Can Donald Trump really be the leading Republican candidate for president? His whole campaign is based on a platform made up of phrases the length of a tweet. “Make America great again … The point is, you can never be too greedy … I would use waterboarding. And I would try to expand the laws to go beyond waterboarding … We won with poorly educated, I love the poorly educated … What do I know about it? All I know is what’s on the Internet.”
And there is Ted Cruz. He uses bigger words than Trump, but that’s cold comfort. “Many of the alarmists on global warming, they’ve got a problem because the science doesn’t back them up … There is a liberal fascism that is dedicated to going after believing Christians who follow the biblical teaching on marriage … There is no room for Christians in today’s Democratic Party … Indeed, the screaming you hear now from across the Potomac is the Washington cartel in full terror that the conservative grassroots are rising up.”
It’s probably not fair to pick out a few quotes but the reality is that the debate on the GOP side is pretty much “full of sound and fury” in 140 characters. On Thursday, the day after the horrific terrorist attack in Brussels, Trump and Cruz were focused on the way their wives were being treated by their opponent.
Trump and Cruz are the inevitable outcome of a Republican party realignment that began when the Democrats supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Trump is making a barely veiled appeal to aggrieved white people who have been convinced that their prospects have been diminished by Latinos and African-Americans, not by the fundamental changes in our economy that have created income inequality that is literally and figuratively killing the white working class.
The death rate for working class whites between the ages of 45 to 54 has risen by 22 percent since 1999, and the dramatic increase is due to drugs, alcohol and suicide. African-Americans and Latinos didn’t move jobs overseas or rig the tax code to disproportionately benefit those with wealth. They didn’t bust unions or create a political system controlled by lobbyists instead of voters.
I’m pretty sure that rich white guys did that.
While the Republicans are turning back the clock to 1928, Democrats are having the usual semi-polite kind of debate that they always have. There are those people who will never vote for Hillary, or never vote for Bernie. They fight it out on Facebook (the 21st century water cooler), marshaling quotes from 1989 or 1993 to make the case for their candidate. Young voters and African-Americans are divided and Democratic turnout is down.
There are some old dog-whistle phrases dressed up for the 2016 election. And the practitioners of dog-whistle politics have embraced diversity! It’s not just African-Americans any more, now Latinos, Muslim, gay, lesbian, and transgendered people are also considered a threat to the “American way of life.” Instead of “state’s rights,” we are warned about the “Washington cartel.” That would be the people that want to take away your “Second Amendment rights.” There is a lot of talk about “religious liberty,” but not religious liberty for Muslims. And the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s Heller decision evidently was not “judicial activism,” even though it overturned the long-standing precedent that allowed for common sense gun control.
Trump talks about taking the country back. That phrase, another dog whistle, evokes a time when there were no Mexicans coming across the border, no African-Americans defending their lives, no gay people with the audacity to get married, no Muslims who happen to love the United States.
Meanwhile, our country has been at war since 2001. Europe is fighting ISIS in subways and airports and Syrian children are dying as they flee a war-ravaged region. Here at home North Carolina has taken away GLBT rights, and Indiana’s governor followed the lead of other governors and signed an anti-abortion law. And that was just one day in the news.
The country that Trump, Cruz and their followers want to go back to doesn’t exist anymore. There is a fault line running through the electorate. Race and religion, modernity and traditionalism divide this country. We live in enclaves of like-minded people and rarely talk to members of the other party. Can we close that fault line and move towards an inclusive and fair country?
As of now, the outlook isn’t good.
Clare Higgins of Northampton, the city’s former mayor, is executive director of the nonprofit Community Action! of the Franklin, Hampshire and North Quabbin Regions. She writes a monthly column and can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.