Some Books for The Trump Era – Reckoning and Resistance

A close look at three books for the Trump era: Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Hochschild; A Black Man in the White House by Cornell Belcher; White Rage by Carol Anderson.

If you’ve been following the best sellers’ list since the November 2016 election, you’ll notice that the nation’s appetite for books to help us confront and understand the reality of a Trump presidency has not abated. As a country, we are in trouble, and we need help. We turn to books to help us understand how it came to be that our country elected an undisciplined, petulant child-man as president. Despite ongoing scandals, embarrassing tweets, near uniform denunciation from popular culture, Trump continues to hold on to a loyal base of between 35% and 40% of the electorate. These numbers haven’t moved much in a year. A number of national polls indicate that there is nothing Trump could say or do that would cause any kind of mass desertion. So who are these people? What’s in their heads? How did we become a country so divided that one side can no longer speak to the other?  

It is human nature to not allow a mystery to rest. It’s deeply embedded in our psychology to keep picking away at an enigmatic conundrum until we have an answer for it. In a way, it’s good that we are motivated to resolve knowledge gaps, and therefore expand our understanding. But it also means we have to guard against being too hasty to grasp at an easy “reason why” when reality is actually more complex than that. Some of the books that have been selling best seem to pull more at our desire to simplify the cause of our national crisis. The instant success of books like Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance and White Trash by Nancy Isenberg show that the reading public has suddenly taken a burning interest in the non-college educated, white, low-income, small-town and rural demographic of our country. It’s arguable that this attention is long overdue, considering that our country is more culturally weighted toward our urban coasts than ever before in our history.

The problem is simply that it’s not factually correct that these people put Trump into office – at least not on their own. The poorest and most economically marginalized have one big thing in common, regardless of race, and that is that they tend not to vote at all. Trump could not have taken the Electoral College without votes from middle-to-high income, traditional GOP party-line voters. Despite all the skittishness with which the party leaders handled Trump’s nomination, their doubts and criticisms after his famous “pussy grab” remark, his insulting of a Gold Star family, his mocking of a disabled reporter, the party loyal did what they do. They came out and voted for their man - just enough to win him the electoral vote. We can never forget that Hillary won three million more votes overall, and that this presidency is the result of a profoundly distorted electoral system that long ago veered away from being a true representative democracy.
 

For now, we’re stuck with Trump and we don’t particularly want to hear that it’s due to “a combination of complex factors.” It doesn’t click into place in the same satisfying way that laying blame does. But we need to be willing to accept complexity and resist the urge to reach for an edgy book title that promises us a rubber-necking look into the “deplorables,” and instead, take a broader view.

Authors writing from the Left perspective on the Trump phenomenon have much to say, but two rough analytical takes have emerged. What I’ll call Take One lays blame on the Democratic Party for abandoning the low-income, white sector of the working class, left downwardly mobile since the de-industrialization of the national economy began in the mid-70s. Take Two frames Trump’s election as a Whitelash. I first heard the term spoken by Van Jones on CNN on November 3rd, 2016. The Whitelash refers to the phenomenon of white voters of all economic sectors turning out en masse on Election Day to lodge a protest vote against all things Obama, in emotional reaction against the changing complexion (literally) of the United States.

Of all books that I’ve read emerging out of Take One, (Dems sold out the white sector of the working class) the best one I’ve found so is Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Hochschild. It comes off somewhat like an odd cross between a well-documented history of corporate hubris causing environmental devastation and an anthropological experiment of deep immersion in a foreign culture. In 2015-16 Hochschild uprooted herself from her home in Berkeley, California to spend several months living among the natives of rural Louisiana, in order to rid herself of liberal urban prejudice, and shed light on what she calls “deep mysteries.” The overarching mystery is what causes the low-income rural, white southern voter to vote for candidates and policies that only make their situations worse? What is behind their hatred of environmental protections, unions, and “entitlement” programs?

Although I often cringed at Hochschild’s naïve reflections on the world in which she found herself, such as her shock at “restaurants in which literally every item on the menu was fried,” I welcomed her calm, inquisitive approach to what is often a somewhat hysterically-toned area of public discourse. The exhaustive detail with which she traces the environmental destruction of the gulf seacoast brought me to tears more than once. Her documentation of the petrochemical apocalypse on bayou fisheries is so impressive that I will likely never eat fish from the gulf again.

But it’s the human angle that gives the book its title and its narrative heft. At the outset of her study, Hochschild makes the smart calculation that it isn’t policies or programs that drive economically vulnerable people to support right wing politicians, but rather, narratives and stories. For those of us on the other side, she argues that empathy is necessary, and that empathy is not the same as sympathy. One need not sympathize with the point of view of Trump voters to empathize with the stories and emotions that drive them. To understand these emotions, she imbeds herself as in the social/emotional landscape of the Deep South. It’s a fascinating ride.

In an effort to give voice to the overarching narrative of the low-income, white Trump voter, Hochschild spends an entire chapter building an analogy of people waiting in line for the American Dream, which remains just out of sight, over the crest of a hill. All of America is in this line, waiting patiently for years for a little piece of prosperity. But, hey! Wait a minute -- what’s going on? There are people cutting in line! These are, you guessed it, immigrants, people of color, minorities benefitting from Affirmative Action, government workers in public sector unions, (our taxes go to pay their salaries!) gays, women, everyone the Democratic party shouts out to during their campaign speeches. These people aren’t waiting their turn. And if they’re cutting in, then someone must be helping them to cut in. The people helping them would have us feel sorry for the line-cutters and vote for policies that help them cut in line.
 

After about eight pages of this, I was ready to say, “okay, I get it.” But using a little critical thinking, and picking the metaphor apart, we can see that it’s based on three dubious assumptions: One: there is an American Dream. Two: there is a line. Three: everyone has an assigned place in that line -- some, naturally behind others.

These three assumptions require a huge amount of unpacking, and doing so helps us to see the depth with which the ideology of white supremacy is embedded in United States culture. The crazy fact is that people can be entirely driven by white supremacy without hating people of color at all. Just assuming that there is a line, and that the natural and fair place for certain people is behind you in that line -- that is white supremacy. Assuming that if people of color progress in life while you as a white person either don’t, or you don’t feel you are, and that must be because they’re getting an unfair pass -- that is also white supremacy.  As to the American dream, what is it? Is it the promise that if you work hard, you can get ahead, and have a nice lifestyle for you and your family? Because if that’s all it is, it is no different from the Russian Dream, the Malaysian Dream, or the Rwandan dream. Every human being on the planet aspires for that. What makes the American Dream special?

Only one thing distinguishes it, and that is its implicit promise of social equality – that everyone, regardless of race, family origin, social rank, or country of origin has an equal shot at it. That’s what makes this country’s dream American. So, why this insistence on a place in line, and others belonging behind you in it? Is the American Dream a “whites first” kind of dream? Everyone gets on the bus, but some go to the back of the bus?
So, yes, Hochschild does a good anthropological service in weaving this metaphor for us to understand, but it only reveals that, sadly, this thing really is about race, after all. By the time I finished reading her book, I was unable to see any benefit in immersing ones self in this “lining up for the American Dream” metaphor. It needs to be said that whites don’t have interests as whites. There is no legitimate white agenda, or a set of white demands, or grievances against whites calling for redress. This kind of thinking is what eventually leads to marching with Tiki torches and hateful chanting. Working people have interests as working people: for livable wages, job security, and dignity on the job. Human beings have an interest in human rights: for access to food, shelter, health care, clean water, equal justice under the law, quality education. People who have faced discrimination have an interest in ending that discrimination, whether because of color, gender, religion, sexual identity, language, ethnicity. But to claim that because some people with dark skin are moving in “the line” faster than you think they should, and conclude that this, therefore, means you are being discriminated against as a white person is a point of view that needs to be fought, not empathized with. Hochschild talks a lot about “climbing the empathy wall” – but there is a point where one needs to admit that what’s on the other side of that wall is not only unpleasant, but dangerous to our fellow human beings in this country.

But if Hochschild’s approach to building bonds of empathy with the Trump voter might be wrong-headed, the value of Strangers In Their Own Land lies in the powerful way it lines up a well-written factual account of the destruction of a community with the stories people tell themselves about it. Are we really so surprised that people have no faith in government when government agencies sworn to protect the environment utterly failed to stop the poisoning of their water, the destruction of their home? This is where the reckoning comes in, and none of us, really, are off the hook.

This brings us to Take Two, which sees the Trump presidency not as a political aberration, but more as an inevitable turn in a long history the struggle for American racial identity. This position is articulated both deeply and convincingly by Cornell Belcher in his book, A Black Man in the White House. Belcher argues that Trump’s candidacy was driven by Republican Party loyalists who spent eight years seething in rage over a Harvard-educated, maddeningly articulate and competent Black man occupying the oval office.

In 2016, GOP leaders, desperate for one last shot at the presidency before demographics shifted forever out of their reach, were finally willing to toss the dice on a buffoonish, race-baiting blowhard as a presidential nominee, as long as he could corral white voters into the voting booths. These include one subgroup of Trump voters under special scrutiny right now, namely, those who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and then switched sides and voted for Trump in 2016. Belcher is particularly well-qualified to write on this part of Trump’s base. A Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, he served as a pollster and analyst of voting patterns for both of Obama’s campaigns, and currently runs the national political strategy think tank, Brilliant Corners.

Belcher argues that white voters who switched their allegiance from Obama to Trump had only been offering their support to Obama as a loan, a gamble on his once-outsider status, and promises of change. Disappointed at the end of two terms with flatlined wages and a dysfunctional government, this group was unable or unwilling to discard deeply entrenched and unexamined white supremacist assumptions when it came time to vote. While most are not overtly racist in their opinions, they chose to turn a blind eye to Trump’s blatant racism and misogyny, itself an exercise of white privilege. They calculated that they could afford to cast a protest vote, just to “shake things up.”

In Belcher’s book, we can see the laboratory in which the narrative tool of “unfairness” Trump uses so well was manufactured. Belcher describes Obama’s enemies in politics and media spending eight years building a case: while gays and lesbians won marriage rights, alternative energy producers benefited from tax rebates, record numbers of young people of color attended universities, at the same time wages for industrial workers fell against cost of living, and the American Dream faded out of sight for dying middle-America towns.  Of course the political goal was never to enact policy to truly give this demographic an economic leg up, only to enrage them enough to motivate them to vote based on skin color – sadly, a tried and true American bait-and-switch game.

And if you want to learn just how old this game is, White Rage by Carol Anderson does an excellent job of tracing the one-step-forward, one-step-back pattern of progress against racial oppression in the United States, starting all the way back with Reconstruction after the Civil War. Anderson takes the reader through Jim Crow, civil rights legislation, Affirmative Action, the crack epidemic of the 80’s and 90’s, Obama’s victory, and the inevitable backlash against him. By the time she gets to the final chapters, the success of the Trump campaign no longer seems a shock but a sadly predictable reaction in a century-old pattern against efforts to deliver on the American promise of equality. His election is as much the product of a stifled, disenfranchised, black electorate as an inflamed white base.

Anderson focuses considerable attention on voting rights, the relatively brief amount of time that the voting franchise has been guaranteed to people of color in this country, and the ceaseless efforts by the camp of Attorney General Jeff Sessions to turn back those rights. She analyzes the fragility of the electoral franchise in the context of the criminal justice system and makes the case that incarceration is the new means of denying the vote to people of color, particularly African Americans.   

This is an issue that particularly hits home for me. My home state of Wisconsin went blue both times for Obama, but in 2016, much to Trump’s delight, the state went to him. Yes, Wisconsin was the Democrats’ to lose. Disastrously, Hillary’s campaign managers were so overconfident that she didn’t even campaign there. But in White Rage, Carol Anderson calls us also to take into account the hundreds of thousands of ex-convicts stripped of their voting rights, even after having paid their debt to society in prison. Wisconsin is one of 20 states that require convicted felons to serve out their sentence plus parole and probation periods before they can legally vote again. I vividly remember canvassing door-to-door in the Milwaukee area to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in 2011. Again and again, African American men who told me they’d love to get out and vote, but a past felony conviction barred them from that right. That plus Wisconsin’s voter ID laws amount to formidable bureaucratic barriers to voting. Many give up before getting ever that voter registration card.

So yes, many whites voted for Trump in fearful reaction to the rapid disappearance of living-wage jobs that don’t require a college degree, and yes, they fell for Trump’s blaming of immigrants for this job loss. But their vote had an outsized impact due to policies that suppressed the votes of people of color, a form of legal Jim Crow disguised within the penal code. To separate these two factors distorts the picture of where we are today. Anderson argues that we need to understand them as working in tandem. Keeping this in mind can also inform us of where to place our energies, and it’s hard to argue that anything is more urgent than voting rights.

The reason it’s important to differentiate between the “Whitelash” position and the “Democrats dissed working class whites” position is this: each points to a different way out of our current crisis. One position puts pressure on the Democratic Party to win back those whom Hillary Clinton infamously called “a basket of deplorables.” And plenty of political columnists are arguing this. They say Dems need to change tone, offer economic solutions to middle America’s pain, talk less about race, and lay off the “identity politics,” because that’s what’s driven working people into Trump’s camp. The second position, in contrast, argues for the continued urgency of addressing racial disparities in this country, including criminal justice reform, voting rights, and immigration rights. It calls for merging economic and racial justice struggles into a coherent set of popular demands: the kind of program the Democratic party may not lead, but would have to either embrace and champion, or lose the next election. This second position sees the Democratic Party’s demographic base, now less than one-quarter white, as less of a liability to be fixed, and more of a no-surprise outgrowth of gradual change in the ethnic makeup of the country as a whole.

We don’t have the luxury of spending too much time arguing over how we got here. The question is: how do we move forward and save our democracy?