This is what polarization and tribal politics does: it establishes clear, unambiguous boundaries that are based on loyalty. Cross the line, and you become a target. The party itself will reinforce it because they all understand that if even a handful of people become brave enough to condemn party leadership, the entire house of cards collapses. Privately, many will vent among each other about what a shit show this has become, but they don’t dare say it in public because the tribe must stay together, and the reason the tribe must stay together is due to fact that they are a minority that governs as a majority, meaning that they have won hard-earned power despite the fact that a majority of people don’t have similar ideology.
That’s why I think people are wrong to dismiss the idea that Trump isn’t calculating here – he is absolutely calculating. He may sometimes miscalculate and pay a short-term prices for it in the polls, but what he’s doing is building an army with legions of committed holy crusaders and race warriors. Trump knows that he probably can’t win a ‘normal’ election (whatever that is anymore). He needs to fracture the electorate, to splinter it into smaller groups and win with a plurality.
This is why I have suspected that he has actually wanted the Democrats to impeach him. If the Democrats were to move on impeachment before the rest of the country, particularly independents, were ready, then what is the result? It unifies his army, and it potentially divides his enemies.
That being said, if there was ever a time to impeach, now just might be that time, particularly coming at a moment when a solid majority of the country is repulsed by his comments. I don’t necessarily think it would succeed, but if you’re going to launch that effort, do it when Trump’s opponents are united on something.
The inevitable follow up to that question is, does a racist comment make that president unqualified to lead? Is it a deal-breaker. Probably not, unfortunately.
I think it could be read more than one way, but what I find absolutely mystifying is the fact that AFAIK not one of the people who claims that Ocasio-Cortez was calling Pelosi racist by referring to her singling out “newly elected women of color” seems to have suggested that Ocasio-Cortez was also calling Pelosi sexist.
Saying that somebody is singling out women is just as much an accusation of sexism as saying that somebody is singling out persons of color is an accusation of racism. Do people think that Pelosi somehow can’t be accused of sexism because women can’t be sexist? If so, they have some catching up to do with reality.
Personally, I neither think that Pelosi is sexist/racist nor that Ocasio-Cortez was accusing Pelosi of sexism/racism. I think Ocasio-Cortez was suggesting that Pelosi was trying to discredit potentially divisive left-wing views by specifically critiquing their proponents who are most vulnerable to disparagement and dismissal, by virtue of being not only relatively inexperienced but also female and nonwhite. That’s not an accusation that Pelosi herself is sexist or racist: that’s an accusation that Pelosi is willing to let pervasive societal sexist/racist prejudice do some of the work of distancing the Democratic Party from more radical liberal views.
I don’t know whether that’s what Pelosi actually is doing, but I think that’s what Ocasio-Cortez was saying she’s doing.
I’d go for a simpler explanation: AOC knows she can easily enlist thousands of vocal allies on her behalf by insinuating racial prejudice in Pelosi. Hundreds of thousands of Twitter users are poised to condemn racism, no matter who is accused of it, no matter how little evidence there may be.*
Whereas insinuating ‘Pelosi declines to support my action-plan and my ambitions, and is therefore attempting to block my power-play with a power-play of her own’ is much, much, much less-likely to generate a massive tweet-storm of support. There isn’t a ready-made support base ready to be fired up over something that is so inside-baseball.
So AOC isn’t likely to employ that complaint–even though it’s more accurate than ‘Pelosi is singling out women of color’ (newly-elected or otherwise).
I think your analysis is thoughtful. But in this particular case I don’t buy the ‘AOC has determined that Pelosi is enlisting bigotry in order to keep her caucus in line’ theory.
*I’m not decrying that state of affairs, because racism is corrosive, and it’s not really reasonable to excoriate people for ‘over-reacting’ to it. But undeniably there are times when accusations are made that fail to be fully fair.
For those who think that Trump was just trolling and wasn’t making a calculated decision to sow division, consider what happened earlier today:
All Republicans + 132 Democrats: Against
95 Democrats: For
It’s divide, and conquer.
Having a disagreement (even spirited) over how to deal with Trump by itself isn’t a problem. The problem is if/when Trump pisses Democrats off so much that they stop trying to govern and get sucked into a media brawl, and end up spending so much time trying to impeach and censure Trump and his cabinet that they don’t have a unified strategy on things like how to deal with the looming budget crisis.
That’s an excellent point. It’s much less daunting that huge proportions of Republicans support Trump’s racism, if there are fewer and fewer self-identified Republicans, the more openly-racist he becomes.
I’m not seeing good numbers on this, and I just spent way too long looking. Party affiliation figures seem to be published only twice a month or so, by major polling firms. For example:
Republicans Independents Democrats
% % %
2019 Jun 3-16 26 46 27
2019 May 15-30 27 45 27
2019 May 1-12 30 38 31
2019 Apr 17-30 29 40 29
2019 Apr 1-9 27 44 26
2019 Mar 1-10 26 42 30
2019 Feb 12-28 30 38 30
2019 Feb 1-10 31 37 30
2019 Jan 21-27 25 41 32
2019 Jan 2-10 25 39 34
That’s an excellent point. It’s much less daunting that huge proportions of Republicans support Trump’s racism, if there are fewer and fewer self-identified Republicans the more openly-racist he becomes.
I’m not seeing good numbers on this, and I just spent way too long looking. Party affiliation figures seem to be published only twice a month or so, by major polling firms. For example:
Party Affiliation | Gallup Historical Trends
That doesn’t really tell us anything (those figures are as of today—there’s quite a delay in posting their results). Still, it’s worth keeping an eye on.
eta --sorry about the double post, but I’ll keep this one up as the stats are easier to read.
It is an excellent point. I can’t cite to it because it was a figure I heard some while ago on the news, but there was a statistic that 37% of all Americans identified as Republicans in 2016. Now it’s 24%.
Yes, thanks. When I first did the search (“identify as Republican”), Google returned a lot of “in 2015” and “in 2016”-type results. Which is all very well, but more-frequent polls would tell us more.
But it may be that no polling firm is checking on this weekly. Ir they did, it would be much more useful in terms of judging how successful Trump’s conduct is in winning or losing him support.
I think Trump’s spirit will permeate politics until we reach the point where a large chunk of his supporters make the connection between the politics of the right and their own suffering. And that could be a while.
All this country cares about, and the only metric we seem to use to evaluate presidential efficacy, is whether we have a regular job and whether we can afford to buy a smartphone.
Yeah but I think the Democratic party has lost support with it. I would guess that Americans have generally given up on the party system and the only reason that we continue to have Democrats and Republicans is because the machines in both parties have control over the system so that they can still tell which team the candidates are on. But the voters themselves are becoming increasingly unaffiliated, which is also why it’s a little harder to predict elections than it used to be.
And I’ve said for a long time (about 35 years now) that no revolution happens as long as people are comfortable. 35 years ago, the exact quote was “as long as people have indoor plumbing and VCRs, there will be no revolution.” The details of that statement may have changed a bit, but the underlying sentiment has not.
Things have to get really bad before people will rise up. We aren’t there, but we sure seem to be on the path.