In a recent post at The Editorial Board, John Stoehr suggests that Donald Trump’s handling of the fallout of the George Floyd murder is spurring white Americans to view this administration, and American politics, through the perspective of African-Americans. I think he’s 100% right, not least because this aligns with the argument I’ve tried to make here that Donald Trump has, since the 2016 campaign, effectively been forcing millions of white Americans to choose decisively for or against the explicit white supremacism that the president embodies. But Stoehr’s reference to a shifting “point of view” among many white Americans — a point of view in which they are learning to see the United States more through the perspective of black Americans, with all the disheartening and enraging results that brings — helped crystallize my sense of a “meta-perspective” that can help us understand our current moment.
First, we can see how very much Donald Trump essentially embraces a viewpoint according to which nothing has really changed since 1968 and Nixon’s law and order backlash election, and in which nothing will ever change. He believes that by identifying himself as the leader of white America, and the enforcer of racial privilege, he will win over enough white Americans to repeat his electoral college victory in 2020 (the fact that the president has apparently given up on winning a majority of votes is an important detail of our politics that is not often enough taken note of). Trump, and his GOP confederates, seem to be betting their political future on a grandiose idea that nothing ever changes in the fundamentals of American politics — that white identity politics is a thing of such majestic gravitational pull that it can always be relied on.
But Donald Trump was only able to eke out a victory because for decades, the GOP had not only relied on mostly dog-whistle appeals to racism, but had also fought a scorched earth, anti-democratic campaign to deny Democratic Party-leaning African-Americans and other minorities the power of their votes, whether through outright voter suppression or dilution of such groups’ influence through precision gerrymandering. That is, even as they acted as if the world had not changed, their very actions were reflecting the great degree to which it had changed, and continued to change – the United States was growing more diverse, and these GOP actions were an acknowledgment that without such ratfuckery, the Republican Party would inexorably become the smaller and less powerful of our two major parties.
And now this counter-revolution has gotten to the point where the president makes more or less explicit appeals to white supremacism. But I think this discounts the important degree to which America’s growing diversity has made such appeals unpalatable to an ever-growing number of white Americans, who have had an increasing likelihood of living with, working with, or marrying minorities. Trump is essentially betting that enough Americans are just as racist as he is to guaranty success through his white nationalist strategy — but he neglects to factor in the degree to which prolonged exposure to an explicitly white supremacist president might now cause millions of white Americans to take a look in the mirror, and say, Fuck that shit. But the clincher is that many of these white Americans had already been changing their perspective before Trump came along, to use Stoehr’s helpful phrasing. Trump is in many ways speeding along the process already under way (even as, tragically, plenty of other white Americans are indeed energized and inspired by his normalization of white nationalism).