The state of the nation in the wake of Election 2016 may be summed up in one word: xenophobia.
Of course it launched the Trump campaign. His vile remarks about Mexicans and his appeals to Islamophobia and racism (a form of xenophobia, in the broadest sense) energized a core of supporters during the primaries, and he was able to parlay that into the GOP nomination. That core of support is awful. We should be concerned about how this will play out, watchful and ready to take action.
But xenophobia is also fueling the post-election fear being expressed by some.
Consider the following situation: a large subgroup of Americans (call them A’s) has suddenly realized that the nation is inhabited by a number of people whose ways and cultural norms are different than their own (call them B’s). These B’s are less concerned than A’s about some matters that A’s consider fundamental values. Indeed some extremists among the B’s hold views that are dangerously primitive, violently sexist and homophobic. Even though the vast majority of B’s reject these extreme views, they get outsized attention. Many A’s become fearful of the growing influence of B’s, convinced that all B’s hold those violent and extreme views and are just waiting for the opportunity to attack.
For A and B we might fill in “‘conservative’ America” and “Muslims”. Or we might fill in “‘liberal’ America” and “‘conservative’ America”. Partisanship has become so cultural and tribal that I don’t think ideological labels like “liberal” or “conservative” are a useful way to describe it anymore; I’ll call them “Red Tribe” and “Blue Tribe.”
Over the past few years I’ve had a conversation like this with Red Tribe folks several times:
Me: “I casually know a couple of Muslims. It’s certainly not my path, and I think there are some problematic doctrines there, but I don’t think they want to kill anyone.”
Fearful person: “Yeah, well, Jews in Nazi Germany didn’t think their neighbors wanted to kill them either, until it was too late.”
But I’ve now had a conversation like this with a Blue Tribe fellow:
Me: “I casually know a couple of Trump voters. It’s certainly not my path, and I think there are some problematic doctrines there, but I don’t think they want to kill anyone.”
Fearful person: “Yeah, well, Jews in Nazi Germany didn’t think their neighbors wanted to kill them either, until it was too late.”
Of course there are awful people among Trump supporters. White supremacists who burn churches and spraypaint “Vote Trump” on them are not acceptable. A lot of racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and otherwise awful assholes now feel empowered and we must be watchful and prepared to act to stop them.
These people were here last week, and would still be around regardless of the results of the election. Failing to be vigilant to stop violence and oppression was never an option. No one’s heart has changed in the past few weeks: haters gonna hate — just as lovers gonna love.
But to assume that all Trump voters support church-burners is as fundamental an error as to assume that all Clinton voters are as awful as her prominent friend and supporter and mentor, America’s greatest living war criminal Henry Goddamn Kissinger. It’s as fundamental an error as to assume that all Mexican immigrants are criminals or all Muslims are terrorists.
(The awfulness of Clinton’s neocon war-hawk supporters who want to bomb foreigners far away may not be as immediately obvious as the awfulness of Trump supporters who burn churches here, but it is just as real. And Democrats’ refusal to understand that is part of why we now have a President-Elect Trump. I hope that, if their party continues to exist, the Dems will meditate long and hard upon that and re-create their party as one that rejects foreign aggression — among other necessary fundamental reforms, to be sure.)
Look, Trump voters are almost half the electorate. They’re everywhere. Statistically, it’s almost certain that even here in deep blue Maryland, one of the team that saved my mother’s life over the past few weeks voted for Trump. (I should also note that, while I’m not sure of his ethnicity, her surgeon had an accent and a cast to his features that suggested he might be from the Middle East. I’d take a bullet for him. If any anti-immigrant asshole feeling empowered by Trump’s election were to harm him, I would devote my days to tracking that person down.)
We, all of us, are deeply connected to people who voted for Donald J. Trump. They’re working in our schools, our stores, our firehouses, our hospitals, our bars. Even in the Bluest of Blue places, New York City, 18% voted for Trump. In Manhattan it was only 10% — but that’s still one out of ten, and you will encounter more than ten people on any given day you spend in Manhattan.
I do not mean to in any way minimize the fact that Trump is going to pursue awful policies. Putting aside for the moment the usual GOP awfulness about the environment and economy, those policies will almost certainly include attacks on fundamental civil liberties — as have the policies of Obama, Bush II, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, and so on.
One of the most concerning aspects of the situation is the way in which so many in the Blue Tribe happily handed surveillance power and control of an army of killer robot drones over to the Obama administration. The problem with authoritarianism, even with the goal of progress or security, is that authority changes hands. If we are fortunate, Obama and those Republicans in Congress with concerns about Trump may work together in the coming weeks to reign in some of the powers of the imperial Presidency before the keys are handed over in January.
But if members of the Blue Tribe are fearfully huddling in their rooms waiting for an attack from the Red Tribe, we — Blue and Red and Purple and Green and F-sharp, all of us — are not going to be able to do much to resist those bad policies. Because effectively working for progress means making connections.
If you’re still convinced that Trump voters are all white supremacists with whom you have nothing in common and so there’s no chance of connecting, think on this: Iowa and Ohio both went for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but for Trump in 2016. That’s because there are a significant number of rural voters who went from voting for the first African-American President to voting for Trump.
Assuming they are all white supremacists is not consistent with the facts. To understand their voting pattern you’re going to have to allow that their motives are more complex.
You’re going to have to listen to them.
Indeed it seems that the — perceived or actual — failure of Blue Tribe to listen to Red Tribe was a major driver of the Trump phenomenon. If you want to understand what put Trump in the White House, go read David Wong’s beautiful and terrible piece “How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind”:
As a kid, visiting Chicago was like, well, Katniss visiting the capital. Or like Zoey visiting the city of the future in this ridiculous book. “Their ways are strange.”
And the whole goddamned world revolves around them.
Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes — either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.
“Nothing that happens outside the city matters!” they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you’d barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.
But who cares about those people, right? What’s newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.
To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. “Are you assholes listening now?”
Martin Luther King famously said that a riot is the language of the unheard. In many ways, the election of Trump is a riot: the frustrations of people unheard by the power structure boil over, harming the innocent, harming the rioters themselves.
As Wong notes, even making such a comparison invites the charge of “racist white privilege”. That charge is an excellent way of not listening.
So the question before you, Blue Tribe (I’m assuming few Red Tribe folks are going to read a Pagan blog, so this missive is directed at you), is, what now? Will you go for the paralysis of fear? Will you assume the worst of all members of Red Tribe and condemn them and try to build power structures to subjugate them? Will you just wait around for demographics to make white people a minority and assume that identity politics will overwhelm everything else in a few years if you can just hold out until then? (I’m telling you, the GOP is going to wise up eventually, tone down the immigration rhetoric, and pick up a lot of socially conservative Latino Catholics for Red Tribe — that would have been the narrative this year if Rubio won the nomination.)
Or will you do the hard work of listening to the frustrations that led to this electoral outcome? Might you even find some (gasp!) Trump voters with whom you have some common ground, with whom you could work with on some of the issues?
With Trump in the White House, we’re not going to be able to rely on the state to solve our problems. (We never could, but that’s a rant for another time.) We’re going to have to take community action. That means connecting with people. And you cannot connect with another human being if you start with the belief that because their calculus of which Presidential candidate was least awful differed from yours, that person is therefore awful.
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