by Vilmos Tehenészfiú Mon Jun 08, 2020 2:54 pm
Is This the Last Stand of the ‘Law and Order’ Republicans?
It was bad enough, Republicans complained, that Obama took an “apology tour” around the world highlighting America’s mistakes abroad. But for the president to question the very fairness of the criminal justice system—as he did in the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin, and several other race-related flashpoints of the 2010s—was unforgivable. That a black president would cast suspicion on America’s core institutions was seen as inflammatory if not subversive.
“He took race back to the sixties, as far as I’m concerned. He made everything a race issue, or at least saw it through a racial lens,” Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina senator and president of the Heritage Foundation, once told me. “The country had moved toward bending over backward to create equality. But then suddenly, with Obama, he just lit the fires. I thought when he was elected that was the big victory, that we had put racism behind us.”
For black folks, especially older black folks, when they hear a white man talking about ‘law and order,’ that means get your ass in the house before dark,” Steele said. “And for the president to say, ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts’—what the hell do you think that means to us? He knows. The man is 70-something years old. He knows what that means to us. He knows what we hear. And he also knows a white person hears something totally different.”
As president, Trump has spread these subliminal messages time and again—whether by attacking NFL players for kneeling, or by encouraging police officers to rough up suspects they arrest, or by alleging voter fraud in response to efforts aimed at boosting minority voting turnout. This is exactly what Republican voters signed up for. Part of what made Trump’s appeals to white grievance in 2016 so powerful is how it dovetailed with his anti-establishment creed. In the three years prior, every leading figure in the Republican Party had pushed a wholesale rebranding effort aimed at softening the party’s image and appealing to black and brown voters. Only by reforming immigration laws and spending time in poor neighborhoods and empathizing with the racially and economically marginalized, GOP leaders from Paul Ryan to Reince Priebus argued, could the party win national election.
With his antagonistic tone toward minorities and his overt appeals to xenophobia, Trump proved that theory wrong—for one election. The combination of soaring intensity among white working-class conservatives and diminished turnout among black voters in big cities was just enough to nudge the GOP nominee across the finish line by a combined 77,744 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the entirety of his margin in the Electoral College. That blueprint remains untouched. The president’s hopes for reelection rest on overwhelming support from whites and a lack of mobilization among minorities. It happened once; it could happen again.
Home
