No Is Not Enough

by Naomi Klein

  Trump speaks directly to that economic panic, and, simultaneously, to the resentment felt by a large segment of white America about the changing face of their country, about positions of power and privilege increasingly being held by people who do not look like them. The intensity and irrationality of the rage Trump and his strongest supporters reserved for Barack Obama, the years of feverish desire to strip him of his Americanness by “proving” he was Kenyan, thereby rendering him “other,” cannot be explained by anything but race hatred. This is the “whitelash” that CNN commentator Van Jones named on election night, and there is no doubt that for a considerable segment of Trump’s voters it is a ferocious force.

  Much of the rage directed at Hillary Clinton during the campaign came from a similarly primal place. Here was not just a female candidate, but a woman who identifies with and is a product of the movement for women’s liberation, and who did not package her quest for power in either cuteness or coyness. As the maniacal chants of “Lock her up!” made clear, for many in America, it was, quite simply, unbearable.

  I am no fan of many of Clinton’s policies. But her policies are not what provoked the seething hatred she encountered—that came from a deeper place. It is not insignificant, I think, that one of the first big controversies of the campaign was Trump’s comment that then Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who had dared to ask him a tough question about previous sexist comments, had “blood coming out of her wherever.” This basest of insults—invoking the ancient idea that women’s menstruation makes them unfit for public life—was an early clue that the blind rage at women overstepping their allotted boundaries would become a driving force of the campaign. It was a hint, too, about the glue that connects a proud playboy like Donald Trump with a sexual scold like Mike Pence (who apparently won’t have a meal alone with a female coworker): a shared belief that women’s bodies exist to serve men, whether as objects of sexual gratification or as baby-making machines. And it was a preview of the rooms packed with white men who would soon be making fateful decisions about women’s health and reproductive freedoms.

  The Ranking of Human Life

  In the 2016 US presidential elections, we heard the roar of men who believe they and they alone have the right to rule—in public, and in private behind closed doors. One of the most chilling details about the men who surround Trump, and who support him most publicly in the media, is the number of them who have been accused of beating, harassing, or sexually abusing women. The list includes Steve Bannon (whose ex-wife told police that he physically and verbally abused her—the case was dismissed when his ex-wife couldn’t be found by prosecutors to act as a witness); Trump’s original pick for labor secretary, Andrew Puzder (whose ex-wife claimed in court documents that he caused permanent injuries after “striking her violently about the face, chest, back, shoulders, and neck, without provocation or cause”—though she later recanted); Bill O’Reilly, of course, one of Trump’s most powerful champions in the media; and Roger Ailes (who worked as an adviser to the Trump campaign after being forced to leave Fox News following allegations of sexual harassment by more than two dozen women, many at his own network, and who, like O’Reilly, denied the allegations). And the list would be incomplete without Trump himself, who has been accused by multiple women, including in lawsuits, of sexual assault and harassment (he denies all allegations), and whose first wife, Ivana, reportedly swore in a deposition that her husband raped her in 1989 (like Andrew Puzder’s ex-wife, she recanted).

  There is no shortage of sexual predators on the liberal side of the political spectrum, but the litany of allegations, accusations, and hush money that swirls around Trump’s inner circle is unlike anything we have seen before. No matter the allegation, it is met with a wall of denial, of powerful men vouching for other powerful men, sending a message to the world that women are not to be believed. Perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise, given Trump’s brand: he’s the boss who does what he wants—grabs what and whomever he wants; mocks, shames, and humiliates whomever he wants whenever he wants. That is what the Grabber-in-Chief is selling. And there is clearly a rather large market for it.

  The Problem with “Jobs Voters”

  Many of Trump’s voters were not primarily driven by “whitelash” or “malelash” sentiments. Plenty of them said they voted for Trump because they liked what he said about trade and jobs, or because they wanted to stick it to the “swamp” of DC elites.

  But there’s a problem with these stories. You cannot cast a ballot for a person who is openly riling up hatred based on race, gender, or physical ability unless, on some level, you think those issues aren’t important. That the lives of the people being put in tangible danger by this rhetoric (and the policies that flow from it) matter less than your life and the lives of people who look more like you. You just can’t do it unless you are willing to sacrifice those other categories of people for your (hoped-for) gain. To put it bluntly, a vote for Trump might not reflect active hatred, but there is still, at best, a troubling indifference behind the act.

  The racial and gender resentments that did so much to bring Trump to power are not new. They have been omnipresent through history, rising and falling with additional stresses and provocations. There are, however, deep structural reasons why Trump’s version of a very old tactic is resonating so powerfully now, at this particular moment. Some of them have to do with those changes in white male status, but that tells only part of the story. What really won it for Trump was how those losses in social status were layered on top of losses in basic economic security.

  The people who have been hit hardest by neoliberal policies such as slashed social services and banking deregulation are not Trump’s white voters—not by a long shot. These policies have done far more to compromise the financial status of Black and Latino families, and it is within communities of color that the deepest service cuts have been inflicted.

  Moreover, the flip side of neoliberal economic policies that exile whole segments of the population from the formal economy has been an explosion of the state apparatus aimed at control and containment: militarized police, fortressed borders, immigration detention, and mass incarceration. The forty years since the neoliberal revolution began have seen the number of people behind bars in the United States increase by approximately 500 percent—a phenomenon, once again, that disproportionately affects Black and brown people, though whites are most certainly swept up in the system as well.

  It’s also important to note that Trump’s base wasn’t mostly poor; it was solidly middle-income, with most of his voters earning between $50,000 and $200,000 a year (with a concentration at the lower end of that range). Since so many Trump voters are not destitute, some argue that their vote can’t be motivated by economic stress.

  But that misses an important factor. A CNN analysis of exit polls found that Trump won 77 percent of the vote among those who said that their financial situation was “worse today” than it had been four years earlier. In other words, they may have been doing well compared with the country’s average, but many had lost ground. And indeed the losses began long before that.

  Insecure on Every Front

  Over the past three decades, but accelerating since the 2008 financial crisis, pretty much everyone apart from the one percent has been losing job security as well as whatever feeble safety net used to exist. That means a lost job has greater implications now for one’s ability to pay for health care or hold on to a home. This state of affairs hurts Trump’s working-class white male voters just as it does so many others. On the other hand, because many of Trump’s blue-collar voters had a notably better deal until fairly recently—able to access well-paid, unionized manufacturing jobs that supported middle-class lives—these losses appear to come as more of a shock.

  This is reflected in a marked rise in deaths among white, middle-aged Americans without college degrees, mainly from suicide, prescription drug overdoses, and alcohol-related illnesses. And this is particular to whites: mortality ra
tes for Black and Hispanic Americans in similar demographic brackets are falling. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the Princeton economists who noticed this trend dating back to 1999 and authored a landmark paper on what they term “deaths of despair,” explain the discrepancy as coming down to different prior experiences and expectations, or “the failure of life to turn out as expected.” Another way of thinking about it is: when a building starts to collapse, it’s the people on the higher floors who have further to fall—that’s just physics.

  On top of those losses, there are also the ground-shifting uncertainties associated with living in a changing country, a nation rapidly becoming more ethnically diverse, and where women are gaining more access to power. That’s part of progress toward equality, the result of hard-fought battles, but it does mean that white men are losing economic security (which everyone has a right to) and their sense of a superior status (which they never had a right to) at the same time. In the rush to condemn the latter form of entitlement, we shouldn’t lose sight of something important: not all forms of entitlement are illegitimate. All people are entitled to a dignified life. In wealthy countries, it is not greedy or an expression of unearned privilege to expect some basic security in your job when you work hard for decades, some certainty that you will be taken care of in old age, that you won’t be bankrupted by illness, and that your kids will have access to the tools they need to excel. In a decent society, people should feel entitled to those things. That’s human privilege. And yet those sorts of entitlements have been under vicious attack by the Right for four decades, to the extent that the word entitlements—referring to pensions and health care—is a slur in Washington, DC.

  It is this complex mix of factors that allowed Trump to come along and say: I will champion the beleaguered working man. I will get you those manufacturing jobs back. I’ll get rid of these free trade agreements. I’ll return your power to you. I’ll make you a real man again. Free to grab women without asking all those boring questions. Oh, and the most potent part of Trump’s promise to his base: I will take away the competition from brown people, who will be deported or banned, and Black people, who will be locked up if they fight for their rights. In other words, he would put white men safely back on top once again.

  The power of that promise is part of why Trump’s election win was like a Bat-Signal for hatemongers of all kinds. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported close to a tripling of anti-Muslim hate groups in 2016 alone. In the month after Trump’s election, there were more than a thousand reported incidents of hate targeting people of color. Thirty-two-year-old Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an immigrant engineer from India, was shot dead at a bar in Olathe, Kansas, by a white man who reportedly yelled, “Get out of my country!” before opening fire. In the first two months of 2017, seven transgender people were murdered, prompting calls for a federal hate crimes investigation.

  To a terrifying degree, skin color and gender conformity are determining who is physically safe in the hands of the state, who is at risk from vigilante violence, who can express themselves without constant harassment, who can cross a border without terror, and who can worship without fear.

  The Identity Blame Game

  Which is why it’s short-sighted, not to mention dangerous, to call for liberals and progressives to abandon their focus on “identity politics” and concentrate instead on economics and class—as if these factors could in any way be pried apart.

  Railing against so-called identity politics and political correctness is standard fare on Fox News and Breitbart News, but those aren’t the only places it’s coming from, and the critics have only become more vocal since the election. The lesson a great many liberal Democrats seem to have taken away from Hillary Clinton’s defeat is that her direct appeals to women and minorities on the campaign trail made white working-class men feel left out, driving them to Trump. Columbia University professor Mark Lilla expressed this most prominently in a postelection essay in the New York Times. He chided Clinton for “calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, LGBT and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake.” This focus on the traditionally marginalized groups, and the “moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity…has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” Unity, apparently, requires that all those noisy minorities (combined, an overwhelming majority, actually) need to pipe down about their individual grievances so Democrats can get back to “It’s the economy, stupid,” the mantra of Bill Clinton’s 1992 winning presidential campaign.

  Except this is exactly the wrong conclusion to draw from the 2016 elections. Clinton’s failure was not one of messaging but of track record. Specifically, it was the stupid economics of neoliberalism, fully embraced by her, her husband, and her party’s establishment, that left Clinton without a credible offer to make to those white workers who had voted for Obama (twice) and decided, this time, to vote Trump. True, Trump’s plans weren’t credible, but at least they were different.

  Similarly, if there was a problem with her focus on gender, sexuality, and racial identity, it was that Clinton’s brand of identity politics does not challenge the system that produced and entrenched these inequalities, but seeks only to make that system more “inclusive.” So, yes to marriage equality and abortion access and transgender bathrooms, but forget about the right to housing, the right to a wage that supports a family (Clinton resisted the calls for a $15 minimum wage), the universal right to free health care, or anything else that requires serious redistribution of wealth from top to bottom and would mean challenging the neoliberal playbook. On the campaign trail, Clinton mocked her opponent’s “Trumped-up trickle-down economics,” but her own philosophy is what we might call “trickle-down identity politics”: tweak the system just enough to change the genders, colors, and sexual orientation of some of the people at the top, and wait for the justice to trickle down to everyone else. And it turns out that trickle-down works about as well in the identity sphere as it does in the economic one.

  We know this because it’s been tried. There have been historic symbolic victories for diversity in recent years—an African-American first family, two Black attorneys general, Hollywood pushed into recognizing Black directors and actors, out gays and lesbians working as news anchors and heading Fortune 500 companies, hit TV shows built around transgender characters, an overall increase in the number of women in management positions, to name just a few. These victories for diversity and inclusion matter, they change lives and bring in viewpoints that would otherwise be absent. It was immensely important that a generation of kids grew up seeing Obama in the most powerful office in the world. And yet this top-down approach to change, if it is not accompanied by bottom-up policies that address systemic issues such as crumbling schools and lack of access to decent housing, is not going to lead to real equality. Not even close.

  In the United States, the significant gains made for greater diversity and inclusion at the top in recent years have occurred at a time of mass deportations of immigrants, and as the wealth gap between Black and white Americans actually increased. According to the Urban Institute, between 2007 and 2010 the average wealth of white families fell by 11 percent (a huge amount), but Black families saw their wealth fall by 31 percent. In other words, Blacks and whites became more unequal during a period of tremendous symbolic advancements, not less. Part of this is because Black families were disproportionately targeted for subprime loans, so they were hit the hardest when the market collapsed in 2008.

  During this same period, young Black men continued to be shot and killed by police at an obscene rate (five times higher than white men of the same age bracket, according to a study by the Guardian), their murders often captured on video and seared into the imaginations of still-developing young minds. It is against this backdrop that Black Lives Matter has become this generation’s civil rights movement. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, writes: “The
Black political establishment, led by President Barack Obama, had shown over and over again that it was not capable of the most basic task: keeping Black children alive. The young people would have to do it themselves.” Similarly, while there are a great many women in positions of power—not enough, but substantially more than a generation ago—low-income women are working longer hours, often at multiple jobs, without security, just to pay the bills. (Two-thirds of minimum-wage workers in the States are women.) In the World Economic Forum’s annual global rankings on the economic gender gap, the US fell from the 28th spot in 2015 all the way down to 45th place in 2016.

  While white Trump voters responded to their precariousness by raging at the world, many traditional liberals seem to have responded by tuning out. When Hillary Clinton called out identifiable groups at every rally, declaring that she would “stand up” for each of them, it was too tepid an offering to build the ground-swell of support she needed. So while white identity politics pumped up Trump’s base, trickle-down identity politics fell flat for his opponent. In crucial states such as Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin, Clinton drew 15 to 20 percent fewer Democratic voters than Barack Obama had in 2012. And that depressed progressive turnout is a big part of how Trump managed to eke out an electoral win (despite losing the popular vote).

  So perhaps this is another lesson to draw from 2016. Fear of “the other” may be an animating force for many supporters of far-right parties, but “inclusion” of the other within an inherently unjust system will not be powerful enough to defeat those forces. It wasn’t inspiring enough to galvanize the demoralized Democratic base in 2016, or to defeat Brexit, and there is no reason to believe that dynamic will change anytime soon.