Future historians will find it ridiculous, but the response to a few hundred white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia will be the trigger for a realignment of American politics. Polite opinion, which includes Establishment political leaders, corporate CEOs, religious leaders of virtually all denominations, the universities and the press, abhor Donald Trump for his alleged moral equivalence between the Charlottesville neo-Nazis and the demonstrators who opposed them. Trump did no such thing, but he did something less pardonable altogether: He split the country along the fracture line of political correctness.
We are in terra incognita for American politics, and predictions are unreliable especially when they concern the future. Nonetheless I believe that the storm of opprobrium that broke upon Donald Trump this week will dissipate, and when the dust settles, the United States will have a different political alignment. Trump’s populism will split both the Republican and Democratic parties, with consequences we can barely begin to imagine. Waving the bloody shirt of Charlottesville will have unintended consequences. I do not know what the president was thinking, but I think his seemingly spontaneous wrangle with the press at his August 15 New York press conference was carefully gauged.
The economic and social condition of African Americans deteriorated sharply under the Obama Administration, and future prospects are grim. Black political leaders have been unable to suggest practical solutions, and instead propose symbolic ones, for example, destroying monuments to the defeated Confederacy of slave-holding states. In fact, black Americans want to keep the monuments to their old oppressors, by a margin of 44%-40% in a recent poll (white Americans want to keep them by a margin of 65%-25%). Although black leaders from the Congressional Black Caucus to the radical Black Lives Matter movement have made the Confederate monuments a wedge issue, there is no enthusiasm for Taliban tactics against relics of American history.
What Trump actually said in his contentious August 15 press conference is that a lot of “good people” wanted to preserve Confederate statues, a point he reiterated in subsequent social media statements. While he denounced the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, who numbered no more than 500 and got the worst of it from armed-and-armored counter-demonstrators, he indicated his sympathy with the citizens of Charlottesville who opposed their City Council’s decision to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. In other words, Trump took a position that Americans support by a roughly two-to-one majority. Trump observed that founding fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson also were slave-owners: should their monuments be toppled like Robert E. Lee’s? “Where do you stop?,” he asked the press corps.
Trump violated the Prime Directive of Political Correctness, namely, to accept the most extreme demands of aggrieved minorities as the norm, and to identify any opposition to these demands with the worst sort of extremists. Black Americans are in anguish, and their prospects are deteriorating. Seventy-three percent of black children will be raised without a father in the home, already a handicap. Although American universities admit black students at roughly the same rate as white students, only 40% of black male students graduate within four years of matriculation. The gap between black and white wages has widened from 18% in 1979 to 27% in 2015, probably because high-paying jobs available to blacks have disappeared, mainly in manufacturing. The fragile condition of black families and the low graduation rate for black male university students set a downward trajectory.
There is nothing that major corporates can or want to do about this, but they feel obliged to keep the social peace by making symbolic concession. That is the root of political correctness: it is palliative care for segments of the population who are figuratively and sometimes literally dying. When the president praised the motives of some who want to preserve Confederate monuments and criticized the violence practiced by some on the Left, the press and most civic leaders complained of “moral equivalence.” That follows the axiom of political correctness that anyone who disagrees with me is Hitler. Because some defenders of Confederate monuments like Hitler, like some of the Charlottesville demonstrators, political correctness concludes that anyone who wants to preserve Confederate monuments likes Hitler, too. And if you don’t denounce everyone who wants to preserve Confederate monuments, it means that you like Hitler, too.
Nothing short of the ritual denunciations we associate with Maoist criticism and self-criticism sessions during the Cultural Revolution, or the witch trials of Europe’s late middle ages, will cleanse you. The difference is that the common people of the Middle Ages believed in witches, and believed in the authority of their priests. The common people of the United States do not believe in political correctness, and do not believe much that the media or their leaders say.
Universities and corporations hire the graduates of gender and race studies programs to staff their Human Resource departments, and compel their employees to attend seminars on race, gender, and sexual-orientation sensitivity training. So much of polite society is caught up in this mechanism of ideological reinforcement as to make any other regime unthinkable. Large corporations declare their devotion to diversity, while the relative position of blacks in the US workforce deteriorates.
Trump’s refusal to accept the prevailing ideological regime threatens the equilibrium of corporate governance. Many of the corporate CEOs who reluctantly joined Trump’s two advisory councils on technology and manufacturing quit over his alleged “moral equivalence.” Trump will respond by pivoting towards the working-class base of the Democratic Party, which has seen no growth in real wages for the past 20 years, and blame fat cat corporations who get rich by giving the store away to China. He will appeal to their traditional enthusiasm for trade protection and immigration curbs. The kind of voters who put Trump over the top last November in Wisconsin and Michigan will support him, along with a surprising large number of black voters, if his plan works out.
White House strategist Steve Bannon signaled the shift in a remarkably frank interview with The American Prospect, a journal that has long advocated traditional Democratic economic policies. Bannon reached out to editor Robert Kuttner and spelled out his game plan, particularly regarding China.
“To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover.”
Bannon’s plan of attack includes: a complaint under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act against Chinese coercion of technology transfers from American corporations doing business there, and follow-up complaints against steel and aluminum dumping. “We’re going to run the tables on these guys. We’ve come to the conclusion that they’re in an economic war and they’re crushing us.”
“Coercion of technology transfers” is the decisive issue that Bannon wants to pursue, according to a senior White House official. China wants to dominate high-tech manufacturing, including a $50 billion program to build its own semiconductor manufacturing operations during the next decade, and it demands that Western companies trade their know-how for access to the enormous Chinese market. China now buys 75% of the world’s semiconductors, and it is hard for Western companies to turn down Chinese terms. If the US government intervenes to prevent technology transfers, the tech sector will object furiously.
Unfortunately for US tech companies, the advisory councils through which President Trump invited them to express their views were terminated this week, because many of their CEOs decided that Trump had stepped past the boundary line of acceptable behavior. Trump has the option to blame them for the problems of working-class Americans, and use regulatory measures to stop their tech deals with China.
Trump will reach out to Democratic voters who are alienated from a leadership that has devoted most of its energy to a radical social agenda instead of bread-and-butter solutions, and he will appear to a majority of his own party. I do not know whether he will succeed; if he does, the self-inflicted wounds to the erstwhile arbiters of American opinion will be fatal.
The colossal paroxysm of anti-"KKK" virtue signaling we’ve been witnessing would seem to place the moniKKKer "AmeriKKKa" somewhere between laughable and ludicrous.
Twisting the spoken words and rhetoric of Trump into the most sympathetic possible spin. Twisting the motives and ideals of his critics into the most nightmarish and phantasmagorical forms imaginable. This is a pretzel-shaped distortion and not a rational, reasonable critique.
Oh really? So when’s the last you’ve talked to anybody in the Republican Party’s base?
"I am surprised *to see you defending anti-semites* and would join Trump in defending people who remained in a crowd who were chanting "Jew will not replace us". It dissapoints me that *you seem to be OK with racism, so long as it is directed towards black people, rather than Jews." [Emphasis mine.]
Do you realize you just contradicted yourself? If the people he’s defending are indeed anti-semites, then by definition they are directing at least some of thei ‘racism’ at Jews.
Spengler means that Trump is courting rural and working-class Democrats — not tranny snowflakes like yourself.
Art Laramee Very mature and very constructive comment. I suppose I should applaud you on managing a three sylable response to a complex issue and valid question.
Denny Ross — Being told you’re to blame for everyone else’s problems will take a toll on you.
OTOH, blacks manage to wreck themselves even after being hoisted on a colossal pedestal, at taxpayers’ expense.
It is easy enough to ‘throw some shade’on Blacks .
Having been around awhile, most of them love their sprongs and will do anything to protect the weak and vulnerable. My grandparents, in Jim Crow Texas were lucky to have them and gentle hearts and hands, as orphans.
Myself, I have dropped challenges, and if you know things are going to be OK, you walk. If not, then you know it is you.
Back in the day, kids would sit outside Safeway, say with a box of puppies. There always a little sign: ‘Can’t keep’. All of them found loving homes, and the kids would too if offered.
You give a challenge to a loving heart, and it happens. If you weasel, they will weasel too.
The biggest drug problem in the US today is not urban/blacks/heroin but rural/whites/opiods.
A good article but I believe some of the pressure on Trump is fabricated from the Republican base which would like to see the president resign so Pence can replace him.
This sounds to me as just another argument in favor of SENS and other approaches to radical life extension.
Hearing leftists dump on Russia and Pravda is just too rich.
The trumpeter holds the common link-key to both racist neoFascists and the war mongering neocon.Zionists. By bashing China belatedly, he can obtain the supports of both parties.
David P. Goldman Maybe I’m missing something. I watched Trump’s interview and drawing "moral equivalence" seems a fairly apt description of what he seemed to be doing. I certainly did not get the impression that his comments were part of some grand strategy, anymore than I have with respect to fairly much anything that he says, or tweets.
I am surprised to see you defending anti-semites and would join Trump in defending people who remained in a crowd who were chanting "Jew will not replace us". It dissapoints me that you seem to be OK with racism, so long as it is directed towards black people, rather than Jews. Niemöller’s famous verse does spring to mind.
I agree with you that on many metrics, it is certainly the case that the US Black population is suffering greatly and that purely symbolic measures, such as the removal of confederate symbols isn’t going to change that.
One reality is that Black people int he US are incacerated at a significantly higher rate than the white population (even when lawbreaking by both groups is similar) and this high level of incaceration has been routinely demonstrated as being a significant contributing factor to problems currently suffered by that community, especially in areas where it places subsequent limitations on fundamental rights, such as the right to vote, or in which vindictive court fines create unmanagable debt that results in further imprisonment.
As such, I am curious about your views on these laws and the broader War on Drug Users, especially as the "War" was a tactic of the Nixon Administration to specifically target the US blacks (and hippies) and help implement the "Southern Solution". According to John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Alcohol widely recognised as being one of the most destructive drugs on both an individual and social level, but is freely available. However, much safer drugs, such as cannabis, LSD, peyote, magic mushrooms and Ayahuasca are not and the possession of even trivial amounts of these can lead to significant jail time under US law. When it comes to drugs that are arguably more harmful than alcohol, such as heroin and methamphetamine the general consensus among experts is that prohibition only adds to the harms, and that regulated access alongside addiction and other treatments is the safest and best way to move forward. By way of example, when Portugal decriminalised drug use, the heroin death toll dropped by about 80%.
As such, would you be willing to support the move away from punitive drug policies and other laws that unfairly target black people and which are significant contributors to the social dysfunction that you deplore, or are you in favour of retaining laws that undermine this community and make it so much harder for them to achieve anything resembling an "American Dream"?
I always expected Trump will start a trade war against China before Bob Mueller nail him on criminal charges. So if he use Charlottesville to start this war to save his own skin, that won’t surprise me. But him stealing Democrats for political relignment? LOL, don’t think so.
I agee with Republic Senator Bob Corker, (former) Trump ally.
“The president has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful. And we need for him to be successful, our nation needs for him to be successful,” Corker told reporters in Tennessee.
“He also has recently not demonstrated that he understands the character of this nation,” he added. “He has not demonstrated that he understands what has made this nation great and what it is today. He has got to demonstrate the characteristics of a president who understands that. And without the things that I just mentioned happening, our nation is going to go through great peril.”
Ouch!!!
this post proves projection does not only happen in a theater.
What has racism in USA got to do with China? Huh?
Rarely do you have the opportunity to read such mindless doggerel from an allegedly respectable journal. The slanted, oblique and cherrypicked nature of these pro-Dump arguments read like something out of the old Soviet Pravda. "Bread-and-butter" solutions in standard AmeriKKKan conservative-ese means robbing the middle class to enrich the wealthy, a task Dump seems eager to pursue, come proverbial hell or high water. The idea of Dump "reaching out to Democratic voters" is so laughably preposterous I had to make sure this article wasn’t written for a new humor section. This only days after Dump proclaimed the Democratic Party and the media "enemies of the AmeriKKKun people." At least make your stupidity consistent.
So, where did "political correctness" come from? Or the media propasphere that enforces it? Or the whole baleful basket of anti-white policies for which it stands guard?
All just fell from the sky, I guess.