Racism is the Democrats’ Key Strategy for 2020
The cornerstone of progressivism, and one of the ways Democrats risk losing the 2020 presidential race, is their exaggeration of white privilege. It leads inexorably to devaluing the voters needed to clinch the Electoral College.
The problem with a race-based, victim-awashed vision of 2019 America is white is not enough, never has been. I was a diplomat for 24 years, about as privileged a job on paper as you can get. But inside the State Department being white was only a start. The real criteria was “pale, male, and Yale.” Being white (the pale part) was great, but only if you were also a man; women were stuck in less-desirable job categories (girls are nurses, boys are doctors.) No surprise the State Department was sued over the years by its women and black diplomats.
But white and male got you only to the door. The “good” jobs required the right background, preferably via an Ivy. A sort-of proud graduate of The Ohio State University, my privilege only went so far. I couldn’t fake it. They knew each other. Their fathers knew each other. They had money, well, parents with money. We Big Ten alums never got our class action together and so muddled mostly in the middle levels.
The idea white was enough has always been laughable. America did not welcome our immigrant grandpas; it shunted them into slums and paid them as little as possible to work for male, pale and Yale owners. Check how many Irish died digging the canals around New Orleans. Read how immigrant children were worked in factories decades. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act used phrenology to exclude Italians. It was so horrendously racist Hitler praised it in Mein Kampf.
In 2019 mentioning the Irish triggers someone with purple hair and a neck tattoo in Elvish to shout slavery was worse. It was. But applying a rank-order to suffering disguises the reason ideology will drag the Democratic party down in 2020: it is about more than race. What progressives call white privilege is mostly status-wealth privilege, with a lot of unrelated things chucked in to fill out the racist manifesto, basically everything bad that happens to black people from airplane seating scrums to what color the director is of the next superhero movie as if every moment today is a hot summer morning in 1968 Birmingham.
The candidates then either dismiss what they call white angst as a Fox narrative or condemn it as supremacy, Nazism, fascism, the words having lost meaning. Dems crow about changing demographics that will turn America into a non-majority nation, and celebrate the end of privilege as the country depletes its stock of Caucasians. They fail to see the salient statistic of America is not that the 61% who are white is falling, but that a tiny percentage, the top 0.1% of households, now hold the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90%.
Every white voter in every swing state feels the pull of that. They’re afraid of losing their place, but not to black people, to the economy. And every one of those voters knows solutions Democrats propose will not help them (they are also unlikely to fix racism but that’s another matter.) Mayor Pete’s Douglass Plan provides billions for black businesses and colleges and wants to reduce prison population by half, Biden wants to provide former felons (a niche market inside the racism community voting black apparently) housing, Kamala Harris has a $100 billion plan for black homeownership, and everyone on MSNBC favors reparations, but not so much for those they see as already having too much, who actually have just a little more, but not enough.
Nothing excuses the at times dangerous behavior of Trump and some of his supporters (but it does explain why this hasn’t hurt the president politically.) Yet declaring all Trump supporters racist is far too crude an understanding. Many feel they are under attack from progressives who fail to see their economic vulnerabilities. Instead of Barack Obama (albeit Columbia ’83, Harvard ’91) talking about hope and change for everyone, they hear today’s Dems dedicating themselves to over-correcting racial wrongs not committed by any of the people who now feel as if they are being punished for those historical sins. They bear Democrats scolding them into resentment over what little more they have than others.
Democratic very-hopeful Kirsten Gillibrand failed to sell this penitent version of white privilege right at Ground Zero for economic inequality, Youngstown, Ohio. Youngstown was archetypal postwar America, a Midwest city built around a now-dead steel industry. It was racially-mixed, not only statistically (49% white, 44% black), but in reality. The now-gone union jobs paid living wages to whites and blacks and allowed people to buy homes on each others’ streets, same as they worked together in the mills. Workers’ privilege. The receding tide grounded all boats.
Gillibrand was asked at a campaign stop there “This is an area that, across all demographics, has been depressed because of the loss of industry and the opioid crisis. What do you have to say to people in this area about so-called white privilege?”
Her answer, praised by CNN as “powerful,” was a wandering narrative about how while white privilege didn’t spare the questioner unemployment, the loss of her house, her son to opiods, and her soul itself at the hands of rapacious inequality, the black folk in Youngstown had it worse, ’cause the supremacist cops would bust a black kid for weed while a white kid would walk away. It was the perfect answer for a progressive media hit. It was the worst possible answer if a candidate actually sought some of those Ohio votes. Gillibrand stumbled on to say she understands families in the community are suffering, “but that’s not what this conversation is about.”
The answer was thin soup to women who lost sons to opioids. Opioids now rank just below suicide as a cause of death in America, as if the two were unconnected. Many more die of opioids than police violence. Ohio has the second highest opioids death count in the U.S. And how much time will the issue get at the next Democratic debate?We can all recite a #BLM victim’s name but none for this.
Gillibrand, standing in as the poster child for progressives, likely cares nothing of 1977’s Black Monday in Youngstown, when 5,000 steelworkers were laid off, or of the 50,000 who lost their jobs after that. The town never recovered, trauma which helped put Reagan and then Trump in the White House. She doesn’t see what they did. The problem is not black and white, it is up and down.
The people of Youngstown understand this in their bones and to the endless amazement of progressive media (Millennial media constantly expressing shock that people support Trump is a genre in itself, out done only by articles by many of the same writers telling the yokels why they are wrong to support Trump. It’s not in your self-interest you stupid in-bred morons!) support Trump even when he is ineffectual in helping, because at least he understands. He would never tell them their economic problems pale in comparison to racism. Gillibrand, on the other hand, went to Youngstown specifically to tell them she doesn’t care, her eye on another audience.
It is time to admit racism is not the core problem, the one candidate Pete Buttigieg claims “threatens to unravel the American project.” It is in 2019 an exaggeration driving a key Democratic strategy, betting the White House on voters with a history of unreliable turnout (since the 1980s blacks turned out in higher numbers than whites, percentage-wise, only for the Obama elections) against a body of whites they devalue.
This is a risky strategy. It alienates too many while challenging others (older Americans of all races historically produce 30–40% higher turnout rates than the youngest voters) to vote for the party that now gleefully denounces Thomas Jefferson as a slaver, and throws its own Vice President emeritus and front-runner under the racism bus. Voters meanwhile wonder when the reparations for their lost jobs and homes will come. They know Dems won’t represent them if elected; as whites, their literal existence is painted as the cause of a problem Dems claim to want to solve.
The Dems can’t reassess because to discuss racism in any but the Party’s own terms is more racism. Dissenters are racists, or at least noncompetitive. Mayor Pete who in January said “Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and our democracy,” now leads the charge with racism. Argument is ended with “Oh, so says a white person.” Whitesplaining! It’s like saying only doctors who have cancer are allowed to treat tumors.
In Wall Street terms, the Dems are shorting white voters. A short means betting against something, devaluing it. If you are short on Microsoft, you make investments which will go up if Microsoft goes down. Dems think white voters have little value, and are betting against them with exaggerated claims of supremacy. Along the way they assume all “people of color” will fall into place, believing what resonates with young, ever-so-offendable urban blacks will also click with their older rural relatives in swing states, as well as with Latinos who trace their roots from Barcelona to Havana to Juarez, and why not, Asians, simply because in the Democratic lexicon any color trumps white, no shades of nuance.
If that sounds simplistic, never mind inaccurate and a bad idea, you may want to short the Dem’s for 2020.
Peter Van Buren, a 24 year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan.
