What Do You Win?
In October of 2018, I wrote a piece called The Thing Without A Name. It was about the way we perceive the concept of American Exceptionalism. It was an attempt to highlight the dangers of falling into a belief which was based on some kind of inherent goodness or exceptionally good nature as part of the "American Character." It was a long way of saying, "It can happen here, and that we believe it can't is one of the best indicators that it can."
In July of 2019, there are concentration camps filled with undocumented people, some exclusively filled with children who have been separated from their families as part of the method of "deterrent." We're finding out the numbers of children who have never been reunited with their families and were instead sent to adoption is still higher than was initially reported. There are lawyers for the US government making arguments in court that access to basic nutrition, hydration and hygiene are neither rights nor necessary for the people held in these camps. Let's be very clear about what this means. It means that the government does not legally recognize the undocumented people in their custody as people. These are the most basic necessities for human health. If they don't need basic nutrition, basic hydration and basic hygiene, they must not be human, because all humans need these things. As much as Barrack Obama earned the title of "Deporter in Chief," Donald Trump has managed to outdo his predecessor. Concentration camps and illegal adoptions which basically amount to state sanctioned kidnapping and relocation are beyond even Obama's horrific record where undocumented people are concerned.
At the same time, the cycle for the presidential election of 2020 is rolling. Currently, the Democratic Party has 20 different candidates seeking the nomination. They have many similarities, and many differences. At the same time, major publications op-ed pages and the social media accounts for many "serious minded" political thinkers are publicly pining for the Democrats to make sure they do not nominate a candidate who will outright offend those Republican voters who don't particularly like Trump, and "could be won over."
It's not clear if these pronouncements are truly misguided or if they are just not at all in good faith and both the Republican operatives and Democratic centrists who keep making this argument just want to see a Republican president who isn't Donald Trump. What is clear is that it hinges on the same variety of belief in Exceptionalism as a reality. It rests on an idea of an American, most specifically an American Republican or conservative which can't exist in appreciable enough numbers to ever be worth chasing in the way it's being suggested.
Consider what it means to have a person, a voter particularly, who has yet to decide even a Labrador Retriever would be a better option as president. How about a quick list of the things this person has to find acceptable to have not come to the conclusion that they could still see themselves voting for Donald Trump.
Concentration camps. We now have concentration camps on US soil. We can argue about what to call them. It doesn't matter really. Internment camps/concentration camps, neither of those means an avoidance of what should be a national shame, and a symbol of cruelty and venality being made policy. I'd thought it could never stop being relevant to say, "It can happen here." It isn't relevant or accurate now. Relevant and accurate is to acknowledge it is happening here.
A widely circulated, not even denied, audio confession of repeatedly sexually assaulting women. Though the conservative media would very like to see it happen, no one of good conscience can separate this from the 20 odd credible rape accusations made against Trump and now, the growing scandal concerning Jeffrey Epstein and the deal Alex Acosta afforded him.
"Good people on both sides." Our best hope is reaching a time when it is an uncontroversial national shame that anyone, and most of all the president might even consider equivocating on the idea that if you march with people carrying Swastikas and screaming "Jews will not replace us," you've forfeited the benefit of the doubt. The rather ridiculous argument put forth was, "You can't just lump all these groups in together." They specifically showed up so that they would be lumped together. Unite The Right was the name of the rally. Unite. I understand the desire to quibble over the definitions of concentration or internment, but we do still have a widely accepted definition of the word unite, don't we? Lest we forget, there's the whole obsession with referring to Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas" and just today, telling four members of Congress who are also women of color that they should "go back to where they came from." All this, and a skyrocketing number of hate crimes too.
In the past decade or so, Americans have become keenly aware of the level of graft at work among the most wealthy and powerful. It's found different expression in different ways, but it is something we tend to agree on. That the whole of the Trump administration has somehow made everything before it seem quaint and almost naive in the expansion of their capacity for graft and corruption is an achievement. Investigations of agency heads and executive branch appointments seem to be multiplying daily. Trump himself hasn't even put much effort into attempting to hide profiting from the presidency. This is before taking the nepotism into account.
Considering the obsession conservative, Republicans and their proxies have with how the United States looks on the world stage, "Airports in the American Revolution" should really be a significant problem. Somehow, it's not though. Having lived through the entirety of the George W. Bush presidency, I was certain I'd then seen the most shockingly ignorant utterances that would ever come from a president, and Trump has even surpassed that.
There's also the ever present fetishization of the members of the military among Republicans and conservatives of every stripe. My personal opinions about John McCain aren't very positive, and of all my opinions, this seems to have drawn more across the board criticism than anything else. Where I and many others have criticized McCain because of the decisions he made as a legislator, it hasn't been a game changer for Trump to criticize him for being a prisoner of war. Take into consideration as well, that he's had more than one public row with the families of service members.
Amidst record wealth and income inequality, Trump gave 1.9 billion dollars in tax cuts to the most wealthy individuals in the country. At the same time, the federal deficit, which has been yet another conservative obsession, is growing faster than it did under Reagan. In the midst of that reality, Trump has repeatedly tried to take away health care access to millions of Americans, with no plan to replace it or even to overhaul it.
These are just some of the more egregious examples. This isn't meant to be a definitive or exhaustive list, but just a quick reference, because it presents an important question.
What is it that is going to be offered to some hypothetical voter who is "Trump averse" but that hasn't come to the conclusion that a Labrador Retriever wouldn't be a better president than Donald Trump? What, exactly, do all of these pundits and professional operatives think it's going to take for this hypothetical voter to finally say, "Yeah, I think I shouldn't vote for Trump"?
The picture being painted is that the "left" of the Democratic Party is just going to be responsible for driving these voters away, and making promises that they can't keep. Considering what hasn't driven these voters away from Trump, in keeping with the argument so many of the intelligentsia are making, what do they think is going to magically draw them to some moderate Democrat? If we're talking about making promises that can't be kept, this is significant, because something is going to have to be offered to those voters, what is it and what are the chances of those promises being kept without the Democratic Party taking a giant, spectacular, incredibly public dump right in the faces of at least one of their core voting bases? Look again at this short, ad hoc list of things that haven't convinced these hypothetical voters that Trump should never be allowed near any elected office again, and then come back with the promise that's going to change their minds.
Let's make no mistake here. This hypothetical voter has had no qualms about the whole of the gains in human rights and civil rights in American history being assaulted by Republican Party leadership for at least five decades. They're perfectly at peace with that. These are people who have been on board through Birtherism, Romneycare becoming Death Panels and Obamacare, Pizzagate, Jade Helm, the Seth Rich conspiracies, the memes and emails with the Obamas portrayed as primates, all of it. Jim Jordan still being a sitting member of the Republican Party even as hundreds of young men who were victims of sexual assault say he participated in the cover up, not a problem! Sending a credibly accused rapist to the Supreme Court was great because it proved ones mistakes in their youth didn't have to destroy their lives, but you know, young people protesting because they're tired of their loved ones and neighbors getting shot by police deserve to go to jail because someone might be late to work. Defunding the agencies charged with investigating and enforcing laws related to discrimination in lending and housing has been fine, because when you don't have any cases being brought anymore, it means the problem went away, right? All of the anti-LGBTQ laws and rhetoric, legislating misogyny, voter suppression, and on, and on, and on and on. All of that has been just fine. Trump though, Trump is going to be the reason those voters finally decide to jump ship?
The idea is that Democrats need to make sure they can appeal to those hypothetical voters.
The reality is that this hypothetical voter doesn't exist, and if they do, it's not in a large enough population to be worth designing a platform around or even risking losing part of the Democrats base in order to appeal to. Aside from the morally bankrupt aspect of it, it doesn't even have a realpolitik explanation.
Republicans have spent twenty years building a voting base that is centered in white Christian grievance. Ever since The Fairness Doctrine ended, they’ve been sowing that field. There is no getting around that. How are Democrats going to appeal to white Christian grievance without abandoning some other constituency which has been part of their base of support over that time? They can't. That's part of why the Republicans have been perfectly fine to keep going about that strategy, and instead of trying to actually reach out to other constituencies, have turned to voter suppression and the like.
The only appeal that is going to be succeed with this hypothetical voter who is only just now deciding Trump and company are a step too far is a magical appeal, and I mean magical quite literally, as in waving a magic wand, and saying an incantation that hypnotizes the target or something.
This hypothetical voter is as real as American Exceptionalism, and in a way is created from the same desires. We want to believe our worst can't be that bad, and our low can't be that low. Unfortunately, it is. The worst of it being, the longer we take in coming to admit and realize that our worst is that bad, and our low is that low, the lower the rest of us are brought. As we keep trying to attempt to treat the symptoms of patriarchal white supremacy like they are something other than patriarchal white supremacy, the more we accept these veiled arguments to act in its favor because we happen to favor the color or pattern on the veil. Whatever sympathies and understanding I may have of how my fellow human beings can come to have these beliefs, how they may be manipulated into supporting them even when they don't understand they are supporting patriarchal white supremacy, it doesn't mean my responsibility is any less to the building of The Beloved Community.
Until we begin to admit that the conservative and therefore Republican project over the last 70 years has been to prevent or to roll back any advancement toward creating The Beloved Community, we are going to keep being manipulated, and at this point, we are out of time to continue this foolishness.