Teen Aged Alligator
Whence last I wrote; the base voters of the GOP had found a taste for the rough and tumble “at least he fights” politicking that Trump brought to the 2016 presidential election. Plus, they felt a tingle up their leg when they heard his overt racism.
Think about the context of Trump’s first run for office. The country was just coming off of the two terms of the first Black president and was on the cusp of electing the first woman president, a woman who every American knew and who (sad but true) most Americans did not like.
At this time, the right-wing media had been growing in size and strength, connecting characters from various points along the conservative ideological spectrum, from the center right to the fringes. Our national polarization was starting to grow more deeply now, and many Americans were beginning to see their party affiliation as a dominant identity brand as they pushed away from the opposite party. As Mason and Wronsky write:
As racial, religious, and ideological identities have cumulatively moved into greater alignment with Democratic and Republican identities in recent decades, American partisans have grown increasingly identified with their parties due to the psychological effects of identity alignment captured in objective and subjective sorting mechanisms. (Mason, February 2018)
Worse, our negative partisanship was beginning to solidify as well. Hating the other guys was good for business and there were a few clear paths of monetization for those on the right: stoking resentment, reminding the audience of their perceived victimization, and appealing to their worst impulses.
It was not a fluke that the end of the Obama administration brought out the most racial animus in the public, and that Republican consultants made President Obama a boogeyman. It was also not a coincidence that Trump was able to tap into the sentiments of the GOP so effectively. He had been calling into Fox and Friends regularly for several years and knew what the most energized politically active Republicans were thinking and talking about. Common topics on Fox stayed remarkably consistent: threats of immigration torrents, rampant crime spreading to quiet, well-manicured suburban neighborhoods, and the near-constant hysteria of impending socialist government under Obama. Trump himself was a primary perpetuator of the Birtherism conspiracy, another frequent topic on the network.
The connective tissue between all of these topics was race, of course, even as it was downplayed or spoken of in code. The election of Barack Obama, however, was one topic where race could not be address covertly. When Trump promised not to be “politically correct,” he hit on something that had been angering the right for decades, the idea that right-wing actors were somehow hamstrung in their freedom of speech. When DJT started saying the transgressive stuff, fling in the face of “political correctness,” he a) made the left furious while got away with it and b) the base loved that. Using offensive language also made for good TV, which led to higher ratings and more money for the media, so this was a double play for right-wing politicos who were drawing massive attention to their eventual GOP nominee while the media was hoovering in ad money.
This was such a phenomenal set of victories, the idea of “triggering the libs” became its cottage industry. Right-wing entrepreneurs sold coffee mugs for “liberal tears” and tee shirts that read “Things I Own: Bible, Guns, Libs.” Thus, being provocative and impertinent for the sake of thumping the left became a sport in itself. Trump’s open use of racist appeals had a third effect, which was grant permission for others to use such language as well, and if you combine this all together, it is easy to see the direction it goes.
Thus, the table of anger was set when the 2020 murder of George Floyd elicited the massive expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement, which had been founded in 2013 but became an international phenomenon seven years later. The left was incensed by videos of seemingly increased, casual racism that had existed, but they had never seen, and in response there were more than 10,000 BLM marches across the country. In the wake of a newfound white understanding of what Black Americans had known forever, a focus on anti-racism gave birth to curricula changes at all levels of education, and the term “woke” made it into the general lexicon as a goal to be achieved. White liberals felt good.
At the same time, the right felt liberated from “political correctness,” and decided this was an ideal time to speak out against a burgeoning new civil rights movement. The term “Blue Lives Matter” became an invalidating catchphrase (with associated merch) and misinformation about violence during BLM marches flourished, even as a study by a nonpartisan group found that 93% of the BLM marches in 2020 were nonviolent. And when anti-racist materials were introduced into History classes, a countervailing movement was championed by Chris Rufo, an activist against Critical Race Theory who made his name being an activist against Critical Race Theory.
There are two important lessons to be learned from this: First, this was an exceptionally successful tactic from an electoral perspective. Stoking the culture war flames first built by Pat Buchanan back in the 1990s, Republicans up and down the ballot ran successful election campaigns by keeping the focus squarely against their perceived bad guys: the people who were victims of racism and who were name-checking their opponents.
The second lesson was that even amidst some difficult conversations, even amongst the most challenging of times, the American people can be happily led into a bifurcated “us versus them” argument when it is boiled down into simple and hostile narratives. Forget complexity and nuance: Apparently, people find reassurance when difficult issues are oversimplified, and three wrathful words become code to make everyone understand the same thing without saying it.
· Build the Wall (anti-immigration)
· All Lives Matter (NO BLM)
· Lock Her Up (Hillary sucks)
· Critical Race Theory (Slavery Wants to Take Away White History)
By the time Trump came to office, the country was spoiling for a fight and Trump was more than happy to set fire to a dry landscape. He probably added gasoline. At the end of the day, he had broken so many norms and upended so many rules, American politics had not only changed, but everything shifted into new, divisive terrain.
What could possibly change in such a short period of time? Commerce. Lobbying. Politicking. All of it. You’ll see.
Next Week: Polarization for Dollars