Donald Trump: The First White President [article in The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates]

[Bone]

@Richard_Parker

Bone:

You might appreciate this one: Donald Trump’s Strongest Supporters: A Certain Kind of Democrat
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/upshot/donald-trumps-strongest-supporters-a-certain-kind-of-democrat.html

I listened to the podcast on Freakanomics where the google search data analyst person mentioned in this article was a guest, it was quite good. There they discussed the magnitude of impact of racism on Obama’s results. Worth a listen. Yes I know it’s titled “how big is my penis”.

I certainly belief there are lots of racists out there, and if a person was a white supremacist, that person is voting for Trump, or at least is certainly not voting for Clinton. I just disagree on the magnitude of that impact. Looking at the 2012 data, Trump didn’t get vastly different results across the board so it’s hard to see how he was something so out of the ordinary. Of course, that could mean that all the other folks were propped up by white supremacists too.

The thing about this election was that it was so close. 3 states combining for around 100K votes flips the election the other way. Results that close means that it could be one thing, or it could be everything that made the difference. If Clinton has a better day, and winds up winning by similar margins, would that be treated as a victory against white supremacism? Since the results were so close it makes it hard to isolate any one or one major cause. Education levels, voter turnout, Comey, white supremacy, her emails, if we’re to convinced it was white supremacism, we need to be able to explain why it wasn’t the other things just as much, or more.

[Richard_Parker]

I would just caution against inflating Coates’ thesis. He is pretty careful actually about his claims of proportion.

[Bone]

Yes, he is careful in much of the article about magnitude, but then in other parts he dismisses this type of nuance. Combine that with the interview text, it’s like a Rorschach test where if we want to identify discussion about proportion, that can be done, and if we want to say white people will bring about Armageddon we can do that too.

I normally enjoy Coates’ s writing, but this one didn’t land for me.

[septimus]

@John_Mace

No, what I’m missing is how all this changed between 2012 and 2016. And the idea that Romney is not WHITE (to the extent that even exists) is laughable.

I’m trying to parse this post. Do you intend WHITE and white to be synonyms? Which of the two are you not sure “even exists”?

What should be obvious to anyone, whether or not we have the time to scrutinize the Atlantic article for misplaced commas or logic slips, is the stark difference between Romney and Trump. The former would be welcome into the Party of Reason and Sincerity. The latter is a disgusting racist whose election has brought ghastly dishonor to his supporters and to America.

Yes, a very large percentage of voters voted for the same party in 2016 as they did in 2012. But elections are decided at the margins.

[Some_Call_Me.Tim]

@Bone

Yes, he is careful in much of the article about magnitude, but then in other parts he dismisses this type of nuance. Combine that with the interview text, it’s like a Rorschach test where if we want to identify discussion about proportion, that can be done, and if we want to say white people will bring about Armageddon we can do that too.

I normally enjoy Coates’ s writing, but this one didn’t land for me.

Care to point out where he says Armageddon **will **result? Several folks in this thread appear to be thinking that a claim that “X threatens Y” is the same thing as a claim that “X will inexorably result in Y”.

For example, the quote that includes “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion” is in the former category and is by no means a claim that the situation inevitably “will bring about Armageddon”. Malthus made a similar mistake in interpretation of this quote back in post 7; I don’t know if you’re thinking of the same quote or not.

[Bone]

@Some_Call_Me.Tim

Care to point out where he says Armageddon **will **result? Several folks in this thread appear to be thinking that a claim that “X threatens Y” is the same thing as a claim that “X will inexorably result in Y”.

For example, the quote that includes “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion” is in the former category and is by no means a claim that the situation inevitably “will bring about Armageddon”. Malthus made a similar mistake in interpretation of this quote back in post 7; I don’t know if you’re thinking of the same quote or not.

I’m willing to dismiss it as rhetorical flourish, but the way that Coates frames that statement is not that X threatens Y.

When W. E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was “singularly disastrous for modern civilization” or James Baldwin claims that whites “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white,” the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump.

Coates says there is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump other than whites have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion. Maybe I’m focusing too much on the phrase “have brought” as in something that has already happened, instead of “the edge” part where it has not yet happened, but the section is rather matter of fact.

I think it does illustrate the point I was making, that throughout the article Coates is more measured, but that part in the conclusion wasn’t. A person who disagrees could focus on that, and a person who disagrees could bypass it for the other meatier parts of the article. I’m willing to let it go because I don’t see that part as central to the argument that Coates is making.

[John_Mace]

@Bone

Yes, he is careful in much of the article about magnitude, but then in other parts he dismisses this type of nuance. Combine that with the interview text, it’s like a Rorschach test where if we want to identify discussion about proportion, that can be done, and if we want to say white people will bring about Armageddon we can do that too.

Exactly. And the problem for the reader is: why shouldn’t one think his thesis is that the magnitude is large? If I write an essay about Bone and say, in one part, that Bone is a “pretty bad person” and in another part that Bone is “an absolutely terrible person”, what should the reader think my thesis is? I think it would be fair to say that I was, at best, trying call Bone “an absolutely terrible person”, but then be able to walk that back by claiming “well, did you miss the part where I said he was just a pretty bad person”?

Coates comes out and says, declaratively, that Trump’s ideology is white supremacy: “It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.” And although he doesn’t literally write “Trump is a white supremacist”, how else is the reader to interpret: “Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.” Is not “one” supposed to refer to Trump, and to mean “a white supremacist”?

I don’t think that makes sense unless pretty much every white person who exhibits some degree of racism is a white supremacist. Romney, for instance, belongs to a religion that in living memory would not admit blacks into its ranks*. And he was an adult when that policy was in place, so it’s not like some legacy policy that he had no ability to evaluate. Why does that not make him a white supremacist? And then we have Nixon, who famously executed the Southern Strategy, especially in his second presidential campaign where Wallace was not a factor in the race. Was he a white supremacist?

The Republican party has a problem with racism in its ranks. A BIG problem. Trump is making that worse, not better. But “white supremacy” is an ideology at the far end of the spectrum of racism, and it cheapens the term by labeling someone like Trump a white supremacist. Trump is a disgusting human being. A huckster and a narcissist of the highest order. He attacks his adversaries personally and in a vicious, demeaning manner. But a white supremacist? No, that’s a distortion of the term.

You can write a 16 page article (or however many pages this one is) about someone filled with all the nuance in the world, but when you call the subject of your article a white supremacist and declare that his political philosophy is white supremacy, it should not be surprising that the reader thinks your thesis is: the subject of this article is a white supremacist and his politics is white supremacy. And if his political ideology is white supremacy, how can one say that the influence of white supremacy is not of a great magnitude?

*One can claim that blacks were “only” excluded from the priesthood until 1978, but in the LDS church, every male in good standing is expected to attain the status of “priest”. Romney was 31 in 1978.

[k9bfriender]

@DrDeth

You can be scared of Muslim terrorists without being a racist.

If the only form of terrorism that you are scared of is Muslim terrorists, then you might be a racist.

@Bone

I certainly belief there are lots of racists out there, and if a person was a white supremacist, that person is voting for Trump, or at least is certainly not voting for Clinton. I just disagree on the magnitude of that impact. Looking at the 2012 data, Trump didn’t get vastly different results across the board so it’s hard to see how he was something so out of the ordinary. Of course, that could mean that all the other folks were propped up by white supremacists too.

The rise of trump is more than just the general, it is largely what happened in the primaries. In 2012, Trump did not run, so it is hard to compare data from a year he did not run, to a year that he did. In May of 2015, he wasn’t being taken much more seriously than he was in may of 2011. If he dropped out in may of 2015, he’d be the same footnote as his 2012 “run”. Who really thought he had a chance before the actual primaries started coming in? If he had stayed in 2012, who knows how those primaries would have turned out. Romney was not all that loved by republicans.

In the general, you had a choice of 2 candidates, both with their flaws to choose from, and while I think that racism helped him there, as the racists were going to vote for a conservative rather than a liberal, it is really how they glommed onto him in the primaries when you had a choice of 17 republicans. It was not a binary choice of greater of two evils, it was, which of these 17 people best represent your worldview, and the it was candidate who had the closest relationship with white supremacism who won over the republican voters.

[Some_Call_Me.Tim]

I think that the phrase “X has brought us to the edge of oblivion” would be more accurately summarized as “X threatens oblivion” than by “X will bring about oblivion”. Your mileage may vary, I suppose.

[Bone]

@k9bfriender

In the general, you had a choice of 2 candidates, both with their flaws to choose from, and while I think that racism helped him there, as the racists were going to vote for a conservative rather than a liberal, it is really how they glommed onto him in the primaries when you had a choice of 17 republicans. It was not a binary choice of greater of two evils, it was, which of these 17 people best represent your worldview, and the it was candidate who had the closest relationship with white supremacism who won over the republican voters.

I don’t think this is a good analysis either. Consider in a primary with many candidates, say, 17, and you had 18 total voters, 2 of which were white supremacists, and 16 of which were super anti-white supremacists. If the 16 splits their vote, and the white supremacist gets 2 votes and wins because all other candidates get 1 based on their cogent policy positions, it wouldn’t be fair to say that the primary voters chose a white supremacist and tar the other 16 voters with that criticism.

That’s why I was looking at 2012 data by party. If the results were not that much different, it undercuts Coates’s thesis, unless of course Romney was also a white supremacist and courted that vote as well. Coates addresses this by saying, well, even if his supporters by and large weren’t racists, they supported a person they knew was friendly towards racism and therefore that racism was not disqualifying. It’s kind of a catchall where he dismisses the idea that there could be non-racist reasons for supporting Trump.

[k9bfriender]

@Bone

I don’t think this is a good analysis either. Consider in a primary with many candidates, say, 17, and you had 18 total voters, 2 of which were white supremacists, and 16 of which were super anti-white supremacists. If the 16 splits their vote, and the white supremacist gets 2 votes and wins because all other candidates get 1 based on their cogent policy positions, it wouldn’t be fair to say that the primary voters chose a white supremacist and tar the other 16 voters with that criticism.

And that’s why analogies that reduce millions of people into 18 fail.

That’s why I was looking at 2012 data by party. If the results were not that much different, it undercuts Coates’s thesis, unless of course Romney was also a white supremacist and courted that vote as well.

2012 is irrelevant, because trump did not run in 2012.

Coates addresses this by saying, well, even if his supporters by and large weren’t racists, they supported a person they knew was friendly towards racism and therefore that racism was not disqualifying. It’s kind of a catchall where he dismisses the idea that there could be non-racist reasons for supporting Trump.

That would be true if Coates was claiming that there are no non-racist reasons for supporting trump. As that was not his claim at all, I’m not sure what you are trying to say here.

[E-DUB]

I think that Mitt Romney is not white or WHITE, but rather just White. (Parse that one.)

[Lantern]

I think the basic problem with Coates and a lot of leftists is an inability to distinguish between two propositions:
A) Trump is a somewhat racist guy who sometimes says racist things
B) Trump is a white supremacist and that is the core of his ideology.

They present a lot of evidence which points to A and pretty much assert without much argument that the truth is B.

There is a real cost to this confusion in that that Democrats forego the best lines of attack against Trump because they misunderstand the primary source of his appeal: the idea that he is a businessman-hero who will look after the working-class by taking on corrupt globalist elites. There were many effective lines of attack against this narrative and if Hillary had used them with any consistency she would probably be President.

To beat your opponent, you need to understand your opponent instead of creating some emotionally satisfying boogeyman.

[k9bfriender]

@Lantern

I think the basic problem with Coates and a lot of leftists is an inability to distinguish between two propositions:
A) Trump is a somewhat racist guy who sometimes says racist things
B) Trump is a white supremacist and that is the core of his ideology.

They present a lot of evidence which points to A and pretty much assert without much argument that the truth is B.

I think that the basic problem with people trying to understand Coates and leftists is that when Coates makes the first point, everyone on the right argues against the second, even thought that is not the point that was being made.

I agree with A. I will add to A that racists and white supremacists will support trump over that of someone who is not a somewhat racist guy who says racist things.

No one is making the argument for B. If you are arguing against B, you are arguing against a strawman.

[Lantern]

Huh? Have you read John Mace’s post?

Coates comes out and says, declaratively, that Trump’s ideology is white supremacy: “It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.” And although he doesn’t literally write “Trump is a white supremacist”, how else is the reader to interpret: “Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.” Is not “one” supposed to refer to Trump, and to mean “a white supremacist”?

[k9bfriender]

@Lantern

Huh? Have you read John Mace’s post?

Yes, I have. What’s your point? He even admits, in the very post that you quoted, that Coates never called Trump a white supremacist, just that, in his opinion, he feels as though coates makes that implication.

But, as far as the lack of ideology, other than white supremacism, that’s fair. You tell me what trump’s ideology is. He doesn’t have one. This allows the white supremacists to paint themselves into his corner, because he’s not shooing them out. White supremacism becomes the ideology that he is representing, even if he is not a white supremacist himself.

Coates’s essay is complicated and full of quite a bit of nuance, and simplifications to his arguments should be made with care, as it seems just about all the simplifications I have seen of his arguments in this thread have been highly inaccurate.

Racism is a hard enough and tough enough subject that you don’t need to be putting words into other people’s mouths, it is hard enough to have a meaningful discussion when everyone has agreed to be on the same page, much less when everyone is insisting that their own negative interpretation is the only correct one.

[septimus]

Trump winning 2 out of 18 votes in the GOP primaries? His worst showing was 3rd in the Minnesota Caucus with 21%, but he did much better than this in every state primary. He got 46% in Nevada and 49% in Massachusetts when there were five candidates still in the race!

Not everyone who voted for Trump was a “racist.” OTOH, most of those who did vote for Trump because of his appeal to racism cited other reasons.

OP asked whether thread participants had read the article. My guess is that most did not. Those claiming that “Coates says there is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump other than whites have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion” did not read it attentively: Coates didn’t say that directly — it was a quote from James Baldwin who died 30 years ago!

Here are a few excerpts.

Trump’s political career began in advocacy of birtherism. But long before that, he had made his worldview clear.

White Americans elected an orcish reality-TV star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.

An opioid epidemic is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment; a crack epidemic is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums.

Not every Trump voter is a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.

Trump’s legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagogue can get away with.

Trump beat Hillary among 18-29 year-old whites. Not “white men,” just “whites.” That is frightening.

[Lantern]

May I ask you what your interpretation is of Coates when he says:
“Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.”

I think Coates is pretty clearly calling Trump a white supremacist and he explicitly says that white supremacy is his ideology. That is not a nuanced argument in the least.

[John_Mace]

@k9bfriender

Yes, I have. What’s your point? He even admits… that Coates never called Trump a white supremacist, just that, in his opinion, he feels as though coates makes that implication.

I was very careful about what I wrote, and I did not admit that (emphasis added). But just to be 100% clear, I do believe that Coates called Trump a white supremacist. What I said was he never wrote the words “Trump is a white supremacist”, but that is not the only way to call a person such:

David Duke is a white supremacist. Trump is one, too.

That is calling Trump a white supremacist in the same way that Coates did. If there was any confusion about that from my post, my apologies.

[k9bfriender]

@Lantern

May I ask you what your interpretation is of Coates when he says:
“Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.”

I think Coates is pretty clearly calling Trump a white supremacist and he explicitly says that white supremacy is his ideology. That is not a nuanced argument in the least.

That the white supremacists had latched onto trump’s coattails to gain relevance in this countries political landscape, and like just about every other national politician in a generation, he did not push them off. His ideology was not about white supremacism, but for the first time since we thought we had put to bed the idea that racism=bad, we have a candidate who allows it to influence his campaign.

Really, I don’t believe that Trump has any ideology at all, he just follows wherever there are people who will say nice things about him. This is dangerous when white supremacists start saying nice things about him, because he could not bring himself to condone them in no uncertain terms as every other candidate he opposed this election cycle did.