The Triumph Of Grievance

The greatest identity politics strategy ever employed has returned.

People celebrate Independence Day with a parade in Williams, AZ on July 4, 2024. Source: gettyimages.com

This article is a bit of a departure for me. Time for me to get in line with the rest of the opinionverse and register my thoughts on the 2024 presidential election. Trust me, it will still be relevant to the themes I write about regularly.

Donald Trump’s victory Tuesday caught me completely flat-footed. I was disappointed. From the outset I’ve failed to see how Trump would be able to deliver on a couple of his biggest promises – deporting millions of undocumented immigrants and steeply increasing tariffs on imported goods – without causing some very deep economic distress. He and the Republicans are going to do that, and tackle inflation in the process? By instituting distinctly inflationary policies? Removing any portion of a demographic that our nation has become dependent upon for low-cost goods and services guarantees higher prices. Forcing other nations to pay steeper tariffs for imports means one of two things: 1) businesses selling imported goods will raise prices to make the difference, or 2) higher-priced goods produced domestically will fill the void. Someone please make it make sense.

I also fear that the nation is headed for a downward spiral of retribution. I see Trump attempting to take swift action against technocrats in the federal bureaucracy in favor of MAGA loyalists. He’ll once again pit favored and unfavored Republicans against each other in House and Senate midterm primaries. He’ll come after Democrats who were behind his impeachment related to attempts to overturn the certification of the 2020 election results and the January 6 insurrection. And I haven’t even mentioned the fallout I suspect we’ll see related to the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the inconsistencies that will come with state-by-state abortion laws.

Someone please try to paint a picture to me of how a successful and more prosperous Trump Administration would look. I can’t see it.

But in retrospect, I can understand it, and I think it can be explained. I understand it because I live in a region of the nation that’s been the target of Trump’s message since well before Trump emerged on the scene as a political figure.

Here’s the kicker – I don’t blame Trump. At all. He’s simply the latest iteration of a Republican strategy that been more than 50 years in the making. Instead, I blame Richard Nixon. What we’re witnessing is the Republican Party’s success in nationalizing Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

This excerpt written by John A. Powell on behalf of UC-Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute (I know, stay with me here) spells out the strategy:

“When President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he told an aide that Democrats had “lost the South for a generation,” anticipating a white backlash in the South. Since the end of Reconstruction, the South had been dominated by the Democratic Party. The national party’s efforts to promote civil rights at the national level weakened its grip on the South, and the Civil Rights Acts, as Johnson predicted, resulted in the deep red now visible across the South in electoral maps.

The so-called ‘solid South’ did not become solidly Republican overnight. Republican strategies began to stoke racial resentment and antipathy to civil rights. For example, Nixon campaign advisor Kevin Phillips and RNC Chairman Lee Atwater admitted appealing to white resentment to civil rights and even white racism. They did so not only by criticizing federal civil rights legislation and impugning federal desegregation orders, but by railing against busing, government dependency, and welfare, or by espousing such seemingly race-neutral ideas as “state’s rights” and “local control” as signals to preserve Jim Crow from federal intrusion. Even without making explicitly racist comments, the “dog whistle” was clearly heard by those who were its intended recipients. These strategies, combined called the “Southern Strategy”, was designed to create a national Republican majority, built, in part, on white resentment.

The dog whistle worked because it was heard and understood by the conservative white base, yet not by more moderate and northern whites. It meant activating racial resentment for one part of the population while denying that fact to the rest. The Southern Strategy married the conservative politics antipathy to marginal tax rates and civil rights, labor, and environmental regulations of corporate elites with culturally conservative antipathy towards civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights.”

For the next 25 years following the effective end of the Civil Rights Movement with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Republicans successfully chipped away at the Solid South Democratic majority. Beginning with Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign in 1980, Republicans saw an opportunity to pull in a similar group of social conservatives in northern states – the blue-collar “Reagan Democrats” who lived in places like Macomb County, Michigan, a working-class suburban county just northeast of Detroit.

Republican leaders like Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich began the nationalization of the Southern Strategy in the 1990’s. They and others appealed to the grievances of manufacturing workers who saw their jobs leaving the U.S. for Asia and Latin America. Republicans profited politically from the economic insecurities of the white, blue-collar working and middle classes. After gaining control of the South, Republicans were able to make gains in Indiana, Ohio, Missouri and Iowa, and then put the press on Michigan, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

The ironic genius of this strategy was that it gave people, white people, a new way to express their grievances. Economic, cultural and social concerns were now merged. They could now be discussed in more neutral, even pleasant terms. New language was given to people’s feelings, and it wasn’t the result of research from a published academic paper. And it worked well.

It was the most successful identity politics strategy ever seen in America.

That is, until Barack Obama became the nation’s first Black president in 2008, and the worst economic crisis in living memory took hold. Grievances took on even greater significance. A “we’re mad as hell, and we’re not gonna take it anymore” sentiment swept the nation. The proto-MAGA Tea Party Movement that flipped 63 seats and gave Republicans a House majority was a proof of concept. Mitt Romney’s loss to Obama in 2012 emboldened the populist types in the GOP. The emergence of Donald Trump in the presidential race in 2015 removed the veneer from the strategy and put things in much coarser, more explicit terms.

And here we are.

I’m an avid follower of Noah Smith’s Noahpinion newsletter. He wrote the first piece in a post-mortem series the day after the election. The series seems like it will focus on what Smith views as the three lessons he learned from Harris’ defeat:

“I do think there are some important lessons that we can already learn from this election, especially at the intersection of economics and politics. In particular, I see three big ones:

·        Identity politics — viewing racial groups as homogeneous “communities” to be targeted with appeals to collective grievances — is not an effective way of winning over Hispanic (or, probably, Asian) voters.

·        People care about inflation more than about unemployment.

·        The educated professional class has become dangerously out of touch with the rest of the country.”

Points 2 and 3 I wholeheartedly agree with. However, I think the so-called “failure” of identity politics misses the point. In fact, MAGA is the identity politics of white, blue-collar, non-college-educated voters.

If Smith is going to view identity politics as the self-interest carrot that whites extend to people of color to attract them to the progressive coalition, then he’s right. That’s an action that is doomed for failure. However, with this statement he’s acknowledging what many people of color have believed all along – that the white progressive appeal to Black, Latino and Asian voters is more performative than anything.

You know, the Obama “Yes We Can” coalition was probably never sustainable. I’ve always believed It was modeled on 1980’s and 1990’s Chicago politics, which united white North Side progressive voters (the “lakefront liberals”) with South and West Side Black voters. The coalition successfully challenged the white ethnic, socially conservative Machine leadership based in the city’s Northwest and Southwest sides. But changing demographics – the rapid rise in Latino and Asian population, and the rapid decline in the number of Black residents – put an end to that.

Similarly, I’m not certain that any MAGA coalition that relies on growing Black, Latino and Asian voters will be long-lasting, either.

From my perspective, people of color are at various stages of minimizing their racial and ethnic identities in electoral matters, and choosing economic factors instead. Black people, who remain the most segregated group in the nation and are least able to minimize their identity, have held onto identity concerns. Yet we’ve also started to vote on our economic concerns and trickled in Trump’s direction. Latinos and Asians are becoming more integrated into the cultural fabric of the nation, and are minimizing identity concerns at a faster pace.

I think it’s important to look at what worked for Joe Biden in 2020, as opposed to what didn’t work for Kamala Harris in 2024. Specifically, Biden’s 2020 message had a distinctly middle class tone to it. Biden related personally with families that had financial discussions over the kitchen table. He spoke of increasing job opportunities for all – not just those in the professional class. That kept many working and middle class people from defecting to Trump.

So what’s ahead for us? At some point it will be Republican overreach. At some point there’s always been Republican overreach, as populist conservatives try to exert their power on the party.

Populist conservatives have a history of trying to convert their populist appeal into legislative power with mixed results. The Newt Gingrich-led Republican House overreached when it impeached Bill Clinton in 1998. The Tea Party House members overreached when they orchestrated the resignation of Speaker of the House John Boehner in 2015. Numerous federal budget battles with threats of government shutdown were the result of overreach, including the longest and most expensive shutdown in late 2018 and early 2019, when Trump was last president. And of course, the January 6 insurrection was overreach.

The examples of overreach grow larger and more destructive as populist conservatism digs deeper into our society. My fear is the next one will have global impact.

Call me a detached observer if you like. But as I view our future, this is a white folks’ culture war, a white folk’s identity crisis. For them, these are the choices. Are we to be a nation of college-educated, white-collar, upper-middle class professionals, functioning as the managers and executives of the global economy? Or are we to be a nation of non-college-educated, blue-collar, working and middle class skilled workers, insulated from a complex world but known for manufacturing quality products for the world to enjoy?

Everything depends on what side of the equation they’re on.