity and wept that this was our country. How could so much of red America be willing to look past (and, by voting, endorse) Trump’s unprecedented and seemingly disqualifying lies, bigotry, sexism, hate-baiting, and apparent instability to want him to be President?
The answers have to do with the men who made things happen by knowing the power of pain — and how to use it. O.J. Simpson’s lead defense lawyer, the late Johnnie Cochran, was, in his way, as much of a showman as Donald Trump. Cochran postured; he blustered; he sent hidden messages; he reached the jurors in his courtroom and the rapt Court TV viewers in much the way Trump reached his voters: by allowing them just enough of a path around logic and outrage to make their votes about something more than the moment.
Trump understood that he could become, however absurdly, a symbol of his supporters’ economic victimization — and an imagined vindication
In Ezra Edelman’s brilliant film, O.J.: Made in America, we were reminded last year that, though Simpson had largely turned his back on the civil rights movement, that as Maureen Dowd wrote at the time, he “preferred white women, white businessmen, and white country clubs.” Cochran understood that the former football star could be made, however implausibly, into a symbol of racial victimization.
In much the same way, Trump — who has no more in common with the people who voted for him than O.J. did with the jurors who acquitted him — understood that he could become, however absurdly, a symbol of their economic victimization, and an imagined vindication. Like O.J. Simpson’s acquittal, Trump’s victory was a victory for an aggrieved and substantial part of the country. The grievances are vastly different in origin, content, duration, and scope, but the emotions have some parallels.
Back in 1995, another Washington Post headline read: “A Shock to the (White) System.” And in a New York Times op-ed piece by Russ Rymer, the large type read: “Lately, whites have felt the shock of injustice. That’s Good News.” But what did we learn from those stories? What did we do to heal the divide? We have within the last few years witnessed the police shootings of Michael Brown, Philando Castil, Tamir Rice (and many others), as well as the Black Lives Matter movement those shootings have spawned. We’ve heard the sickening racism among many of Trump’s loudest followers, and we’ve seen the cold-blooded shootings of police. All of these things — despite the color of our president’s skin and the hope and grace he brought to the office — suggest a 2016 country not sufficiently different from the 1991 country in which Rodney King was savagely beaten by L.A. police and recovered just enough to ask, plaintively, “I just want to say, you know, can we, can we all get along? Can we, can we get along?”
Like all other colors, red has many hues
What and who Donald Trump actually is and becomes as president is for no one — not even Trump — to know for sure. Trump the president may well turn out to be the strutting, dangerous outrage of Trump the candidate. But if he is, it’s unlikely that blue voters will be alone in their protests and determination to stop him; like all other colors, red has many hues, and put into practice, much of Trump’s stated agenda would not only crush those who fought and voted against him, but also hurt wide swaths of his supporters.
I’m not suggesting that intolerance should ever be tolerated. But if the main objective of blue America, as stated the day after the election by Michael Moore, becomes “to fight, resist and obstruct in the way Republicans did against President Obama every day for eight full years,” then it seems we’ll be no more likely, two decades from now, to have healed the divide exposed in this election than we healed the divide exposed by the O.J. verdict. And though in July Moore was almost alone in predicting Trump’s victory, that doesn’t guarantee his infallibility as a prognosticator. Moore’s call to stop, immediately, “the meanness and madness that’s about to begin” seems to ignore the need to see clearly what’s actually happening, not what might. lf we learned nothing else from this election, we learned the value of learning.
Injustice lights a match. Anger is the fire. Hatred is the ash. Somehow, it needs to be swept away, from both sides of this ugly aisle.
