It’s the Progressive Ideologues’ Fault
By crying wolf they lost credibility and desensitized people to the charges of bigotry
The Republican convention was a shocking look into the disturbing worldview of the Republican Party. From brazen lies to racial appeals, it’s truly terrifying to think of the pre-civil-rights attitude that Republicans wish to bring to this country. They want to turn the clock back on America in ways that would be disastrous.
I am, of course, describing the 2012 Republican convention, as described by progressive thought leaders.
When we up the rhetorical ante in today’s polarized landscape, we make sure that fewer and fewer people will listen to us the next time. It’s the “boy who cried wolf” problem. And the anti-Republican progressives pushed the envelope in this area so forcefully that Republican voters became numb. Sure, they tell us that Donald Trump is a sexist racist who would be a disaster; but they said that about Mitt Romney, about John McCain, about both Georges Bush, about Bob Dole…. Well, just about everybody. Those people were clearly not racists; so why should we take the progressives’ opinion seriously now?
Progressives, it’s your fault that Donald Trump has destroyed our political system.
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Racism, sexism, and many other forms of bigotry are alive and well in America. And, undoubtedly, classism and other sentiments against other socioeconomic classes is as well. Donald Trump is an example of that. But we are also one of the least bigoted countries in the world, and the vast majority of our political differences come from honest disagreement, not bigotry. It merely seems, as an outside observer of the attacks that come against Republicans that dishonest accusations of bigotry have been on the rise. They’re made out of political expediency. What happens is that the targets of of these attacks, and others in that political coalition, become numb to them.
During the 2012 election (and indeed, during the 2012 Republican convention, because I remember which bar I was at in Tampa when I watched this live), MSNBC host Martin Bashir was joined by MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell for a segment in which they said that Republicans’ (and, specifically, Mitch McConnell’s) attacks on President Obama for taking too many vacations to go golfing was an attempt to link the President with Tiger Woods (black men who golf!) which plays into the old stereotype of the hypersexual and aggressive black man, because of Tiger Woods’ sex scandals.
This. Was. Absurd.
Now let’s be clear: attacks on President Obama’s vacationing and golfing were absurd if they were meant to signal that the President was not taking the duties of office seriously enough. They were just as absurd as Democrats’ attacks on President Bush for taking too many vacations. Vacation-based attacks are relatively common in modern politics. They’re absurd, but relatively common features in modern politics. They are not racist.
Conservatives jumped on this line of thinking as the obvious insanity that it was. Progressives… Had nothing to say. Nobody on the progressive side engaged in any self-policing, trying to convince their fellow left-wingers that this was stupid and dumb and shouldn’t have happened, and that Republican attacks on Obama’s golfing were stupid and dumb but not racist.
This is anecdotal. Perhaps this segment was an outlier; perhaps this *should* have gone unremarked. TV news is almost by definition outrageous! Who cares!
This isn’t a one-off event. Bashir also alleged that the word “IRS” was, in the context of Republican attacks, a dog-whistle for the n-word. Calling the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare” was a racist dog-whistle. Calling President Obama a “professor” was not boilerplate GOP anti-elitism — which is, like attacks on golfing, dumb — but a code for calling President Obama “uppity.” Using the phrase “a black cloud hanging over us” was racist.
Again, this is all anecdotal, and perhaps inconsequential. Conservatives, from the elite to the grassroots, were paying attention: they got the message from the media that criticizing the first black president, in any way, could be construed as racist.
They built their defenses and went to the ramparts.
(This is not to let the GOP off the hook: many politicians *did*, both intentionally and inadvertently, use racial dog whistles in the Obama era. This was a big problem, and also to blame for Donald Trump [as this series has documented in previous editions]. But the false-positive rate, we should probably accept, skyrocketed.)
So Donald Trump comes along. He’s much less careful about his words, both intentionally and inadvertently. He dog-whistles. He outright barks. He attacks, he never apologizes, and his Twitter account is apparently run by alt-right nationalists. Conservatives, coming out of an era when mentioning “golf” and “IRS” is apparently racist, are desensitized to both actual racism, and criticism of their candidate as racist. They, in fact, *like* a guy who’s going to aggravate progressives with racial rhetoric, and refuse to apologize for it.
The progressive calculation may be different, here. Indeed, famous progressive pundit Matthew Yglesias has explicitly said that we are not sensitive enough to bigotry; so much bigotry exists that maybe we should spend all of our efforts calling out bigotry and none of our efforts calling out disingenuous accusations of bigotry, because there just aren’t enough hours in the day and the marginal benefit of genuinely fighting bigotry, even when overextended, outweighs the benefit of fighting false-positive bigotry.
Hey: I’m just the messenger here. If progressives are interested in having a legitimate and functional opposition party, I’m here from the opposition to tell them that their tactics aren’t working, and are in fact counterproductive. Yes, I would like conservatives on my side to be more receptive to legitimate criticisms, but there is, of course, only so much I can do. The current call-out strategy is not working. It’s making heartland activists less receptive, not more. Progressives need to be better here.
Or do they?
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I’m sure there are many, many progressives out there who are happy about this state of affairs. The nomination of Donald Trump has, as this series is premised on, destroyed the Republican Party, and the Republican Party is a vehicle for misery and destruction in America. Trump’s nomination has made it harder for Republicans to be elected at *any* level of politics, and that’s a good thing!
This has been a much closer election than previously thought: there have been polls showing Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton by more than the margin of error — a CNN/ORC poll, which is an outfit in relatively good polling standing. Clinton is winning comfortably now, with most polling forecasters putting Trump’s potential of winning the presidency in the sub-20% range. This is, nonetheless, to me, a Clinton voter, *terrifying.* The nomination of Donald Trump made it more likely that Clinton will become president, which, in the eyes of progressives, is a good thing. (Yes, basically any Republican in the field would have had a better shot at this thing.) But the nomination of Donald Trump also made it more likely that Donald Trump will become president, which should be viewed as a positively disastrous thing. (For both sides.) Is that worth it?
Donald Trump’s nomination, while making it less likely that any Republican will get elected, has also made it more likely that Trumpism as a force will infect the GOP; that Republican candidates who *do* get elected will be more Trump-like in their policies, in their rhetoric, in their attitudes. And Republicans are still a powerful political force in this country, up and down the tickets. Yes, it’ll be wonderful when Clinton is elected president. What will be less wonderful is when we have more Paul LePages in governors’ offices around the country; when the Texas GOP becomes unmoored from its principles and obsessed with power; when the Kansas GOP decides that Sam Brownback’s reforms were not regressive *enough.* Is that worth it?
Perhaps the progressive movement’s goal is no more than the nihilistic destruction of the GOP and a future — or at least a GOP-rebuilding period of time — that looks a lot more like one-party Democratic rule at the national level. And perhaps, even if not, it’s not incumbent upon progressives to make the GOP better — they can make critiques, fair or not, and it’s incumbent upon Republicans — myself, others of my ideological stripe, etc. — to make the GOP better in the right ways. While I’d argue that’s a really horrible misreading of what the history is of opposition political movements and of how the American political system works, it’s also a view that takes it as fact that if someone is in one of the two political coalitions, they have no interest in having a functional opposition party. I would certainly argue that players on both sides have a legitimate interest in two functional ideological coalitions, rather than one semi-dominant one and one dysfunctional minority (that nonetheless wins many seats, exercises a lot of power, and influences many peoples’ lives).
And perhaps this is all wrong. Perhaps Clinton will be elected, Trumpism will be harmlessly exorcised from the GOP, and the Republicans who remain will be no worse at governance than they would have been if, say, Scott Walker won the GOP nomination. And the only effect of Trump will be a national loss and a Clinton presidency.
But, I guess I doubt it. And it still doesn’t absolve progressives of their culpability.
