No Wrong Moves

During a Trump rally on Saturday in Minden, Nevada, [Alabama Senator Tommy] Tuberville, a retired college football coach, claimed that Democrats are "pro-crime" because "they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that. Bullshit. They are not owed that."
NAACP president: Sen. Tommy Tuberville's comments about reparations are 'flat out racist'

As you may have guessed from the headline, cue the "outrage." NAACP President Derrick Johnson might as well have reached into his deck, pulled out a strongly worded form letter address: "To Whom It May Concern" and simply had someone put the address to Senator Tuberville's office on it. It was a rally for Donald Trump with a Senator from Alabama in attendance. What else was anyone expecting?

While it's difficult to believe that there were people who didn't get the memo after the 2016 election, "deplorables" cast votes, too. And they charge the same thing for their votes that everyone else does; having politicians parrot their viewpoints back to them in public. And in a nation where negative partisanship is as strong as it is now, those Republicans who disagree with Senator Tuberville are just going to pretend that he never said anything, because there's no benefit in placing themselves on the wrong side of people who would otherwise vote for them by denouncing him.

While I'm not a political junkie by any means, I'm not completely uniformed. Yet, I'd never heard of Senator Tuberville before media outlets started reporting on the coffeepot conflagration that his rally performance provoked. Now, his name is everywhere. And for what?

Alabama is already synonymous with backwardness, intolerance and racism. Anyone who hasn't made their peace with that is very behind the times. So it's not like this is going to have any political fallout for the Senator. And for Donald Trump? he knows which side his bread is buttered on. For him, it's a twofer... "the libs" sputter in apoplexy and the former President takes their attacks on him and uses them show his supporters that he, and by extension they, are persecuted. And for Black Republicans, well, they're not going to do anything that any other Republican wouldn't do... it's not like any of them have managed to carve out a position such that denouncing the apparent racism of their fellows is a path to electoral victory.

And yes, I said "apparent." It's not at all clear to me that Senator Tuberville was doing anything other than whipping up the crowd in a way that he knew would work to his political benefit. Sometimes, people use racist language because they're actually racists, and sometimes, they use racist language because it gets a rise out of people they don't like. Here, I genuinely suspect the latter, and people are lining up to take the bait.

National Public Radio went with the headline: "Alabama Sen. Tuberville equates descendants of enslaved people to criminals." Which may be true, but it requires making a link between the Black population in America today and the former chattel slaves of more than a century ago. And honestly, I don't think that many of the people at that rally bothered to make that connection. What they heard was yet another take on the same old idea: That the Democratic Party wants to give money to people who were lazy, shiftless and had no respect for the law at their expense. And even for those audience members who made the connection, as far as many of them are concerned, slavery is just an excuse that Black people give for being lazy, shiftless and having no respect for the law. Again, this isn't anything new. Anyone who's been within 500 miles of the Mason-Dixon line (or a Conservative think-tank) in the past half-century should be well aware of this line of reasoning. This horse is so dead that it's practically fossilized. Why are people still pointing out that it's being beaten?

The outrage machine no longer has any reason for existing than to produce less and less effective outrage. And so it's now at the point that it simply spirals. Politicians make comments that spark "outrage" so that their supporters can be "outraged" at the supposed outrage. I'd be surprised if Senator Tuberville doesn't already have fundraising e-mails calling on voters to donate to him that feature all of the people who have lined up to call him a racist.

But I guess that's really the point. It's not that American society never learns; it's that it learns quickly, and well. Outrage, though its ability to motivate people to give money and give votes, grants power. Once a person has a loyal following, there is no punishment that can be meted out that will deter those followers from seeing the object of their adoration as unfairly martyred for standing up for what's right. The idea that what's right generates opposition becomes a positive incentive to incite opposition as proof of one's own righteousness. And the only people who lose at this game are the ones who won't play.