On Talking (White) Populism without talking WHITE populism
I’ve just finished George Packer’s “Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt” from the most recent New Yorker. It is absolutely worth a read.
The piece speaks incredibly clearly to some of the divides present at this time in history. It has a cogent theory for how we got to the Trump-era Republican party and the Obama/Clinton (and yes, Sanders) Democratic party. But, most notably of all, this piece is invaluable for illustrating what its author — and with him so many intelligent observers — seem completely unable to grasp.
One pillar of Packer’s piece is his not-so-veiled attack on political correctness — though blessedly he spares us the use of the phrase — wherein he bemoans the current trend that “people of good will are afraid to air legitimate arguments”. The author clearly considers himself one of those people of good will, and I will grant that large portions of the argument he lays out here are legitimate. But I am sorry (not sorry) to inform him that the backlash he’s witnessing is against the ongoing tyranny of smartish white men with incredibly narrow experiences mistaking their anemic theories about other people for the truth. His piece, for all its strengths, is a prime example of this.
In Packer’s essay, communities of colour — to say nothing of women, religious, or sexual minorities — are always just barely in the frame. Latinos barely merit a mention beyond phrases like “Mexicans were moving in”. People of Asian descent are trotted out briefly to fulfill their role as model minority, and nothing more. Indigenous people? We still have those? And black folks are, unsurprisingly, not granted the same intentional consideration that the reader is implored to extend to the embattled white working class.
The concept of white privilege is only brought up long enough to present it as a strawman for dissembling. How can all white people, regardless of economic status, be privileged when an entire group of white people is poor? Rubbish. Black Lives Matter, which has been undeniably successful in forcing an uncomfortable and tangible picture of American racism into the zeitgeist, is dismissed as not “a reformist movement but as a collective expression of grief and anger”. As if grief and anger play no role in reform. As if the Democratic nominee for President having to figure out how to navigate dealing with BLM, without alienating indispensable black voters is not in and of itself evidence of BLM’s political effectiveness.
As has become tiresomely typical among white journalists and thinkers, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ assessment of race and American history is deemed unhelpful and “deeply pessimistic”. Unable to contend with Coates’ assessment itself, the author prefers to refer to the assessment as deeply disturbing, and use our common discomfort with that which disturbs us to pivot away from further consideration. Never mind the fact this strain of deep pessimism — as he puts it — is not new, but also foundational to American political thought.
The author evokes Jefferson for his purposes, but conveniently misses essential and relevant strains of Jefferson’s thought. Can you get more pessimistic about the ongoing legitimacy of government than “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”? If Coates’ writing is a “jeremiad” then how would our author classify Jefferson’s 18th Chapter in “Notes on the State of Virginia”?
Yeah, that sounds really optimistic.
Instead of engaging with it, the so-called “new consensus” of black political thought is quoted only so that it may be dismissed out of hand. With the helpful condescension he demands we shield the white working class from, Packer utilizes a (black) academic to remind everyone else that they “better watch out” because “I don’t know how you live by the identity-politics sword and don’t die by it.” As if we are not quite literally dying in the streets due to identity. As if using our identity as a reason to kill us is not among America’s longest, most cherished traditions.
But putting all that aside, the largest failing of this piece, and the author’s logic therein is how it misses the fact that these peripheral concerns of racial identity politics are seminal to explaining the white working class he seeks to examine.
How can one honestly explain the disenchantment of the white working class without addressing the fact that their previous enchantment was built on the bedrock of white supremacy? That in the very real America which is the subject of their nostalgia, it was always a certainty that regardless of how little they had compared to the white elites they have now come to loathe, they would always be better than niggers.
An indispensable element of the alienation of the white working class, and an indispensable element of their gravitation towards Trump is his clear acknowledgment of the fact that they believe this particular promise was broken.
White elites were the ones who struck this deal with the white working class nearly two and a half centuries ago, and they have — under great duress — welshed on the bargain. Trump recognizes this, and that is why he so dutifully hurls invective at the “other” whether they be black, Latino or Muslim. When Trump says that “protestors realize there are no consequences to protesting anymore” and that “in the good old days this didn’t happen…because they used to treat them very, very rough” he is inviting white working class voters to wax nostalgic about the America of vicious beatings on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the America of Red Summer and the America of the Tulsa pogrom.”
Packer claims halfway through his piece that “identity politics breaks down the distinction between an idea and the person articulating it”. Putting aside the fact that this distinction is a clear absurdity — ideas do not burst into the world independently, but are crafted by people with specific experiences, incentives and yes, identities — he seems to state this as if it were a bad thing. So in the interest of dialogue I will meet the author halfway.
I know the author doesn’t want to hear this, and I truly wish it was not the case, but there is absolutely nothing in the American social, economic and political fabric that can be considered apart from white supremacy. It is the critical figure that is missing from his calculus, and the reason that his otherwise insightful analysis and all associated ideas — be they his or spontaneously generated in the ether — must nonetheless prove woefully inadequate.
