begin quote from:
What Are Trump Fans Really ‘Afraid’ to Say?
begin quote from:
What Are Trump Fans Really ‘Afraid’ to Say?
The Opinion Pages |
Campaign Stops
What Are Trump Fans Really ‘Afraid’ to Say?
RHINESTONES
twinkling around the perimeter of her shades, cornsilk curls undaunted
by the Pensacola sun, Elizabeth Kemper, a supporter of Donald J. Trump,
is all certainty. She is fed up. “You know, this country is so dang
political correct,” she tells a CNN reporter. “I’m afraid to say what I really feel, you know?”
On
her shirt, a silhouette of Mr. Trump’s head nestles in the protective
crook of the state of Florida, his face turned stalwartly eastward, away
from Mexico, his Mordor.
Ms.
Kemper is blazing, passionate, incredulous. “I think this country
better go back to some of those values. Some of the values my parents
grew up with, my grandparents grew up with,” she says. “Whatever was
wrong, they could point it out and tell you.”
The
notion that Mr. Trump voices ideas that his supporters are “afraid” to
express, vital truths lost to the scourge of political correctness, has
been a rhetorical through-line of his campaign. Mr. Trump says exactly
what he thinks, his fans gush — about immigrants, about Muslims, about
women — a bygone pleasure now denied most Americans.
It’s
an odd construction. Once you say, “He says what I’m afraid to say,”
and point to a man who is essentially a 24/7 fire hose of unequivocal
bigotry, you’ve said what you’re afraid to say, so how afraid
could you have been in the first place? The phrase is a dodge, a way to
acknowledge that you’re aware it’s a little naughty to be a
misogynist xenophobe in 2016, while letting like-minded people know,
with a conspiratorial wink, that you’re only pretending to care. It’s a
wild grab for plausible deniability — how can I be a white supremacist
when I’m just your nice grandpa? — an artifact of a culture in which
some people believe that it’s worse to be called racist than to be
racist.
Trump
fans are flattering themselves if they think that, say, declining to
shout slurs at black people or sexually harass female co-workers is some
form of noble restraint. Not only is that a pathetically low bar, many
do not seem to be clearing it. Video of a Trump rally in Kentucky on Super Tuesday shows a student named Shiya Nwanguma
being shoved and jostled. She reported being called a racial epithet as
well as an abusive term for the female anatomy. Video from a North Carolina rally
on Wednesday shows a white Trump supporter punching a black protester
in the face. One glance at your worst relative’s Facebook page, one toe
dipped into the toxic sludge-fire that is pro-Trump Twitter, and it’s
abundantly obvious that no one is holding much back.
It’s
tempting to declare that the Internet isn’t real life, that online hate
isn’t a credible barometer for offline behavior. But human beings built
the Internet, we populate it, we set its tone, and collectively we’ve
designated it a major engine of discourse. It’s been my experience that
anonymity makes people more honest, more themselves.
If you applaud the sentiment that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re
not sending their best,” and “they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing
crime, they’re rapists,” from the mouth of a presidential candidate, why should I believe you aren’t saying worse in the privacy of your home?
Mr.
Trump isn’t saying anything that his supporters wouldn’t. He hasn’t let
an explicit racial slur slip on the campaign trail. It’s the other way
around. They’re laying bare the subtext of his speech and policies,
revealing how they appear to angry white people primed and frustrated by
the past century of Republican dog-whistling. They’re saying what Mr.
Trump can’t.
Regardless,
even if Trump supporters were managing to toe some politically correct
line with their words, they speak as clear as day with their votes.
A
voter whose preferred immigration policy involves “a wall” and “a list”
makes it clear where he stands on the humanity of refugees. A voter who
thinks it’s perfectly reasonable not to immediately disavow the support of a white nationalist makes it clear where she stands on the Black Lives Matter movement. A voter who feels well represented by a candidate who has called women “fat pigs” and “dogs” makes it clear he is not to be trusted when it comes to women’s health.
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It
doesn’t take clairvoyance, or even tremendous mental dexterity, to see
what Mr. Trump means by “make America great again.” It just takes a
history book. Many of us remember what America used to be like, and
don’t care to go back.
Some
of Mr. Trump’s loudest critics come from the groups he’s built his
campaign on demonizing — black people, Latinos, Muslims, women —
historically marginalized groups whose voices are reaching wider
audiences thanks to the democratizing power of the Internet. Political
correctness is construed, deliberately and effectively, by its opponents
as an attack on fun, but it’s really an attack on the status quo that
made Mr. Trump both very wealthy and a viable presidential candidate.
We
cannot ignore the fact that the populist sensation of this election
hasn’t been Bernie Sanders. It’s been a racist, nationalist
demagogue-for-hire with no sincere ideology beyond his own vanity. Mr.
Trump is a cipher; his voters love him because he does nothing but hold
up a mirror to their basest prejudices and bask in the feedback loop of
narcissism. They’re not “afraid”; they’re leading Mr. Trump as much as
following him. They called him into being, not the other way around.
Lindy West is a columnist with The Guardian and the author of the forthcoming memoir “Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman.”
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