Death of a Nation

by Dinesh D'Souza

  Raul has transmitted his work ethic and savings habit to his children, who are all self-supporting and who have now bought their parents a piece of land and a house so that they can be comfortable in their old age. As for their politics, Raul and Maria Elena are both Republicans. One of Raul’s points of pride, his wife says—we don’t get much from Raul because he speaks hardly any English—is that they have never taken government handouts even when they have been eligible for them. Ellen is now married to a bank executive, and she and her husband are also Republicans.

  But this is not true of all of Ellen’s siblings. I don’t have an official count, but it seems that they are about one-half Republican, one-half Democratic. Why, then, might children raised in the same household under the same parental values go such different ways politically? Apparently it’s because her siblings who are Democrats believe that the other party, the Republican Party, hates Hispanics. They think Democrats are the party of inclusion while Republicans are the party of hate. In short, they have drunk the progressive Kool-Aid.

  So finally we are in a position to answer the question of why the progressive Democrats focus so much on illegals. Essentially they want to blur the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, so that when Republicans speak out against illegal immigration, Democrats can portray them as being “against immigrants.” This way Hispanics—not just illegals but also legal Hispanics whose families have been in America since the mid-nineteenth century—will learn to fear and despise Republicans in the belief that they are racist bigots who are opposed to all Hispanics.

  It’s another big lie, of course, but a toxic one. And as we see with Ellen’s family, at least to a degree, it works. In this respect, it’s a successful lie. The reason Democrats need the lie is that they have no other way to win over hardworking, self-supporting people like the Martinez family. The Martinez clan is a self-reliant bunch, while the Democrats need fearful, dependent people who don’t believe they can survive without the Democratic Party to take care of them. Ellen’s hope, Debbie’s and mine is that this big lie, like all the others, is finally exposed so Democrats won’t be able to con Hispanics into fatally succumbing to the party of the plantation.

  10

  Holdouts

  Democrats and the Problem of White People

  All you heard from the Clinton campaign was African American this, African American that. The same with Hispanics and Latinos. . . . Nothing about white people. . . . I am a white male, no way was I going to vote for her.

  —Wtf1958, blog post response to an article posted on CNN1

  The so-called Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville seemed almost scripted by a group of Hollywood progressives. Here was an event featuring neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen and white supremacists of every stripe. There they were, chanting for Donald Trump and sporting MAGA hats. And then—in a kind of dramatic climax to the narrative—one of them drove his car into a pedestrian, killing her. So the Charlottesville rally illustrated not only hate and its apparent source but also the consequence of that hate, a dead body lying in the street.

  What better metaphor could the left have for Donald Trump’s America? Here, blatant and undisguised, were the white nationalists who were said to have taken over the Republican Party and made up the core constituency that got Trump elected a few months earlier. Whatever might be said about how progressive Democrats were the bad guys in the past, or about how bogus the Southern Strategy and the big-switch narratives might be, here was visual, irrefutable proof that today’s racists are in the Trump camp, and the people mobilized to fight them, Antifa, Black Lives Matter and the rest, are allied with the progressive cause. The progressive message following Charlottesville was clear: say what you will about history, we are the good guys now.

  Trump was pressed by the left to make a full-throated denunciation of the Charlottesville rally. In a sense, the progressives in the media wanted to force him to repudiate his alleged supporters while acknowledging that Antifa, Black Lives Matter and the counterprotesters were right to confront them. Trump refused, going no further than to denounce violence from “all sides.” Later Trump did sign a Senate resolution roundly condemning white supremacy.

  Still, Trump’s refusal to unilaterally rebuke the so-called Unite the Right ralliers brought tears of disappointment and outrage to CNN commentator Van Jones. “He’s not defending the humanity of the people who were run over . . . He can’t distinguish between Nazis with torches saying anti-Jewish, anti-Black stuff and . . . the people who went there to try and defend people from those thugs.” Jones invoked his Jewish godmother to insist that “she can’t count on the President of the United States to stand with her when a Nazi ran over an American citizen. Killed an American citizen with ISIS tactics in our country.” Jones concluded with a sniffle, “I’m just hurt. I’m sitting here hurt, and I think a lot of people are hurt.”2

  The Charlottesville narrative built on top of images of Richard Spencer—the poster boy of white supremacy in America today—and a few dozen of his like-minded compatriots raising their arms in a “Heil Trump” Nazi-style salute in the aftermath of the election. The narrative came in the wake of news articles preceding the election showing that the Ku Klux Klan newspaper Crusader had, without endorsing Trump, nevertheless praised his candidacy.3 For progressives, Charlottesville was the ultimate confirmation and the ultimate vindication. No wonder media coverage of Charlottesville was intense and lasted for weeks, rivaling if not exceeding the coverage of, say, the two parties’ national political conventions.

  At one point I almost laughed out loud when I saw a single white nationalist surrounded by a dozen or so cameramen and reporters. No one, not the white nationalist, not the reporters, not the onlookers, seemed to recognize the irony of the situation. This wasn’t the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-1920s marching down Pennsylvania Avenue with 50,000 hooded Klansmen. This was one solitary guy. Yet he was the obsessive focus of the media because the reporters were convinced that he—this one guy—was the disturbing face of white supremacy in Trump’s America.

  For the progressive left, Charlottesville is part of a larger narrative that can be summed up by Univision anchor Jorge Ramos’ assertion, in a CNN interview with Anderson Cooper, that Trump and the Republicans “want to Make America White Again.”4 So MAGA, in this view, is a disguised way for Trump and the Trumpsters to say they want to go back to a country where whites are supreme and blacks, Hispanics and other groups are second-class citizens, vulnerable to deportation and discrimination.

  This theme is perhaps most fully fleshed out by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates takes issue with commentators across the political spectrum who say that Donald Trump got elected by winning the white working-class vote. “Trump defeated Clinton,” Coates writes, “among white voters in every income category, winning by a margin of 57 to 34 among whites making less than $30,000 and $50,000; 61 to 33 for those making $50,000 to $100,000; 56 to 39 among those making $100,000 to $200,000; 50 to 45 among those making $200,000 to $250,000; and 48 to 43 for those making more than $250,000.”

  Trump won rich whites and poor whites. He won young whites, middle-aged whites, and the white elderly. He won whites with college degrees and whites without them. He won white women and white men. And in varying margins he won them in every part of the country. “Part of Trump’s dominance among whites,” Coates writes, “resulted from his running as a Republican, the party that has long cultivated white voters.”

  Notice, Coates says, that Trump did not win blue-collar Hispanics or blacks. If Trump made some sort of a working-class pitch to restore jobs to America, Coates asks why that appeal fell on deaf ears among working-class minorities. Only white workers seemed to have heard it. Consequently, Coates concludes, Trump didn’t really win by assembling a working-class coalition. Rather, he won by forging an ethnic coalition, and therefore he is, in the title of Coates’ essay, “The First White President.” Obviou
sly there were white presidents before Trump, but Trump is the first to win election by harnessing the power of whiteness.5

  THE KNOW-NOTHING ENDORSEMENT

  Before I dive into this debate, I want to point out that we’ve actually been here before. I realize that many on the left consider Trump’s presidency to be unprecedented, and even Republican “never Trumpers” seem to agree, justifying their defection from the GOP and their persistent attacks on Trump on this basis. Both groups are wrong. The issue of how to deal with a noxious bigoted group that professes to be in one’s camp was faced by Reagan in the 1980s and also, in a more serious form, by the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln.

  During one of his election campaigns, a woman confronted Reagan with the news that an extremist group perceived as white supremacist, the John Birch Society, was supporting his candidacy. “What’s your reaction,” she demanded to know, “to your endorsement by the Birchers?” Reagan responded, “They will be buying my philosophy. I’m not buying theirs.”6 And that was how he successfully diffused the issue. Still, Reagan’s response was, in my view, insufficient, because it made no effort to answer the question: if you don’t agree with these white supremacists, why do they think you’re their guy?

  Now let’s turn to how Abraham Lincoln handled this same issue. There was a powerful political party in the 1850s colloquially known as the Know-Nothings. The term came from the group’s self-appropriation of an insult. Their critics called them ignorant buffoons who knew nothing, and in the manner of blacks who call each other nigger, the Know-Nothings ironically embraced the label. Officially, though, their party was called the “Americans.”

  When the Whig Party dissolved, many of its members joined the Know-Nothing party. The Know-Nothings were both a reform movement and an anti-immigrant movement. Know-Nothings supported antislavery, missionary projects at home and abroad, charitable aid for orphans and the poor, and temperance. They also despised the new immigrants, especially the Irish, for their “rum and Romanism.” The Know-Nothing platform called for slavery restriction, alcohol prohibition, a halt to immigration, and a law banning immigrants from benefiting from the Homestead Act, which made cheap land available to settlers moving west.

  The immigrants for their part hated the Know-Nothings. The Irish in particular associated them with the same English Protestants who had been oppressing them back in Ireland. We have already seen how the Democratic Party had been organized by the Van Burenites in the North to recruit Irish and other immigrants to the urban machines. Even though the immigrants were clearly being exploited by the Democrats, this was exploitation with their consent. So the immigrants identified with the Democrats, and the Know-Nothings identified first with the Whigs and then with their own American party.

  By 1860 this American party had dissolved, but the underlying movement had not; it counted upward of a million supporters. Given the association of the Irish and other immigrants with the Democratic Party, the Know-Nothings were naturally disposed to vote for the opposing party. This made them potential Republican voters who, in a close election, could easily make the difference. Lincoln knew he needed the votes of these Know-Nothings if the Republican Party was to prevail in that critical year.

  Throughout the 1850s, the Democratic stalwart Stephen Douglas had repeatedly and vociferously castigated the Know-Nothing movement, branding its followers a bunch of ignorant xenophobes. Douglas did not hesitate to do this even when the Know-Nothing movement was at its zenith in the mid-1850s. Lincoln, by contrast, made no such condemnations. He recognized that the nativist movement, despite its malevolent elements, was part of the antislavery movement, and he had no intention of dividing the forces of the antislavery movement.

  During the 1860 campaign, Democrats circulated a rumor that Lincoln had made a secret stop at a Know-Nothing lodge in Quincy, Massachusetts. The issue was all over the papers, and Abram Jonas, a Jewish Republican attorney in Quincy who detested the Know-Nothings, wrote to ask Lincoln if it were true. Lincoln responded that it was not, but then he added this, “And now a word of caution. Our adversaries think they can gain a point if they could force me to openly deny the charge, by which some degree of offense would be given to the Americans. For this reason, it must not publicly appear that I am paying any attention to the charge.”7

  In private, Lincoln made his position clear in an 1855 letter to his friend Joshua Speed: “I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? As a nation, we began by declaring that all men are created equal. We now practically read it, all men are created equal, except negroes. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics. When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”8

  It should also be said that leading Republicans like Frederick Douglass rejected the Know-Nothing agenda and embraced the immigrants. Likening hatred for the Chinese to hatred for blacks, Douglass said, “I want a home here not only for the Negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.” The Republican platform in 1860 contained no denunciation of immigrants, no call for restricted immigration and no support for excluding immigrants from the provisions of the Homestead Act.9

  Even so, Lincoln’s only denunciation of anti-foreign and anti-Catholic prejudice appears in a personal private letter. Lincoln never publicly repudiated the Know-Nothings. For this he was assailed by Democratic newspapers, just as Trump was assailed in the progressive media for not sufficiently repudiating the white nationalists in Charlottesville. And Lincoln got the Know-Nothing vote, just as we can reasonably surmise Trump got the white nationalist vote.

  Lincoln never expressed guilt or qualms over this; from his point of view, the Know-Nothings came to him; he didn’t go over to them. Moreover, in rejecting the bad elements of the Know-Nothings, such as their hatred of immigrants and determination to shut America’s door to them, he did not hesitate to identify with the good things they stood for, such as social reform, temperance, and antislavery. In this episode, if we think about it, there is a valuable lesson for Trump and the Republican Party.

  THE OBAMA-TRUMP VOTER

  Now we turn to Coates’ charge that Trump got to the White House through a successful appeal to whiteness or white supremacy. Progressives like Coates interpret Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” as a call to return America to a time and place where women were out of the workforce, blacks were segregated and discriminated against, Hispanics and Asians were barred from coming to America and gays were a silent group confined to the closet. Admittedly Trump never said any of this, but might his voters understand him to be saying—or at least implying—it?

  More than eighteen months into Trump’s presidency, scholars have crunched the numbers to figure out which voters gave him his margin of victory. This consensus holds that Trump did not win by getting out his vote, nor did Hillary lose by failing to get out her vote. Base voters of both parties showed up to vote for their candidate. American presidential elections are typically decided by the independent or “swing” voter who is captive to neither party, and Trump prevailed by winning a sufficient number of these voters in key states.10

  In 2008 and 2012, these independent voters pulled the lever for Obama. In the 2016 Democratic primary, many of these same voters were for Bernie Sanders. So Trump won by getting Obama voters and Sanders voters. This is confirmed by the fact that Trump won blue states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Obama won all those states, even while Hillary had regarded Wisconsin as so securely in the bag that she didn’t even bother to campaign there.

  Consider
Youngstown, Ohio, which is regarded as America’s prototypical working-class town. This is union territory, so heavily Democratic that Republicans often don’t field candidates in many races and think they have done well when they get one-third of the vote. Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about a father who returns to Youngstown after World War II to work in the steel mills. But “now the yard’s just scrap and rubble . . . Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do.” Translation: America used to be great, but isn’t anymore. The evil corporate bosses have ruined it.

  Youngstown is in Mahoning County, and Mahoning—together with adjoining Trumbull County—gave Obama the margin he needed to win Ohio in 2008 and 2012. No one thought these voters would switch parties; in the words of columnist Paul Sracic, it would be “like asking a New York Yankees fan to cheer for the Boston Red Sox.”11 Yet Trump almost took Mahoning County—Hillary won it by a hair—and he did win in Trumbull County. His promise to make America great again seems to have resonated.

  In Wisconsin, Trump won twenty-one working-class counties that just four years earlier had gone to Obama by comfortable margins. Howard County, Iowa—which is 150 miles northeast of Des Moines—went for Obama by a margin of 20 points in 2012; in a massive swing, Trump won it by 20 points. Maine’s second congressional district, which Obama won by 8 points, went for Trump by 12. Of nearly 700 counties that twice voted for Obama, more than 200 defected to Trump.

  Who are these voters? They are white voters—we can call them Bruce Springsteen voters—and we can safely dismiss the idea that they are white supremacists. White supremacists don’t vote for a black presidential candidate, however well qualified. Nor was Obama well qualified; he was a community organizer who had not yet served a single term in the Senate. Clearly Obama’s skin color did not prevent these swing voters from going over to his side.