There are a few caveats: I have seen enough reports from enough people to believe that hate attacks are up, and that many groups that are racialist and sexist do fill empowered by the Trump Presidency. Is it because Trump gave them permission? Why would someone willing break a law care if they had permission. Is it gloating? Maybe. It may also be that feel that while there will be histrionics and protests, maybe even some armed people in the streets in liberal capitals: they probably suspect, with good reason, liberals are cowards and they have cried wolf so long that no one takes even real threats seriously.
I think that may have been at play in Brexit too, honestly.
And has anyone proven that wrong?
Scott Alexander, who I often don’t agree with, actually makes some points worth considering here in his recent post entitled, “You Are Still Crying Wolf”. While I may not agree with a lot of this or the lack of seriousness of some issues addressed, I will say a goodly portion of the narrative I am hearing on liberal arts podcasts pontificating on politics actually does indicate this is at hand:
There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up. It’s a catastrophic distraction from the dozens of other undeniable problems with Trump that could have convinced voters to abandon him. That it came to dominate the election cycle should be considered a horrifying indictment of our political discourse, in the same way that it would be a horrifying indictment of our political discourse if the entire Republican campaign had been based around the theory that Hillary Clinton was a secret Satanist. Yes, calling Romney a racist was crying wolf. But you are still crying wolf.
Note that Alexander doesn’t say that Trump or Romney is not racist, but the uniqueness of threat is laughable. Alexander, like me, also was quiet on this because we didn’t want to be accused of being a Trump apologist, but both Alexander and myself thought that talk of racism was not going to help progressives because it has been thrown at people as milquetoast as Bernie Sanders.
You shoot that attack on Sanders, and you think you can use the same attack on Trump and it will stick?
Alexander makes some sound points though, and the numbers back it up. If anything, there is speculative evidence that racism cost Trump white votes. If anything, he received less white votes than Romney. He voting percentage among minorities was up from Romney as I have stated like five times now. Yet we still get tons of “Dear White People,” articles about Trump.
Secondly, most of theories about that vote don’t wash. Alexander points out that even if the Klan and alt-right are growing very fast, they are still tiny and can’t explain but 1% of vote. Even with liberal assessments of numbers, Alexander spells it out pretty clearly:
Maybe a better way of looking for racists: David Duke ran for Senate in Louisiana this year. He came in seventh with 58,000 votes (3%). Multiplied over 50 states, that would suggest 2.5 million people who would vote for a leading white supremacist. On the other hand, Louisiana is one of the most racist states (for example, Slate’s investigation found that it led the US in percent of racist tweets) and one expects Duke would have had more trouble in eg Vermont. Adjusting for racism level as measured in tweets, it looks like there would be about 1 million Duke voters in a nationwide contest. That’s a little less than 1% of voters….
I mean, kind of. But remember that 4% of Americans believe that lizardmen control all major governments. And 5% of Obama voters believe that Obama is the Antichrist. The white supremacist vote is about the same as the lizardmen-control-everything vote, or the Obama-is-the-Antichrist-but-I-support-him-anyway vote.
So what do liberals do about this? Give people like Radix and former Alternative Right editor and white nationalist at NPR, Richard Spencer, a bunch of free press. While this is meant to scare people in opposition to Trump, it’s more effective at spreading the right’s message across sectors.
If anything, that is pouring gasoline on garbage can fire and kicking into a dry field so it moves away from your house.
Alexander goes into many more arguments, and even some of the more cynical elements of Trump:
So we have Trump – who loudly condemned Duke before February 28th, and who loudly condemned Duke after February 28th – saying on February 28th that he wanted to “look into” who David Duke was before refusing his (non-existent) endorsement. I’m not super sure what’s going on. It’s possible he wanted to check to see whether it was politically advantageous to officially reject it, which I agree is itself pretty creepy.
That a reality television star should watch the ratings so closely should surprise none of us.
There is a bit at the end though that is interesting that Alexander points out:
If 47% of America supports Trump (= the percent of vote he got extrapolated to assume non-voters feel the same way), there are 150,000,000 Trump supporters. That means there has been one hate incident per 500,000 Trump supporters.
But aren’t there probably lots of incidents that haven’t been reported to SLPC? Maybe. Maybe there’s two unreported attacks for every reported one, which means that the total is one per 150,000 Trump supporters. Or maybe there are ten unreported attacks for every reported one, which means that the total is one per 45,000 Trump supporters. Since nobody has any idea about this, it seems weird to draw conclusions from it.
Oh, also, I looked on right-wing sites to see if there are complaints of harassment and attacks by Hillary supporters, and there are. Among the stories I was able to confirm on moderately trustworthy news sites that had investigated them somewhat (a higher standard than the SLPC holds their reports to) are ones about how Hillary supporters have beaten up people for wearing Trump hats, screamed encouragement as a mob beat up a man who they thought voted Trump, knocked over elderly people, beaten up a high school girl for supporting Trump on Instagram, defaced monuments with graffiti saying “DIE WHITES DIE”, advocated raping Melania Trump, kicked a black homeless woman who was holding a Trump sign, attacked a pregnant woman stuck in her car, with a baseball bat, screamed at children who vote Trump in a mock school election, etc, etc, etc.
But please, keep talking about how somebody finding a swastika scrawled in a school bathroom means that every single Trump supporter is scum and Trump’s whole campaign was based on hatred.
I know friends who feel threatened, and I know friends who feel like they will be unable to marry their loved ones and that they will be attacked. My response to this is different than Alexander’s: the culture as a whole is more aggressive in the states because people feel like chickens are coming home to roost. So I don’t tell people that their fears are mere histrionics–and I do think there are plenty of histrionics to go around–but that if they feel unsafe now, they should have five months ago.
Also, it’s hard to believe that people really care that much about minorities when they make excuses for a hawkish candidate who has no problems killing brown people in droves as long as it is by drone strike. It’s just local minorities that matter, right?
But to people who feel afraid: you might have right to feel afraid. You probably did in January of this year too. Maybe you did feel afraid then as well, but now you think people will listen to you.
All I say to you is stay safe, stay tough, be resilient, and be careful about people claiming to be your allies.
Now, this brings to the cases of Stave Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos. I listened to several liberals lecturing their audience about how Social Justice rhetoric had nothing to do it, how safe spaces were really just trauma mechanism, and how the rhetoric on campuses didn’t matter that much except to minorities who felt threatened there. I pointed out that minorities on those campuses come from completely different class backgrounds than the ones killed by cops. This is not to say they don’t live in a world without opposition and oppression, but it isn’t the same world as Eric Garner.
Yet Milo Yiannopoulos alt-light success story was predicated on profound missteps on how most people over 35 and most people who aren’t in universities would perceive those demands from activists in #BLM. Milo was an attention-seeking libertarian that could say outlandish things and sound reasonable by selecting the most histrionic screeds to go against. It worked. It also provided cover for Steven Bannon.
Most of what Steve Bannon is being attacked for is Yiannopoulos rhetoric and his attacks on neo-conservatives on Jewish/Christian lines. This may be fair in part, but portraying Bannon as a simple Neo-Nazi Karl Rove misses the point. Bannon basically agrees with left-liberal Post-Keynesian theories around deficit spending on infra-stracture. Bannon agrees with Putin on Christianity and ISIS, and thus one has the makings of an Otto Van Bismark more than Francis Yockey.
Vox, in a recent expose on Bannon, actually was one of the few liberal outlets to give him his due while even Bill Kristol was attacking him as an anti-semite caricature. Bannon is an “economic nationalist” whose right-wing operation hires many jews and gay men. While that doesn’t say anything on Bannon’s personal views: Bannon sounds positively like many liberals on the economic crisis and the fall-out it calls, but his view on secular and muslim world’s encouragement on Christianity is a bit of Samuel Huntington and a bit of Vladimir Putin in the mix. He may be a racialist as almost all nationalists are at some level, but attacking them on those grounds, even with bipartisan support, will back fire. It will also likely cause Trump to double down.
Bannon is playing a much longer game than the inflammatory headlines at Briebart indicate. He can have Milo play the stooge, he can both appeal and oppose the 14/88 and Radix elements of the Alt-right while pushing out Milo or people like Sargon of Akkad as the new, less racialist version of alt-right appealing to excesses of campus politics. He can get liberals to give him and his speeches tons of free press, although so can Richard Spencer these days.
With enemies like these, Bannon and Trump may not need friends. They haven’t so far.
Symptomatic Commentary 