Thursday, August 17, 2017

Trump is calibrating how to get it white.

Trump is a nationalist and populist.
Trump is also a Republican.

Trump is a white politician taking about race in America.

There is talk all over TV by pundits saying there being a division in the House of Trump.   Brannon nationalist vs. the establishment people now led by Chief of a staff Michael Kelly.  Some people are ascribing the various positions taken by Trump in the past few days as evidence of White House in-fighting.   Trump is going back and forth on Charlottesville, on the KKK, on Business Councils, on monuments, so it must be an artifact of division inside the White House.

I disagree.   I think it is evidence of Trump feeling his way on an important part of his appeal to many Americans--his position on whiteness, race, and the nature of American ethnicity.

This blog reported closely on how, during the primary election, Trump knocked off GOP contenders representing both the GOP establishment (Bush, Kasich)  the Tea Party (Rubio) and the religious conservative wing (Carson, Cruz).   His formal positions on issues were the same as other candidates.  He did not prevail because his positions were different.

Trump prevailed because he was the superior showman, the center of all attention,, and because he got something else right that the others did not.   He appealed to the frustrations and worries of white Americans, and did so in a way that pleased some people without, simultaneously, permanently offending enough Republicans that they would fail to vote for him.   He got both the bipartisan racial vote and the partisan Republican non-racial vote.

He caught the sweet spot.

Trump created a new calibration of how to express racial frustrations and grievance.  He expressed a 21st Century response to the frustration of a great many whites over the changes taking place to white identity.  It was more than unease with immigration, more than concerns about illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America, more than frustration with the delicate talk required by politicians.  It was all of those things combined, plus some inchoate feeling that the country was becoming un-American, that changes were happening that weren't all that good, that there was a better past that was being lost.  Donald Trump had repeated what Richard Nixon was able to do in 1968 with his Southern  Strategy.   He updated what the new-George Wallace did in 1972.    It expanded what George W. Bush did with the Willie Horton ad in 1988.

Donald Trump said aloud what a great many American think about ethnicity, race, foreigners, crime, and needs-based entitlements, and he said it in a way that communicated that he shared those feelings, while simultaneously saying it in a way that did not fully estrange people who are offended by overt racial talk.

His failure to condemn David Duke and the KKK is too much.  Trump needed to back off that.  But Ann Coulter's criticism of Trump for being soft by is not good either.  Tack back.  As of today he has located a better, safer talking point to make the soft-touch assertion of white nationalism, without sounding too racist.  He is talking about civic monuments.   Better to defend Robert E. Lee statues than defend a live David Duke.    

It is delicate stuff and has to be calibrated carefully.  A New Yorker can say the same things a Southerner might say, but it is heard slightly differently.  A New Yorker talking about crime is presumed to be taking about crime, while the same words from a southerner would be presumed to be taking about blacks and preserving a social order that privileges whites.  But the distinction is small and the zone of equilibrium is tiny.  The small margin of error showed up in Trump's presumed flip flops on Charlottesville.  
What is going on here?  He is trying to stay in that sweet spot.

To hit the calibration correctly Trump needs to have the support of that great bi-partisan base of Democrats and Republicans who feel uncomfortable with the demographic changes taking place in America and with the pressure on manufacturing jobs coming from foreign trade and automation.  Trump has a villain to point to:  too much immigration and too many here illegally, plus foreign trade, plus crime by non-native-born people.   But he has to hit these notes hard, but not too hard, lest respectable business leaders signal to the public that Trump's talk and policies are too racist.

Trump's back and forth the past five days are not signals of indecision nor of division in the House of Trump.  They are signs that Trump, who appears to act by instinct  rather than strategy, is simply trying to hit the right notes by trial and error.  

He is finding his way to talking about monuments and history, not race.  I expect him to settle into that subject and get away from Charlottesville.

Charlottesvelle is a loser.  It is hard to defend someone who drives into a crowd to kill people.  Monuments are a better subject for him.

4 comments:

Rick Millward said...

The movement to remove Confederate monuments has been quietly growing for some time, leading to the recent actions by states and cities to take them off public grounds.

Monuments are symbols and humans process reality through the use of symbols. Symbols are shorthand for concepts; for instance the symbol of the American flag communicates a set of specific values like freedom, tolerance and justice to those who revere it, but it can just as easily stand for the opposite depending on individual experience. One mans symbol for a noble cause can easily be another's for oppression.

Perhaps this is the underlying reasoning for the the "No graven images or likenesses" commandment...

Peter C. said...

I swear I learn more from this blog about politics than all the newspapers put together. Nice job Peter. You should run for something.

Rick Millward said...

The Trump voter by definition has a problem processing reality, so attributing a rational motivation to their actions is sketchy from the start. They are a cult, led by a person who is not of any material substance, but a projection of the cult member's own prejudices and attitudes.

It may be possible to explain how the monuments represent evil to African Americans and others, and certainly worth the effort to try, but the argument is likely completely lost to a racist. I suspect city leaders have known this and avoided the issue to keep the peace, not a viable long term solution.

Peter C. said...

I think Trump is clueless when it comes to history. He has no idea what happened in the past or why. He probably took too many business classes and not enough humanities courses. He reacts to the present, which he can't relate to anything that happened previously because he doesn't know it. That comes out every day.