Building on yesterday's post, it would be easy to
start talking about toxic masculinity, but I think that will come later. Right
now it may be more pertinent to talk about white male rage in this election. It
has taken an unusually ugly form with Trump, but it is worth pointing out that
it was also a key part of the Sanders campaign.
Yes, Sanders had a lot of supporters who were not
white men, but there are ways in which it is relevant that I want to address.
First of all, his focus on that demographic hurt his
campaign. I felt like the Black Lives Matter protest in Seattle could have been what
turned things around, making his campaign more inclusive and broadening his
appeal to the Obama coalition. He never did that, and that's why he lost the
primary.
(That coalition is also why Trump will lose the
general election, so if you are mad at them about Sanders, there should be some
room for gratitude as well.)
When I last wrote about this, it seemed like part of
the problem was that Sanders' brand of socialism simply wasn't capable of
allowing for other factors, and that limited him. I suspect the anger itself could
also have been a problem.
The anger can easily be traced back to privilege,
because neither President Obama as a Black man nor Hillary Clinton as a woman can
display anger freely and have it interpreted the same. That the Angry Black
Woman label has been applied so frequently to warm and gracious Michelle Obama
further demonstrates that point.
So building your personality around anger is a
privilege, but it is also a bad strategy for being effective. Sanders has been
a senator for a long time, and been known for big ideas, but even colleagues
who liked him struggled to identify his achievements. Barney Frank has
attributed that to Sanders waiting for the revolution: "He plants his flag
and expects that someday everyone will see that he was right."
That seems very similar to the depth of Donald
Trump's plans, and maybe it's why revolutions in general end up falling far
from their ideals.
I remember realizing once that John McCain was a
contrarian more than anything else. That meant that sometimes he said true
things, but not enough to make up for a lot of the other stuff that came with
it.
If you are setting yourself up as an angry
revolutionary you are defining yourself by your opposition. That can lead to
viewing everyone not with you as enemies. It puts you in tearing down mode. So
you have Susan Sarandon lecturing Dolores Huerta (from whom Sarandon could
learn a lot), and Sanders wanting Cornel West on the DNC platform committee,
which was a slap in the face to Obama. It means denying the accomplishments of
the current administration which has had an uphill climb but has still done a
lot.
And that's one thing that I see with Trump.
Everything is bad now. America is the worst.
It doesn't matter that unemployment goes down and stocks go up or when troops
come home - everything is bad and the worst ever. A lack of willingness to see
the good around you is a thief of joy. I guess if your focus is maintaining
anger, joy would be a liability.
The maintained anger makes it easy to run over other
people. It becomes not just easy, but necessary to shout down anyone supporting
the other side. There are people believing Trump will win because they only see
his supporters, forgetting that for many people who support Clinton the price of stating
it openly has become very high. So then everything is rigged, but it's only
rigged because you refuse to see all of the other people who feel differently.
It bothers me greatly that there are people who talk
about election rigging and they mean closed primaries instead of purges of the
voting rolls. There are people who matter that you are not seeing.
It bothers me greatly that there are people saying
"Can you believe these two candidates?" and they really believe that
Clinton is horrible like Trump, so that even people who like Clinton a lot feel
compelled to keep qualifying that she's not perfect. When has there been a
perfect candidate?
I will write more about what makes Clinton a great candidate
tomorrow, but let me point out now that she has the most representation in her
team of any candidate. Not only are there different races, genders, and ages,
but she has also made an effort to include people with disabilities. She sees
people.
It makes a difference.
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