Pot of deplorables, seen by Fra Angelico, detail from “Last Judgement, Hell,” c. 1431, tempera on panel, 105 x 210 cm, Museo di San Marco, Florence.
When Hillary Clinton said that half of Trump supporters were deplorable, we were “shocked, shocked.” But only because she said it; politicians aren’t supposed to reveal their contempt for voters. Suddenly Clinton seems authentic, and her people get worried.
Gustave Dore, Dante’s Inferno: The Sowers of Discord, punished by the demons for demonizing their enemies. 1857.
Are they deplorable? And what does it say about us if we think so? Here there are a number of problems, which you can look at from a social science or from an activist perspective.
Who are the Trump supporters and why are they supporting him? The reflexive response of columnists and late-night comics is that you know who they are when you see their response to Trump’s bigotry. But the polling numbers raise some questions. Second, suppose half of Trump’s 40-some percent of the likely voters are deplorable, that is 20% of the electorate. That is huge. Can you make fundamental change with forces like that in opposition?
First, looking at the numbers, distinctions have to be made. Trump has from the beginning energized his campaign by racist appeals that mobilize white supremacists and neo-nazis, but they are not characteristic of Trump voters as a whole. Trump voters as a whole … were less than half of the Republican primary voters, but now are, more broadly, Republicans and Republican-leaning “independents.”
Reuters-Ipsos poll, conducted March-April 2016. Click to enlarge.
The post-primary polling showed that most of the Republican base would vote for Trump, but the primary polling shows that almost half of them preferred other candidates, and we know that he is deeply unpopular (as is Clinton). Trump’s rhetoric is racist, anti-immigrant, misogynist; he attacks the elites, the political and media establishment, trade agreements, China … and he promises jobs. Who among his supporters is responding to which appeals? How many are supporting him reluctantly because they are loyally Republican? Or because they loathe Clinton more than they despise Trump? How many are fixated on overturning Roe v. Wade, how many on the Second Amendment? How do the different attitudes cluster together?
Let’s just look at racial attitudes as an example. Not all Republicans or all Trump voters share the same racial attitudes. Polls may show that more conservatives and Republicans show racial resentment and more believe racial stereotypes, but they also show differences in racial attitudes. One widely reported poll, the Reuters Ipsos poll conducted from March-April, shows that between 40% and 50% of Trump supporters think blacks are lazier, more violent, and more criminal than whites, and 32% think they are less intelligent. But we don’t hear about the 50%-60% of Trump supporters who didn’t express those views – who are they, and why do they support Trump? And should we be surprised to find that 20% of Republicans support Black Lives matter?
“Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats?” by Nate Silver and Allison McCann. April 30, 2014.
Further complicating the picture, surveys show that many white Democrats are not very different from white Republicans. Between 20% and 30% of Clinton supporters think blacks are lazier, less intelligent, more violent and more criminal.
Maybe many Trump voters are not so “deplorable” — and maybe many Clinton voters are. Maybe we should pay attention to Clinton when she said “we all” have implicit bias.
John Hagedorn got me thinking about this some more when he questioned the demonization in Clinton’s comment. If you look at the way progressives talk about people who vote Republican, you see that it isn’t just half of Trump supporters who are being demonized.
We need radical social change, but people on different sides of the huge cultural divide in our political life are becoming so separate and hardened in attitudes that it seems impossible to develop a majoritarian social movement. This, too, is a “Wall,” the one separating us by race, class and culture. The Democratic Party can barely win majorities, and its deep thinkers seem to believe that they only need to wait for whites to become a minority — demographic determinism; but the party is structurally so enmeshed with financial interests and corporate power that their talk about “change” is just a platform bait and switch. The Sanders movement was so limited by its electoral strategy and by its white, middle-class, college-educated base that it couldn’t reach black and Latino voters, and even though it was an overwhelmingly white movement it couldn’t bridge the class and geographical divides to capture a significant white vote.
History shows the need for mass disruptive social movements that can make cross-race and cross-class alliances, but it doesn’t show us how to do it in the 21st century. We know that in the sixties the antiwar and the black freedom movements developed separately, in parallel, to bring about deep structural and cultural changes, but stopped at the cultural and structural Walls separating them from the white working class and middle class majority. They understood the depth of racism and its strategic centrality, the power of direct action and massive disruption, the importance of independence from the political parties, and the need to preserve their autonomy while welcoming alliance. They upended the political parties and forced lasting political change. But it didn’t help that so many of them also demonized the white “deplorables” of their time, who fought their own battles in isolation without much support or recognition. Many of us left the student movement to organize in communities and factories, doing some good and learning it takes a lot more than political will and good intentions to break through the Walls.
When we don’t have a strategy or a movement, we have some time to learn. Here are two articles about those white voters who go with Trump or some other Republican.
