Now Do You Like Me?

While drifting around online looking at news and commentary, I came across a story of another Black supporter of Donald Trump being ejected from a rally, on orders of the candidate, because he'd been mistaken for a protester and a paid "thug." Earlier today, I decided that I'd track down the story again. A quick Google search started turning up stories before I'd even finished entering search terms, and one thing I noticed is that almost all of them were from left-leaning commentary sites - but there was also one on Russia Today, "Trump mistakes black supporter for 'thug' and removes from rally."

One of the interesting things about the Russia Today article was that it included some tweets from the person in question, an ex-marine named CJ Cary. This bit, in particular, stood out for me: "It's not his fault he did not know who I was at that moment. He has been so traumatized by Black hate.." Part of it is politics as usual - we tend to have high standards for political candidates (or pretend to, anyway), and rather than admit that we support someone despite the fact that they fell short on a particular occasion, we tend to move the goalposts. So far so good. But the concept that Mr. Trump was unable to view Mr. Cary as an individual, simply because of the color of his skin, due to the fact that most Black voters actively oppose him ties into one of the ongoing debates that has roiled the Black community for the past hundred years or so: Respectability politics.

In a nutshell, respectability politics says that the respect of others is something that a person or a group purchases by behaving in a way that the others find respectable. While in many circles, respectability politics is considered a particularly insidious form of victim blaming, there's another way of looking at it: beggars can't be choosers, even when they feel that the have a moral entitlement to choice. Mr. Cary's formulation that its the fault of Black people that Donald Trump appeared to confirm the widespread impression of him as a racist, will likely be said by some to blow clean through respectability politics on its way to Uncle Tom/"slave mentality" territory, but it fits in with the overall message of respectability politics, namely that Black America needs to clean up its act if they expect to be respected by White America.

In the end, respectability politics divides the Black community because it it expects a high degree of unity from it. It's difficult enough to order pizza for five with any degree of unanimity, the idea that you're going to be able to drive an agreement among some 26 million adults on a plan to meet the not-monolithic-either expectations of of White America is little more than a pipe dream. And in that regard, the idea that in order for any of us to be treated as individuals worth the benefit of the doubt, an overwhelming majority of us are going to have to toe an ever-shifting line seems ridiculous.

The irony of Mr. Cary's case is that "Cary says he wanted to deliver a note to Trump urging him to be less offensive and more inclusive to four demographic groups: black people, women, people with disabilities and college students." Which seems a lot to ask of a "traumatized" man.

I'm Not Speaking To You

So Anita Lynch, a Bernie Sanders delegate to this past summer's Democratic National Convention, tells NPR's Audie Cornish:

I actually met with two strong Hillary people after the convention 'cause I wanted to hear what they had to say. I wanted to hear their perspective. I really wanted to try to understand. And one of the things I said to them was, convince me to vote for Hillary and two things I want you to leave out the conversation - the word Trump and the words Supreme Court. And then tell me why I should vote for Hillary.

When Ms. Cornish asked Ms. Lynch if they'd been able to pull it off, the answer was "Not totally, no."

And so, in the next segment, Ms. Cornish puts the question to one Roz Wyman, a lifelong Democrat and superdelegate who is firmly in the Hillary Clinton camp. Ms. Wyman's answer?

Well, I can certainly be happy not to mention that man's name, but the Supreme Court is obviously very important. And if somebody doesn't care about who's going on the Supreme Court, they're not probably a very good Democrat.

And this leads Ms. Cornish to remark that the potential to name nominees to the Supreme Court is the most important thing for her. Ms. Wyman then says:

Well, it's not the most important thing. I - you know, I balance a lot of things. But the Supreme Court is absolutely important beyond belief. And they're there for, you know, 30, 40 years. And some of the issues - I mean just imagine getting rid of Roe versus Wade. That's one of their prize things. Or we might get Citizens United - get rid of that. The court is absolutely important if you're Democrat in my opinion.

Ms. Wyman's unwillingness to put forth another argument for voting Mrs. Clinton stood out for me. And, yes, I'm saying unwillingness. I'm taking her at her word when she says that the Supreme Court is not the most important thing for her, in spite of the fact that she describes it as "absolutely important beyond belief." And if we take her at her word, she understands that she has other priorities than defeating Donald Trump or being able to seat Supreme Court justices. But when given the opportunity to make the case to someone who might be persuadable, based on those priorities, she refuses to take it, and her response left me with the impression that she considered it thoroughly wrongheaded for anyone to even want to focus on them.

And this is why I consider many everyday Americans to be poor salespeople for the candidates and the policies that they support. Because they can't bring themselves to understand other people's priorities, and instead insist on framing things as a responsibility to their own priorities. Whether one is a very good Democrat or not, a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for Hillary Clinton, and if Mrs. Clinton is elected to the White House, she'll be able to nominate justices to the Supreme Court whether that was a given voter's first, second or twenty-fifth reason for voting for her. When given the chance to advance Mrs. Clinton's chances to name justices to the Supreme Court, Ms. Wyman seemed to toss it away because she couldn't bring herself to ignore the lack of ideological purity that such an act would entail. And while it may make some sense to have a litmus test for the people you vote into office, it doesn't make much sense to have a litmus test for the people whose votes you would court on their behalf. Yet, this strikes me as a common habit.

It's often said that politics are a way for people to express their identities as members of a particular ideological community. And people will self-segregate based on those communities. And while it may make sense to not talk to people who are of an opposing community, with whom one has so little in common that it seems difficult to carry on a worthwhile conversation, once the borders of community preclude speaking to potential allies, simply because they live outside the lines, it becomes counter-productive.

Words Will Never Hurt Me

My father could tell stories that would make it hard for you to sleep at night. But then again, he grew up in the Deep South before the Civil Rights movement, when ignoring the mockery of white people could, at times, be a very dangerous thing to do. Not because the jokes that whites told about blacks were themselves dangerous, but because they could be a prelude to violence. To borrow a phrase, "Those who people would attack, they first dehumanize." But here's the thing, to my understanding - it's not a causal relationship. Nor it is an ironclad correlation. In my father's time, or my grandfathers', the fact that a group of white guys was talking among themselves and laughing at you could very well presage violence. Today? Not so much. Not to say that it doesn't happen, but today, it's newsworthy.

But while these things may have happened in the past, many people who remember them are still alive and they passed those memories on to their children and their children's children. After all, when I was a child, my parents had no inkling of what 2016 would look like, and I couldn't even conceptualize a time so far in the future. So they didn't teach me to live in the world of today. The world they taught me to live in was a combination of the one they found themselves in, the one they had grown up in and the one that they had been prepared for by their own parents. And they did this because this is what they understood.

I suspect that many parents end up doing the same. And so a lot of people wind up living with one foot in the past, and fearing that as long as the vestiges of the past are still visible that the other foot may join it. That takes a long time to die. But so too does the past itself. We may think of the bad old days as dead and gone, but its not as if the people who made them that way were suddenly swallowed whole by the Earth. And even if they were, their ideas didn't die with them. There are people younger than myself who would gladly return the United States to a time that I'm not old enough to remember, but have heard enough about to understand that I never want to visit.

I'm of the opinion that when it comes to offense, people only have the level of power over us that we have learned to give them. And sometimes the people who taught us those lessons did so with the best of intentions. And while the best thing that we can do for ourselves is un-learn them, that process is neither quick, easy or painless.

Crossing

Stragedy

This morning, on the radio, I heard a political analyst make the point that "it's difficult to say that [Donald Trump] he is trying to win." Or, at the very least, his campaign had hit upon a strategy that wasn't likely to work.

Whenever I hear that someone is doing something nonsensical, a reflex kicks in that prompts me to ask under what circumstances it would make sense. And so I started thinking about it. I recalled seeing a headline, somewhere along the way, in which Donald Trump said that about two-thirds of people who backed him were die-hards who would support him no matter what he did or said. Let's say that he honestly believes this to be true. (Now, as a politician and a showman, it's hard to be sure of what Mr. Trump actually believes, and what's part of the act, but let's say, for the sake of argument, that he really does believe this part.)

For all that people may think that Hillary Clinton is the far better candidate of the two, it's unlikely that her level of die-hard support is that high. I pulled a 50% number out of thin air, and when I spoke to a couple of people I knew, they floated the same number, so let's go with that. Using those numbers we can cobble together a chart that looks something like this:

All numbers completely fabricated.

The red bars represent people intending to vote for Donald Trump, and the blue bars for Hillary Clinton, natch. And the size of the bars, when taken together, give Mrs. Clinton about a 6 or so point lead in our imaginary poll, which is in the ballpark of what I've been hearing recently, if perhaps a bit on the low side.

The dark red bar represents our hypothetical die-hard pro-Trump voter. The lighter red bar can be thought of as anti-Clinton voters - people who are voting for Donald Trump as the lesser evil, as it were. And, of course, we can view the blue bars in the same way: Dark blue being strongly pro-Clinton and light blue being less invested anti-Trump voters. To use standard polling-speak, you can contrast the committed voter with the voter who merely leans towards a candidate.

It's often said that Donald Trump is more focused on his die-hard base of support than he is is trying to appeal to voters outside of it. And if you think that the actually electorate looks something like this chart, you can come up with a workable theory as to why. If Mr. Trump can sow enough Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt to get the light blue portion of the voting public to "stay home" on Election Day, he wins, even if that costs him all of the light red portion. (Conversely, Hillary Clinton can carry the day by mobilizing the light blue portion to turn out, even if that means that the light red portion shows up to cast a vote against her.) Everyone in the blue section of the chart (as well as those voters who don't support either one of them strongly enough to show up) are effectively write-offs; the Trump campaign has no interest in inducing them to defect. Hence the negative tone of the campaign; negativity doesn't convert voters, it simply makes them apathetic. And if you're attempting to stage the election between only the die-hards in each camp, apathy is your friend.

Because of the way the Electoral college works, there are really only a few states in which this can, or needs to, work. Blue states are going to vote for Mrs. Clinton, regardless of what strategy Mr. Trump uses, and the Red states are in the bag. So there are only the swing states that Trump needs to influence in this way.

Is this the actual plan? Don't ask me, I came up with it while brushing my teeth this morning. But it strikes me as a framework that one can place Donald Trump's actions into that lends them rationality, rather than randomness. And it's unlikely that someone who can get this close to becoming President of the United States, win or loose, is random.