Backlash

Barrack Obama scared people when the public discovered he was black.

Barrack Obama had been thought to represent a post-racial America, an America that had moved past racism. 

It wasn't really true, of course.  Race is still a great spoken and unspoken issue in America. A great many people were highly conscious of his race when he was elected, with some favorably inclined, some unfavorably inclined.  But everything changed when a white police officer in Cambridge, Massachusetts hassled Louis Gates, a black professor at Harvard, who was seen trying to enter his locked Cambridge home.  Gates had locked himself out.  The policeman interpreted his struggle as a break in.  Gates said it was his own home. 

Obama said the confrontation and arrest of Gates as "stupid." The Cambridge police demanded an apology.  Obama backtracked, then arranged a "beer summit" with Obama, Biden, the policeman and Gates.

Obama's favorably index dropped immediately.   The public discovered something they didn't like.   Obama sided with the black guy being hassled, not the policeman who presumed the black man fussing at the door might well be a thief.  The Pew Research people found that 41% of people disapproved of how Obama handled this; 29% approved.  Among white voters 53% had approved of Obama's job performance.  Immediately after the incident only 46%.  He went underwater among whites.

MSNBC Host Joy Reid opined that America has had 3 periods of Reconstruction.   The first was the famous one, the one following the Civil War, when blacks were emancipated from slavery and given voting rights.  The backlash ended reconstruction and created a revised history of the antebellum south, plus Black Codes that reestablished black subservience.  

A second backlash was the aftermath of the Civil Rights laws the ended legal segregation and Jim Crow laws in the south.  The rules changed quickly but the culture dragged behind, with the result of backlash in the form of votes for Richard Nixon with his Southern Strategy in 1968, George Wallace in Michigan in 1972.  

Ronald Reagan recognized the power of this backlash.   Philadellphia, Mississippi, a town of 7,000, became famous in 1964 as the site where three civil rights workers were murdered, then their bodies moved and buried in an earthen dam.  A search by federal agencies found the bodies.  It emerged that white people in the KKK, the county sheriff department, and the city of Philadelphia, Mississippi police department were involved.  Seven people were eventually found guilty.   Reagan chose this as the place to inaugurate his campaign, with a speech about states rights.  People got the message.

Joy Reid said that the election of Barrack Obama created the 3rd Reconstruction and then the third backlash.  His election established a black person in a position of power, with a liberal social agenda on multiple issues.  This, too created backlash.  Reid says Trump is the expression of that backlash:

"Trumpism is about what every Reconstruction backlash is about: restoring cultural norms that the majority finds comforting and empowering."

Donald Trump won the overwhelming majority of votes of self-identified evangelical Christians.  Trump is not pious in the least, but he advocates for old style cultural norms and a traditional social order that pushes back against the Obama support of diversity, multiculturalism, racial equality, religious equality.  Trump's attacks on "fake news" and skepticism of the science on climate reflect respect for a faith-based view of the world.  Religious people believe in science, but they simultaneously believe in scriptural truths. Trump respects alternative facts and the autonomy of individuals to choose to believe those, versus secular experts.

The Obama presidency pushed the boundaries on homosexual rights, on transgenders, on abortion access, on Islam, on immigration, on access to health care, on race.  Laws and cultural norms changed under Obama.  Trump is backlash, restoring those norms.