Silence is Enabling

Billy Bush--of all people--says something powerful and true.

I had underestimated Billy Bush, and I had barely known of him.   He had a show, "Access Hollywood."  He interviewed celebrities. 

His job was to ingratiate himself with celebrities and get them to say interesting things.  Donald Trump was a star.  Bush was a near-nobody.  He chuckled along with Trump.

Billy Bush: NY Times op-ed

Then the tape came out.  Trump had bragged about the sexual entitlement of fame and wealth.  Use Tic Tacs. She's married but I bet I can f--k her. They let you kiss them.  Grab them by the p---y.  

Trump did the talking.  Bush laughed along.  Bush got fired from his celebrity show.  Trump was elected president. 

Billy Bush acknowledges that he enabled Trump, that he did it to advance his career, and that the issue was not simply about women.  Men who chuckle along are part of the problem.  They normalize something wrong.

Race, too.  Donald Trump did not create white racism.  Not everyone who voted for Donald Trump is a racist.  But Trump's margin did not come from the "economically distressed."  Incomes did not predict Trump's votes.   Attitude on race predicted Trump's votes.

Adam Serwer, in The Atlantic, wrote that "Trump's great political insight was that Obama's time in office inflicted a profound psychological wound upon many white Americans, one that he could remedy by adopting the false narrative that placed the first black president outside the bounds of American citizenship."  Birtherism put Trump on the political map.

Trump voiced something that was as endemic: anxiety and hostility over the displacement of native born whites as the default center of American social hierarchy.  It was a Copernican revolution.  The earth was one of several planets, and not the center.  White males were one of several identities, but no longer the center.

Trump knew how to voice putting things right.  Obama was illegitimate, a foreigner, an immigrant, black, and Muslim.  Mexicans were not "the best"; they brought drugs and rape.  Muslims were suspect and should be banned.

Click Here: Atlantic article

Donald Trump made a frontal assault on one of the core values in America, the notion that America was built around a creed of "liberty and justice for all", not a racial group.  The idea that people of all faiths and religions were part of the American polity.

Republican voters saw this behavior.  Some ignored it.  Serwer writes that a great many of them liked it, glad to have said aloud what they were thinking all along.  Black people, brown people, women, gays, immigrants, Muslims, transgenders--they were all seeking legitimacy and equality and it was too much, too fast, too un-American.  They were outsiders.

Most Republicans went along.  Whites voted for Trump, even educated, prosperous white women, appalled by the Access Hollywood tape.  

Billy Bush never said he just went up and kissed women, nor that he grabbed anyone's crotch.  He was lost his job because he heard Trump say it and played along for his own self interest.  He enabled something offensive and wrong.  

American school children memorize the Gettysburg Address: a nation dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal.  They say the Pledge of Allegiance: liberty and justice for all. Trump did not just stand for borders.  He also excluded people inside the American polity who didn't conform to the white, Christian tradition.  He called them illegitimate, criminals, rapists, and terror suspects.

It worked.  Like Billy Bush on the bus, Republicans stayed silent, and let Trump be Trump, and overwhelmingly gave him their vote. 

Now Billy Bush is sorry, and says he shouldn't have just gone along.