Dems are Shorting White Voters in 2020

August 3, 2019

Tags: Immigration, Kirsten Gillibrand, Nazi, Racism, white supremacy
Posted in: 2020, Trump

The cornerstone of progressivism, and one of the reasons Democrats are likely to lose the 2020 presidential race, is their misunderstanding of white privilege. It leads inexorably to devaluing the voters needed to clinch the Electoral College.
 
The basic idea is whites are ahead of other races economically via privilege, an amorphous term including access to good colleges, sympathetic treatment by cops, better terms on mortgages, and more. Kanye scores big money-wise, but when he tries to get a cab he’s just another black guy, while taxis compete for me to be in their back seat.

Not sure? David Brooks of the New York Times says “Racial equity has become the defining issue of the moment.” In fact, white progressives are now further left on race and diversity issues than the typical African-American voter, what one very white man calls The Great Awokening and feels is comparable to the abolitionists in the North who demanded civil war to right racial wrongs.

Elsewhere, the Times wants to impeach Trump for racism. That article claims Democrats’ problem is their “obsession with Robert Mueller and his tedious investigation — an investigation all but irrelevant to the racist agenda that animates Trump’s political project.”

The problem with this victim-washed vision of 2019 America (not a good era for subtlety overall) is white is not enough, never has been. I learned this during my 24 years at the State Department. I was a diplomat, about as privileged a job on paper as you can get. But inside the State Department (and don’t think while it is different today it is all that different) being white was only a third of the bargain. The criteria for upward mobility was “pale, male, and Yale.” Being white (the pale part) was a great start, but only if you were also a man; women suffered in promotion rates and even then only in less-desirable job categories (girls are nurses, boys are doctors.) But white and male got you only to the front door. The “good” jobs required the right background.

A sort-of proud graduate of The Ohio State University (somehow Harvard feels no need to call itself The Harvard) my privilege only went so far. Some animals are indeed more equal, and I couldn’t fake it. They knew each other. Their fathers knew each other. They had money, well, parents with money. No surprise the State Department has been sued successfully over the years by its woman diplomats and its black diplomats. We Big Ten alums however never got our class action together and so muddled mostly in the middle levels.
 
The idea white, or even white and male, was enough has always been laughable. America did not welcome our grandpas; it shunted them into slums and paid them as little as possible to work for male, pale and Yale owners. Check how many Irish died digging the canals around New Orleans. Read how immigrant children were worked in factories decades. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act used phrenology to exclude Italians. It was so horrendously racist Hitler praised it in Mein Kampf.

Now in the world of 2019 mentioning the Irish triggers someone with purple hair and a neck tattoo in Elvish to shout slavery was worse. It was. But applying a rank-order to suffering disguises the reason this ideology will drag the Democratic party to likely defeat in 2020: it is about more than race. What progressives call white privilege is mostly wealth privilege, with a lot of unrelated things chucked in to fill out the racist argument, basically everything bad that happens to black people from airplane seating scrums to what color the director is of the next superhero movie as if every moment today is a hot summer morning in 1968 Birmingham.

The candidates then either dismiss what they call white angst as a Fox narrative or condemn it as white supremacy, Nazism, fascism, the words having lost specific meaning. Dems gleefully crow about changing demographics that will turn America into a non-majority nation soon enough, and celebrate the end of privilege as the country depletes its stock of Caucasians. They fail to see the salient statistic of America is not that the 61% who are white is falling, but that a tiny, tiny percentage, the top 0.1% of households, now hold about the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90%.

And every white voter in every swing state knows that, even if the candidates do not. And every one of those voters knows that the solutions the Democrats propose will not help with it (they are also unlikely to fix racism.) Mayor Pete’s Douglass Plan provides billions for black businesses and colleges, Kamala Harris proposed a $100 billion plan for black homeownership, everyone on CNNMSNBCNYTWAPO favors reparations, and all the candidates support free medical care for illegal immigrants, but not so much for those they see as already having too much, who actually have just a little more but not enough.
 
Nothing excuses the at times dangerous behavior of Trump and some of his supporters (but it does explain why this hasn’t hurt the president politically.) Yet declaring all Trump supporters racist is far too crude an understanding. Many feel they are under attack from progressives who fail to see their economic vulnerabilities. Instead of Barack Obama (Columbia University ’83, Harvard Law ’91) talking about hope and change for everyone, they hear the Dems dedicating themselves to over-correcting racial wrongs not committed by any of the people who now feel as if they are being punished for those historical sins. They witness Democrats scolding them into resentment over what little more they have than others.
 
Democratic hopeful Kirsten Gillibrand failed to sell this version of white privilege right at Ground Zero for economic inequality, Youngstown, Ohio. Youngstown was archetypal postwar America, a midwest city built around a now-dead steel industry. It was a racially-mixed city, not only statistically, but in reality. The now-gone union jobs paid living wages to whites and blacks and allowed people to buy homes on each others’ streets, same as they worked together in the mills. It was workers’ privilege.

Gillibrand was asked at a campaign stop “This is an area that, across all demographics, has been depressed because of the loss of industry and the opioid crisis. What do you have to say to people in this area about so-called white privilege?”

Her answer, praised on CNN as “powerful,” was a wandering narrative about how while white privilege didn’t spare the questioner unemployment, the loss of her house, her son to opiods, and her soul itself at the hands of rapacious inequality, the black folk in Youngstown had it worse, ’cause the white supremacist cops would bust a black kid for weed while a white kid would walk away. It was the perfect answer for a progressive media hit. It was the worst possible answer if a candidate wanted some of those Ohio votes. Gillibrand stumbled on to say she understands families in the community are suffering, “but that’s not what this conversation is about.”

The answer was thin soup to a women who lost a son to opioids. Opioids now rank just below suicide as a cause of death in America, as if the two were unconnected. More die of opioids now in America than car crashes, and more die of opioids than police violence against POC. In 2017, Ohio had the second highest opioids death count in the U.S., 4,293. And how much time will the issue get at the next Democratic debates?

Gillibrand, standing in as the poster child for progressives, likely cares nothing of September 19, 1977 in Youngstown, Black Monday, when 5000 steelworkers were laid off, or of the 50,000 who lost their jobs after that. The town never recovered, trauma which helped put Reagan and then Trump in the White House. She doesn’t see what Trump sees, and what Ronald Reagan saw. The problem is not black and white, it is up and down. The people of Youngstown understand this in their bones and to the amazement of progressive media, they support Trump even when he is ineffectual in helping, because at least he understands. He would never tell them their economic problems pale in comparison to racism.
 
It is time to admit racism is not the core problem, the one candidate Pete Buttigieg claims “threatens to unravel the American project.” It is in 2019 an exaggeration driving a key Democratic strategy, betting the White House on a pool of voters with a history of unreliable turnout (since the 1980s blacks turned out in higher numbers than whites, percentage-wise, only for the Obama elections) against any hedges toward a body of whites they devalue.

This is a risky strategy. It alienates too many, challenging too many others (older Americans of all races historically produce 30-40% higher turnout rates than the youngest voters) to vote for the party that denounces Thomas Jefferson as a slave holder, and throws its own Vice President emeritus and poll-leader under the racism bus while Barack silently lets it happen. Voters meanwhile wonder when the reparations for their lost jobs and homes will come. They know Dems won’t represent them if elected; as whites, their literal existence is painted as the cause of a problem Dems claim to want to solve.

The Dems can’t reassess because to discuss racism in any but the Party’s own terms is more racism. Dissenters are racists, or at least noncompetitive. Mayor Pete who in January said “Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and our democracy,” now leads the charge with racism. Argument is ended with “Oh, so says a white person.” Whitesplaining! It’s like saying only doctors who have cancer are allowed to treat tumors.

Writes The New York Times‘ Charles Blow in a column that uses “racist” or “racism” more than 30 times: Americans who do not concede that Trump is a racist—are themselves racists: “Make no mistake. Denying racism or refusing to call it out is also racist.”
 
In Wall Street terms, the Dems are shorting white voters. A short means betting against something. If you are short on Microsoft, you make investments which will go up if Microsoft goes down. Dems think white voters have little value, and are betting against them with exaggerated claims of white supremacy. Along the way they assume all “people of color” will fall into place, believing what resonates with young, ever-so-offendable urban blacks will also click with their older rural relatives, as well as with Latinos who trace their roots from Barcelona to Havana to Juarez, and why not, Asians. If that sounds simplistic, never mind inaccurate and a bad idea, you may want to short the Dem’s for 2020.
 
BONUS: If any of this sounds basically like the same strategy Dems are using now to shun people as misognyist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic, you may be right.

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