The tarnished Dem brand. Plus: Why Trump attracted so many Blacks and Hispanics

Politico has published a couple of important after-action reports on the election. The first concerns the highly unstable nature of the Biden coalition:

“People expected these huge compressions [of Trump’s base voters] and huge margin increases from some of these constituencies, and it didn’t happen,” said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and an expert in election demographics.

The Biden coalition bears a resemblance to the Obama coalition, he said, but “there are clearly differences.”

For Democrats now, he said, “There’s no choice but to do better among white, non-college voters, and that’s partly what they were able to do in this election, right? What they really need to do is more … You can’t just rely on non-whites and educated liberals. That’s insane.”

I've been trying to make this very point for ages. Throughout this past year, we've seen a parade of talking heads on MSNBC -- and to some degree CNN -- offering variations of this message: Forget all about the White working class. They're gone. They are the Borg; they have been assimilated. Instead, we must endlessly concentrate on getting out the Black vote.

 

The "Go big on Black" strategy worked superbly in Georgia and elsewhere. As noted in a previous column, I'm willing to bow deeper than anyone else before the goddess named Stacey Abrams -- although we should note that one of Abrams' great strengths is her ability to speak to struggling people of all kinds.

 

That said, most commentators won't mention one hard fact: Black people are only twelve percent of the electorate. Most of those voters are in states that are either deep red or deep blue. Can't we talk about mathematics and geography without opening ourselves up to charges of racism?

 

The working class is massive and ubiquitous: Blue states, red states and purple states. The working class is where the votes are. When the Dems were a working class party -- as opposed to a fragile coalition of non-Whites, feminists and college brats -- we had a perpetual lock on the Senate.  

 

Unfortunately, both the progressives and the Alt Right have forced everyone to think RACE RACE RACE at all times. As I've said before, a perpetual race consciousness invariably worsens racism. 

Worse, one non-White group has actually started to slip away:

The instability of the coalition was evident in the Latino vote — strong in some areas of the country, weaker in others. In Arizona, where Democrats aggressively courted Latino voters, Biden’s win was widely attributed to Latino enthusiasm in Maricopa County, where Biden won more than three-quarters of the vote in Latino-heavy precincts, according to the UCLA Latino Politics and Policy Initiative.

But Republicans made gains with Latinos in Florida and South Texas.

Florida should have been ours. It would have been soooo easy to "commie-bait" Trump, the authoritarian who fell in love with Kim Jong-Un. I'll say it again: A D candidate should never miss a plausible opportunity to run to the right of a Republican.

Texas remains the great dream. That dream could have been a reality this year. 

 

A great part of the problem, I think, has to do with the culture wars. Most Latinos are culturally conservative, and most African American voters are far more centrist than many presume. Progressives and socialists pretend to speak for these groups, but they don't.

 

And that brings us to a second Politico article:

Still, some frustration is bubbling up in the Senate as well. Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who lost by 20 points to Republican Tommy Tuberville last week, blamed getting tied to GOP “catch-phrases” as the reason red- and purple-state Democrats took a beating.

“We’re not some demonic cult like we’re portrayed to be,” said Jones. “I was fighting the same battle that Jaime Harrison was fighting, that Mike Espy was fighting, that Cal Cunningham was fighting, that Steve Bullock was fighting. And Democrats have not been able to fully counter the Republican narrative.”

The entire Democratic party has been buried under decades of mud, and the mudslingers stand to our right and left. Decades ago, progressives and fascists joined forces to portray the Democratic party as a criminal enterprise. 

 

The Iraq disaster should have destroyed the Republican brand for a generation. Instead, both the right and the left colluded to convince the public to blame everything on Hillary Clinton, not George W. Bush: "It's all her fault. She made him do it!"  

 

If you Google the terms "Occupy Wall Street" and "Fascism," you'll learn how the far right used that movement to manipulate the left and to demonize the center. Example. 

 

QAnon has now managed to convince millions of people -- millions -- that Dems literally rape and kill babies. The growth of the QAnon monster may be the greatest threat facing this nation. 

 

There is no hope for the Democratic party unless we can remove the mud and place it where it actually belongs. The GOP -- not the Democratic party -- has rigged elections, spread disinformation, and fostered a culture of bribery and corruption. They, not we, are the criminals.

 

Q, XX and XY. Some evidence indicates that the majority of Q believers may be female: See here and here. Why is this happening?

 

Women are more likely than men to attend church, and the Q message is skewed toward the pious. Moreover, weirdo conspiracy theories have always attracted those within what used to be called the "New Age" movement, which has always had more appeal to women than to men. If you believe in astrology and chakras, you are are more likely to accept the adrenochrome myth.

 

(Back in the day, I met a few male New Agers who were clearly faking it. It's a way of getting laid: Men pretend to believe in woo-woo in order to woo.)

 

The growing number of Q's female fans disproves a silly belief one sometimes encounters -- a belief that women are inherently wiser than men. 

 

Please don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying that all of Q is XX. Far from it. Within two important sub-groups, Qanon-ish thinking appeals primarily to males.

Bromance. Juan Williams -- a Black man of Latino cultural heritage -- addresses the problem of Trump's gains within those two communities. 

How did 12 percent of Black men, according to the Fox News voter analysis, vote for Trump?

And why would 39 percent of Latino men vote for a man who called Mexican men rapists and enforced harsh anti-immigrant policies?

Machismo, says Williams, is a large part of the equation. Male Hispanic voters were particularly likely to veer toward Trump.

Latin machismo and Black gangsta rap lyrics have long had a fascination with big money, grabbing women, including porn stars, and Trump’s “La Vida Loca” lifestyle.

Many Latinos “like a strongman even when he’s the wrong man,” syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette wrote last week.

And John Legend, the singer, explained minority men growing politically close to Trump by saying:

“Some people see the meanness, the bullying, the selfishness of Donald Trump and they mistake it for strength, a kind of twisted masculinity. Some see his greed and they mistake it for being good at business.”

We all know how most feminists would react to the above-quoted paragraphs: They would offer predictable blather about toxic masculinity. Of course, an anti-testosterone harangue of that sort would only make Trumpism more appealing. The Democratic brand suffers from its strong identification with feminism, which -- as all polls indicate -- is simply not popular, not even with women. (Gender equality, by contrast, is popular.) 

That said...

 

I don't think that Williams has managed to get at the root of the problem. Machismo may be an important factor, but I would argue that there is a deeper explanation for Trump's appeal to a certain type of Black and Latino male: Members of both groups have demonstrated a weakness for conspiracy theory.

A number of articles indicate that the Q movement has had a massive impact on Florida's Latinos. See here:

One example, according to NALEO, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that facilitates Latino participation in American politics, is a Facebook page “Cubanos por el Mundo” that makes false claims that the Cuban government is planning a caravan at the southern border to create a migratory crisis before the election to sabotage President Trump.

A video posted by the Facebook page pushing the claim this week was shared more than 334 times in one day.  

Online disinformation also has spread into more mainstream Spanish news media in Florida. 

For example, an ad that ran in El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language sister publication of the Miami Herald, included an insert on Sept. 11 that claimed that America Jews support “thieves and arsonists” and equated Black Lives Matters protesters with Nazis. The newspaper later apologized and said it was investigating its business relationship with the Libre, the company behind the insert. 

South Florida’s Radio Caracol had a similar incident last month, with the station issuing an apology after airing a half-hour segment of paid programming which included an anti-Black and anti-Semitic rant. The aired message included claims that if Democrat Joe Biden won the White House, it would mean the U.S. would fall into a dictatorship of “Jews and Blacks..."

Also see here.

In June, a Noticias 24, a Venezuela-focused news site that has a large following in Latin America, amplified disinformation with a story bearing the headline “social networks also accuse Joe Biden of being a pedophile.” A month later, when the lie resurfaced, “#BidenPedofilio” trended in Spain.

On Facebook, a Puerto Rican-born pastor Melvin Moya has circulated a video titled “Signs of pedophilia” with doctored videos of Biden inappropriately touching girls at various public ceremonies to a song in the background that says, “I sniffed a girl and I liked it.” The fake video posted on Sept. 1 has received more than 33,000 likes and 2,400 comment

The roots of the Q movement go back to the infamous Milton William Cooper, the "Conspiracy King" of the 1990s. As longtime readers know, I got to know the man (though not well) in the 1980s, before he became well-known. 

 

Cooper was a racist and his audience was White; the lectures I attended felt a bit like sheet-free Klan rallies. He offered transparently-disguised versions of the usual anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, republishing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion at a time when the text of that old hoax was not easy to find.

 

After Cooper's death, a strange thing happened: He became very popular among African Americans, particularly Black men. A prominent rapper named himself William Cooper.

 

This Vulture article discusses the overlap between Cooperism and Black culture:

Seventeen years after his demise, Bill Cooper retains considerable name recognition on 125th Street. Mention of him and/or Behold a Pale Horse rang a bell with a surprisingly high number of people of a certain age who identified themselves as longtime Harlem residents.

“Most people, anyone who once thought of themselves as radical in any way, knows William Cooper,” said one dapper-looking man standing under the marquee of the Apollo. “Behold a Pale Horse, we used to just call it ‘The Book.’ ” Others recalled talks given by the late Steve Cokely, an African-American independent researcher–street speaker who occasionally referenced Cooper. In the middle of a presentation on topics like Cointelpro, Cokely would pick up a copy of Behold a Pale Horse and say, “Let’s see what the white boy has to say about this.”

Still one of the most-shoplifted books in Barnes & Noble history, the popularity of Behold a Pale Horse began in prison, places like Attica, Clinton/Dannemora, Green Haven, and Sing Sing, where Cooper’s extreme paranoid view made complete sense.  

Rappers who have mentioned Cooper or his book include the Wu-Tang Clan, Big Daddy Kane, Busta Rhymes, Tupac Shakur, Talib Kweli, Nas, Rakim, Poor Righteous Teachers, Gang Starr, Goodie Mob, Suicideboys, Boogiemonsters, Wise Intelligent, Public Enemy, Miz MAF, Aslan, Lord Allah, Ras Kass, and the Lost Children of Babylon, who told their listeners to prepare to meet your fate “like William Cooper … when the storm troopers breach your gate.”

The key to Cooper’s appeal, said Ol’ Dirty Bastard, he of blessed memory and court jester of the Wu-Tang Clan’s early Behold a Pale Horse adapters. “Everybody gets fucked,” ODB told me when we spoke in 2004. “William Cooper tells you who’s fucking you … when you’re someone like me, that’s valuable information.”

Under the circumstances, I'm surprised that QAnon does not appeal to more Blacks. 

 

In the future, Trumpism, Qanon and allied movements -- in whatever new forms they take -- will continue to find dupes among the very people whom the fascists seek to eliminate. This is an infuriating cultural paradox, but it is also a reality. We must find a way to deal with it.