At the moment 35% of Republican voters vote Trump. The emotional drivers of many of them are considered to be anger and anxiety, but journalists suggesting that anger is the whole of the Trump phenomenon are merely throwing the usual mud at The Donald. Some like him simply because they find him entertaining, and not the usual dull pre-scripted dog.. Many find his bluntness refreshingly, if not almost amazingly, honest; even brave. Some like him because the media and the political establishments are so monolithically against him — and, frankly, so snide in their opposition.
(When New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik slams Trump’s “Home Shopping Network crypto-fascism,” for instance, I expect the line that really stings this group of voters is the “Home Shopping Network,” not the crypto-fascism, and the evident class disdain that first phrase contains. “How dare you trailer trash push your way among civilized people,” Gopnik seems to suggest. They dare because of the infuriating contempt they experience, and experience continually, not only from Gopnik.)
But of course it isn’t only emotion that drive this 35%. Nearly all commentary on Trump misses the possiblily that Trump voters vote Trump because of his policies; which are few and less than detailed, granted, but the few he has enunciated — immigration restriction, for instance — reflect large if not overwhelming public preference, their preference, and preferences that as a rule are been ignored. Trump, on at least a few major items, shares those preferences. How he plans to achieve them? That’s something he seems to expect to work out along the way. But the goals are nothing if not popular.
This style of approach is much more of a serious development than it may appear. The left/right split on ‘means’ has amounted to one side saying, “We’ll accomplish feel-good liberal goals through more government,” the other side saying, “We’ll do it with less. (“Less” outright coercion of the public generally translating into less restrictions on private coercion from the corporate side.) Trump is on the left on this one — he will ordain a wall — but in explicitly intending to use government hard for popular socially conservative ends, he is appealing to the Trumpenproletariat in a way they have not been appealed to virtually since Lincoln.
The 65% of Republicans who (so far) haven’t voted Trump are key, because they divide into those who loathe Trump and would never vote for him, and those who might prefer Rubio and company but would vote Trump if it came down toTrump or Clinton. I suspect the latter are overwhelmingly in the majority. The former, the true Republican Trump-haters, are either establishment-conservative Party hacks who expect to get the bum’s rush should Trump reach office, or neoconservative ideologues to whom Trump’s ideological transgressions are simply heretical. The former fear for their jobs, the latter for their jobs and their even more precious mindset.
But in terms of votes, the fact is that both are a numerical sliver. A sliver, granted, that mans the operational and propaganda heights. But one that gets blown away whenever an election is staged.
Bernie — as usual — in many ways parallels Trump. As with Trump, Democratic party and pro-Dem media establishments are not warm to Bernie, for a Bernie ascension might lose them their present sinecures should a new socialist broom sweep clean. Also, no small number of his key issues are staggeringly popular with part of the Democratic electorate. Free education, for one. Is it any surprise that students facing a quarter million in debt are pro-Bernie on this one? This gives him the youth vote straight out of the starting line. I’m surprised he hasn’t come out for free nursing homes as well — the votes from the elderly and their children currently being crushed to pulp by said “care givers” would supercharge the Bern to even higher peaks on both ends of the age spectrum
But in sharp contrast to establishment treatment of Trump, the media and party elite give Bernie the silent treatment, not 24/7 excorciation. This is to be expected. The media are the left, and they don’t treat socialist populists with the full-throated rage that threatened Republican elites treat populists, because to the left, there are no enemies to the left. To them, Bernie is simply a slightly more evolved form of liberal, Spock as opposed to Kirk. He’s obviously better fit to command than Jimbo, but, alas, too superior to the audience to be electorally viable. “Yes,” they feel, “eventually we liberals will be able to come out of the closet and admit that we are democratic socialists too: but for now the “S” word is just a little too advanced.” There’s no hatred for Bernie among the apparatchik elites — just a sense that he’s a bit too far ahead of his time.
If Clinton goes down before the convention, I have little doubt the Dems as a whole would back Bernie overwhelmingly and happily. An aged, grumpy, professorial type with opinions a shade too far to the left? I expect that describes the father of most every white leftist in the Democratic Party. And with Trump at the gates, this is not an Oedipal year. Democratic voters will prefer the comfort of home.
But the Party and the population as a whole are two different things. On the ground, the big contest between Trump and Sanders is the white demographic. And how do they play out there? Simple: Trump is popular with whites that are poor, desperate, suffering, and crapped on. Sanders is popular with a number of whites in that category too, but more popular with well-off whites — the students, the teachers, the cognitive elite.
The white poor, the white uneducated, the white unemployed, the whites who are an inch from blowing out their brains — they want Trump. He talks their crude, blunt language, he knows that immigrants have taken their jobs, he acts like them, and he gives the media and the establishment the same finger the white underclass wish they could. Sanders is not one of them; but he does seem to genuinely share their passionate anger at the bosses, so they’ll come out for Sanders (the ones who haven’t lost all hope, that is) if it’s between him and a status-quo candidate like Hillary, currently positioning herself as the second coming of Obama in feminist drag. If it came to Sanders against Trump? For reasons of style alone, Trump would take the votes of poor whites hand over fist.
The simple truth, agonizing to state by the left, is that the white vote is the key to being elected in the United States. Even in 2012, 74% of voters were white. But it is a divided vote, a demographic split between the white poor and the white secure, between those programmed leftwards at colleges and those inclined rightwards by Fox and Duck Dynasty. And as the white middle class crashes, poor whites may be an ever-growing part of the white voting demographic, as the 1% cast off more and ever more of them.
But well-off whites are a serious part of the opposing segment, and there is hesitation to embrace Bernie among wealthier whites, partly because of the fear that he’ll raise taxes significantly, and partly out of a certain shallow but politically correct impulse to follow up the first black President with the first Female one. (Caitlin Jenner in 2024, of course. And why not? As corporations grow in power and select politicians and policies through direct donation, why not make elective offices affirmative action positions too? It’s not as though they’ll act independently.)
Should Sanders get the nomination, this demographic will go almost entirely into Bernie’s pocket, for reasons as class-driven as Downton Abbey. After all, Sanders is upper class, a Vermont Senator with an rumpled academic veneer, whereas, whatever his bank statement may say, Trump is palpably, self-evidently, massively, lower class; and to upper class whites, lower class whites are sheer vermin, shambling invitations for visceral contempt and disgust to erupt.
To such upper class whites, Sanders is not the angry social justice warrior but the grumpy yet distinguished older-Jewish-doctor-icon who promises to bring an ailing America back to health by transitioning it into Sweden. And Sweden is hip, isn’t it? Sanders would pick up all this demographic, Trump virtually none.
Minorities are an interesting wild card in all this. Polls say blacks respond better to Trump than Sanders. Hardly a surprise — Trump, not Obama, would be our real first black President. Obama may be cafe-au-lait in hue, but behaviorally he’s as blindingly whitebread as any other Harvard Law Grad. Trump? Trump could be any pimp standing on the Project corner. He’s one step from a sweeping white feather in his purple fedora and a bright gold front tooth right now. Black anti-semitism being what it is — the ADL not long ago put it at 34% — Trump would beat Sanders in terms of the black vote handily.
Upper class whites as a rule support almost any pro-black initiative — provided the recipients live far, far away. They expect, absurdly, appreciation for it from black activists, who daily tear their veins open over slavery and Jim Crow and Rosa Parks’ not getting the front-row seat on the bus, and feel nothing will ever compensate. Not so absurdly, among themselves they bask in vast mutual self-adulation before their own beneficent tolerance. So when a white candidate who so clearly is one of them is clearly, overwhelmingly rejected by blacks, how do they rationalize it? They don’t; in practice white liberal journalists do not talk about it at all.
But, deep down, I think they see it positively. Blacks may receive a good deal of lip service liberalism from upper class whites, but the revealed preferences of the latter is obvious enough by looking at housing patterns. White liberals wish black people loved them as much as they love themselves, but so long as the black people in question keep far away, that’s fine. Black indifference to Sanders would not cost him one white vote from this group, quite the contrary; I expect it might well gain him a few, though the voters would never admit it, even to themselves.
Yet Hillary Clinton’s victories over Sanders have been almost entirely due to the black vote, and one of the interesting questions of the campaign is how that is playing out psychologically among Bernie supporters. Though never spoken aloud, their angle is doubtless patronizing: they say to themselves that blacks, poor babes, victims as they ever are of poor education and social debasement, simply are not aware of where their interest lies. They need whites leadership to descend, like angels, from suburbia to lead them to the Promised Land.
But below the internalized Political Correctness Police, the circuitous revealed-preference part of the white liberal psyche likely seethes with resentment. “Bernie would be winning…. my college debt would be paid off entirely if it weren’t for those… grr… wonderful and delightful black people.”
Sanders himself is remarkably free of this. Really, this remarkable figure seems to have emerged via time machine from the radical Thirties. To Sanders, blacks as a bloc don’t really exist. Racism is mere diversion, a card trick played by capitalism to split and dupe the working class, whose best course is to unite as one and and screw the bosses. Sanders sees the people through class-colored glasses alone. There are no other colors to this genuinely non-racist anomaly. Blackness is a shell game, a spoke in the wheels of working-class solidarity.
Of course Sanders’ attitude of disinterest in race except as a irritating and foolish subset of economic dynamics drives black activists nuts. What, are we not special? Do we not deserve unique attention, treatment, apologies, reparations, empowerment? Sanders clearly feels not. Resolve the agonies and inefficiencies of capitalism, he argues, and the associated negatives of racism will fade of themselves. Keep the 1% society as it is, and blacks will continue to suffer along with everyone else. Economics is central, racism peripheral — worse than peripheral, a distraction. He effectively throws cold water in the face of the black left, saying “Grow up.” And they move towards Hillary in droves.
For Hillary, ever more cynical, feels that the way to the black vote is to stroke black ego by going after white racism, the universal cause and excuse for any and all black problems, and not, like Sanders, by seeking to lessen economic inequality for all Americans. Naturally Hillary wins. Flattery trumps logic.
But this special position of blacks in Democratic politics portends crisis. For if the Democratic Party exclusively the Black Party, the only harbor for the black American voter, it will only be as a subset of any increasingly Hispanic party in which blacks and black issues count for less and less. The will have no impact on the Republicans, and ultimately no voice among the Democrats. The end result? Reservation Nation, where the gates go up not around wealthy suburban communities to keep outsiders out, but around Detroit and Baltimore to keep insiders in.
Paradoxically, it is Bernie Sanders who is the great bastion against this neo-Soviet internal exile, by providing a non-racial category where black votes and voices will continue to matter. Trump and Clinton both are driving a racial polarization that leaves blacks with no presence in the one party, and only symbolic value for the other
Where do other ethnicities stand in the great quest to harpoon the White Whale that is Donald Trump? Hispanics: they vote left en masse. Cheap labor aside, that’s why they’ve been shipped in. Jews? If push came to shove, I doubt there’s a Jew in America that would not vote for a fellow Jew over Donald (“Worse Than Hitler”) Trump. The Times has simply painted the Swastika on his forehead too many times. Women? I expect they’d break 50/50, with a little inclination toward Sanders. Trump is all loudmouth Alpha Male, Sanders all Grumpy Dad, and you’re safer with Dad. Besides, what woman wants her husband or boyfriend staring at Melania for the next four years and thinking in comparative terms?
As ever, the white majority as a bloc is the key to winning the American election. Could Trump pull enough of that bloc together to win? He might have trouble pulling in the left side, but yes. I say that because when Trump runs, voter turnout has jumped as high as 182% among Republicans. When Hillary runs, it drops as much as below 50% among Democratic voters. Trump would not have to get a huge number of left-of-center voters, and Hillary’s rhetorical determination to make the Democratic party the Black Lives Matter Party Force will drive at least a number of the left side to the right. Force of numbers give it to Trump.
Trump versus Sanders is another story. There, most blacks would stay home; those Hispanics who bother voting would give Sanders most of their votes; and Sanders would get all the white left, a good chunk of the white moderate vote fearful of Trump, and enough of the intelligent white poor concerned about Trump’s ability to deliver. Enough to squeak through? Very possibly. As polls have consistently shown, Sanders wins over Trump in head to head polls with almost double the lead Hillary holds.
Looking farther ahead, however, the electoral picture is grim, both for blacks and for the two-party system as a whole. The larger problem coming down the pike is the descent of the white population to minority status. That is a problem not because of white difficulty adjusting to minority status — ‘trailer trash’ have had long and bitter experience acclimating to that — but because the resulting voting population will be without any majority at all.
Majorities tend to consensus; groups of minorities, to desperate balkanization. Peaking suicide rates are only a phase for the balkanized white poor: once the weak are culled out, radicalization will be the coming option. Anyone striving to speak their concerns is already demonized as a Hitler, automation will explode the numbers in terms of unemployment, their anger and alienation is so vivid that the life-span is shrinking among males without college educations, and now among all white women.
The white transition to a wretched but still massive minority is vast with ominous possibilities. Trump is no Hitler, but the necessary preconditions for an American Hitler are growing every day. Ironic that liberal immigration policies will have brought it into being; ironic too, that Trump may be prove to be our last best hope to forestall it.