Thomas Edsall often seems a cut above other Times writers because he likes to shore up his case with numbers. The problem is, making a case involves more than finding supporting data: it means seeking out all the data, including any data that disconfirms your views. Edsall artfully leaves too much of such data out, even as he slips unjustified conclusions in.
Case in point? Edsall’s recent Times piece, Does Democratic Weakness Create Republican Opportunity? Edsall tells us early on that Gallup says Trump has 70% unfavorables. Implication? He’s doomed! (How many unfavorables does Hillary have? No citation there. Not even from Gallup! Strangely, a search for a thorough corresponding study of Clinton negatives on the Gallup site turns up nothing. Apparently only Trump-bashing numbers are worth examining.)
There are more pollsters than Gallup, of course. Also not cited. A National Review poll tells us Trump has 68% negatives — and Hillary 58%. AP calls it at 69% to 55%. So there’s only average 12 point difference… among women. What about the missing gender — men? Newsweek: “Among Republican-leaning voters, 62 percent of men said they view Trump favorably compared with just 41 percent of women.” Among Dems it’s nearly even, but that 21 point lead on one side certainly does even the numbers on the other, doesn’t it? (Edsall neglects to cite the latest HuffPo poll, where Trump’s unfavorables among women are 57.8% — lower than Hillary’s.)
But such filtered data is not Edsall’s argument here. Rather, it is his astounded observation that while Newt Gingrich wrote a set of election guidelines for Republican candidates that recommends “widespread inclusion of ethnic groups,” Gingrich also supports Donald Trump! Who as we all know (because Edsall tells us so, in the teeth of Trump’s repeated calls for party and national unity) that Trump wants to exclude ethnic groups. What gives?
Well. The first thing to note is that there is no reason to think Gingrich is serious about his document. I mean, what’s he going to do in a Party puff piece, come out shouting, “White supremacy now!”? Gingrich talks the inclusivity talk because it’s the required cant every politician is expected to mouth, and Edsall is cherry-picking that one phrase out of a 26-page booklet because he wants to re-assert the unpalatability of Trump to the inclusion-friendly Times readership. Fair enough. But Edsall knows full well, as does Gingrich, that the Republican voter base is increasingly and overwhelmingly white, and that asking Republicans to reach out to other ethnic groups is like asking Louis Farrakhan to proselytize in Chinatown. That’s simply not where their support is.
This isn’t vile or immoral per se. It depends on the demographic, and the ideology through which you view it. 93% of blacks voted for Obama in 2012. Because they like bailing out bankers that foreclosed on over a million black homes? No: because they identified with Obama on a racial basis — which we celebrate as a righteous marker of racial pride and racial solidarity, while we passionately “demonize,” as Edsall likes to say, white voters who appear to be doing the same.
Well, fine, demonize away, but observe the process, because it is predictive. If all minorities and minority politicians play the minority card to evident advantage, then as whites become a minority, they can be expected to do so as well. Some — WASPs, Rust Belt working class whites, the Appalachian poor — are already minorities. Why do we expect them to act differently, vote differently, than any other such group? Why do we expect politicians to shun them, or them to shun politicians who address their unique concerns?
Edsall goes on to cite the 2013 “autopsy” report on the need for Republicans to get more “Hispanics, gays, women.” Why? The fact that pundits say they need to means they aren’t doing it now. And where do they stand now? They hold majorities in Congress, governorships, state houses, local contests across the board. Because they’re embracing “Hispanics, gays, women”? They’re not embracing them. And they’re winning.
Yes, but they’re losing national elections, Edsall suggests. Am I missing something, or have Republicans won two out of the last four, and nine out of the last eight? Edsall notes at the very end of his piece that the latest NBC poll gives Clinton only a 3-point 48%-45% lead over the candidate running in utter defiance of Gingrich’s ostensible recommendations. (And ignores, typically, the near-even 41-40 Reuters poll, the Rasmussen polls giving Trump the lead 41-39, and the latest Fox poll that has the Trump lead widening 45-42).
This is losing? The Republican strategy is succeeding. Why shouldn’t it? 61% of the public is white. 74% of the voters last time around were white. Why try to take non-white voters away from Democrats, who have them all but hog-tied, when all you need to do instead is energize the white vote just enough to get them to the polls? And, I might add, freeze the practice of importing Democratic votes by freezing immigration. A cynical policy? Indeed it is — on both sides. Pro-immigration have boosted Democratic votes massively. Are we surprised that Republicans seeking to reduce Democratic votes will argue for opposing policies?
Edsall comes to bury The Donald, not to praise him and his electoral insight on this score. So he lets the statistical mask drop and moralizes instead, calls these developments “backward-looking” and “racial reaction…” Frankly, he would be better off simply calling it “democracy,” a curious political arrangement whereby the majority elects a leadership that addresses majority concerns. Looking at it from that end would have allowed him to direct his data-gathering inclinations profitably to what seems to me an obviously emerging political trend.
What appears to be going on politically is a historic realignment of racial party identification analogous to the overwhelming shift of black voters from Republican to Democrat around the time of the Civil Rights Act. Trump’s walloping sweep of the Northeast in the primaries suggest that a similar realignment of whites is occurring, this time in the opposite direction, to the benefit of the Republicans. Even the Democrats as well seem to be segregating into a wing of overwhelmingly white voters (the Sanders crowd) and the black-brown-LBGTQETC-feminist coalition of fringes represented by Hillary. The many harmonies between Trump and Sanders suggests that some future meta-Trump (or even Trump himself, if he turns out as liberal as National Review fears) might well meld the white Democrats into the Republicans, leaving the Democrats as we know them in the long-term cold — a Black Lives Matter party as riven with factionalism as the Republican party is united in placid homogeneity.
Ross Douthat elsewhere rather supports this insight, suggesting (rightly) that that Trump voters are not the gap-toothed trailer trash of liberal wet dreams but actually upper middle class! (Well, upper-lower. He wouldn’t want to give Times readers the impression that such readers and what he condescendingly calls the Trumpenproletariat are actually social or intellectual equals.) Ross is wrong, but subtly wrong, as usual: they’re not upper-lower instead: they’re upper-lower also. Indeed, in Trump’s last sweeps, he led in every class and economic category. And that is significant because, while we would like to assume that Republican, and Trump Republicans in particular, are a lower species of vermin, they are for the most part not all that different from other Americans of whatever party. Trump’s is a resonance sweeping across the board.
But — and this is a line that even Trump has failed to cross — addressing these developments explicitly remains conversationally fatal. Clearly and increasingly, demography decides elections. Seekers after power, candidates like Trump, like Clinton, like former Speaker Gingrich, not only appeal to specific demographics, but now aim to actively shape them.
But whereas power-seekers like Mrs. Clinton can vocally celebrate the rise of some demographics as the expense of others, those on the opposing side must use an Aesopian language. For all the talk of white nationalist support for Trump, the fact is that there is not one single white nationalist in any elective office in America, and “Make America White Again” is neither Trump’s tagline nor a viable one. Hence the spectacle of Newt Gingrich making policy recommendations that contradict his actual support. It is an ideological form of white flight — saying one thing, doing another.
But it is a mistake to suggest, as Edsall invariably does, that it is backwards and racist. It is simply a matter of Republican politicians learning to play a game that Democrats have developed to the level of an art.
The problem is, it is an art of power, not an art of community. Fundamental shifts of population are being made to gain votes or provide cheap labor for corporate donors, but the question of whether the social fabric is torn in the process of being patched and re-patched is not addressed. Nor can it be addressed, except circuitously, while political correctness, the restriction of morality to left-wing discourse alone, is the norm. The multicultural left calls this “dog-whistling,” a way of appealing to base sentiments that dare not be expressed, but to look beyond that is to see a manner of reasoning and analysis that dares not be expressed. Those grow in darkness but eventually flower in policy and ideology. What is the entire Trumpian spectacle if not the first such shoots?
From a larger sociological perspective, what we may be going through is a crisis point where the centrifugal forces pulling America into subsidiary racial tribes may either be reaching the historical moment that the overarching whole begins to seriously fall apart, or the moment where countervailing forces of integration begin to seriously re-assert themselves, and the loosely monocultural again subsumes the loosely multicultural. This is not as new a story as it seems — whites were an American minority for centuries, with a black slave underclass, an encircling Native American indigenous population, and a powerful Mexican neighbor waiting for them as they pushed West. That they eventually gelled into a majority culture was neither a short process nor a delicate one. Nor are all the drivers behind such emergences clear. But rough monocultures do emerge, and their characters matter. Detroit is violent, but it is not Chechnya. Yet. It may never be, if underlying trends are arrested and reversed suavely, as opposed to collapsing in a hard crash. In this sense, Gingrich’s contradictions may less hypocrisy or confusion than a much-needed buffer. Just as, in contrast to as well as in congruence with the multiple nationalist parties on the rise in Europe, Trump may be a prevision of the new normal. And Edsall, an example not so much of moralistic sputtering but of a long-term trend sputtering out.