Just who do those people think they are?
Displaced and fighting back.
Republican candidates in the South can be more frank and direct than can candidates elsewhere. It is still a dog whistle, still code, but more audible and the better to examine.
Alabama Senate Candidate Bradley Byrne is challenging Doug Jones, that unlikely Democratic Senator who won a flukey election against former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, the candidate who had become famous for dating high school sophomore girls when he was in his early 30's. Byrne has a tough race in a crowded primary, facing Roy Moore again, plus former Senator Jeff Sessions, Tommy Tuberville (the former Auburn football head coach), and others.
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The race creates a laboratory experiment: what motivates Southern Republican primary election voters. In Alabama the subtext of race is close to the surface, in part because the Democratic and Republican parties are divided by race. Republicans are the party of whites. Democrats are the party of blacks, plus a few college-town liberal-type whites. There are way more Republicans.
Jeff Sessions' announcement ad was noteworthy for its content: his expression of total loyalty to Donald Trump. Don't think I had any independent judgement, he said. I was there as Attorney General to serve Donald Trump, period. I had provocation to defend myself because Trump criticized and humiliated me for two years, but I took it like a whipped dog, and didn't write a book or say a word of complaint.
It was a clear message of loyalty. Love Trump, love me, I suffered, I earned it.
Bradley Byrne is going with a message of preservation of the social order in the face of presumptuous people of color. Here is the Byrne 30 second TV ad, filmed outdoors, with Byrne sitting at a campfire talking to the camera:
"When the towers fell, I knew my brother would be going to war. Dale was a true patriot. I can't bring him back. I miss him every day. It hurts me to hear Ilhan Omar cheapening 9/11. Entitled athletes dishonoring our flag. The squad attacking America. Dale fought for that right, but I will not let them tear our country apart. That's why I'm running for Senate. I'm Bradley Byrne, and I approve this message."
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Thirty second ads of this kind are worthy of close examination. They are expensive and brief. People choose words and messages carefully. Byrne picked three opponents, people he said "tear our country apart," bad, dangerous people. All are people of color.
More important, though, is his subtext message of exclusion and entitlement: These outsiders and have forced their way up and into our beloved America. Then, instead of being grateful to us, they criticize us. Byrne gives a hostile construction to their words and actions, "cheapening 9/11," "dishonoring our flag," and "attacking America."
More important, though, is his subtext message of exclusion and entitlement: These outsiders and have forced their way up and into our beloved America. Then, instead of being grateful to us, they criticize us. Byrne gives a hostile construction to their words and actions, "cheapening 9/11," "dishonoring our flag," and "attacking America."
The presumption! The temerity! The ingratitude! The entitled athlete!
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is in the news today, not for "attacking America" but for attacking Joe Biden and moderate Democrats. "Oh God, in any other country Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are." Left populism looks up, at wealthy, powerful elites, Bernie's greedy billionaire corporate oppressors. She considers herself the real Democrat, fully entitled to call out error and injustice in the social order.
Right populism, from George Wallace, through Ronald Reagan, to Donald Trump, and here with Byrne, finds an enemy by looking down. Historically in the South, that has involved keeping black people in their place. In the current context, it is black and brown people, now including newcomer immigrants, perceived as unworthy, unwelcome interlopers, who presume to share power. Right populism defends the traditional social order.
He does not say white-on-top. He doesn't need to.
5 comments:
You just put 2 and 2 together and got 4 million.
Gratuitous accusations of “racism” like this are part of why Trump won. You have no idea how fed up people are with these unjust accusations. Keep it up and it’ll be 4 more years.
Michael Trigoboff raises an excellent point.
People who in fact respond to racially imbedded messages do NOT want to be called racist. Everybody knows people who are more racist than themselves. Few if any people are as racist as are members of the KKK, or as was Strom Thurmond in his Dixiecrat days. Democrats have a dilemma. It is real but cannot be openly discussed without significant backlash.
I have been overweight much of my life. I never liked people alluding to my weight, no matter how carefully and obliquely. Among runners, I was called one of the Clydsdales, big solid horses. Nice, huh? Not nice enough. Words like "husky" or "stout" or "prosperous" all alluded to the same thing, and they weren't particularly welcome. Even saying I was healthy and fit did not work, because it alluded to my size.
Trump supporters who are uncomfortable around blacks or Jews or Muslims or who who feel some resentment about competition from them or who identify black people as having significant advantages over whites in polls was a huge predictor of the 2016 vote, for Trump. But my experience trying to write about it is that nothing is a more sensitive topic.
What should Democrats do? Probably do the inverse of what Republican politicians do: recognize the dog whistle and pretend not to hear it, even as they note that it is sounding. Send a message of equality, that everybody is the same, the MLK message of race being irrelevant. Don't acknowledge the multi century problem of race in America, neither its history nor presence. Acknowledging race makes everything worse. This does not throw peole of color and their concerns under the bus. It isn't denying racism. Instead, it is dealing with it in the most effective way, by ignoring it. Everything else backfires.
Peter Sage
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." President Lyndon B. Johnson
Johnson was a rarity; a white Southerner who grew up bigoted and changed, becoming a a civil rights advocate. While one might question his motives, the important thing was that he changed his behavior which is the sign that at least he recognized his own racist views.
"I will not let them tear our country apart". Subtext? Hardly...it's right out there. This is the same tactic used by Bryan Kemp and his pickup ad in the Georgia governor's race. Fear tactics. Prior to emancipation Southerners had no fear of African Americans, afterwards it became a primary political motivator. Why?
Why, indeed.
Reading about southern politicians like Jeff Sessions inevitably raises the question of
Abraham Lincoln's passion to "save the union." I for one feel no kinship, even remote,
with the sleaze balls that inhabit our southern states. The thought that our notional politics would not have been had to endure individuals such as Strom Thurmond, Trent Lott, Jeff Sessiona and George Wallace along with Lindsey Graham braying their asinine ideas about white supremacy for the past 160 years is almost too wonderful to even contemplate. THe Civil War, often referred to as the bloodiest in history, would not have occurred and the slave states, already nearing bankruptcy under the slavery system as the outset of that war, would have gone down the toilet into the cesspool of Southern states. If they decide to secede again I would say Godspeed and caution them not to let the door hit them where their brains reside as they exit. Bob Warren
LBJ was certainly correct in his prediction -- the working class has had their pockets thoroughly picked, and have been crushed into the working poor. Now what?
It's happened to working people of all colors. Half of all Americans cannot meet an unexpected $500 expense. If you cry yourself to sleep because your car breaks down and you have no money to get it fixed, you are poor. That's fully half of America today.
People with white skin who are poor sure don't appreciate being called 'white privileged.' They don't feel like they are living a life of privilege, they get pulled over by the cops daily if they have a broken taillight they can't afford to fix, racking up fines they cannot pay, just like brown or black people. 'Affluence privilege' is very real in America, but far from all white people are affluent.
Both right and left are talking down to, and viciously about, half of America, while patting themselves on the back for being so virtuous.
Surveys have shown that diversity training in corporations has little positive impact. The only measurable outcome is that participants have less empathy for poor white people, who are now seen as having been born into a life of privilege that they must have wrecked.
Trump voters are our fellow Americans. The rhetoric, the very theories, we have taught ourselves, the stories we tell each other about our neighbors, have created a country that elected a reality TV con man. Both sides are combining in a way that has put America into a downward spiral, and both sides need a serious rethink, acknowledging that some of their long-held ideas might be counter productive.
2018 cemented Democrats as the party of people who can afford to shop at Whole Foods. In 1960, Democrats represented nearly every district in the bottom fifth of average income, and roughly half of the richest. After the 2018 midterms, they represented 83 percent of the richest districts. They went from a near universal hold on the poorest districts to controlling just about 40 percent. The parties have switched places on the income ladder.
https://theintercept.com/2020/01/03/bernie-sanders-democratic-party-2020-presidential-election/
This represents a catastrophic failure of the Democratic Party, liberals, and progressives. Somehow, their rhetoric has alienated the very people who need activist government solutions the most. Yet I see so many people doubling down on the same rhetoric that has created this surly, polarized country. When we are talking about who is a real American, we're not talking about solving our very real problems. Another day, another election, wasted.
“For a long time, the Republican Party just used racism to divide people in the service of their real politics,” said Sandberg, “which were just pro-corporate and pro-top-1-percent. But the Democratic Party as a whole hasn’t fully caught on to the obvious antidote to this: that we need to form a multiracial working class coalition by polarizing on economic issues and pointing out the con that the Republican Party is perpetrating on many of their voters when they use racist fear-mongering to divide and distract people while they hoard all the wealth in society for themselves and their Wall Street backers.”
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