My Take on the U.S. Presidential Election

In a nutshell, my take on the recent U.S. presidential election is that we came very close to losing American democracy. It was saved, for the time being, by election officials and workers in the individual states who did an amazing job in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. The court system gets credit, too, but largely because the states presented the judiciary with such clean results. And the much-maligned Post Office deserves credit for getting huge numbers of pandemic-induced mail-in ballots delivered on time.

As Donald Trump’s Attorney General William Barr said, his department found no evidence of irregularities significant enough to change the outcome.

One can also view it as a vindication of Federalism and the division of power.  Imagine if a single federal agency had been in charge of carrying out the election and certifying the results.

Trump was clearly counting on chaos and, indeed, had said as much in the lead-up to the election. If the vote failed to show him the clear winner, he appeared to believe the outcome would be messy enough to render the results invalid.  Who knows exactly what would have come next, but I doubt it would have been a peaceful transfer of power in line with the provisions of the Constitution as we have traditionally understood them.  The storming of the Capitol could easily have been far worse.

To me, the most astonishing aspect of the election was that Trump got about 10 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016. One might argue that was because overall turnout was significantly larger, but despite his appalling behavior, he got half of the additional votes. And there was no rush by the people who voted for him the first time – most significantly white Americans, -- to acknowledge a mistake and sweep him back out.  Not at all! And there was even evidence that Trump had found new pockets of support in unexpected places.

Having read a great deal of commentary and analysis on what produced Trump’s 2016 victory, I would say that in broad-brush terms there were two significant trends: changing demographics signaling the coming end of a dominant white majority combined with persistent economic stagnation and even decline of much of the white middle class, and particularly those with less education. Many white Americans seem to fear they are in danger of sinking below layers of both new, non-white arrivals and the traditional Black “underclass.” To them, the presidency of Barak Obama seemed a harbinger of their decline.

Recent books that help shed light on what is going on include: “Strangers In Their Own Land,” by Arlie Russell Hochschild; “Brown Is The New White,” by Steve Phillips, and “Caste,” by Isabel Wilkerson.

Toward the end of her book, Wilkerson relates a conversation she had with the historian Taylor Branch, the author of a trilogy on the life of Martin Luther King. She quotes Branch, who she identifies as a friend, as saying: “People were angry when the projections (that whites would fall into minority status by 2042) came out. People said they wouldn’t stand for being a minority in their own country [my emphasis]. … So the real question would be, if people are given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”

That’s clearly a concern Wilkerson herself strongly feels. But quoting Branch, who is white (she is Black), serves to give the notion, which Trumpism clearly embodies, more force and credibility.

Biden’s victory was a relief, but the down-ballot outcome was sobering, suggesting significant problems lie ahead. Democracy, as we have known it, may indeed not be the top priority of a significant number of Americans in years to come,

Metropolitan Museum Evokes "1984," "The Sympathizer"

The latest development at New York's Metropolitan Museum brings to mind books like George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984" and the equally grim tale "The Sympathizer" by Viet Thanh Nguyen. In both stories, the chief protagonist runs afoul of an authoritarian regime and as part of his punishment, must make confessions.

On Nov. 26, 2020, the New York Times ran an article in its art section that the Met had appointed its first Chief Diversity Officer, Lavita McMath Turner, a Black woman with experience in such matters, most recently at the City University of New York.  That's not a big surprise.  Many major U.S. cultural institutions have recently taken a similar step.  Moreover, as the NYT article pointed out, the NY city government informed its cultural institutions that if they didn't take steps to diversify their staffs, they might lose some of their public funding. 

What most interested me was an element of confession associated with the Met's announcement.  It came at least in part as a result of a staff letter five months ago, the NYT said, that urged the museum's leaders to acknowledge "a deeply rooted logic of white supremacy and culture of systemic racism at our institution."

The notions of white supremacy and systemic racism are key phrases and concepts in the current movement that sometimes go as far as attempting to "cancel culture" in bringing about change, much of which is arguably overdue. If one doesn't decry "white supremacy" and "systemic racism" in those terms, however, one is insufficiently "woke" and, well, might suffer the fate of Orwell's Winston Smith or Nguyen's anonymous narrator -- periods of punishment and correction.

While those advocating such a reconsideration of the very basis of U.S. society tend to paint it in terms of a moral awakening and reckoning, is also purely and simply a power struggle.

The Met's President and CEO Daniel H. Weiss and Direct Max Hollein stopped short of repeating the key phrases -- "white supremacy" and "systemic racism" -- in the institution's July 6, 2020 mea culpa. But the document made it clear that a confession along such lines is in the offing.

"Our government, policies, systems, and institutions have all contributed to perpetuating racism and injustice, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art must reflect on its past and aspire to be an agent of change," the July 6 statement said.

Along with promised reforms and new initiatives on various fronts -- hiring, staffing, collecting, exhibitions, etc. -- substantive change "will also require that we understand our past and that we accept the importance of truth-seeking as a necessary part of the process of learning and reconciliation."  

In other words, forward-looking reforms are not enough. 

"A set of commitments to anti-racism cannot begin without an honest assessment of an institution’s own history and present practices. This process will require that we investigate our own history and that we accept the importance of truth-seeking as an essential element of healing and reconciliation. We will begin this work in the coming year through an institution-wide initiative and produce a public report."

That was number one on the list of steps the Museum said it planned to take.

In writing this, I don't mean to beat up on the Met per se.  It's just that these developments are an excellent example of the nature of the culture war in which the U.S. is currently engulfed, and particularly in the arena of high-culture arts and that of academia. 

But at the same time, they give rise to an interesting question: if the Met's forthcoming self-examination concludes that the institution and thus its leadership have been complicit in preserving white supremacy and that the Met is part of systemic racism, can Weiss survive as president and CEO? It's hard to have it both ways.

 

Trump's Tactics and The Two Narratives

The current flap over whether Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is in some way responsible for Tuesday's apparent terrorist attack that killed eight individuals in Manhattan is illustrative of two trends I have been writing about.

The most straight forward is a salient element of President Donald Trump's modus operandi and one that his supporters love: the best defense is a strong offensive.

Women and Identity Politics

With the degree of misogyny evident in the last U.S. presidential election and with the on-going Hollywood-led sexual harassment scandals, one would think that just being a woman would suffice to be a member of a political identity group.

But no, it apparently gets more finely sliced than that with white women under attack along with white men in the prevailing U.S. culture wars that may increasingly determine political outcomes.

Here's a Washington Post story about a recent conference in Detroit attended by about 4,000 women. What struck me about it was the following paragraph:

Identity issues were a theme of many of the convention events, which included a workshop titled “Confronting White Womanhood,” for “white women committed to being part of an intersectional feminist movement to unpack the ways white women uphold and benefit from white supremacy.”

Unpack? Then what?