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Some thoughts specifically on the African American vote and 2016. As outrageous as it was when Trump asked African Americans what do you have to lose? he is proud of it:
“Donald Trump was heavily criticized when he urged African Americans to vote for him because they have “nothing to lose,” during his 2016 presidential campaign. “You’re living in poverty. Your schools are no good. You have no jobs,” he said. Now, two years later, Trump said he’s “proud” of that statement.
“You heard me say this many times. I’m very proud of it. Remember I used to say ‘What do you have to lose? What do you have to lose?’ because I’d read these horrible statistics… highest crime, worst education, all the bad things, lowest homeownership. about African-Americans and they’ve always voted for Democrats. Not all, but a big portion,” said Trump in a recent speech. “And I’d say ‘what do you have to lose after reading these horrible stats. And my people would say ‘Oh, that’s not a nice thing to say.’ But I’d say ‘but it’s true. ‘What do you have to lose?'”
Why shouldn’t he be proud of it-evidently sizable slices of the AA community decided the answer was nothing. They didn’t see the election of Jeff Sessions an unreconstructed segregationist to the DOJ as ‘losing something important.’
Indeed, Trump has gone further-he thanks Black voters for not voting.
Fewer Black voters came out in 2016 than in 2004 for John Kerry. I know a lot of folks choose to blame Hillary though I think this is buying more of the same Coolaid that got us here.
Regarding the fall of the Black vote in 2016 a few things about stand out:
1. It was the first post Voting Rights election-as John Roberts’ Court struck down Clause 4 in 2013. Roberts’ justification for this was that the Southern states-with a few red states elsewhere who had been specially required to run by changes in voting laws with the feds had been so thoroughly reconstructed by 2013 the clause had become redundant.
Literally the very next morning after this regrettable ruling you had Southern states adding new voter ID laws and other requirements meant to suppress the Black vote. This has not been discussed nearly enough.
Although… there’s a double edged sword dimension to this. Yes, you can argue that the Democrats need to discuss it more-and they have been the last few years-an the House Dems first bill will focus on voting rights.
But it’s also a fact that sometimes when campaigns and candidates focus too much- ‘too much’ doesn’t really sound like the right way to put it but…-this actually demoralizes young millennial Black voters who are already relatively easy to discourage-and do face mounting hurdles. After all if it’s really hard to vote and you have to go through a minefield to do it many will give up-who wants to go through a minefield?
2. In chapter A we looked at the way Russia and the Trump campaign focused on suppressing the Black vote with surgical precision; to be sure, Trump and the Russians were hardly inventing something new here-this has been GOP modus operandi going back to at least Nixon.
As Trump’s digitial manager, Brad Parscale, put it ‘we have three different voter suppression efforts going on.’ During the campaign many argued that the Trump campaign was in trouble as they had no effective GOTV system in place. But GOTV GOP style is less about getting its own voters out-who mostly will get themselves out anyway-but getting the other party’s voters not to come out.
Roger Stone boasted of how the claim-not supported by facts-that Danny Willams was Bill Clinton’s illegitimate son-depressed the Black vote.
3. In the same interview with The Intercept-Chapter B)-Roger Stone divulged that he also knows too much about the etymology of the Comey letter-he also boasted of how he used the unproven and suspect story of Bill Clinton fathering an illegitimate Black son to surgically suppress the Black vote.
So we see how the suppressing of the Black vote effort worked on multiple levels. The first is voter id laws and other requirements that target Black voters making it harder for them to vote. But then they also work on the demand side by arguing to Black voters that-really, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? Same difference.
In this regard, it was particularly unfortunate that Colin Kapernick bought into the false equivalence meme-Ok Donald Trump’s a racist but then Hillary Clinton is a liar so, it makes no difference which one of them wins the election, when it actually made a great amount of difference.
Kapernick is a young, talented NFL QB with a lot of standing among young AAs and for him to buy into that false narrative simply made it even more entrenched.
To be sure my criticism here is simply that what he said here was inaccurate but because of his status as an ‘influencer’ did a lot of harm-yes, he’s got a right to his opinion but then so do I…
Kapernicks’ larger focus on the problems facing young AAs-police profling, excessive force, abuse, etc-are concerns I share. As for his leading the ‘kneel downs’ that’s his 1st Amendment right and hopefully it can contribute in a powerful way to combat these social evils.
Ironically, Trump himself has done more to foment tensions around the ‘kneel downs’ etc by all his ignorant, baiting attacks than anything else. The week in 2017 before he started condemning players who kneel down during the national anthem six players had actually kneeled during the anthem.
The week after Pence had his theatrical, noisy ‘walkout’ at that Colts game 206 did-including many white players and white coaches. In other words to the extent that Kapernick’s goal in kneeling was to bring attention, Trump actually helped his efforts greatly which just shows the cynical, demagogic game behind the whole farce: If you really-for whatever reason-were this put off by the kneeling the best way to kill it off would be to praise it or at least not condemn it-if you are in a position of authority that’s the worse thing you can do if your genuine goal is actually to smother it rather than exacerbate it.
If asked, the best thing might be to say as little as possible, whatever you say should be as anodyne as possible. Then quite possibly many will get bored with the whole thing-and prior to Trump’s clumsy intervention and Mike Pence’s theatrics of storming out of the NFL stadium-not many were too interested.
All of which underscores Trump’s goal is not to get players to stop kneeling but if anything maybe get more to kneel so that he can further demagogue the issue and use it politically to divide Americans along racial-and to an extent generational lines.
Shadi Hamid had a recent interesting piece on ‘populism’ and its true goals-which are not utilitarian.
“To view politics in this way is to see it not as a means of implementing policy, but as a means to alter and reshape political culture—something that right-wing populists have long understood. Across Europe, right-wing populists have purposefully and methodically “injected” the question of Islam and Muslim minorities into public debates. As these issues become more salient to voters—particularly with the influx of Muslim refugees and fears over demographic change—mainstream parties come under pressure to address them, which in turn makes them more salient. Even if immigration policy does not change significantly, the very fact that immigration—and related cultural, religious, and demographic issues—comes to dominate political debates helps solidify a party system in which the primary divide is oriented around culture rather than class. (If immigration isn’t seriously addressed by those in power, it may actually help right-wing populist parties by increasing the salience of immigration and the associated “Muslim problem” as a grievance.)
But if, for the populist, politics is not about “what works,” it also isn’t about building consensus, resolving differences, fostering civility, or many of the other things the center-left and center-right hold dear. Democracy, instead, is about conflict. To be democratic is to embrace conflict as a natural and even healthy feature of political life. These two starting premises—that political cleavages are fundamentally about culture rather than economics and that democratic politics is inherently confrontational—offer a more promising and realistic foundation for leftist politics and specifically for Left populism.”
Hamid makes the interesting point that politics is often more about showing solidarity with certain social groups than policy preferences themselves which can be fluid. But if this is true, Trump’s populism has soured many of us with the whole nasty business and as Hamid himself admits while perhaps logically you can imagine a ‘leftist populism’ most ‘actually existing’ populist regimes have been on the Right.
As we saw in Chapter A, while the Russian interference effort focused particularly on suppressing the Black vote by attacking Clinton, many in the AA community nevertheless tend to dismiss or minimize this effort:
https://twitter.com/Sifill_LDF/status/1074663476239446016?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1074663476239446016&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fevilsax.pressbooks.com%2Fwp%2Fwp-admin%2Fpost.php%3Fpost%3D5073%26action%3Dedit
This also goes for the Comey letter. Of course, in general the media has failed to cover Comeygate-as noted in (Chapter A) we can count the exposes on the FBI’s outrageously throwing the election to Trump on one hand-there have been literally three major pieces from a major MSM outlet since the election.
But regarding Comeygate you can argue that this was a clear case of racist law enforcement institutions-particularly the NYPD and NY FBI-putting their thumbs on the scales to take out the candidate-Hillary Clinton-they rightly feared would have DOJ policies at least as strong as the Obama Administration in terms of fighting for the civil rights-and fighting against police misconduct,
Indeed, Eric Dyson rather provocatively suggested her Administration would have been even stronger.
But be that as it may, what you had were racists in law enforcement making sure we have not a DOJ run by someone committed to enforcing civil rights for all Americans but rather Jeff Sessions-an unreconstructed segregationist with views that continue to predate Selma. Alabama-where he’s from.
As we saw in (Chapter A) it was the Black Congressional Caucus who was most vocal regarding the rigging of the 2000 election known as Bush v. Gore. Their concern was not solely about what they thought of Al Gore but the fact that the votes of millions of African Americans had been disenfranchised.
And this is the the very little told story of the 2016 Emailgate obsession; this phony scandal was used to yet again disenfranchised millions of AA voters.
In my admittedly very tough chapters on Comey I argued that you can’t simply ignore the fact that Comey is a lifelong Republican who donated to both of Obama’s Presidential opponents and came up with Ken Starr investigating Whitewater-and then the Marc Rich pardon.
It should also be taken to heart that Comey was a loud advocate for the Ferguson Effect in 2015-the idea that crime is up because AAs are protesting police brutality against their community too aggressively.
But few have put this together-again Comeygate is the ignored side of Watergate 2.0.
If there was any one particular action taken by Obama’s DOJ-Loretta Lynch the AG-that outraged the NYFBI and NYPD it was the moving of the Eric Garner case against Dan Pantaleo to the DOJ’s Washington office. Yet, interestingly, we see another issue that came up regarding the Black vote in 2016:
While Eric Garner’s Mother -like many movement Mothers-endorsed and campaigned for Hillary Clinton
his-now late-daughter Erica, viscerally opposed Clinton.
Indeed, Erica Garner wasn’t asking any questions as to where the emails came from just reacting to what Assange wanted her to react to. But it points to a clear generation divide that showed itself in 2016 in the AA community-the older, civil rights generation believes the vote is sacred and the notion of not voting is unthinkable-as so many marched, bled, and died for it. Many in the younger generation, however, see the power of the vote differently-withholding it until they like what politicians are already doing.
No doubt there was reason to worry if Black Millennials in large number would eschew voting-and music to the ears of Trump and friends: thank you for not voting.
However, having said all of this, 2018 saw a huge bounce back in the Black and millennial vote and after so many are now ‘woke’ it’s doubtful they will fall asleep anytime soon.