Richard Nixon taught Republican leaders to win elections using dog whistle racism, a lesson they have continued to live by ever since. They have assiduously taught their base that the measure of equality African Americans won with major civil rights legislation came at the expense of white people and that they, as white people, now have substantial grievances.
Trump got the racism part, but missed the dog whistle part, and gave the game away in the process.
Before Trump, the benefit for Republican leaders came in the corollary — that the federal government mostly serves just to take money from hard working white people and give it to those lazy Black people. This logic allows Republicans to advocate publicly, and with straight faces, tax cuts that benefit only rich people and profligate spending on defense, the only federal function they like, while trying desperately to eliminate any social welfare program the federal government might undertake.
So, in 2012, we saw leading Republican savage, Newt Gingrich, calling Barack Obama, our first Black president, the “food stamp president.” Rick Santorum, at roughly the same time, stated flatly that he does not want to make the lives of Black people better by giving them other people’s money. His specific example at the time was Medicaid, which obviously benefits white people as much as or more than Black people, at least numerically, if only because Black people make up about fourteen percent of the population.
This Republican argument was always vicious, in its lack of empathy for other humans, and in its titanic stupidity, and it only ever attracted people who were already prone to “white supremacist” thinking, which was a regrettably large percentage of the public. The election of Obama indicated that it was on its last breath. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and became president only because of the lingering effects of the slave owners who wrote the Constitution.
Trump is the purest distillation of the Republican racist argument. His appeal was pure, naked racism. Against Mexicans and Muslims, but the basic logic is no different. Identify a group by an irrelevant characteristic and promise to discriminate against them to help everyone else. African Americans smelled the rat and voted for Trump at the lowest rate of any identifiable group. Trump offered zero experience and zero demonstrable competence for the job, only ridiculous ideas — the wall and the Muslim ban — that would provide zero benefit, but potentially cause substantial harm.
With his very poor response to the pandemic that emerged during the last year of his term in office, Trump proved what any thinking person could have predicted: that the pure racist argument leads to bad governance. Trump implicitly admitted as much. Republicans since Nixon have been very fond of self fulfilling prophecies in which they assert that the federal government can do nothing right and prove the point by sabotaging every effort. This is the basic dynamic in their refusal to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which is hugely irrational on its face. Trump’s destruction of the postal service from within is an even better example of the concept.
Long term demographic changes spell the demise of the “white supremacist” ploy, no matter what anyone wants. It is already failing — Republicans keep losing the presidency, without help from the slave owners’ Electoral College — because only about half of the white population buys the argument to begin with, leaving African American and other “minority” voters to decide the issue.
But, by being overt, both about his racism and about his gross incompetence, Trump risks ruining the argument even for people who choose to buy the “white supremacist” gambit. Republican leaders never had any intention of actually helping the working and middle class “white supremacist” dupes. The whole point all along was to drive the republic back as close to the effective oligarchy of the founding as possible. The gratification for the sheep was always only the psychological benefit of having to have zero compunctions about looking down on Black people, which some people enjoy.
But the psychological gratification can wear out if you or a family member dies as the result of Republican incompetence. The saving grace for Trump is that he has inspired a cult of personality, such that his loyal sheep will never doubt him, or notice his profound incompetence. Even Republican elected officials at the highest level who remain abjectly loyal to Trump continue to carry water for him. Why is anyone’s guess.
The good news here is, again, that this dynamic will eventually disappear as racial and ethnic “minorities” make up an ever larger percentage of the population, rendering the “white supremacist” gambit ever less effective.
Under the new regime, we will not be totally free of problems, of course, but we will have a new set of problems and may finally work the stain of racism out of our politics and policy.
Oh so NOW you guys care about police officers?! What a dumb profile pic, trying to look smart by adjusting your glasses. What a fucking prick