Imagine that your daughter got in trouble in school for using a racial epithet against a classmate. What do you think would be the best news angle on this? That she did it, that a lot of parents and students were outraged by it, or that some parents and the school administration defended your daughter and that she wasn’t punished?
Of the three, the least interesting is the one where people acted as you’d expect them to act. When children make racist attacks on other children, that naturally upsets people. It’s somewhat newsworthy that it happened at all. But the actual story here is about the people who didn’t act as expected. The parents who defied expectations and said that the comment wasn’t really racist or intended to be offensive or the principal who declined to take any administration action– these are the natural hooks to any good news story on this hypothetical event.
Declining to focus first and foremost on the outraged parents and students who complained isn’t an effort to erase their point of view. Yet, because they’re not particularly newsworthy, their reinforcement of expected behavior can get deemphasized in importance even if, in a way, it’s the most important thing.
This is why I am sympathetic to what Jamelle Bouie is arguing in the New York Times when he points out that the majority of Americans have always opposed Trump and Trump’s racism. He wants to know why the people who love his racism or are at least willing to countenance it are seemingly the only ones the press ever wants to discuss.
Well, I already explained that. Implicit in covering outrageous behavior is the fact that it isn’t normal. But if your opinion is always relegated to the implicit, it can seem like it isn’t being given proper exposure or weight.
The flip side of this, though, is that normative, majoritarian behavior and opinion is presented as correct on the merits. The time to really worry is when it becomes newsworthy that people are upset about kids making racist comments to other kids at school or it becomes rare that such actions are punished.
At a certain point, the very deemphasis on the most important thing becomes newsworthy and people need to be reminded that this country still agrees that hurling racial insults at each other is not good. That’s what Bouie is doing here, and he’s providing a needed corrective to the narrative. But that doesn’t mean the overall critique of the media is correct. When Trump does something unprecedented and norm-shattering, that’s a story. When people shrug it off, that’s a story. If we don’t make these stories, then the norm is weakened and the aberrant behavior replaces it.
So, it’s important to remember that if we want racism to stay outside the norm, we must enforce the lines that should not be crossed and highlight it when they are crossed. We have to shame the people who make excuses more than we applaud the people who cry foul.
Yet, if we let this pattern repeat over and over again without highlighting the good people who are upholding the norm, that’s a mistake, too, because it distorts the overall picture and gives too much attention to the bad people.
Bouie also attempts a political argument that mobilizing black voters is one of the more important ways that the Democrats can improve on their 2016 performance, and this is also true. Yet, it remains the case that if the same people vote the same way in 2020 as they did in 2016, then Trump will win again. Relying solely on differential turnout or a different combination of third-party candidates to pull the Democrats over the top is not a sound strategy. Some Obama/Trump voters need to be won over next time. Not every 2016 Trump voter is attending his rallies in a MAGA hat and chanting for Democratic congresswomen of color to leave the country. If this were the case, Trump would be at least even money to win again. The Democrats do have to be concerned with how people in so-called Trump Country feel about the party because they have to do better with them in 2020.
It may be annoying, but it remains true that the biggest story in American politics is that the president of the United States is a raving racist and that more and more people are making excuses for him. That his support among Republicans remains sky high despite his aberrant behavior is not only a big story, but also an enormous threat to the character of the country and the Democrats’ hopes of defeating him.
For these reasons, the stories will continue, and they should continue. It’s actually a way of preventing racism from becoming the new norm.
I’m not sure this is true. I’m more than willing to be proven wrong but from my layperson’s perspective: yes, Trump is a raving racist; and yes, he has a solid base that’s sticking with him; but no, there aren’t “more and more people making excuses for him”.
In fact, we’re one vote/defection from a “trend” by the terms of traditional political journalism: 1) Rep. Amash breaks with Trump after the Mueller report and leaves the party, 2) Reps. Brooks, Fitzpatrick, Hurd, and Upton break with the party to vote with Democrats to condemn Trump’s racist tweets, 3) ???
Nobody can predict the future, but these could be cracks in Trump’s crumbling wall of support.
(Another sign: Susan Collins’ approval rating has dropped more than any senator in the country. https://www.pressherald.com/2019/07/18/new-poll-finds-support-wanes-for-susan-collins-in-maine/
In fact, this could be a “canary in the coal mine” kind of race. Collins has been electorally untouchable, in part because of her carefully cultivated image as a moderate. If she’s vulnerable, then some other Republican incumbents may be vulnerable too, increasing the chances that Democrats might narrowly retake the Senate in 2020.
The last three Maine incumbent senators left on their own terms, each deciding in the first 10 weeks of the new year: George Mitchell announcing on March 5, 1994; Bill Cohen on Jan. 16, 1996, and Olympia Snowe on Feb. 29, 2012.)
First, I can tell I was being distracted when I wrote this because it was rife with typos which I have hopefully fixed.
Second, you’re right in a way. A more precise way of saying I what I mean here is that more and more people are defending stuff that they’ve never defended before. That’s not the same as saying that there’s an overall increase in people defending the president.
Yep, and that’s one of the challenges of this historical moment—how to organize and engage in ways that both 1) minimize the chances that Trump’s popularity/support can grow, and 2) keep increasing the pressure of him and his minority government so that a growing number of his supporters are forced into increasingly untenable situations if they continue to support him.
Sen. Collins is a good example. Over the past two years she’s continued to stick with Trump and McConnell; and that’s meant she’s been defending statements and actions she’d never defended before. It’s taken a while, but she’s gone from having the highest approval ratings in her home state of any senator to having the 2nd lowest.
That could change and she’d still be tough to beat if she runs next year. (Maine voters haven’t ousted an incumbent senator since 1972.) But you can bet that her pollster will take an in-depth survey next January, and if the numbers are weak, there’s a good chance she won’t run. (Or so say longtime observers of Maine politics who I know.)
P.S. That said, all my examples are small potatoes. A senator with bad polling numbers here, a handful of censure votes there. I *think* they’re worth pointing out because they could be signs of victory, and therefore a disciplined, nonviolent inside/outside organizing/political strategy can still save our democracy…but there’s no way to know for sure.
Bouie seems to be saying that our worthless corporate media are making too much of the spectacle of Der Trumper’s rallies, that they represent some sort of aberration in American society, circa 2019.
How one can watch Der Trumper whip thousands of his NC National Trumpalists into screaming spittle-flecked eliminationist rhetoric at the top of their lungs and think that the real news is that many others disagree is somewhat, um, contrarian. Historians will mark this rally as the time that “It Has Happened Here”, the moment when National Trumpalism fully bloomed in all its gruesome glory. Further, Der Trumper could have orchestrated this response in EVERY county that voted for him in 2016, this isn’t some “aberration” peculiar to NC. It could be replicated all over TrumpAmerica.
Obviously we have sunk far too low for another McCarthy Moment, when some voice of reason can intone “At long last, sir, have you no shame?”, with some sort of national consensus. There is no person or institution remaining to fulfill that role or function. The National Trumpalists (fka Repubs) have no shame; indeed the word is now so weak a concept that one feels like a pathetic fool even to advert to it. After thirty years of “conservative” propaganda (with very high steroid doses following the 2008 election), the Volk have been prepared and will now permit anything; Will is all.
Indeed, like all Good Germans, they want to participate in the elimination.
I had a similar thought to Bouie. What am I supposed to do with It? Trump makes news just by answering questions. And his base loves it, the more hate the better. The news media is going to report it and we will talk about it for the next several days or more. That’s free advertising.
I think it is going to be tough to beat this guy, and maybe it can’t be done. I have seen the advice from the wise ones to stay away from big progressive ideas like M4All since Trump will beat us half to death with it. I also saw Faux News has been on the attack against Biden saying he delivered another gut punch to the American taxpayer for proposing tax increases. I guess the Dems just need to hunker down and do nothing, Sounds like Hillary a second time around.
Great “world as it is” sentence!
Now, what are you (and I, and we) going to do about it? It seems to me that’s the question.
In the world as it is, any meaningful victory is uncertain at the beginning (and in the middle) of a campaign. Part of the task of leadership is taking action (and summoning others to take action) in the midst of uncertainty.
Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes in 2016. It took Comey’s unprecedented intervention, the Russian subversion, and massive voter suppression for Trump to win by the narrowest of electoral vote margins. And he’s done virtually nothing to broaden his coalition since then.
If that’s not a winnable fight, I don’t know what is.
I am personally distressed at the fear so many have of this guy embodied in Pelosi afraid to open impeachment and the warnings from pundits to stay away from many progressive ideas, maybe all the ones that mean anything even Biden’s apparently. . I can understand some degree of caution but there are things that should be done. I have my list and I’m pretty sure you have one too. We simply can’t give it all up without a reckoning. For me personally I won’t, I just won’t.
Trump was a little bit of an unknown in 2016. Not so anymore. All the gremlins have come home now. Most of the time I agree with you though, this fight is ours to lose. Peace.
I’m somewhat surprised that you treated Bouie’s July 18 piece in the NYT as mainly a critique of the media. While he did critique the media, the larger part of his argument, IMO, was that the media are overlooking a lot of votes in play by concentrating mainly on the behaviors of noncollege-educated whites.
Here’s the CAP voter demographic analysis that is the main source of Bouie’s argument (linked in the NYT piece)
Among 17 scenarios for various turnout models of combinations of race (including Hispanics and Asians) and education demographics Bouie spotlights this one:
The other CAP scenarios are about equally split between either Democrats or Republicans winning the Electoral College in 2020. These differences have implications for primary voting and campaign strategy for the ultimate nominees. They seem more worthy of attention than the casual dismissal “Bouie also attempts a political argument …”