The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2 no. 22

So there’s a video floating around, featuring an interview of four white women who supported Donald Trump. They were asked whether they liked what he was doing, asked whether they liked the pace at which he was doing them, and finally poked about what he was doing, perhaps to get a sense of whether they actually knew what he was doing. And of course it’s hard watching. Selena Zito, noted on the campaign trail that people who did support Trump tended to take him seriously but not literally while the press tended to treat him literally but not seriously. I think this latter part’s obviously not true anymore. But I don’t think the first part was true either. One of the things I took from the interview is that people believed Trump would do pretty much the things he said he would do. They overlooked some of his personal behavior—some of it (and the parts they didn’t overlook, like perhaps the bullying, they desired)—but when Trump said he wanted to build a wall they believed it. When Trump said he wanted to ban Muslims they believed it. 

Anyway. 

The problem with these types of videos is that they’re really just one step removed from a specific type of late night talk show skit. The first show I saw it on was David Letterman, but it’s been used by others. A series of folk (selected randomly) would be interviewed on the street about current events to see what they knew, only to find out that most people tend to be pretty ignorant about current events. The interviewer of course would be in on the joke, as would the audience….but the interviewee would be clueless. The skit relied on three factors—the ignorance of the American populace in general, the ignorance of the American populace in general about their ignorance, and then finally people’s desire to feel better about themselves at someone else’s expense. 

(It’s such a simple setup that a few of my younger fraternity brothers used it at Michigan during move-in week.)

It works pretty well as a late night talk show bit. 

It doesn’t work all that well as news, for two reasons.

It presumes the behavior they’re capturing is unique to Trump, when it isn’t. Well, part of it is. But you could go back eight years to the beginning of the Obama presidency and likely find a version of the same behavior—people who supported him loving what he did even as they didn’t quite know what he was doing. You could probably replicate this for Reagan supporters, probably for Clinton supporters, and maybe for both sets of Bush supporters. Now the consequences of support for Trump are obviously different given what Trump’s doing. But the support itself isn’t all that unique. We likely don’t have to look at that deeply within our own histories to find similar behavior. 

So there’s kind of an empirical problem. 

But there’s also a political problem. If we take this video, and then work under the assumption that these voters are both typical Trump supporters and atypical human beings, it makes it that much harder for us to connect with them. And if we can’t connect with them it becomes harder to work with them. In fact, it even makes it harder to contest them.

….

“We can’t use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.”

This quote comes from an essay written by Audre Lorde a few decades ago. She’d been invited to a feminist conference held at NYU only to realize that the panel she appeared on…the last panel of the event….was the only panel with black women on it, and only two black women at that. In fact, the text isn’t quite clear, the panel may have been the only panel with lesbian feminists on it. The end result was a conference supposedly devoted to Feminism that was incredibly parochial, incredibly narrow. For Lorde the people who’d thought that they could have an entire conference dealing with women’s issues in general that didn’t include black women, didn’t include women from the Third World, didn’t include poor women, perhaps didn’t include lesbians, were engaging in the same type of action people who sustained patriarchy did. In fact, the then-and-now standard solution to such a problem (adding folk for tolerance’s sake) would be wrong as well. 

Lorde:

Fully recognizing difference enables us to recognize our fundamental interdependence, and doing this will bring us closer to liberation.

Largely because the problem Lorde wrote the essay to deal with is still with us—I don’t know how many women ended up not supporting the Women’s March on Washington because at the outset at least it was profoundly tone deaf about the types of difference Lorde wrote about over 30 years ago—people have used Lorde’s “master’s tool” thousands of times. 

But I think there’s one specific way it doesn’t tend to be used.

Lorde is writing to people who broadly think of themselves on the same side. People who consider themselves to be on the left end of the political spectrum. People who believe racism and patriarchy are fundamentally problematic forces in human life.  What about people on the other side though? We all need to reconcile ourselves to the possibility that we’re looking at the beginnings of a cold civil war. One that could possibly turn hot. In reconciling ourselves to that possibility we have to take seriously the possibility that people on the other side won’t be able to be swayed by dialogue. 

At no point in time though can or should we dehumanize people on the other side. Because once we do that we lose the thing we’re fighting for. 

“I might have to kill my enemy, but I will NOT dehumanize him. I will NOT use the weapons that were used against me, unless they are righteous.” —Steven Barnes

That sounds about right. 

….

I obliquely mentioned the BWI protest last week. I went. I’d never seen anything like it. I don’t think it can be sustained, which is why meetings that attempt to provide an institutional backbone are critically important. But still it’s something special.

There’s a critique coming from black folk that needs to be put down pretty hard, suggesting that folks protesting Trump’s policies on immigration are not doing enough to support black protests (against things like police brutality) or that immigrants themselves haven’t quite reciprocated. Although blacks are a lot less likely to support a range of policies that swap out freedom for violations of civil liberty (at least when it comes to terrorism), I’m thinking we’re probably a bit more conservative on immigration than our vote would have one think. 

To these critiques I’d simply note four things:

1. There aren’t “blacks” over here and then “immigrants” over there. Black people are immigrants too. 

2. Although a lot of folk I saw at BWI were first time activists, a lot of the folk I saw at BWI were the same folk who routinely show up to West Wednesdays, the same folk who showed up at the various Freddie Gray protests.

3. Obama deported 2.5 million immigrants, more than any other President in US history. Police killed 233 black people in 2016.  

4. Immigrants don’t usually protest….because they’re scared of deportation.

….

I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts, but I listen to Daniel Denvir’s The Dig. You should too. 

For my Baltimore folk, I think there’s an Indivisible meeting tomorrow at 2640 St. Paul at about 6:30pm. And a protest rally on both the Homewood and Medical campuses on Thursday at noon. 

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With Rum if you’re so inclined.