Nobody Can Explain What He Is Doing

On Sunday we spent all day packing. Monday was an 11-hour drive to northern Wisconsin. Today we cleaned nearly a year’s worth of mouse shit out of every drawer, pantry closet and shelf. Grendl the cat helped by catching two mice last night.

That’s an explanation of how life interferes with writing. It’s late Tuesday afternoon, so I’ll just say a few things about the strangeness of Donald Trump. He is 4 months away from the presidential election and nobody knows what he is doing.

It’s obvious by now that it doesn’t matter what he does, he will get the votes from his white base of somewhere between 30% and 40% of Americans. So his recent eruptions of racism are inexplicable, further turning off the 10% to 15% of voters in the middle who will make the difference in November.

Re-tweeting a supporter shouting “white power”, then claiming he didn’t hear that comment? Never saying that he doesn’t support people who shout “white power”? Of course, that would be his millionth lie, but not even to try? He retweeted a video of a white couple with guns threatening peaceful black protesters in St.Louis.

Chris Christie, former New Jersey Governor who failed to get any important position in Trump’s White House, said on Sunday, “He is losing, and if he doesn’t change course, both in terms of the substance of what he is discussing and the way that he approaches the American people, then he will lose.”

His closest aides say they can’t understand why he doesn’t seem to be able to control his impulses. He shows no interest in actually governing and has no plans for a second term. When Sean Hannity offered him a softball question about his plans for a second term, Trump could not name one policy he planned to pursue. Hannity asked a second time and got nothing again. Jonathan Bernstein, a Bloomberg opinion columnist, says, “My basic sense is that Trump isn’t nearly concerned enough with winning re-election.”

He desperately wants to hold rallies, but they don’t make his reelection any more likely, especially if the rally is a public relations disaster, as his Tulsa rally was from planning to low attendance.

Meanwhile his poll numbers have been plummeting for three months, and that plunge shows no signs of stopping.

That makes me very happy, but also confused. Has Trump had enough of being President? Has he figured out a way to lose the election, declare that he never loses, and then ride off into the sunset?

Does he know what he is doing? Has he ever?

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

June 30, 2020

Has Something Finally Changed?

My credit-card bank, Citibank, a huge global enterprise, sent me a message on June 5, and probably to all of their millions of customers. Given the history of corporate politics, the message was surprising. The CEO of Citi’s US Consumer Bank, Anand Selva, wrote, “I hope you know that Citi is an organization that champions equality, diversity and inclusion and is willing to stand up for those values when they are threatened.” I knew that Citibank paid lip service to equality and diversity, like all major organizations, but I also knew that the only value that Citibank had been consistently willing to stand up for was its bottom line.

The message also quoted two other high executives, who clearly stated that the racial status quo is not acceptable. Mike Corbat, Citi’s CEO, said, “The tragic and unnecessary death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the ensuing unrest are glaring reminders of the progress we need to make to have a truly equal and just society.” Jane Fraser, President of Citi and CEO of Global Consumer Banking said, “We must use this painful time as the turning point to a better future that embraces our common good by listening, learning and being committed to taking action to create a more equal and just society.”

Good talk, but what about action? In two surprising cases in recent days, financial giants have fired people for racist actions off the job. The story of Amy Cooper calling the police in New York’s Central Park on a black man, Christian Cooper, who wanted her to leash her dog, has become known around the world, and led to her being fired by Franklin Templeton. Less well known is a similar incident this month: a white couple saw a Filipino-American man chalking “Black Lives Matter” on a wall in front of his house and called the police. The cops recognized the man as the owner of the house and left. The white man, who had been a managing director in the public finance group at the wealth-management firm Raymond James, got fired. Raymond James issued a statement: “Raymond James has zero tolerance for racism or discrimination of any kind” and the man’s actions “were inconsistent with our values”.

Firing employees who attract national attention because of racist behavior is easy, although it seems to me to be a new phenomenon. Changing the culture that allowed those people to think that they could safely act out their racism in public is much more difficult. But perhaps Citibank and other corporate giants will actually do something “to create a more equal and just society.”

While it’s important to see that America’s white leadership seems to be shifting position, what really matters is what the rest of Americans think. Here’s my scientific study of popular attitudes. I participated in the Black Lives Matter Protest for Equality on Sunday, June 7, in Jacksonville, our very local piece of the nationwide protest movement that itself is remarkable. About 100 of us stood at a major intersection with signs, many about Black Lives Matter. I watched the stream of traffic for 2 hours. Hundreds of people displayed their approval of our demonstration by waving, giving thumbs up, flashing the peace sign, raising clenched fists, and of course honking. People in and on every type of vehicle offered support: pickup trucks, Cadillacs, motorcycles, guys driving semis, sports cars, and beaters.

I saw only five expressions of disapproval: a guy with thumbs down, 2 guys with a middle finger, and 2 guys shouting “All lives matter.” In a Republican town in the rural Midwest, that informal survey might indicate a broad shift in opinions about BLM and the larger issue of racial inequality.

Here’s a final piece of evidence for anyone who is waiting eagerly or apprehensively for November. I can’t help checking Trump’s disapproval rating on the website of 538 every day. I have written before that his levels of approval and disapproval have been remarkably steady since his election, steadier than any other postwar president. Since March 2017, his disapproval level has ranged between 52% and 57%, except for a few weeks during this March and April, when disapproval briefly dipped to 50%. His approval percentage has been between 37% and 44%, again except for those weeks, when it rocketed upwards to 46%. That was the only moment during his presidency that his approval got within 4% of disapproval.

That’s the background. Since that positive blip, his ratings have gone down, but there have been so many brief ups and downs over the past 3 years, that nothing seemed to actually change. But the fall in approval and rise in disapproval has continued for two months, and the gap is now more than 14%. During the past two years, that has only been topped during a short period in January 2019. At that level, the presidential election in November would be a landslide.

Just how much skin color does matter in America is made visual in a NYTimes article that graphs the differences between white and black lives in terms of employment, income, home ownership, college completion, and life expectancy. In Minneapolis, for example, where protests have been intense, the median household income in white neighborhoods is nearly $80,000, but only $30,000 in black neighborhoods.

Some enterprising and courageous reporters asked Trump supporters at the Tulsa rally this weekend about what they teach their children about Black Lives Matter. The usual response was some version of “The protesters are radical leftists. Trump is doing everything he can for blacks. We are color blind. All lives matter.”

The attitude that racism is not worth talking about, much less fighting, has predominated in white America for decades. It meant, among other things, that police brutality, exercised within a racist context, was broadly tolerated. Now maybe the rubber band has snapped.

We’ll see.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

June 23, 2020

Racial Politics in 2020

When liberal America recognized, after years of being told, that racial language mattered, conservatives were outraged. They labeled the attempt to banish routine white supremacist talk “political correctness”. That was classic conservative racial politics as I have known it in my lifetime: be blind to existing racism, refuse to change racist habits, label every attempt at reducing racism in American life as a government intrusion.

“Political correctness” was a deliberate phrase. It served as a weapon against efforts to discuss the importance of language by labeling the idea political, which meant liberal. Through endless repetition and hollowing out by exaggeration of any useful meaning, the taunt has lost its sting over the decades. Conservatives use it more now as a bullet point on the list of their racial politics.

Maybe conservatives hope that nobody, or at least nobody they care about, will notice that they have fully adopted political correctness in their own language. Macroaggressions have mostly disappeared, replaced by microaggressions that were not so easy to see before people stopped saying “nigger”. Steve King of Iowa is now ostracized for saying what would have been unremarkable not so long ago. Even the proud racists who make a home on the right fringe of the Republican Party avoid the most obvious offenses.

But that’s as far as they go. The Republican Party is white and rules white, even more than it did 50 years ago. They are determined that nothing American blacks and nothing American liberals say should ever come to pass. Here in Illinois, in Jacksonville, Illinois, it’s worth tracing how we got here.

The Republican Party developed in Illinois as an opponent of slavery, with people from Jacksonville taking leading roles. They coalesced around Abraham Lincoln, who ended slavery, and after his death created unprecedented government programs to reconstruct racial politics in Washington and across the country. Meanwhile, Southern white supremacy became identified with the Democratic Party. The massive, sustained, and violent resistance of Southern whites crushed the Radical Republicans and black reformers by the 1870s. The Republican Party became just as convinced as Democrats that the racist system called Jim Crow should be implemented everywhere, with big regional differences but national agreement that white supremacy should continue forever. Anti-racist politicians in America before World War II were rare, as rare as prosecutions of whites for the murder of black Americans.

Then a seemingly unstoppable social movement, led and leading a host of politicians who were civil rights enthusiasts. Liberals became anti-racists in the 1960s, and decided to push again against Jim Crow and Southern intransigence. They could be found in both parties, but became the center and conscience of the Democrats as they shoved the Party to the left. For a short while, they survived on the fringes of the Republican Party.

Stuart Stevens, a long-time Republican election consultant, has just published the book “It Was All A Lie”. He calls his Republican Party “just a white grievance party”. He traces that back to the Republican Party’s decision to focus on white voters after Goldwater lost in a landslide in 1964. “Race is the original sin of the modern Republican Party.”

Led by Democrats, resisted by Republicans, since the 1960s new freedoms have opened up to black individuals, men and women, many of them. At the same time, new methods of racial control developed under both parties, from the war on drugs backed up by stop-and-frisk policing to quiet acceptance of Confederate hagiography.

Those are the differences and similarities between the broad band of liberalism represented by the Democratic Party since the 1960s, and the narrower brand of conservatism represented by the 21^st-century Republican Party. Now everybody’s wondering, have we reached another dramatic moment, when years, decades, even centuries of oppression move masses of people who were not moved before, shifting the political parties again, creating a new normal?

We can see signs of what is happening to the racial politics of each party. There are voices among Republican politicians, supported by millions of voices of Republican voters, who are saying the system needs to be changed. Yet they are on the fringes of a Party whose official voice, with the barest of internal criticism, espouses and implements a policy of retreat from today, back to the 1950s, when men were men and blacks were quiet. The most we can expect from the most liberal Republican candidates this fall is a studied neutrality, based on a heavy dose of support for doing little. The rest of the Party, as a social body of thousands of donors, radio hosts, elected and unelected officials, has enshrined Rush Limbaugh as their philosopher, transforming itself into an army of little Trumps. Even if he and many of them are defeated in November, that body will remain for a long time. The Republican question is, when will riling up the base with political nonsense stop being a campaign tactic?

The Democratic question is different. How strongly has today’s political form of anti-racism, beyond civil rights, affected their social body? Will that social body integrate voices which have been listened to, mostly politely, but ultimately disregarded? The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has just been defeated a second time by a Democratic establishment and by Democratic voters. Are those Democratic voters shifting their center, as they seem to say to pollsters? Are those Democratic politicians shifting their center, as so many are saying now?

I won’t predict, even to myself, that the Democrats as a Party will jettison the racial politics they have developed over decades. But it seems possible that “American society”, that hopeful concept which still mainly means white male American society, is noticing, recognizing, and internalizing the reality around us, which will be hard to stuff back into the Pandora’s box of official America.

Meanwhile, most Republicans are still looking to an even more racist past for greatness. Stevens does not label all Republican voters racist, but he says “to support Trump is to make peace with white grievance and hate.”

Of course, Republicans who have not repudiated their history with the Party, as Stevens has, do not agree with him about Republican racism. That can be seen in the differing answers that Republicans and Democrats give about whether certain behaviors are racist. While majorities in both parties said that telling a joke about a racial group is racist, fewer than 25% of Democrats, but 40% of Republicans said that was not racist. Wanting one’s children to go to school with people from one’s own cultural background was labeled not racist by 30% of Democrats, but 45% of Republicans. The big partisan differences are revealed when asked about displaying the Confederate flag: 20% of Democrats, but 60% of Republicans deny that it represents racism.

The forces of change are at both ends of the political spectrum. The Democrats are being pulled left by a younger, more educated coalition of races and genders and sexualities that sees how anti-racism and anti-sexism fit together into a vision for the future. Republicans seem to be hearing only the older, angrier, anti-information white male culture of grievance, that shades into those armed and violent fascist cult-like movements, which the Republican Party, again bowing to its leader, can’t seem to repudiate.

Until this Republican racial politics loses big or repeatedly, they won’t abandon it. Until Democrats win with an embrace of anti-racism, their Party won’t be comfortable with it.

The next step forwards or backwards will be taken in November. Whether we know afterwards what Americans really want, despite Russian hacking and Republican vote tampering, beyond endless polls that seem to tell us everything until they are no longer relevant, remains to be seen. Need I say that the future of racial politics in America will be our choice?

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

June 17, 2020