I have a friend who is smart and very insightful and deliberately annoying. He insists it is his role in life to annoy people so they start paying attention to important things. He gets under your skin with a rhetorical ploy. He pushes his statements to the limit. Politicians are not 99% crooked; they are 100% crooked – you can’t trust a single one of them – not a one. Americans are not only stupid about things many others are smart about; they are irretrievably stupid and there’s no point in trying to change them.
There’s more to this friend than his style of communication and I’ve learned to sift through his rants for the rewards, which are definitely there if you are patient. But how much better, it seems to me, his contributions to knowledge would be if he showed greater interest in nuanced thought and expression.
I fling that criticism at him knowing that I too live in a glass house and have been no less guilty of jumping on bandwagons and leaving nuanced thought in the dust myself.
Case in point – the charge that Trump supporters are white supremacists. Many of his base are just that, but very likely not the majority, and maybe not even a large minority. What’s wrong with assuming they are the heart of the base is that, as when my friend lets the bad guys represent the whole, we are getting the basic facts wrong. That’s not smart. It means we’re heading off to war when we might well accomplish a better outcome by staying at the negotiating table a bit longer. Not all Muslims are terrorists; not all Evangelicals are bigots; not all Catholic priests are child molesters. Overgeneralizations can lead us to poison the well.
Dr. Robert Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the founder of an organization called CPOST, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. It is funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Pentagon, the University of Chicago and the Argonne science and engineering research laboratory, connected with the Department of Energy. It’s got credentials, in other words.
I saw Dr. Pape interviewed last night on (Christiane) Amanpour and Company, one of the best things on television, in my view. He reported on a new study – actually three separate studies, each with its own methodology, of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, designed to figure out who exactly these particular Trump supporters were. By taking down of the Stars and Stripes and replacing it with the Trump flag, they left no doubt they were Trump supporters; the only questions that remain at this stage are what degree Trump himself was responsible for goading these men on – they were 86% men (that’s not a false generalization). And how exactly were they able to justify not merely storming the steps of the Capitol, but smashing the windows and breaking in.
Pape’s conclusions? If you look beyond the obvious, the fact that 86% of them were male and 93% of them were white, you find some quite interesting facts not immediately evident. They are not poor, for example, and not the kind of folk you expect to see rabble-rousing. What unites them – and this is true across all three studies – is the fact that they come from counties in which minorities have made gains against white folk. Not from red states but from blue states. Not from Trump Country but from Biden Country.
That slogan shouted at the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville has stuck with me: “Jews will not replace us!” What? Jews? Who the hell is afraid of Jews? You’ve got to be seriously out of touch to think that Jews in America are out to replace anybody. They are a tiny minority of the population and they are already well integrated into the larger national community. Their goal is continued integration, not replacement. That’s stupid-talk, pure and simple.
But there’s the key word: replace. That’s what Pape’s study revealed about the mob at the Capitol. They were concerned not about an army of invaders; they were concerned about having their white representatives in Congress replaced by minorities, people of color and Hispanics in particular.
“White supremacy” is the wrong term. It may sound like splitting hairs, but most Trumpists don't want to lord it over everybody – being supreme involves suppression, thuggishness and strutting. What’s going on among this segment of the white population is fear, not desire to be on top. A large number do, and when you encounter them, it's not surprising your stomach turns. But if you take them all one by one, you see they are not, for the most part, thugs. You can argue that the reason is likely that after being on top for so long throughout American history, and treating minorities as also-rans, it’s not surprising that many fear that when the tables are turned whites are going to get their comeuppance. Bullies are quick to assume the whole world is made up of bullies. They fear they will, in turn become objects of derision, abused and cast aside. But a quick look around should tell you that that’s not what is happening. Hispanics learn English, some gay people even join the Republican Party – there is complexity in the system. Catholics were a despised minority in the early years; today, they share with Jews the control of a Supreme Court which currently lacks a single WASP member. And it’s not a radical body but an archly conservative one. Nuance. I can't stress enough the importance of nuanced analysis.
Donald Trump and his Fox Network lapdogs have been spreading this fear from the start. Fear-mongering is one of the most-used tools in the fascist toolbox. It is now mainstream policy within the Republican Party to disenfranchise black voters, who, they realize, will vote democratic. They have chosen to do this via non-democratic means, thus revealing their true colors. I wish I could say that good will out in the end, but I lack that faith. If we don’t find a way to move the average fearful American voter, their lickspittle representatives will go on coming up with non-democratic proposals for disenfranchisement.
Remember the battle for same-sex marriage in California in 2008? That was probably the last time I put my body on the line for a political cause. I went into the No on 8 headquarters day after day to make phone calls to urge people to vote no in the upcoming election, which was a proposition to overturn the right of lesbians and gays to marry. We lost. And the loss was painful. It struck home, close to the heart. I knew in my own life and the lives of my many gay friends who had lived in a state of marriage without the legal benefits and the social recognition, which was so essential for dignity, that there was no reason to take away the right to marry we had, however briefly. The only serious opposition came from religious bigotry, from Catholics and Mormons largely. Ordinary people with healthy sex lives, we knew from experience, don’t bother with other people’s sex lives – and with how they build families.
The loss woke us up. Gay leaders realized it’s not that they hate us, it’s that they don’t know us. Suddenly we began seeing scenes of two gay daddies playing on the floor with their rug-rats. And big strong men going all soft and squishy about how much they loved their two moms. We had to stop arguing legal rights and start appealing to our fellow citizens' best instincts.
It worked. As we became more human in the public eye, the resistance withered away. A Pew Research Center poll taken in 2004 showed Americans opposed same-sex marriage by a margin of 60 to 31%. Today, less than twenty years later, those figures are reversed. 61% of the population support gays and lesbians who want to marry. If you ask liberal democrats, the number is 88%. Only the conservative Republican subset of the population, the place where authoritarian patriarchal religion still holds sway, are opposed, and even a third of them (36%), are in favor. People can change their minds.
What has to happen is that we need to get more voices out there to counter the fear-mongers like Tucker Carlson and others who would lead Americans, like lemmings, off a cliff, taking democracy with them.
It’s happening. More and more films and streaming videos are taking up the cause of black folk. More and more people realize that learning Spanish makes our Hispanic neighbors feel more welcome; it doesn’t mean we’re throwing out the English language.
Have a listen to the May 6 interview with Dr. Pape on Amanpour and Company.
Really enlightening.
Fascinating that the insurrectionist mob came from the blue states.
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