Frank Rich lacks a sympathetic understanding of lower income white Wallace and Trump supporters.
Trump Nashville rally 2017, public domain.
Posted by John Engelman, Raceology.
New York Magazine, November 2017
"What Comes After Trump Could Be More Dangerous," by Frank Rich
Whether Trump lasts another three weeks, another three years, or another seven years, our troubles won’t be over when he’s gone. They may well get worse...
What we should be worrying about instead is the remarkable staying power of the American voters who put these guys in office. They’re in for the long game no matter the fate of the current administration. Trumpism predates Trump and Pence by decades and is a more powerful, enduring, and scary force than either of them...
The toxic anger that defines Trumpism — a rage at America’s cultural and economic elites in both political parties as well as at minorities and immigrants — will only grow darker and fiercer once its namesake leaves office...
Right-wing nationalist populism is nothing new in America; the genealogical lines of Trump and his immediate antecedents, Sarah Palin and the tea party, trace back [to]...once the civil-rights revolution took hold in the 1960s: The term “backlash” grew out of the economic columnist Eliot Janeway’s 1963 observation that white blue-collar workers might “lash back” at new black competitors entering a contracting job market. That anger coursed through the quixotic presidential campaigns of the onetime Nixon aide Pat Buchanan from 1992 to 2000, through Ross Perot’s in 1992, and, most especially, through the four presidential runs of the segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace between 1964 and 1976...
The swath of America that has now been reinvigorated and empowered by landing a tribune in the White House for the first time is a permanent mass movement that has remained stable in size and fixed in its beliefs for more than half a century. How large a mass? At the high end, Trumpists amount to the third or so of the country that has never wavered in support of the Trump presidency. A low-end estimate might bottom out at the quarter of the nation that still approved of Trump’s hero Nixon even when he surrendered the presidency...
Now that Trumpists have tasted real Executive-branch power, they are ravenous for more. Laura Ingraham, Rupert Murdoch’s new all-in Trump host at Fox News, pointedly told the New York Times on the eve of her prime-time show’s premiere last month that while Trump is “invaluable” as “the titular head of the movement,” Trumpism “is about the movement.” Bannon has called Trump “a blunt instrument for us.” Finer-tooled instruments — smarter and shrewder demagogues than the movement’s current titular head — may already be suiting up in the wings...
To appreciate the tenacity and enduring political constancy of Trumpism, George Wallace’s story is the essential text...
He inveighed against “pointy-headed professors,” the “filthy rich in Wall Street,” and Washington’s “briefcase-totin’ bureaucrats” while supporting big-government programs like Social Security and Medicare that benefited his base...
Up until the would-be assassin, Arthur Bremer, riddled Wallace with bullets at a Maryland campaign stop, Nixon had so feared Wallace’s looming threat to his reelection that he tried to derail him preemptively by secretly contributing $400,000 to Wallace’s opponent in Alabama’s 1970 Democratic gubernatorial primary. (The dirty trick failed.) Both in 1968 and 1972, with the race-baiting Spiro Agnew on the ticket, Nixon worked hard to usher Wallace’s disaffected white Democrats into the GOP en masse by pandering to their racial and cultural resentments with respectable code words (“silent majority,” “law and order”) rather than rants like Wallace’s clarion call for “segregation forever.”...
But the country hadn’t dodged a bullet when a bullet took Wallace out of the arena; it had dodged a moment of truth. With Wallace off the field, and his voters for the moment dispersed and reassimilated into the normal two-party order of things, America in 1972 could tell itself that the fever was breaking, much as the deluded Jeff Flake imagines today.
Instead, Trumpism has been metastasizing in plain sight ever since — gravitating from the Democrats to the Republicans but in truth a remarkably consistent force no matter what its followers’ party affiliation (if any). When Wallace’s national political trajectory was accelerating in 1971, Donald Warren, a sociologist at Oakland University, began interviewing midwestern voters in depth to come to grips with the phenomenon. He coined the term “Middle American Radicals” to capture their paradoxical politics: They sided “with the traditional left in opposition to the privileges and power of the rich corporations,” but with the right in their fear “of the growing power of the poor and minority groups in our society.”...
[What is happening is] a replay of the purge of the 1960s, when the reinvented GOP shaped by Goldwater, Nixon, and the “southern strategy” shoved aside the likes of Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney...
Trump has paved the way for far slicker opportunists to gain access to the national stage. Imagine a presidential candidate with Trump’s views and ambitions who does not arrive with Trump’s personal baggage, his undisciplined penchant for self-incrimination, and his unsurpassed vulgarity...
However common the ground of Democrats and Trumpists when it comes to economic populism, they will still be separated by the Trumpists’ adamant nativism, nationalism, and racism.
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I have excerpted from a much longer essay in which Frank Rich makes no effort to understand the lower income white supporters of George Wallace and Donald Trump, other than to dismiss them as ignorant racists. Those who feel the same way Rich does enjoy a feeling of moral superiority that is nothing more than politically dysfunctional sanctimony.
Full disclosure: I voted for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, George McGovern in 1972, and Bernie Sanders, and then Hillary Clinton in 2016. I still believe that lower income whites without college degrees have legitimate grievances against Democrat support for Negroes and third world immigrants.
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy was published in 1944. It was written by Gunnar Myrdal. He was a Swedish academic who later on won the Nobel Prize for Economics.
In this book Dr. Myrdal acknowledged that blacks tended to perform less well academically than whites, and that they have higher rates of crime and illegitimacy. He attributed these deficiencies to racial discrimination. He predicted that when blacks were no longer discriminated against they would behave and perform as well as whites.
An American Dilemma was cited in the 1954 United States Supreme Court Decision Brown vs Board of Education, which found segregated public schools to be unconstitutional, and which encouraged the fledgling civil rights movement. Dr. Myrdal's optimistic appraisal of black potential so permeated the civil rights movement that I accepted it on faith as a child, teenager and young adult, even though I had not heard of the book or its author.
Two generations since the civil rights legislation was passed into law and since the War on Poverty began anti poverty programs designed to alienate black poverty it is clear to those who look that Professor Myrdal's optimistic assessment of black potential has not been substantiated. Black rates of crime and illegitimacy have risen. Black academic performance has not improved, despite expensive efforts like Head Start and No Child Left Behind.
When George Wallace ran against President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 he was a regional candidate. If four years later the predictions of Dr. Myrdal were coming to fruition, Wallace would have lost support even in the South. What had happened instead were four years of black ghetto riots and an ongoing crime wave. Frank Rich does not mention this at all.
Richard Nixon is condemned because of his Southern Strategy that led eventually to the Republican domination of the United States that persists. If by 1968 blacks were beginning to behave and perform as well as whites, there would have been no Southern Strategy. There would have been no Nixon presidency. Nixon would have lost the 1968 election to a Democratic dove who would have ended the War in Vietnam.
The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 increased legal and illegal immigration to the United States. It was unpopular at the time.
Lower income whites have legitimate reasons for opposing immigration. By competing for jobs immigrants enable employers to pay lower wages. By competing for places to live immigrants enable landlords to raise rents.
When I ask a white blue collar Republican why he votes Republican he does not tell me that strong labor unions force manufacturers to move their factory production to low wage countries. He does not tell me that progressive taxation punishes success.
He tells me about black and Hispanic crime. He, his friends, and his relatives have probably been crime victims. He tells me what it was like attending public schools where most of the students were blacks and Hispanics. He tells me about the jobs he did not get because of affirmative action.
These are legitimate complaints. It is these legitimate complaints that fueled the candidacy of George Wallace, and won the presidency for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. Until the leaders of the Democrat Party recognize the legitimacy of these complaints, and modify their racial policies the Republican Party will continue to dominate the United States by winning the votes of whites who are harmed by Republican economic policies.
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