RD - this is a pretty good article, in the sense that it presents something to be discussed in a tone that promotes engagement - rather surprising for
The Atlantic which tends to be fair-minded, if left-leaning on most issues, but tends to revert into bastion-defense mode of liberal orthodoxy on race and class and get the vapors over Donald Trump (to be fair,
The National Review is also still busy sucking its thumb and sulking over Trump's presumptive nomination. There is more than enough butthurt for the media on both sides of the issue).
First, the author did a good job in his selection of a person to interview, since this individual will not be easily dismissed as just some bigoted redneck by the typical
Atlantic reader. I am not entirely certain what goal he's trying to accomplish with the article; if he is trying to re-assure the left that yes, Trump supporters really are white tribalists or something, or if he is very cautiously trying to warn about PC excesses without either giving up his own, less intense commitment to identity politics. He also might be trying to wright a true caution, but is afraid that he'll be dismissed at best and fired at worst if he does not appropriately camouflage his cautions.
I don't think it's necessary to discuss most of the article since the young man's views are what they are; he is just one voter (as the writer points out) and he's already done a good job of speaking for himself.
However, the comments of the author at the beginning and the end, framing and summarizing the article bear some examination:
Quote:
Last week, I wrote an article asking why Trump supporters aren’t bothered that their candidate called Clinton a shameful abuser of women who may well be a rapist. After all, Trump used to insist that Clinton was a victim of unfair treatment during his sex scandals. Either Trump spent years defending a man that he believed to be a sexual predator, even welcoming him as a guest at his wedding, or Trump is now cynically exploiting a rape allegation that he believes to be false.
He goes on to discuss why the young man has been willing to overlook this point - not deny it, but overlook it.
First, I must say there's some truly amazing irony in complaining about anyone's cynicism whilst running against Hillary Clinton; a woman whose core principle is whatever it needs to be at any given moment. If he were running against Sanders, cynical political tactics might carry some weight as a point of contention, but if he were he then would obviously not be bringing up Bill Clinton's past behavior.
Second, if Trump is cynically exploiting a charge he believes is false*, Hillary has no one to blame but herself. She stated in this campaign, in no uncertain terms, that we should always believe an accuser. This, however, is a standard where her behavior has amounted to "unless of course they're accusing my husband". Trump is very clearly simply taking up the gauntlet; his talk about Bill Clinton amounts to "Ok fine, have it your way. Believe all accusers. Then obviously I was wrong in defending your husband, and his accusers must be telling the truth, right? RIGHT???"
The author overlooks this in his other, very short article which is so short that it conveys a tone of "I need to get this bit about cynicism out there quick and then shut up before anyone spots the holes." This causes me to call into question just how deep his interest really is in understanding Trump voters, because it goes right to the heart of the objections both to Clinton herself and the PC-addiction of the left: Set a standard of behavior, then, when that standard of behavior is applied to you, start crying foul and obscure the double standard that was the goal all along. In the case of the SJW/PC portion of the left (and the less extreme forms in the less extreme left) this is unconscious and unorganized, but in Hillary's case it's an active and transparent strategy that gets excused or distracted from rather than denied.
Hillary exacerbates this with comments about "Dealing with men getting 'off the reservation'" and the only note it gets is that it's offensive to Native Americans. That comment in the context of the aforementioned bringing up of Bill's past carries an undertone of "You just remember, I'm a woman so I get to set the boundaries. Any time I feel like you're getting too much of an advantage I can just whip out that card and play it, Donald, and don't you forget it".
This goes ignored by the author in both articles, and while understandable in the case of the article you linked, it's something that very much reflects the unwritten rules of national conversation that Trump supporters are fed up with. There are counterpoints to much of this, but for Trump supporters there's no point in event entertaining them since experience teaches that the left wants to jump straight to the counterpoints in order to avoid defending the double standards that makes those counterpoints necessary in the first place.
Quote:
My correspondent has come to believe that political correctness is transforming American culture in a way that puts his interests at odds with activists who are pursuing social justice and Hispanic immigrants who might benefit from affirmative action. His perception of these changes is causing him to engage in zero-sum thinking. If identity-based tribalism is America’s lot, he intends to vote his group interests, whereas he was previously inclined toward a more individualist ethic.
That shift alarms me.
Neither the pursuit of social justice nor immigration policy nor relations among people of different ethnicities are inherently zero sum in nature. Quite the contrary, if sound policies and social norms are in place. If there is an uptick in white people shifting from a liberal mindset to a tribal mindset, something has gone very wrong.
What?
The correspondent’s words track concerns I’ve aired before.
I appreciate the tone of this portion (it's unconfrontational) and her correctly identifies that something, indeed, has gone very wrong.
However, there is a sense as well that his listening to his interviewee was quite selective. Disregarding the silliness of claiming a white man with an Asian fiancee is falling into white-identity zero-sum thinking, there is the fact that his fiancee despite initial trepidation about Trump decided to support him herself. The interviewee puts forth a number of politicial and economic concerns but the author attempts to shoehorn them back into an exclusively racial context in his summary.
The author seems unwilling, as well, to confront the fact that this zero-sum thinking is what the left actively promotes. Any time "appealing to white voters" is mentioned, it is said with the implicit assumption that doing so inherently and automatically runs counter to the interests of everyone else, right before we're told that it's a losing strategy because there aren't enough white men (the attempt to portray women as automatically part of the minority umbrella is invariably slid in there somewhere). The economic concerns of white voters are invariably recast in terms fo the identity politics the left desires. The immigration issue is the primary example of this - it's portrayed as white people disliking darker-skinned Spanish-speaking people** when in fact its competition for jobs and public resources. If we had hundreds of thousands of Norwegians pouring in, these people would not likely be any more accepting of it just because more of them are blonde.
Furthermore, this zero-sum thinking is only criticized when its white people (or men) engaging in it***; it's portrayed sympathetically if it's a minority or a woman. Social justice has been repeatedly portrayed as the need to take whites and males down a peg, and no number of pegs is ever enough. I'm reminded of the BLM activist on CNN loudly telling white people "You have ta sacrifica y'all selves!" and no one blinking an eye at this blatant admission that among activist blacks, at least, the desire is white grovelling in submission****. It may be that this particular author is the sole voice on the left cautioning against zero-sum reasoning, but it seems more likely that his concern with this, assuming it's genuine is more a matter of him rather uncomfortably beginning to realize what a problem PC/SJW thinking has really become and either being unwilling to fully confront it yet, or else afraid of consequences if he does so.
Quote:
In The Federalist, David Marcus argues that anti-white rhetoric is fueling white nationalism. I’ve previously warned that “encouraging a focus on white identity is a dangerous approach for a country in which white supremacy has been a toxic force,” an admonition that applies to the right and left in different ways. And on the subject of “political correctness,” I’ve posited that citizens who oppose Trumpism should “take a careful look at everything that falls under the rubric of political correctness; study the real harm done by its excesses; identify the many parts that are worth defending; and persuade more Americans to adopt those norms voluntarily, for substantive reasons, not under duress of social shaming or other coercion.”
Today’s correspondent is just one voter. Future opinion polls will say much more about how typical Trump supporters relate to political correctness and white identity. If it turns out that there are a significant number of people who are reacting to social-justice shaming and rhetorical anti-whiteness by shifting from supporting campaigns like Gary Johnson 2012 to campaigns like Donald Trump 2016, what then?
This section comes across as the author being exceedingly careful not to say anything that might raise the defenses of the likely
Atlantic readership by being very careful to re-affirm that yes, the right engages in white identity politics too, and that's bad. The implication, which the author is trying to avoid calling attention to, is that minority (and gender) -based identity politics is perfectly ok. It is not just PC that drives this belief; it is the double standard of identity politics especially in the recent climate of protests, safe spaces, triggering, and the prominent acknowledgement that around 40% of millennials think bans on speech "offensive to minorities" is ok - the specter of Euro-style "hate speech" laws is rapidly rising. Of late, we've seen Attorneys General trying to shoehorn the tobacco company model into suing energy companies as well and people are correct to fear that the left is well on its way to trying to outlaw opposing ideas.
As for applying to the right in different ways, he would do well to realize that the vast majority of "white identity politics" on the right has only incidental correspondence to race, and that "white nationalism" is much much more rare than the left likes to think. Put succinctly, white nationalism does not mean either "white people who are also nationalists" nor "refusing to excuse people from obeying the law because they're not white and have a sob story", or a number of other things that really involve opposition to double standards that favor minorities.
His last sentence reveals his unwillingness to address the depths of the problem - there is very little in the way of political correctness that can be salvaged at this point; the parts that are worth salvaging already ARE norms from the first, early 1990s round of PC. The national conversation issue is not a problem of the left needing to curb its excesses, it's a matter of the left needing to understand that it cannot have a monopoly on dictating what is acceptable to discuss and how it is acceptable to discuss it, minority "leaders" included.
I cannot really tell if this author is lightening his message for fear that a real castigation of the left will end in him being dismissed (either his views, or in terms of his continued employment) or if he's just not completely come to grips with the fact that these excesses are a major driver of Donald Trump being nominated for President. I applaud his attempt to take a fair, non-judgemental tone with his interviewee, but the left has been very good at lecturing the right on how the right needs to denounce its "racist" or "extremist" elements, which the left then takes it upon itself to designate. A lot more articles like this are going to be needed, especially since I predict that if Trump loses or at the end of his Presidency the identity machine will be back in full force.
*I am not attempting to discuss whether it IS false; while the accusations against Clinton are more credible than some of the hilarious attempts to garner publicity we've seen with the mattress chick and UVA I still give them at most a 50% chance of being true in terms for the question of whether a sexual assault was committed.
**The belief that serious efforts to deport illegals or enforce immigration laws themselves rely on an alarming stereotype of Hispanic people as "brown people" that are indistinguishable from each other, often disguised with sarcastic references to the views whites supposedly hold towards "brown people." It also rests on the presumption that enforcement would revolve around simply rounding up anyone that "looked Hispanic". This is an absurd proposition - with 12 million people to get rid of, a more counterproductive method is hard to imagine. Furthermore, a huge portion of the immigration enforcement apparatus itself is Hispanic and isn't likely to want to round up their own families.
The fact is that Hispanic people from different backgrounds can be told apart based on their behaviors and speech patterns- it is pretty easy for a Hispanic person, or a properly trained immigration officer, to detect an illegal based on behavior and speech whether they're Hispanic or not, for much the same reason that it's easy for us to tell apart someone from Alabama, someone from Boston, and a Canadian. If those three people arrived in Japan, a trained Japanese immigration official could probably tell them apart even without examining their documents, but an average Japanese person with little English skill might find themselves hard-pressed. Trying to pretend that Puerto Ricans will simply get rounded up by racist white immigration agents (the aforementioned Hipanic agent notwithstanding) makes no more sense than claiming a Bostonian and an Alabaman are indistinguishable and really reflects a projection of the left's amalgamation of everyone into unified identity groups, and then projecting that amalgamation onto the right along with what it imagines to be the view of the right or anyone enforcing laws it doesn't happen to like very much.
***Zero-sum thinking is part and parcel of feminist belief. The discussions surrounding rape are a perfect example, with any discredited or even unsubstantiated rape claim treated as some sort of loss for victims and women, and a win for "rape culture", a laughable concept if it weren't so dangerous. In point of fact, the defense of claims like the UVA incident and then the huffy, blustering concern about how it will be "bad for victims" that someone had the gall to bring facts into it simply make the advocates look both foolish and fanatical and increase suspicion of victims. Recently, whining about how many women's sports teams are coached by men is another example. If a men's group tries to form on a campus, it's denounced as some sort of loss to women, and if it is allowed to form it's portrayed as only acceptable if the women's studies/women's group is allowed to police what goes on there. It is not an accident that the author of the article studiously avoids addressing the gender aspects of a Trump presidency; an examination of how feminism is pushing men into all sorts of things like MRA, MGTOW, (both of which at the very least worthy of some scrutiny, although not from the left or from feminists) and voting for Trump would be sticking his hand into a tree shredder of screaming lunatics.
****BLM, and the young, relatively uneducated people that form most of it, are rather blatantly interested in white submission more than anything else, at least to Black dominance of racial dialogue and to re-working of social systems to grant equality of outcome based on race, or even preferable outcomes to blacks - not just preferential treatment on the input side. As the quote reveals (it was in a CNN interview with the girl that interrupted Bernie Sander's rally last year and got a lot of attention) about "sacrificing y'all selves" that quality or preferential outcome can come from forcing white people to give up anything black activists and black liberation theology preachers deem "white privilege". These people, despite being prevalent in colleges
are not there to learn, do not beleive they ahve anything to learn (they think the view they picked up in a childhood filled with black victimology is unassailable) and seem to think they're there for the purpose of teaching everyone else.
Quote:
The students Heller interviewed seem to think they're not at college to be educated: they are at college to educate everyone else. As Jasmine Adams, a member of the black student union, put it:
“We’re asking to be reflected in our education,” Adams cuts in. “I literally am so tired of learning about Marx, when he did not include race in his discussion of the market!” She shrugs incredulously. “As a person who plans on returning to my community, I don’t want to assimilate into middle-class values. I’m going home, back to the ’hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.”
While I share Adam's view that Marx is over-taught in college, I question her desire to leave college as a completely unchanged human being. You should change who you are, and what you think, in college. It's a transformative experience. That's the entire point. It's what you're paying for.
The last point is salient. Young people are being fed the idea they have nothing to learn, in fields of study that serve no purpose other than pandering to their own sense of victimhood - and they are paying considerable sums to obtain it.
It really causes one to question the sincerity of these institutions commitment to social justice when they want to charge tens of thousands of dollars teaching young people to make public caricatures of themselves and then to continue feeling victimized by "the system" when their useless degree in absolutely nothing results in them being 30 and still having trouble moving past customer service jobs. No doubt a Master's Degree (easily funded with more student loans) is the fix!
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