Tea Party whites, Trumpism and neo-Confederate pseudohistory

In yesterday's post on Arlie Russell Hochschild and her study on Louisiana Tea Party supporters, I mentioned an article of hers that appears in the current (10:1917) Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, Weiß und stolz und abgehängt.Donald Trump und der Südstaaten-Rassismus (behind subscription at this writing).

Part of her point in this article is that Southern Tea Party adherents - it would be redundant to say "white" adherents - focus on the government as the image and main instrument of the groups they see as the enemy: Yankees, coastal elites, Hollywood, black people, professional women, the mainstream media. In part, this is because of the eternal complaint against alleged freeloaders: "Und zudem gab der Staat Leuten Geld, die nicht arbeiteten, und untergrub damit die mit der Arbeit verknüpfte Anerkennung und Ehre." ("On top of it all, the government gave money to people who don't work and thereby undermined the recognition and honor tied up with work.")

The article notes that it is a translation into German from English, so I'm reverse-translating here without having the English original available.

But Tea Partiers do not view the government as a whole as their enemy. On the contrary, they worship the military and the police, worship in the Christian theological sense of idolatry even. The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE agents terrorizing Latino parents picking up their children and school - those actual coercive agents of the state, they ones that are charged with using physical violence on behalf of law-and-order, they are big fans of those!

No, it's the civilian government that raises their hatred. And particularly those aspects of civilian government that they imagine to benefit people less fortunate and/or less white than they are.

Hochschild describes a related aspect of Tea Partiers' admiration for Donald Trump's demagoguery and his rejection of "political correctness":

Daher hörten viele mit freudiger Erleichterung einen Donald Trump reden, der offenbar hemmungslos, omnipotent und wunderbar frei von jeglichen Einschränkungen durch politische Korrektheit war. Er äußerte sich verallgemeinernd über alle Muslime, alle Mexikaner, alle Frauen – unter anderem auch darüber, dass Frauen menstruierten, was er „ekelhaft” fand. (So sagte er über Megyn Kelly, die Nachrichtenmoderatorin von „Fox News“, sie „blute aus was auch immer”). Munter imitierte er einen behinderten Journalisten, indem er seine Arme schüttelte und so eine Zerebralparese nachahmte – in den Augen seiner Gegner alles zutiefst abfällige Äußerungen, die jedoch befreiend auf all jene wirkten, die sich durch die Mitleidsverpflichtung geknebelt fühlten. Trump ermöglichte es ihnen, sich als gute, moralische Amerikaner zu empfinden und zugleich überlegen gegenüber Menschen zu fühlen, die sie für „anders” oder unter ihnen stehend hielten.

[From that viewpoint, many listen to Donald Trump speak with happy relief, he being clearly unrestrained, omnipotent and miraculously free from any limitations from political correctness. He made sweeping declarations sweepingly about all Muslims, all Mexicans, all women - including even about women menstruating, which he finds "disgusting." (So he said about Megyn Kelly, the news moderator for Fox News, that she "had blood coming out of her wherever.") He jauntily imitated a disabled journalist by shaking his arms in order mimic cerebral palsy - in the eyes of his opponents, all the most deeply derogatory expressions, which nevertheless had a liberating effect on all those who felt themselves gagged by the obligation to feel pity. Trump made it possible for them to experience themselves as good, moral Americans and at the same time to feel superior to people that they regarded as "other" or beneath them.]

Or, to put it more succinctly, they got a thrill by identifying with Trump's meanness. This is a typical characteristic of authoritarian followers. Trying to understand this in terms of their "deep story," a Hochschild term that is otherwise useful, complicatres rather than clarifies understanding of how this attitude translates into the politics of Trumpism.

We could say that a normative issue imposes itself here. At what point does explaining this kind of collective joy in meanness cross over from understanding it to justifying it?

And this is not jsut a matter of show business. We see in Trump's callous and irresponsible response to Puerto Rico's hurricane disaster right now that this kind of meanness has ugly, real-world consequences. No matter how "liberating" Trump-adoring white people in Louisiana might feel it is to see Puerto Ricans suffer and die due to the kind of meanness Trump practices as President or how much "happy relief" it may give the Louisiana Tea Partiers.

Not to defend Donald Trump, but I couldn't find a report in which Trump used the word "disgusting" specifically in relation to his own genuinely disgusting comment about Kelly; he did use it about Hillary Clinton going to the bathroom during a break in one of the debates. (See: Kayla Epstein, Trump responds to Megyn Kelly's questions on misogyny – with more misogyny The Guardian 08/06/2015; Jacob Sugarman, Donald Trump’s disgusting new attack on Megyn Kelly: She had “blood coming out of her wherever” Salon 08/08/2015

If the reference above to white conservatives' complaints about welfare loafers seems like a throwback to the 1960s, Hochschild is also aware that the throwback goes even further.

In explaining the historical and sociological background of Southern whites, Hochschild relies heavily on the classic by W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941). Cash's book is a standard work and often quoted. But it was published in 1941. It has historical value. But it doesn't directly address the political of white Republicans in the Deep South in 2017. And even her historical accounts rely on confusingly wide descriptions. It likely wouldn't be clear to readers who weren't history with the history of sharecropping, for example, that this system was a post-Civil war institution, not an antebellum one.

But her historical account in this article recounts the neo-Confederate pseudohistory:

Dann brach der Bürgerkrieg aus, und der Norden schlug den Süden vernichtend. Städte wurden niedergebrannt, Felder verwüstet – teils von konföderierten Truppen auf dem Rückzug. Nach dem Bürgerkrieg ersetzte der Norden die Regierungen der Südstaaten durch eigene, handverlesene Gouverneure. Profitgierige Glücksritter kamen als Agenten des dominierenden Nordens. Ausbeuter aus dem Norden, eine wütende, traumatisierte schwarze Bevölkerung zu Hause und von allen Seiten moralische Verurteilung – das war das Bild, das mir die wütenden Südstaatler zeichneten.

[Then the Civil War broke out, and the North pulverized the South. Cities were burned down, fields wasted - partially by retreating Confederate troops. After the war, the North replaced the governments of the Southern state with its own hand-picked Governors. Profit-seeking adventurers came as agents of the domineering North. Exploiters from the North, an angry, traumatized black population at home and moral judgments from all sides - that was the picture that the furious Southerners drew.]

That's my translation from the German. And this is my supplemental translation out of Neo-Confederate-Speak:

Then the Civil War broke out when Southern slaveowners insisted on seceeding to defend slavery when they rejected the democratic results of the Presidential election of 1860. The North pulverized the South in four years of bloody warfare initiated by the white southern planters to defend their "right" to own other human beings as property. Cities were burned down, fields wasted - partially by retreating Confederate troops. And when the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the Confederate states, mass abandonment of the plantations by black ex-slaves, most of them native Southerners by birth, played a massive part in the "pulverizing" of the traitor Rebel government. After the war, the North replaced the governments of the Southern state with its own hand-picked Governors. (That one is too much of a fiction to even qualify.) Profit-hungry adventurers came as agents of the domineering North, according to the WATB grumbling of many former Confederates, even though massive capital investment from the hated North was desperately needed. Many Northern whites also came to act in such roles as schoolteachers, motivated by a patriotic and Christian desire to create a better future for the South that had been wrecked due to the treason of the slaveholding planter class. Exploiters from the North, as Southern white supremacists were wont to call any of their fellow Americans from the North, an angry, traumatized black population eager to become responsible free citizens, voters and full participants in civil life, and moral judgments from all sides - except from that of white supremacists who still hated democracy and Constitutional government, judgments that came because even Northerners who had previously been indifferent to slavery had been confronted with the true horror and destructiveness of the slave system - that was the picture that the furious white Southerners who rejected the American form of government and the American way of life drew, even though a significant number of Southern whites also supported the new democratic governments established during Reconstruction.

A very similar passage appears in her book Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), although she includes a couple of phrases there to slightly distance herself from the narrative, indicating that she's describing the version her Tea Party subjects gave her.

As a native-born white Mississippian, I'm tempted to say that only a Yankee would swallow that white Southerners actually believe that Lost Cause, neo-Confederate version of history. Yankees in my experience tend to be generous-minded in that way.

But for the most part, for any adult white Southerners that present the view of the Civil War and its aftermath that she describes there, one of three things is going on: (1) they are shooting off their mouths without putting their brains in gear; or, (2) they've made no effort to fact-check even the most superficial aspects of that story, even though the information is readily available; or, (3) they know it's hogwash and they are just repeating it because they see it as the White Man's tribal narrative and they identify with it and doing give a flying flip if it's actually true.

All of this points to a basic problem in trying to understand and explain a political phenomenon like the Tea Party or Trumpism in terms of a "deep story" that is heavily based on long-established ideological constructs. And deeply dishonest ones, at that.