Mean Times

On Election Night 2008, I was lying in a hotel bed in New York, watching the results come in to conclude a presidential race about which, up until that point, I’d felt my typical ambivalence. That sentiment begs an explanation, but the distinctions I drew then between the candidates then seem so quaint compared to the starkness of today’s race that perhaps you’ll forgive me if I leave that obligation untended. My qualifiers were “mice nuts,” as a friend of mine likes to say. Or, per another, “distinctions without a difference.”

Back to that moment: As Barack Obama predictably defeated the hapless McCain and Palin, I was overcome by a sense of gratitude, mostly toward people who’d been more clear-eyed about an historic opportunity than I had over the preceding 18 months, and had pushed so hard to give America her first black president. So powerful was the sudden recognition that this sheer fact — that a black family would, for at least four years, inhabit the White House, the most prominent structure slaves ever erected in this country — that differences over policy and ideology seemed irrelevant.

We’d long needed to prove we were capable of a giant, collective act of good faith: That, if Black America could produce a unifying candidate, White America would oblige by helping to elect him.

Each side complied, and did so again in 2012. So, like a lot of people, I naively assumed that this sequence, and the subsequent legalization of same-sex marriage, meant that we had, indeed, Moved On. We’d at last outgrown our reactionary impulses, and were marching hopefully along the mythical path to A Post-Racial America, whatever that is.

The only thing I’m reasonably sure of in 2016 is that I won’t experience that same sense of momentousness.

Yes, as the father of a four-year-old girl, there will be deep significance in seeing Hillary Clinton assume the mantle from Obama. If that outcome comes to pass, both of my children will reach the ages of eight and 11 having only seen the White House occupied by someone other than a white male. That’s a profound early impression. For over two centuries, white male presidents are the only kind Americans have ever known.

But that outcome masks something else.

A few days ago, the New York Times published a now notorious compilation of video footage its reporters recorded at various rallies for Donald Trump this year. As you’ve likely seen, the footage features numerous scenes of violence and white males of a wide range of ages, liberated by their surroundings, to hurl a variety of racist, sexist and homophobic epithets.

The Times’ footage was hardly the first document of the Trump movement’s ugliness, but it uniquely captured the tacit call-and-response of Trump and his core supporters. There’s the scene at the 1:21 mark, where Trump, who was famously slow to disavow his endorsement by David Duke, says to an almost exclusively white male audience, “Our president has divided this country so bad …” And, as if on cue, ensuing roars keep him from completing the sentence. Someone near the Times reporter yells, “Yeah! F — — that n — — -!”

I’m 41. I grew up in middle Georgia, the geographic, albeit not cultural (on our best days, at least), heart of the Deep South. My ears are hardly virginal to expressions of racism, sexism and homophobia, but I’ve never directly witnessed any of the three expressed openly in a mob. Presumptuously whispered, yes. Brazenly whooped in an approving crowd, never.

Until recently, that unique experience was such a thing of the past that it literally lived in a museum. There are pair of fascinating exhibits in Memphis’ National Civil Rights Museum, in which you can sit in the bus Rosa Parks made famous and weather recordings of taunts similar to what Ms. Parks endured, or walk a reenactment of the integration of public schools in Little Rock, and hear the curses those pioneering black students bore.

The images of the angry, twisted faces of white adults screaming at a small line of black school children are visceral and nauseating. Yet, frozen in black-and-white stills, they pale in comparison to cell phone footage of nearly identical mob rage in, of all places, a 2016 presidential candidate’s rally. So astonishing is the Times footage that I’m left to wonder if George Wallace or Lester Maddox ever provoked a reaction so potent (Lester’s Pickrick drumsticks notwithstanding).

To recap, I’m a middle-aged son of the racially scarred South, and prior to the Trump movement, I had to go to a museum to experience anything similar to what his rallies routinely conjure. It took eight years of an Obama presidency to foster the mirage of a post-racial America, and it took three minutes of footage from Trump’s 2016 rallies to dissolve that mirage utterly. Between Trump and the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s like we’re waking up from a dream to the reality that it’s not a day past 1968.

I’m reading (possibly rereading, I can’t recall) Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which early on references an 1841 history of the Children’s Crusades, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackey, LL.D. Here we find an author with a dim view of mankind’s prospects referencing an author with an even dimmer view. Mackey writes:

“History in her solemn page informs us that the crusaders were but ignorant and savage men, that their motives were of bigotry unmitigated, and that their pathway was one of blood and tears. Romance, on the other hand, dilates upon their piety and heroism, and portrays, in her most glowing and impassioned hues, their virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honor they acquired for themselves, and the great services they rendered to Christianity.”

Vonnegut opens Slaughterhouse Five with a brief history of the protagonist’s attempts to record his firsthand experience of the Dresden firebombing in World War II, an event as destructive as Hiroshima yet lacking the latter’s infamy. Filmmaker Harrison Star asks Vonnegut, “Is it an anti-war book?” triggering this Hobbesian exchange:

“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”

“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”

“No. What do you say, Harrison Star?”

“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead.”

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too.

Trump has uncaged this leviathan in our nature pointlessly. Polls indicate that the election of America’s first female president this fall will be the result of a potentially historic thrashing. Indeed, the Clinton campaign has openly said that its goal is not merely to defeat Trump but also to smash Trumpism. It’s a strikingly idealistic objective for a candidate so firmly positioned as the pragmatist’s choice.

As satisfying as the idea of such total conquest sounds, consider me disabused. We can’t paint over the vast amount of rotten wood Trump has exposed beneath the veneer.

There is a popular rationalization circulating about Trump’s supporters: they’re not idiots; they’re just misunderstood. As the country’s demographics and economics evolve, the losers are rural, white, undereducated men. And what they’re losing is their dignity. This is the ‘why’ of racism, sexism and homophobia.

To that, I would add that some portion of this dynamic is self-perpetuating. If you’ve grown up in a small or mid-size city in Flyover Country, and you were anything other than a straight, white conservative, complacent male, you probably know where I’m headed. On his tribute with John Cale to Andy Warhol, 1990’s Songs for Drella, Lou Reed closes the biting “Small Town” thusly:

When you’re growing up in a small town

you know you’ll grow down in a small town

there is only one good use for a small town

You hate it and you’ll know you have to leave

To be sure, economics is likely the primary driver for America’s urbanization and coastal polarization. But, within each town, there’s also an insidious social force that often leaves a late teen who’s any combination of creative, ambitious, LGBTQ, not an evangelical Christian, or ethnic/racial minority to conclude, “This place is impossible, so my only option is to leave.” The post-World War II era has been one of increased mobility, and within that mobility has been an invisible brain drain from small town America to urban centers and creative enclaves like Portland, Austin, Boulder, etc. And so what’s left in these brain-drained towns? You guessed it, angry, aging, conservative white males and decaying industry.

There is a dovetailing, dystopian theory — centuries old, yet lately resurgent in popularity — that an accelerating automation frenzy, powered by robotics and artificial intelligence, will whisk us into a digital dustbowl era, obliterating the need for any form of human labor. In this narrative, Trump’s angry white men are merely the first wave of 21st century Okies.

If, like me, your job did not exist when you were in college, you will be hard pressed to embrace this theory fully. From the Renaissance onward, human history is one steady stream of examples where technology obviated one set of jobs and created demand for another. Our country, perhaps the most tech-drenched and work-obsessed on the planet, is seven years removed from economic collapse and, as of this writing, suffers less than 5% unemployment. Indeed, there is a strong countervailing theory that the future is better than you think. (Credit goes to my former CEO Brett Hurt for recommending this book.)

I think the better comparison for Trump’s crowd is not Steinbeck’s Okies, but England’s Luddites. This will seem like an incredibly condescending generalization, especially if you haven’t refreshed yourself on the actual Luddite history. The fear of 19th century English textile workers that their jobs would be lost to automation was real and valid, as was their conviction that their government was indifferent to their plight. Still, one key difference between Okies and Luddites is that Luddism is a choice. Also, economic mobility in 19th century England was vastly different than that of 21st century America.

Regardless, as quixotic as I may find the endeavor, smashing Trumpism is my primary justification for giving Clinton my vote. Had the race gone the way most predicted over a year ago — an oligarchic battle between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush — my typical ambivalence (fueled in part by having never lived in a swing state) would’ve led me to glance furtively at one of the third-party candidates.

But the notion of voting one’s conscience — third parties’ siren pitch to voters — seems like the luxury of a bygone era. I’m truly sorry, Gary Johnson, but this isn’t a year in which I can spare that. These are mean times, and the only vote that satisfies my conscience is one to burn Trumpism to the ground and salt the earth beneath it. That won’t end the grotesque impulse that undergirds Trumpism, but it may at least numb that impulse for a decade or two.

I should add, that, while acknowledging her ethical foibles and my general distaste for the Clinton Machine’s machinations, I suspect Hillary will be a fine president and maybe an effective one. From the very outset, she was the most experienced candidate in the field. She may have made dubious use of that experience at times, but she nevertheless was in Teddy Roosevelt’s “arena.” Depending on how deep a hole Republicans dig for themselves with Trump, she may get eight years to demonstrate this and to do so with a friendlier Congress than her predecessor faced.