In this essay I try to answer the liberal cri de coeur, “How the Hell did Trump get elected?” To do that properly, many factors must be considered, [1] not just the obvious ones, including Trump’s nearly 40 point advantage among non-college educated whites, a fact that initially led many analysts to claim he won the presidency by riding an enormous wave of working-class support. To get a more fully comprehensive and nuanced answer, the essay begins at the time conservatives went from being thought of in the 1930s as crackpots to creating one of the most effective political organizations in American history.
American conservativism did not become a recognized political “movement” until the 1940s and early 1950s. Most analysts, both critics and supporters, agree that New Deal policies and programs initiated by FDR and passed by Congress set the stage for much of today’s U.S. domestic policies and fueled the ongoing debate between conservatives and progressives about the appropriate role of government in society.
Initially, people holding conservative beliefs belonged to both major political parties and were also independents or moderates, though that changed a great deal with passing time. Conservatives fought the New Deal’s policies and principles and the related federal programs that followed because in them they claimed to see a dangerous drift into socialism and Communism, a drift they saw as destroying individualism and liberty through excessive reliance on government action and by a steady increase in the size and power of government, allowing it to control individual lives in ways unimagined in the Constitution or by the country’s Founders.
Popular Conservative Thought Transformed
After WWII, different elements of the modern conservative movement coalesced around three critical themes that have greatly influenced American history. The first was the idea that the federal government should not have primary responsibility for addressing socioeconomic issues; on a practical basis that meant conservatives opposed FDR’s New Deal welfarism and its aftermath. The second was a conservative attack on the “undeserving poor” for abusing government assistance, especially as non-whites became increasingly eligible for programs such as Social Security, the GI Bill, FHA guaranteed loans, and public welfare, programs that had been the exclusive province of whites. The third factor was the Cold War and conservative identification of Communism as an intrinsic evil and the Soviet Union as America’s arch enemy.
All three themes were closely related since conservatives conflated Communism with democratic socialism, labor unions, and the social safety net, which conservatives disdainfully characterized as public welfare. They believed America was being attacked from the outside by the Soviet Union and from the inside by liberals via the civil rights movement and the transformation of America into a welfare state that destroyed individual effort and responsibility.
The 1950s have been titled the Great Decade of popular conservative thought in American politics. Great things began happening for conservatives after Truman’s presidency. The moderate Republican Dwight Eisenhower was elected, finally bring an end to Democratic Party domination of the presidency. Conservative intellectuals in and outside academia published ideas that excited right-leaning Americans across the country. It was the decade that conservatives began to pull together into what was a fresh, new political movement characterized by energy and enthusiasm for right-leaning beliefs and values that were different from those of establishment Republicans.
In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater, a staunch conservative and an opponent of the Civil Rights Act and integration, was nominated as the GOP candidate for President. Politically, he was an outsider who won the nomination of a deeply divided Republican Party after defeating the more moderate candidates of the GOP establishment. Although Goldwater was not personally a racist and avoided overtly racist rhetoric, he wasn’t shy about using dog whistle [2] messages when his presidential campaign toured the South. Many people believe that his nomination as the GOP candidate for President identified for the decades that followed Democrats as the party supporting civil rights for black Americans and Republicans as the party opposed to civil rights and integration.
To make sure readers know that I’m simply not making all this up about Goldwater and dog whistle politics, here’s a quote by Richard H. Rovere from an article he wrote for the New Yorker (10-3-64). [3]
". . . the Goldwater movement, whether or not it can command a majority, remains an enormous one in the South and appears to be a racist movement and almost nothing else. On his tour, Goldwater seemed fully aware of this and not visibly distressed by it. He did not, to be sure, make any direct racist appeals. He covered the South and never, in any public gathering, mentioned ‘race’ or ‘Negroes’ or ‘whites’ or ‘segregation’ or ‘civil rights.’ But the fact that the words did not cross his lips does not mean that he ignored the realities they describe. He talked about those realities all the time, in an underground, or Aesopian, language—a kind of code that few in his audiences had any trouble deciphering. In the code, ‘bullies and marauders’ means ‘Negroes.’ ‘Criminal defendants’ means negroes. States’ rights means ‘opposition to civil rights.’ ‘Women’ means ‘white women.’ This much of the code is as easily understood by his Northern audiences as by his Southern ones . . ."
According to a column published in June 24, 1963, by conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Republicans want to unmistakably establish the Party of Lincoln as the white man’s party.”
Evans and Novak concluded with: “All this is more than speculation. ‘I’m very much afraid,’ forecast an anti-segregation Republican, ‘that we’re well on the road to becoming the white supremacy party, and there’s no turning back.’ ” No turning back indeed and that perceptive column was written in mid-1963.
In the turbulence of the mid-1960s, William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review publisher William A. Rusher quickly aligned the magazine with conservatives who opposed the civil rights movement and the national civil rights legislation being considered in Washington. The magazine officially opposed federal enforcement of equal access to public accommodations, desegregated educational institutions, and the government’s efforts to protect black voting rights in the South. That history of the National Review, Buckley, and other nationally prominent conservatives aligning with Southern whites on racial issues is one of the keys to understanding the many connections between the New Right and what was known as the “Solid South,” referring to the South’s monolithic support of Democratic Party candidates.
White backlash against the civil rights/integration movement and the Democratic Party began in the South after President Truman integrated the military in July 1948 and the Democratic National Convention adopted a platform that included an anti-lynching law, opposition to school segregation, and ending job discrimination and access to public facilities based on race. That backlash grew steadily until the 1960s, when Governor George Wallace of Alabama, a prominent segregationist, left the Party and ran as the American Independent Party candidate for President. Wallace, who had been a racial moderate, had become an enthusiastic supporter of Jim Crow laws that whites used to dominate and terrorize blacks, declaring in his 1963 campaign speech for governor:
"In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny and I say segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
That change occurred after Wallace’s famous “stand in the schoolhouse door” to prevent the federal government’s forced integration of the University of Alabama, Wallace analyzed more than 100,000 letters and telegrams his campaign received from across the country and found that 95 percent supported his refusal to admit blacks. Wallace concluded that appeals to racial hostility would be well received across the country and immediately discarded his previous strategy. Months later his national campaign was all about states’ rights and the unwarranted intrusion of federal authority into the rights of individuals. Of course, “states’ rights” and “federal intrusion” were transparent signals supporting segregation all Southerners understood. His approach allowed Southerners and others with racial animus to oppose integration and civil rights on grounds that lent cover, enabling them to deny they were racially motivated and to accuse their accusers of prejudice against whites. [5]
In 1968, Richard Nixon’s campaign of states’ rights and law and order adopted Wallace’s strategy by targeting alienated whites across the country who felt the Democratic Party had abandoned them for the civil rights movement and integration. According to Kevin Phillips, a strategist on voting patterns for Nixon’s campaign, the emerging majority of disaffected whites would arise in the South, West, and in suburbia:
"White Democrats will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party. . . . Who needs Manhattan when we can get the electoral votes of 11 Southern states? Put those together with the Farm Belt and the Rocky Mountain States and we don’t even need the big cities. We don’t even want them. " [6]
To moderate and liberal Republicans, Nixon’s strategies were leading the GOP from their traditional political platform and into the arms of unrepentant bigots. That didn’t bother Nixon since he clearly saw the Sunbelt as the Republican Promised Land filled with white voters eager to bolt from a too liberal Democratic Party. [7] But, as Kevin Philips noted above, Nixon didn’t care if those voters were dirty-dog racists as long as they voted for him.
But many voters, especially older adult voters, cared a great deal about what they thought was the mindless violence they associated with anarchy and rebellion, which was what they believed happened outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968. The Chicago police riot came after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F Kennedy and the extremely violent demonstrations that followed ML King’s murder. As the nation watched with shock and horror on national TV, middle class white demonstrators fought Chicago policemen and the National Guard in the streets and city parks, giving Richard Nixon’s campaign an enormous boost as he sold himself to the nation as the preserver of law and order and social control. That riot and our reaction to it formed a pivotal moment, after which preserving law and social order became critical conservative memes that resonate powerfully to this day.
Another critical facet in the rise of the New Right was the creation of right-leaning foundations and research institutions that have deeply influenced state and federal politics. In the summer of 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, former head of the American Bar Association and a well-known corporate lawyer, to analyze the problems of modern conservatism. The critical factor Powell stressed in his report was the necessity of the conservative movement to organize. Powell proposed vigorous and concerted corporate mobilization that would fund and support national organizations capable of generating conservative ideas and of inserting them into the national conversation.
Two primary results of the Powell memorandum were that large corporate donations began pouring into already-established institutions, like the Chamber of Commerce and the American Enterprise Institute, and later into many newly created conservative foundations, most notably the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and the Cato Institute. After the early 1970s, funds that had once flowed into fringe right-wing organizations like the John Birch Society were diverted into more respectable but also more politically savvy conservative think tanks that would became the critical foundation for cut-throat, winner-take-all politics that gave the Perfect Storm structure.
Ronald Reagan’s Dog Whistle
Goldwater first put coded racist appeals in play on the national stage in his 1964 presidential campaign and failed. Wallace tried to go from vicious racist to warm-hearted dog whistler and failed. Nixon refined Wallace’s technique, applied it across the country, and succeeded. But it took the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, to perfect the fine art of dog whistling and make it a critical part of the national GOP playbook.
For many on the left, the term “states’ rights” was a historically and morally loaded term. It was not simply a political conviction that each and every state had a sovereign right to control its laws and regulate its citizens but also was code for white supremacy and the oppression of black Americans. Reagan certainly knew that when he launched his 1980 presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a hotbed of white supremacy notorious nationally for the murder of civil rights volunteers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner by the KKK. Reagan cynically chose that venue for his campaign’s kickoff speech for one reason: he was anxious to attract large numbers of white Southern voters to his candidacy and did so by loudly professing: “I believe in states’ rights.”
Despite his pleasant, smiling, kindly demeanor, when it came to getting votes Reagan was George Wallace’s brilliant student. Those New Right positions anchored Reagan’s meteoric rise in the national Republican Party. One of his talents as a politician was to tap into the outrage a great many conservative voters felt about welfare, civil rights, and the antiwar/counterculture movements that were featured nightly on national TV news. Reagan hit on a sore point that had been irritating millions of voters nationally and used that multi-faceted outrage to his advantage. Many white Americans strongly rejected claims of blacks having been systematically oppressed and openly rebelled against the premise behind affirmative action and forced busing, which Reagan and the New Right loudly condemned as racial discrimination against innocent whites. Millions of those white voters across the country believed that “giving” blacks more meant whites were being dispossessed of what they were entitled to: jobs, opportunities to advance, education, social standing, the right to live in white communities, and more. That angry white backlash became the meat and potatoes Reagan and the New Right feasted on.
Reagan consistently sold conservatives throughout the country on the idea that an intrusive liberal government was an active danger to individual freedoms and liberties enjoyed by whites through programs focused on aiding minorities and the undeserving poor, meaning people of color. Though his coded messages never mentioned race, Reagan was able to convince millions of white Americans that all race-conscious remedies were nothing but discrimination against innocent whites and had to be opposed.
Here’s how that strategy was accomplished in the real world. In 1981, Reagan advisor Lee Atwater let down his guard about conservatives and race in a revealing interview with Alexander P. Lamis, a professor of political science at Case Western Reserve University, and exposed the racial focus of national GOP campaigns:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” So anyway you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.
That cynical statement of Reagan’s dog whistle politics is as chilling and open an admission of the Republican intent to capitalize on racial prejudice as has ever been made.
Why the Conservative South Swung Republican
Contrary to popular myth, the movement of Southern voters toward conservative politics was not precipitated by LBJ’s pushing the Civil Rights Acts and other social justice programs through Congress. Many Americans may be unaware that the conservative philosophy of limited government, states’ rights, low taxes, and individual freedom originated in the Southern colonies and grew stronger after the colonies merged into the new United States of America. After the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era, whites in the Deep South, Southwestern, and Border states were determined to continue dominating blacks despite federal interference. They enacted brutal Jim Crows laws that systematically denied black Americans rights guaranteed by the Constitution to all citizens, ensuring blacks could not vote, hold public office, attend schools with whites, or share the same social space except as an oppressed, subjugated out-caste.
In reaction to Lincoln having been the leader of the hated Republican Party during the Civil War, Southerners developed an inward-focused conservatism under what became an authoritarian one-party rule of Democrats. Their strongly held conservative values grew from what Southerners asserted was a natural, innate hierarchy of worth and ability, with the white landed aristocracy/gentry at the top and former slaves at the bottom. Here’s a typical understanding of that innate hierarchy, eloquently stated by Bob Jones Jr., a well-known separatist/fundamentalist: “If you are against segregation and against racial separation, you are against the will of God.” [8] It is impossible for the Enlightenment ideal of equality and Southern hierarchy to be consistent with each other.
Over the decades since the Reconstruction Era, conservative values, including states’ rights, limited government, low taxes, and individual freedom, were grounded in fundamentalist religion, tradition, and order, commonly referred to as sacred principles of the Southern way of life, and became the civil instruments through which Southern conservatives legitimized white supremacy. It took one hundred years but by the 1980s most Southern politicians had come to realize that continuing the open battle for racial superiority that had been so effectively exposed on the national stage by TV cameras in the tumultuous 1960s would result in the South being held in contempt by mainstream American society and treated as redneck heaven. They were too savvy to let that happen.
To transform their national image without significantly modifying their beliefs, Southern whites gradually turned from what they had claimed for centuries was their God-given right of dominance over blacks to a conservativism grounded in the fundamentalist religion that was dominant in the region. That abandonment of earlier racist identification with Jim Crow was for many Southern whites more a matter of political necessity than a morally transformative experience. As a result, white Southern conservatives slowly began responding not only to dog whistles emanating from national political campaigns but also to their powerful need to retain political power on their own terms. And that’s when states’ rights, individual liberty, low taxes, law and order, and national defense came into their own in the South.
Although traditional beliefs on the part of white Southerners about race have been changing slowly since Jim Crow rule, we shouldn’t be so confident of social progress as to think we are in a post-racial period. Here are two examples. In 2000, Alabama became the last state to officially remove an anti-miscegenation provision from its Constitution. Although 60 percent of those voting approved that ballot measure, nearly 526,000 Alabamans voted to continue the prohibition of racial inter-marriage. In early 2012, the polling firm Public Policy Polling revealed that nearly 30 percent of likely GOP voters surveyed in Mississippi believed that interracial marriage should be illegal. Those examples indicate that tradition, fundamentalist religion, and racial animus continue to play strong roles in conservative Sunbelt politics. As William Faulkner wrote with amazing perspicacity in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
New Right Media
Richard Nixon may have been the first national leader to advocate for news outlets that pushed a conservative point of view. However, he could never have imagined today’s talk radio and national cable television networks that promote hardline conservative values and viewpoints. Part of the reason is that throughout much of radio’s history, the Federal Communications Commission enforced a policy that required public broadcast license-holders to give multiple perspectives on controversial topics and prevent a biased public agenda. That “Fairness Doctrine” was abolished in 1987 during the Reagan Administration, which opened the door for ideologically oriented radio and cable TV programs.
Today, American conservative journalism, including tabloids, weekly subscriber-based email dispatches, blogs, talk radio, newspapers, and cable TV, has gradually morphed into what has been called a conservative media ecosystem that is devil-may-care, nativist, fact-challenged, sensationalistic, hyper-aggressive, iconoclastic, and populist. It quickly grew into a rightwing megaphone that came to include Savage Nation (1994), Drudge Report (1995), Fox News (1996), InfoWars (1999), and Breitbart (2005).
But, despite people like Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge spending decades fomenting ideological angst, we should be interested in the agents most responsible for contributing to the Perfect Storm: Fox News and Trump. It’s very difficult to overemphasize the role Fox News played in the success of Donald Trump’s campaign and the prominence of the New Right. To state that many of their on-air “news” personnel served as propagandists for Trump and to agitate his base with factoids, intentional distortions, innuendo, and outright lies is to belabor the obvious. Here’s a fairly recent example from Fox News host, Jesse Watters (12-16-17) from the many hundreds available:
"The [FBI] investigation into Donald Trump’s campaign has been crooked from the jump. But the scary part is we may now have proof the investigation was weaponized to destroy his presidency for partisan political purposes and to disenfranchise millions of American voters. Now, if that’s true, we have a coup on our hands in America."
Sort of takes your breath away, but only if facts matter more than bullshit.
The GOP and Fox have dined on and encouraged a diet of conservative venom for years. It’s hard for many to forget the rank speculation about Obama’s birth certificate, his being born in Kenya and attending madrasas in Indonesia as a Muslim, about poor people with no personal responsibility, and the scary brown immigrant “others” that created the perfect milieu for the rise of Trump. Fox News promoted The Donald by giving the GOP presidential frontrunner $30 million in free “interview” airtime from May 2015 through the end of that year. That total included Trump taking part in several-hour long interviews that were re-broadcast on later dates. [9] In that same period, Media Matters reported that Trump appeared 243 times on Fox News for a total of 49 hours. The closest any of his primary rivals came was Ted Cruz, who started as one of The Donald’s most vocal critics and made 122 appearances on Fox until he imploded toward the end. Without the help of Fox News, Trump would not have been able to effectively dominate the GOP primary to the point where other candidates became nearly invisible. In the presidential election campaign, Trump rode Fox News like a surfer poised on the top of the giant breaker that was the Perfect Strom’s leading edge.
Democrats Become Moderate Republicans
Although many left-leaning voters have never heard of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), since the mid-1980s the ideas, policies, and platforms of the Democratic Party were greatly influenced by the DLC. Founded by Southern Democrats in 1985, the group sought to transform the Party by pushing it to embrace more conservative positions and support business oriented, centrist viewpoints. By the time Bill became the head of the DLC in 1990, both Clintons were deeply involved with leading Democrats to the right by adopting conservative strategies in the ways they approached politics and governing. Under Bill Clinton’s leadership, one of DLC’s main purposes was to win back white middle-class “Reagan” voters with centrist-conservative policies and programs that addressed their concerns. Those who do not agree with my assessment that both Clintons in effect became moderate Republicans should read Thomas Ferguson’s and Joel Rogers’s excellent book, Right turn: The decline of the Democrats and the future of American politics. New York: Macmillan, 1987.
Within the DLC, populism was not merely out of favor, it was aggressively opposed. The organization had virtually no grassroots supporters since it was funded almost entirely by corporate donors. Its executive council consisted of companies that donated at least $25,000 and included Enron and Koch Industries. A list of its known donors includes dozens of the country’s most powerful corporations, all of whom stood to benefit from a Democratic Party that had crawled into bed with big business and was less dependent on unions and the grassroots for financial support. Along the way, DLC supporters slowly morphed into the Third Way, an organization that advocates a synthesis of center-right economics and center-left social policies.
If you examine the legislation that Bill Clinton signed into law during his terms as President, his track record is considerably more right-wing than the political ideology of the average Democratic voter. Here are the low points:
- The 1993 multi-lateral North American Free Trade Agreement that is still in effect and destroying American manufacturing.
- The 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (used by the U.S. Supreme Court to allow businesses to discriminate against women).
- The 1994 global trade agreement that created the World Trade Organization
- The 1994 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ban on openly-LGBTQ people serving in the Armed Forces.
- The 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill (contributing to the U.S. becoming the world’s leading mass incarceration state).
- The 1996 federal “Defense of Marriage Act” that prohibited the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages.
- The 1996 gutting of America’s welfare system; the bill limited lifetime welfare benefits to five years and gave more control to states, most of which cut benefits.
- 1997 tax-relief plan reducing estate and capital gains taxes for the wealthy.
- 1999 Wall Street deregulation that replaced the Glass-Steagall Act with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act; federal deregulation of financial instruments-agreements known as mortgage-backed securities, credit-default swaps, and collateralized debt obligations that led to the Great Recession of 2007-2008.
Obama and Race
This discussion begins with a very quick peek at the modern Republican Party. In every way you can measure it, with very few exceptions the GOP is the party of whites. Its elected leaders at every level are white. Its voters are white. Its messages are framed for a white audience. Its policies are crafted for a white base.
Those factors pertained long before Obama ran for president but his presidency and the white-focused GOP arrayed against him certainly cast those dynamics into sharp relief. No one with an open mind and unbiased vision could fail to see it for what it was.
Although racism by itself is an inadequate explanation of America’s current political situation, racial animus is critical to understanding Trump’s election. Here, in a figurative nutshell, is what many white Trumpers thought about Barack Obama’s presidency: America didn’t have any problems with race until Obama came along and started making everything about race.
So, you might wonder, in a president who very, very seldom in eight years in office mentioned race, how could that be? Well, until Obama was elected President, white Trumpers typically never thought about race. But since Obama’s election every time they turned on TV news, they saw a black guy with his feet up on the desk in the Oval Office and were forced into thinking about race on a regular basis, something they never did before and didn’t like doing from 2008 on. Suddenly, the President of the United States didn’t look like them and it was not only discomforting and upsetting but also for many whites was the ultimate affront. Seeing a black man as he performed the functions of the presidency was a constant slap in the face. For others, the anger generated by Obama in conservatives was a reminder of how profoundly white Americans are imbued with racial animus that for a great many lay just below the surface.
To put all that another way, in the eight years of the Obama presidency, white voters became far more racialized than they had been in any previous presidency (Racialization is a process that involves the imposition of racial characterizations or interpretations on events, identities, and socioeconomic situations among others and typically includes racial resentment, racial animus, and various anti-black attitudes [10]).
According to political scientist Michael Kesler, “President Obama presided over the most racial political era—one in which Americans’ political orientations were more divided by and over race than they had been in modern times” (Kesler, 2016, p. 10). Author’s Note: Kesler’s work references repeated cross-sectional surveys carried out with identical instrumentation on comparable national samples before and during Obama’s presidency, an unparalleled verification process that supported his findings of a strong racial spillover effect among conservatives. Instead of Barack Obama’s two elections increasing the healing of the country’s persistent wound of racism, his elections ironically increased racial animus in conservatives and hardened their racial resentment. Those broad-based anti-black attitudes formed a critical element in the Perfect Storm of 2016.
ANYONE but Hillary
Hillary Clinton’s problems with the American public began well before her era of public service. But because of length constraints in this essay my comments are focused largely on her service in appointed and elected positions.
Although it is undeniable that over several decades Clinton put herself in various compromising positions, none of her detractors, certainly not those in Congress, has been able to establish her legal culpability. What they have accomplished is to drag her name and reputation through the gutter and that was all that proved necessary, at least as far as her political opponents were concerned.
In a campaign filled with calculated innuendos and unsubstantiated accusations, Donald Trump was able to persuade voters that he was the ultimate outsider, the protest candidate against establishment Washington and Hillary was the ultimate insider, the status quo dealmaker. Trump was able to transform Hillary’s superior experience and qualifications into huge negatives with his base that she was never able to deflect.
On top of all that, Hillary’s campaign made incredible, unforced errors by focusing time and money on states she didn’t need to win rather than spending time shoring up the famed Blue Wall, those 18 states that voted for the Democratic candidate for the past six Presidential elections. Her field strategy was based on what proved to be colossal miscalculation and baseline incompetence by ignoring traditional white working-class and black American voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin and by never implementing the critical get-out-the-vote effort in many parts of the country. Compounding those problems, local activists were frequently shoved to the periphery in favor of supposedly well-informed, data-savvy gurus at campaign headquarters who eventually demonstrated they couldn’t find their asses with either hand.
Of course, all too many of Hillary’s wounds were self-inflicted: her thoughtless and potentially criminal use of a private server to send and receive official State Department emails, her highly questionable relationship to the money-making functions of the Clinton Foundation, and her sleazy coziness with Wall Street and the Big Banks as she raked in $18 million for giving more than 80 paid speeches to banks, corporations, and trade associations. And you can’t forget the way the Democratic National Committee crawled in bed with Hillary and then put its finger on the scale to ensure she won the nomination. As a further incentive, the DNC knew that picking Hillary would eliminate the always irritating Bernie Sanders and his ragtag legion of uncontrollable supporters who actually believed he wasn’t for sale.
Speaking of unforced errors and self-inflicted wounds, who could forget Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment made on September 9, 2016 at a campaign fundraising event. “We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”
The other campaign trail comment that may have cost Hillary even more voters than the “deplorables” fiasco was made at a town hall meeting in Columbus, Ohio, in March 2016. When she was laying out her plans for renewable energy investment, she said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” And those people don’t vote or don’t pay any attention to threats to their livelihood. Yeah, right. Of course many disgruntled working class progressives and independents in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin voted for Trump or for Jill Stein to punish the Democratic Party for her reprehensible behavior. With quotes like those it’s not hard to see why people from widely varying walks of life thought Clinton was an elitist who had turned her back on the working class in her effort to win the election.
Those who loathed Clinton saw her as the living embodiment of avarice and deception. People who hated Hillary seemed to automatically accept every allegation conservatives made against her, no matter how lurid and unsubstantiated, including the often laughable and typically ridiculous accusations that originated in an online cesspool. They hold her personally responsible for the American deaths in the attack on the consulate in Benghazi and for the supposedly corrupt connections among the State Department, various foreign governments, and the Clinton family’s foundation that was sensationalized in Peter Schweizer’s book, Clinton cash: The untold story of how and why foreign governments and businesses helped make Bill and Hillary rich.
Trump used that sensationalism to paint Hillary as irredeemably corrupt. For The Donald, it didn’t matter that many of those allegations were shown to be factually inaccurate or unsubstantiated. As a result, millions of angry voters became convinced that Hillary personified America’s broken political system.
In an election where millions wanted substantive rather than superficial change and were angry with career politicians feeding at the Big Money trough, many voters saw Clinton not only as establishment but also fundamentally untrustworthy. Trump was able to portray her as a business as usual career politician who hadn’t been able to accomplish anything of merit. Her numerous, serious campaign miscalculations cost the Democrats dearly in the Presidential election because far too many voters hated both Clintons and what they stood for and would go to ANY lengths to defeat Hillary.
Many people not only disliked and mistrusted Hillary Clinton but also expressed such unbridled loathing and visceral disgust for her that it bordered on the unbalanced. When people at Trump’s rallies chanted, “Lock Her Up!” it obviously expressed a desire to see her punished for all sorts of unsubstantiated and purportedly bad behavior. But the intense antipathy many felt went beyond that and seemed to express something far more critical than imprisonment. I believe that animus can be explained by a key psychological characteristic of many conservatives.
Jonathan Haidt and other psychologists [11] have demonstrated that inducing disgust makes moral judgments more severe, especially among people with higher sensitivity to their bodily sensations, specifically conservatives. According to that research, disgust is “well suited for use as an emotion of social rejection” (Schnall et al., 2008, p. 1097). In that and other research, Haidt suggested that moral judgements like disgust are largely intuitive and are based on appeals to emotion and not on reason or reflection.
Since the binding moral foundations for conservatives are community, authority and purity, impurity—in this case imputations of criminal behavior, “Crooked Hillary”—elicits deep seated feelings of disgust. Here’s a pertinent example. When Al Baldasaro, a Republican New Hampshire representative and Trump delegate, called for Clinton to be shot in July 2016 over her emails and complicity in the assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the wat he framed his remarks was telling: “Something’s wrong there . . . This whole thing disgusts me. Hillary Clinton should be put in the firing line and shot for treason.” Later, he also called her a “piece of garbage.”
As part of that appeal to disgust, Trump and his supporters made Hillary’s general state of health the subject on numerous internet conspiracy theories, such as her drooling while on stage, needing a catheter even in public due to her serious health problems, or the risk of her infecting people she shook hands with during a bout of mild pneumonia in September 2016. So I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that Clinton was subject to a striking number and intensity of disgust reactions that came to typify many conservatives, especially female Trumpers, as the campaign progressed.
During the campaign for president, the seething hatred of Trump supporters for Hillary Clinton became so irrational and baseless one writer termed it the Clinton Derangement Syndrome. [12] And no one can deny the flat out misogyny exhibited by Trump and his supporters. How can anyone forget the T-shirts, signs, buttons, bumper stickers and chanted slogans: “Hillary Sucks but Not Like Monica,” “Trump That Bitch!” “Life’s a Bitch: Don’t Vote For One,” and “Trump vs. Tramp.”
Throughout the campaign, Republicans did their best to demonize Hillary by falsely criminalizing her actions. Examples include chants of “Lock Her Up!” and “Crooked Hillary!” and the show trial staged by Chris Christie at the Republican National Convention where the audience shouted “Guilty!” over and over in response to his allegations. That demonization process created a false narrative and toxic environment that may have led unsophisticated voters to believe that Clinton, if elected, would face impeachment, certain conviction, removal from office, and imprisonment.
However, Democrats must accept at least partial responsibility for Hillary’s defeat. They backed a marginal candidate who they desperately wanted to be better than she was. They backed a candidate who had a rapidly shrinking window for success that was slammed shut in the final days of the campaign when FBI Director James Comey announced the reopening of the official investigation into Clinton’s e-mails. They backed a candidate who had the smallest chance of defeating Trump of any Democratic candidate and refused to see the consequences of that choice. They never recognized the Perfect Storm for what it was until, surprise surprise, the election was in Trump’s pocket.
The Trump Campaign
Although millions voted for Trump, a great many of those voters did not like him or his obnoxious character traits. Yet they voted for him then and would do so again for many reasons, chief among which he wasn’t Hillary. Those millions of voters gave Trump a pass despite his intentional “exaggerations” and narcissistic bombast largely because “he’s not a politician.” One of his traits they appreciated most was that he was an unpredictable disrupter, a classic, lowlife shit-disturber who they thought would shake up politics as usual in Washington and thus “get thing done.” So, what does his base now think about The Donald? As of January 22, 2018, polls determined that “85% of Republicans approved of the job he was doing.”
Here’s how millions of white working and middle-class voters felt about Donald Trump’s candidacy: Year after year, they voted for local, state, and national Democratic Party candidates based on principles and conscience. Despite that faithful support, they were rewarded with fewer and lower paying jobs, by companies closing their doors because of competition with foreign competitors that paid their employees a pittance, by immigrants and minorities getting all the gravy flowing out of Washington, and by their paychecks growing progressively smaller compared with what the fat cats make who control the politicians. When Trump came along they thought it was time to shake things up and to Hell with principles and establishment pols.
Although I firmly believe working class and middle-class grievances played a key role in elevating Donald Trump to the Oval Office in 2016, it was only one segment of the Perfect Storm he rode into Washington. In the wake of Trump’s surprise win, some journalists, scholars, and political strategists argued that economic anxiety drove these Americans to Trump. To an extent they were right but analysis of post-election survey data conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic found other factors were involved. Evidence suggested financially troubled voters in the white working class were more likely to prefer Clinton over Trump. The leading factor that best predicted support for Trump, besides Republican affiliation, proved to be cultural anxiety—emotions experienced by those who felt like strangers in their own country, by people who supported the deportation of undocumented and other immigrants, and voters who questioned whether investing in a college degree would pay off.
According to that research, “Nearly two-thirds of the white working class say American culture has gotten worse since the 1950s. Sixty-eight percent say the U.S. is in danger of losing its identity, and 62 percent say America’s growing number of immigrants threatens the country’s culture. More than half say discrimination against whites has become just as problematic as discrimination against minorities.” [13] And don’t forget, many other conservatives held their noses, averted their eyes, gritted their teeth and voted for Trump expressly because he wasn’t Hillary Clinton.
We can’t blame Trump for being a shithead because that’s like blaming a rattlesnake for being a rattlesnake. Trump was smart enough to recognize the political situation for what it was, a golden opportunity for a conscienceless demagogue to rise up and incite angry and disaffected voters over real and invented problems. Trump is little more than an accidental beneficiary of many decades of conservative dog whistle politics, populism, political chicanery, putting party over country, crawling in bed with Big Money, and a public with the attention span of a gnat. We simply cannot deny that our collective inattention to what was happening nationally resulted in the New Right settling into The Swamp while one of the least qualified, most obnoxious candidates in history took over the White House.
So, who’s really responsible for The Donald residing in the White House? It’s time for all of us to look in the mirror and say out loud, “We put him there.” And, yes, since I’m not into pointing the finger of blame at individuals, that’s a collective “we.”
Conclusions
I trust my readers will have noticed the conspicuous absence of any discussion of Russian influences on the 2016 presidential election. That absence is not accidental as I do not believe evidence indicates that effort achieved much. Sure, the Russians tried to stick their fingers into the election process with the intent of getting Americans to favor Trump. But did that interference do significant damage? Meaning did it change the election by getting people who would have voted for Hillary to vote instead for Trump? I highly doubt it since I believe people who accessed the websites created by the nefarious Russians were already Trumpers. The recent big push by Democrats for the Special Prosecutor may be the right thing to do but is also pure politics; it’s just another opportunity for them to make something out of an embarrassing loss and replace The Donald with Pence. That’s my two cents worth.
Okay, after all the above discussion, why did Donald Trump win the White House? In the time since President Trump pulled off his stunning upset of Hillary Clinton, Democrats have blamed the result on all kinds of factors: James Comey’s letter, Russian interference, voter suppression, Jill Stein’s candidacy, depressed African-American turnout, a flawed candidate too many voters hated, and an inexpertly run campaign to name only a few. The truth? In an election decided by fractions of percentage points, it’s easy to call just about anything a difference-maker.
However, what we must never forget is that the vaunted American system that supposedly makes our country “the best in the world” has over the last four decades totally screwed huge numbers of citizens. The trouble is, those citizens knew the Washington establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike, had turned their collective backs on them and had cavalierly cast them into the wind. Consequently, in 2016 many of those disaffected voters turned their anger and frustration on their oppressors and voted for Trump because they were convinced he was the white knight come to save them by “Making America Great Again!” For certain, Donald Trump was the only presidential candidate who was able to tap into disaffected voters’ anti-establishment anger. But that wasn’t all there was to The Donald.
Perhaps the single most important fact in the 2016 presidential election was that Trump garnered support among white Americans across class, income, and geographic locations, with the main exception of large cities. Thus, not one simple explanation can account for that broad backing, indicating multiple factors were in play.
One of those key factors was racial politics. Today’s New Right simply cannot admit to themselves that a great many Republican voters are motivated far more by white identity politics than by such traditional conservative values as small government, strong national defense, or individual liberty. They deny the GOP’s post-1964 success was fueled in many ways by attracting whites disillusioned by the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights and integration.
New Right intellectuals refuse to admit Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 created the conditions under which Trump could thrive. Trump’s politics of aggrieved white nationalism—labeling Latinos rapists, Muslims terrorists, and black people either lazy or criminals—succeeded at least in part because the GOP’s voting base is made up of what I think of as closet white supremacists who oppose equal rights for minorities and for a dozen or so other factors, including “Lock Her Up!”
Here’s an important caveat. From my point of view, the majority of Trump supporters was not and is not overtly racist. Maybe twenty percent fall into that category but progressives don’t lag that far behind with about 14 to 15 percent of their voters categorized by social psychological researchers as racist. So, progressives must not fall into the ugly habit of trying to claim the moral high ground while castigating their political opponents as dirty-dog bigots. That’s far too simplistic and is not a reflection of reality, especially since too many white Democrats/liberals have the same problem.
For more than four decades, working class and middle-class whites felt trapped by political decisions in Washington in which they had no input, insecure in their jobs, doubtful that the American Dream was within their reach, and certain that immigrants, blacks, and Hispanics were riding the government gravy train while their struggles were ignored or discounted. Those people formed a critical part of Donald Trump’s base. Among the white working-class, Trump’s election was not driven by allegiance to the GOP or to the New Right movement but by years of angered frustration over their treatment by establishment Washington.
In the last several decades, disaffected workers have become angry voters, and angry voters have been lashing out against globalization, free trade, immigration, rigged markets, and especially against the established political parties and national leaders that have consistently turned their backs on them by favoring blacks, immigrants, and the rich. For the last five decades, the New Right has cast whites as victims of an activist, liberal government willing to reward greedy and undeserving minorities who are intent of taking over this country. Not only did the Perfect Storm of new conservatism sweep Donald Trump into the White House but it provided the necessary environment to allow white populism to seize control of the Republican Party, eliminating nearly all the moderates in Congress.
Millions of white voters were mad as hell because they knew from bitter experience the so-called “American Dream” was nothing but a cruel, unattainable fiction for them and their children. Thus, they rallied behind a self-promoting, populist, bigoted demagogue named Donald Trump because he viciously attacked the Democrats—as well as establishment Republicans—for those policies and put the blame for the decades-long decline of whites and the rise of minorities/immigrants squarely on Hillary’s shoulders. Those disaffected voters bought that argument based on emotion rather than reason and turned a blind eye to Trump’s obvious and repulsive character flaws because they bought into his angered attacks and his brash, anti-establishment, in-your-face persona. For them, he was the answer, not the problem.
Without doubt Trump was able to recognize and tap into disaffected whites whose resentment had deep roots and who had a history of being ignored by establishment pols from both parties. Trump attracted the support of many who were unusually susceptible to messages about the ways “dangerous” outsiders and social changes (same sex marriage, queers, transgenders) threaten America, and so lashed out at groups that he identified as legitimate targets. In Trump’s world, social threats were perceived as especially dangerous and as demanding extreme responses, including mass deportation of millions of illegal immigrants; limiting civil liberties across the board by allowing the federal government to monitor all phone calls, domestic and foreign, without warrants for calls to any number even remotely linked to terrorism; crushing the Black Lives Matter movement; creating an official list of Muslims living in the U.S.; jailing his political opponents (Hillary) and banning foreign Muslim nationals from visiting the U.S.
As to why so many people voted for Trump despite knowing he was a deeply flawed candidate with reprehensible character traits, only four explanations seem pertinent. First, some voters simply identified with or liked his positions no matter how bizarre, racist, nativist, or sexist. Second, many voters who did not identify with Trump’s positions fully understood them to be racist/sexist/nativist but nonetheless did not find him objectionable. Third, some voters never interpreted his comments or positions as being racist, sexist, or objectionable. Fourth, for many voters other factors took precedence, making his flaws, no matter how egregious, non-issues; those other factors may have included lower taxes, cutting government regulations, his ability to appoint Supreme Court justices, trade, cultural anxiety, or the possibility of Hillary Clinton being elected was so god-awful that Trump was the only acceptable candidate. When trying to understand the Perfect Storm that Trump rode into the White House we can’t forget all those millions who voted for Trump expressly because he wasn’t Hillary (“Trump that Bitch!”). For those voters, who he wasn’t was far more compelling than who he was.
And the Good News Is . . .
. . . it took a Perfect Storm to get a loathsome toad elected in 2016 and perfect storms are rare events. Which means Democrats don’t have to agonize that their brand is a dead flounder rotting on the beach. Well, in many ways that near-death flounder is closing in on the beach but reality-based fixes are available if the Party listens to people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Of course, that’s a very big if. We can’t keep doing the same old crapola the Clintons and Obama pulled by becoming centrist Republicans and expect different results. Genuine progressive change is what we need, not the campaign trail bullshit Obama fed us. The sad truth is if the Democratic Party doesn’t get back in touch with its better leftist self, Trump being re-elected in 2020 looks more and more probable, despite Robert Mueller lurking in the background since even he may not be able to dislodge The Trumpster from his White House throne if Republicans continue to support him.
If we are realistic, we should take a deep breath and acknowledge that a great many Trump voters were right about a number of things. They were right about our political system being corrupt and broken (big money contributors rule!). They were right about the status quo with the establishment leaders of both parties favoring the rich and powerful (Wall Street and the Big Banks) while everyone else sucks dirt. They were right about trying to overthrow the prevailing political order (Democrats becoming moderate Republicans). They were right about Hillary being a terrible candidate, but for very different reasons than I hold. And, yeah, they were flat out wrong about a whole lot of other issues, such as minorities and immigrants being gifted with government-sponsored free rides on the backs of hard-working white Americans.
I firmly believe if Bernie had run as Trump’s opponent he would now be our President. And, since Bernie clearly wasn’t Hillary or a Hillary look-alike, that would have eliminated a huge source of voter angst. He was a seasoned politician and, unlike Hillary, would likely have run a competent national campaign. We’ll never know but that’s my opinion based on how and why Trump won in 2016. My hope is that come early 2019, the Democrats will have identified a strong, competent, left of center progressive candidate who will kick The Donald’s ass back to New York City.
In the meantime, the goal for everyone is to get to the polls and vote in the coming November 2018 elections. I include Republicans in that “everyone” category since the only way they can save their Party from self-destruction is to kick their present leaders out of office to force the GOP into acknowledging their collective cowardice in failing to exercise the duties of Congress as a check on presidential over-reach. We should all vote for sanity in Washington and at the state level by pulling the proverbial lever for every left-leaning Democratic candidate on the ballot.
Yes, I know how ridiculous that may sound to some but if the GOP and the New Right aren’t taught a hard lesson about what kind of country we want to live in, we could be in for a shit-storm of biblical dimensions. Just imagine what Washington would be like if Trumpers were elected to 35 or more of the hotly contested House seats up for re-election in 2018 and Republicans wind up keeping their solid majority.
We do not need a nightmare like that so get political and volunteer to campaign for a genuine left-leaning Democrat for Congress. And then vote and get your friends to as well. We are either part of transforming the Democratic Party or we’re spectators watching President Trump commit any number of offensive acts while in office through 2024.
1. Schaffner, Brian F., Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta. 2017. Explaining white polarization in the 2016 vote for president: The sobering role of racism and sexism. Source: https://mirror.explodie.org/schaffner_et_al_trump.pdf . See also Michael Tesler. 2016. Post-racial or most-racial? Race and politics in the Obama era. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (Chicago Studies in American Politics), and Carol Anderson. 2016. White rage: The unspoken truth of our racial divide. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
2. The term dog whistle refers to coded appeals to racial animus. They are coded because messages containing explicit racial animus had become socially unacceptable. Coding allows the speaker and message recipients to claim they are free of racial hostility. They are able to deny culpability specifically because the message is intentionally ambiguous. That studied ambiguity allows those accused of racial animus to respond with indignation and moral outrage at being falsely accused. Dog whistle appeals are not about the politician as racist but about the politician doing whatever it takes to win. Dog whistle politics are not about racism as much as they are about amoral expediency and the unbridled quest for power. See Ian H. Lopez. 2014. Dog whistle politics: How coded racial appeals have reinvented racism and wrecked the middle class. New York: Oxford University Press.
3. Richard H. Rovere. The Campaign: Goldwater. The New Yorker, October 3, 1964. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1964/10/03/the-campaign-goldwater
4. The New Right is a combination of Christian religious organizations opposed to abortion and America’s godless culture (homosexuality, militant feminism, racially mixed marriage, etc.), conservative think tanks, resurgent right-wing political groups, and conservative business organizations like the Koch brothers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that claim labor and environmental regulations and high taxes are destroying the ability of American firms to compete in the global market.
5. See: https://www.salon.com/2013/12/22/how_the_gop_became_the_white_mans_party/
6. Kevin Phillips. 1969. The emerging Republican majority. New York: Arlington House.
7. See Garry Wills, 1969. Nixon Aagonistes: The crisis of the self-made man. New York: Mariner Books.
8. Quoted in Andrew Michael Manis. 1987. Southern civil religions in conflict: Civil rights and the culture wars, 1947-1957, p. 136. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
9. See https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/01/12/fox-news-has-given-donald-trump-nearly-30-milli/207912
10. See Michael Tesler and David O. Sears. 2010. Obama’s race: The 2008 election and the dream of a post-racial America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Michael Tesler. 2016. Post-racial or most-racial? Race and politics in the Obama era. Chicago: University of Chicago; Carol Anderson. 2016. White rage: The unspoken truth of our racial divide. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing; and Tesler, Michael, et al. 2018. The spillover of racialization into health care: How President Obama polarized public opinion by racial attitudes and race. American Journal of Political Science 56(3): 690-704.
11. Schnall, Simone, Jonathan Haidt, Gerald L. Clore, and Alexander H. Jordan. 2008. Disgust as embodied moral judgment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34(8): 1096-1109.
12. Sarah Kendzior. 2016. Clinton Derangement Syndrome: Diagnosing the real reason that so many Americans hate Hillary, The Correspondent, August 11, 2016. https://thecorrespondent.com/5072/clinton-derangement-syndrome-diagnosing-the-real-reason-that-so-many-americans-hate-hillary/1434615793424-45000115
13. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-working-class-trump-cultural-anxiety/525771/
