On—Deep Breath—Donald Trump And “Gender Queer” And Parker Molloy And Chris Geidner And Matt Yglesias

And against counterproductive and unfair smear campaigns

I don’t want this newsletter to get too mired in intraleft conflict, which is fundamentally boring to most normal people, but hey, it’s the end of the month and this comment from reader Rick Gore on my last post sparked a lot of stuff in my brain:

So many people seem to think that if you keep pulling an (already ringing) fire alarm it will somehow put out the fire. Yes — everybody — or at least everybody who is willing to hear it — functionally the same thing — knows that Trump is bad. The fire alarm has been pulled many, many times. What we actually need to do is to start FIGHTING the fire, which means either (a) figuring out how to peel some Trump supporters away from him or (b) figuring out how to turn out current non-voters and get them to vote for the Trump alternative or (c) some combination of (a) and (b). An article talking about how we would go about doing THAT would actually be helpful, but I’ve seen precious few of those.

I find the lack of self-awareness among many thought leaders and consultants in Democratic and progressive politics really striking. It was a bad enough warning alarm that Donald Trump got elected in 2016, which we all knew totally could never happen. But then, while 2020 didn’t turn out to be a nail-biter per se, it wasn’t a blowout, either! All that chaos, all that scandal, all those ridiculous, and in many cases, frankly menacing actions on the part of Trump, and he. . . came pretty close to winning again! More alarmingly, the groups supposedly threatened by Trump — non-white minorities — moved toward him. (Update: Not long after this post went up, my brother, who follows electoral politics more closely than I do, texted me to argue against my phrasing here. “The last election was absolutely a nail-biter,” he said. “People don't seem to understand this. The margin of victory was three states that had Biden winning margins of 0.63, 0.3, and 0.23 percentage points.” That would be Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia, respectively. Reasonable people can differ on whether this constitutes a nail-biter given that Trump would have had to win all three to earn a 269-269 tie — at which point things would have gotten super weird — but fair enough.)

If your job is to get Democratic/progressive candidates elected, this pattern of events should jolt you a little bit. You and your colleagues have been railing nonstop about how dangerous Donald Trump is, about how antidemocratic and racist he is, and how much of a threat to vulnerable people he is. After all that railing, Trump. . . picks up support among many of the groups you’re claiming to want to protect! If that doesn’t inspire a crisis of conscience about the quality of your work and the accuracy of your beliefs about effective politics, what would?

Shortly after the election Politico published an article that nicely explained some of this, headlined “Trump Didn’t Win the Latino Vote in Texas. He Won the Tejano Vote.” In it, the independent immigration reporter Jack Herrera examined one of the most alarming facts about 2020, which concerned a border county in Texas: “Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Zapata County’s vote in a hundred years.”

“To many outsiders,” wrote Herrera, “these results were confounding: How could Trump, one of the most virulently anti-immigrant leaders, make inroads with so many Latinos, and along the Mexican border no less?”

Herrera explained that actual residents of the county didn’t buy this framing at all:

In Zapata, however, these questions have been met with mild chuckles to outright frustration. The shift, residents and scholars of the region say, shouldn’t be surprising if, instead of thinking in terms of ethnic identity, you consider the economic and cultural issues that are specific to the people who live there. Although the vast majority of people in these counties mark “Hispanic or Latino” on paper, very few long-term residents have ever used the word “Latino” to describe themselves. Ascribing Trump’s success in South Texas to his campaign winning more of “the Latino vote” makes the same mistake as the Democrats did in this election: Treating Latinos as a monolith.

Ross Barrera, a retired U.S. Army colonel and chair of the Starr County Republican Party, put it this way: “It’s the national media that uses ‘Latino.’ It bundles us up with Florida, Doral, Miami. But those places are different than South Texas, and South Texas is different than Los Angeles. Here, people don’t say we’re Mexican American. We say we’re Tejanos.”

Though not everyone in the Rio Grande Valley self-identifies as Tejano, the descriptor captures a distinct Latino community—culturally and politically—cultivated over centuries of both Mexican and Texan influences and geographic isolation. Nearly everyone speaks Spanish, but many regard themselves as red-blooded Americans above anything else. And exceedingly few identify as people of color. (Even while 94 percent of Zapata residents count their ethnicity as Hispanic/Latino on the census, 98 percent of the population marks their race as white.) Their Hispanicness is almost beside the point to their daily lives.

It’s not just that the most successful mainstream progressive journalists / consultants / campaign staffers / activists and others like to talk and write about race in the deeply essentialist and condescending and tokenizing way that bounces right off both Zapata voters and so many other members of the United States’ linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse non-white population. At this point, I’d argue this sort of identity talk is a prerequisite to get any sort of desirable position in these fields (at least if the position in question entails discussing identity). It’s everywhere, and it has absolutely exploded during the Trump years.

This style of discussing identity is stifling and elitist and does not reflect how real people talk — it’s an extension of the longtime tendency, shared in very different ways by both right-wing racists and left-of-center social justice types, to flatten groups of hundreds of millions of people into borderline useless categories, and to then pretend they share some sort of essence.