Donald Trump Gives White Men Permission to Be Sexist and Racist

​Large numbers of Americans are voting for Donald Trump because large numbers of Americans are racists and sexists, perturbed that their long-standing dominance in American life is slowly waning.

That is an impolite thing to say (or YUUUGELY politically incorrect, to borrow from the current Republican front-runner). American media elites, for all of their alleged elitism, keep searching for rational, coherent, or even minimally intelligent reasons why so many of their countrymen (and they are largely men) are backing for president a man who has offered exactly zero detailed or coherent policy points, and instead spent his campaign crafting a quilt of hateful polemics and improbably crude fantasies cast as solutions, all stitched together by strings of adolescent insults. This is a man so lacking in both chill and self-awareness that he continues to use his campaign stump as a platform from which to defend himself against a decades-old insult, recently raised again by Marco Rubio, about the size of his hands ("He said I have small hands — I'm actually 6'3", not 6'2" — but I've always heard people say, 'Donald, you have the most beautiful hands,'" Trump says). Still, Trump continues to dominate the GOP primary, and it's looking increasingly inevitable that he will go into the convention as the front-runner. That leaves the leaders of the Republican Party, along with writers and thinkers on the right and the left, wondering: What do these people see in him?

What they see is the most vulgar, obvious version of many of the values the Republican Party itself has been stoking for decades now: white supremacy and male entitlement. The kind of racism and sexism on display in the Trump campaign has been bubbling just under the surface (and sometimes over it) of the GOP for generations, but the counter-forces of liberalism and anti-racism have shifted the social consensus of what's acceptable and also what's acceptable to say out loud. There are many people who believe racism is wrong, that one's religion doesn't make them a terrorist, that women are just as capable and intelligent as men, that one's nationality or race doesn't make one more likely to be a criminal or rapist. But there are many others who don't believe those things and just don't say it out loud. Trump's proud refusal to be "politically correct" — which basically just means "don't be racist or sexist or otherwise bigoted" — opened a floodgate of prejudice from the people who were just waiting to be given permission to say out loud what they had long been thinking (or only saying behind closed doors). Others may not take the opportunity to join the chorus, but they are happy to tolerate it.

Donald Trump has taken this long-simmering bigotry in the GOP further: He was publicly supported by an actual white supremacist, as in the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and he initially refused to disavow his endorsement. Trump claimed he didn't know anything about the man, David Duke, and so couldn't comment on his support. Polifact gave Trump a "pants on fire" rating for this claim, but in any event, you would think it would be enough to hear "white supremacist" or "Ku Klux Klan" (probably also worth rejecting the public backing of any adult man whose official title is "Grand Wizard"). Trump eventually tweeted that he disavowed the endorsement, but even that was fairly subdued, especially compared to his usual bombast. And white supremacists continue to believe Trump is on their team.

His Republican challengers pounced, declaring the GOP a white-supremacy-free zone. Yet Trump was simply following a path well trod by successful and respected Republicans before him. Democrats dominated in the Deep South until party leaders launched their "Southern strategy" to appeal to racist whites in the South, sweeping Richard Nixon into power and handily winning the white Southern vote for generations. Barry Goldwater, a far-right darling sometimes compared to Trump, opposed the Civil Rights Act (he lost, badly). During his presidential campaign, the revered Republican Ronald Reagan spoke at a fairground situated in the county seat of Philadelphia, Mississippi, a city best known for the 1964 murders of civil rights activists, with a speech emphasizing the importance of "state's rights." "State's rights" is long-time shorthand for "a state's right to discriminate against black people."

Reagan and many Republicans who have come after him have used dog whistles to communicate to white voters, "I'm with you." Trump simply uses a bullhorn.

The GOP today is not the exact same party it was 20 years ago. And yet the GOP has long relied on the white male vote, stoking racial animus and subtle sexism to set up a clear-us-versus them politic, a sense that the white male experience in America is the standard and anyone who seeks to make the government meet their needs is a taker, a leach. They oppose abortion rights, widely accessible birth control, affirmative action, and the reining in of the policing and prosecuting that often wreak havoc on black communities. They cater to the aggrieved, the angry, the men who feel entitled to the attention and efforts of politicians, and who feel remarkably betrayed if their stranglehold on politics and culture begins to shift.

This is the GOP that the GOP has built. The question shouldn't be "How did this happen?" but rather, "Why now?"

And the answer is a combination of a black president, a potential female future president, a degenerating white male standard of living, and a presidential contender who is willing to use his authority to grant permission to the worst kinds of intolerance.

If history tells us anything, it's that every big social shift is met with a proportionately significant backlash. We've seen it again and again: Blowback against the gains of the civil rights movement, of the feminist movement, of increased rights and recognition for gay and transgender people.

So it should come as no surprise by the end of the first African-American president's second term, there is a significant segment of Americans who hate Barack Obama for reasons unrelated to his actual policies. Among some race theorists, there is an idea that whiteness — being a white person — only exists in opposition to blackness; that is, to define what you are, you have to also identify, define, and marginalize what you are not. For many white people, that difference from black people is a cornerstone of their identity, whether they would self-identify as a "white American" or not. And it's not just an identifier; it's something they believe makes them better. For generations — and still — white skin, and especially being a white male, has offered significant privileges and advantages in the United States, from the right to own other people, to the right to vote, to the right to eat in the restaurant of your choosing, to the right to a home in a good neighborhood, to a series of financial benefits and opportunities to build generational wealth. All of this has encouraged and abetted white prosperity. In 200 years, there has been just one president who is not white; there have been none who are not male. The overwhelming majority of congressmen, senators, and Supreme Court justices past and present have been white men. For as long as the United States has existed, white men have been able to look up and see people who look like them in positions of power, authority, and respect.

That is changing. An African-American president made a small dent in that unending line of white presidential power; a female president may make yet another. And the kind of Trump-supporting white men who have never had access to that kind of power, but saw themselves reflected in it (white men without college degrees and white men who are poor), are indeed suffering: Unemployment is higher, their real wages have dropped, and they're dying earlier.

And now, there are fewer people downstream from white Americans. The bottom fell out of the economy a decade ago; yes, there have been financial recoveries, but the psychic tolls remain. Looking at Donald Trump voters, these do not seem to be people who have a lot of options open to them — he is not securing the support of the educated, upwardly mobile class, and indeed proclaims, "I love the poorly educated." Rather, his base is the folks who feel cheated. They are the folks who have heard their entire lives that if they play by the rules — which basically means show up on time and don't break the law, at least not too seriously — they will prosper, or at least stay afloat.

That is no longer true. And instead of blaming complex geopolitical systems — the lack of a social safety net, the cult of masculinity that defines men by what they provide for their families, globalization, the outsourcing of low-skill jobs and related driving-down of wages — significant numbers of voters seem to blame the guy they see as taking what he doesn't deserve. They see that guy in the White House. They see that in the woman who could occupy it next.

There is no strategy in telling people they are racist or that their political views are facile, even ignorant. No Trump supporter will be swayed by this column. But perhaps the GOP, for so long a party breeding ignorance, stoking hatred, and encouraging a voter base of no-nothingness hostile to a changing world, can take an internal look and realize: Trump is blossoming. Who made this soil so fertile?

Trump may still lose the nomination; at the very least, he likely will face a difficult convention. But even if he loses, his base will remain, and those voters, with their hostility to minority groups, their sexism, and their racism, will continue to vote, to influence policy, and indeed to be some of our friends and neighbors. Even if Trump loses the election and retreats from the public square, the rest of us will have to reckon with the poison he left behind, and the reality that making America great may also mean making America honest about the bigotry and hatred living so acutely in our country. 

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