Lest you think it’s just me and MSNBC’s Joy Reid, though, National Review Online’s Charles C.W. Cooke has been one of the very few political pundits willing to call it out when, on Friday night’s Real Time, he euphemistically chalked it up to “white identity politics.” Where he was wrong was in positing a Republican Party at a crossroads with white resentment, when in reality, they chose that path long ago.
This is no
But if Trump does manage to pull that off, he will be in the select company of another presidential candidate who also understood the political power of white resentment, and masterfully used it to break through. That was then-Senator Barack Obama.
It seems like a distant, soft-focus yesteryear now, but there was a time in this country when you couldn’t say that anything black mattered, not if you wanted to get elected. That was the America that Barack Obama was trying to become president of, and one of the biggest obstacles he faced was the fact that he knew a guy who was super-effing-black, like, hasn’t-gotten-over-the-Tuskegee-Experiment-black. His name was Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the mainstream media helped wage a campaign to turn Obama radioblactive for ever having laid eyes on the man.
Just let that sink in for a second, because Donald Trump is the white Rev. Wright on steroids, and he’
It was against that backdrop that then-Sen. Barack Obama gave his now-famous speech on race, “A More Perfect Union,” and it was in the middle of that speech that I first knew he was probably going to win. In just three paragraphs, Barack Obama spoke to the concerns of resentful white people in a way that no candidate ever has before, or since, and he told them that it was okay:
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear
that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
If Obama gave that speech today, he’d be getting hollered at by #BlackLivesMatter harder than Martin O’Malley in an “All
It wouldn’t work in this political climate, but that doesn’t mean Obama was wrong. There’s this notion, in our media culture, that racism is this unforgivable sin, but the truth is that everyone is somewhere on the spectrum, between Klansman and, “Oh, shit, that’s actually not Morgan Freeman,” and the best thing President Obama did was to disarm that defensiveness. He knew that in order for his historic candidacy to succeed, it needed to not be an indictment of the people who had prevented anyone else from beating him to it.
President Obama got elected by confronting white resentment, and neutralizing it. Donald Trump is succeeding now because he is harnessing it, inflaming it, and normalizing it. The only question now is whether there are
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