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The Irrational Reaction to Trump’s Press Conference Is About Class and White Guilt
President Trump, August 15, 2017 (Photo credit: White House Youtube Channel)
The only way to describe the media’s reaction to Trump’s press conference and statements about the events in Charlottesville yesterday is irrational. To understand how irrational the reaction was, just imagine if instead of involving white nationalists and antifa counter protestors the events of last weekend had been a conflict between two rival biker gangs.
Do not change a single event from this weekend but imagine the events being the result of violence at a biker rally. One biker club has its national rally and a rival biker club shows up to protest and disrupt it. During the course of the weekend, a lot of shouting and violence take place. Fights break out on Friday. For reasons yet to be known the local police do nothing to separate the rival gangs and violence and conflict spills over into Saturday. Finally, on Saturday afternoon a member of the first gang runs a car into a crowd of its rival gang injuring nineteen and killing one.
Now ask yourself, would anyone in their right mind claim that only the first biker gang was to blame and everyone is obligated to condemn it? Of course, no one would. There would be national outrage about the problem of biker gangs. The local police would be called to the carpet for not maintaining order. Law enforcement would crack down hard on both gangs and biker rallies in general.
The only reason the media and the nation at large are not having the same reaction it would if Charlottesville involved a fight between biker gangs is because it involved white nationalists. And the media and political class are incapable of having a rational conversation about anything involving white nationalism or white supremacy. The reason for this is that to do so would be to call into question the entire concept of white guilt.
White guilt, like all racial collectivist beliefs, is completely irrational. White guilt is doubly irrational because it embraces the very sort of racial collectivism it claims to reject. It is irrational to say that one person is responsible for the actions of another person just because they share the same color of skin. It is irrational to say that anyone living today is in any way accountable or responsible or has any reason to feel guilty about events that occurred before they were born. The entire concept of collective guilt–be it based on race, class, sex or anything else–is utterly irrational. It represents the worst sort of tribalism, which civilization and rationality seek to end.
White guilt, like all irrational belief systems, is completely antithetical to any form of rational discourse about any of the areas it concerns. Once a believer in an irrational ideology is forced to have a rational discussion about one area of the ideology the entire ideology comes into question. This is why the integration of professional sports did so much toward ending the idea of white racial supremacy. When blacks and whites were not allowed to compete on the same field, whites could hold the irrational belief that whites were inherently superior athletes to blacks. Once Jackie Robinson became a star in the major leagues and Jim Brown became the best football player in the world, whites could no longer hold that belief. They were forced to have a rational conversation based on facts about the relative athletic ability of the two races. And once they did that, they could no longer refuse to question or discuss rationally their views on racial superiority in every other area of life. The entire ideology fell like a house of cards. Within a few decades, white supremacy went from a societal given to a fringe belief.
One of the primary tenants of white guilt is that white nationalism is a unique evil. White guilt necessitates that white nationalism not just be wrong but a unique wrong in the world, worse than communism or any of the sins of other races. If white nationalism isn’t worse than other isms, then whites have no more or less to answer for than any other race or creed and the whole edifice of white guilt collapses. This is of course irrational. White nationalism and belief in white supremacy is evil but no more or less evil than any other form of nationalism or religious or racial supremacy. So no believer in white guilt can have a rational discussion about white nationalism without calling the entire concept of white guilt into question.
Statue of Robert E. Lee (Photo credit: Katherine Welles / Shutterstock.com)
When Donald Trump spoke yesterday, he attempted to force the nation to have an honest and rational conversation about white nationalism and its involvement in the events last weekend. He said two undeniably truthful and rational things about the events this weekend. First, he said that not everyone at the march in Charlottesville was a white nationalist. This is true. The march was a protest against the tearing down of a Robert E. Lee statue. It was organized by white nationalists but 200 or so people attended. It is perfectly rational and truthful to say that not all of them were white nationalists. Some of them, albeit perhaps a small minority, no doubt were there because they wanted to save the statue.
Second, he said that the counter protesters deserve a significant share of the blame for the resulting violence and death. This is also true. The counter-protesters were active willing participants in the violence that occurred. The proof of that is in the photos and accounts of the weekend given in the Virginia ACLU Twitter feed. And as I explained above, had the events in Charlottesville involved any other group but white nationalists everyone involved would be assessed their share of the blame.
To say those things and to try and have a rational and truthful conversation about last weekend is to admit that it is possible for white nationalists, no matter how bad they are, to have been the victims of a wrong–or at least not totally responsible for the events of this weekend. And to do that is to necessarily admit the reality that white nationalists are not uniquely evil or worse than other violent or supremacist groups. Donald Trump’s statements were a direct challenge to the entire concept of collective white guilt.
One of the interesting things about Charlottesville, that no one seems to have noticed, is that an event that was supposed to be about white nationalism and white supremacy was not a race riot. I have not, in any of the pictures and video I have seen of the weekend, seen a single black person. Charlottesville was a conflict almost entirely or maybe entirely between white people. There is a good reason for this. The debate and conflict over white guilt is almost always a conflict between upper class and middle and lower class whites. Black people are nearly always bystanders or props in that conflict.
To understand why you have to understand how white guilt works. You would think the belief in collective white guilt would be an expression of self-loathing, but it is not. When a white person believes in white guilt they are engaging in one of the purest forms of virtue signaling. Since the belief is irrational and has nothing to do with their actions, they are not accepting any real moral responsibility. What they are doing is asserting their moral superiority over other white people who refuse to accept the belief. When a black person asserts collective white guilt, they are doing it to attack white people. When a white person does it, the white person is saying they understand their burden and the horrible sins of their race. In doing that, the white person is showing their moral superiority over other white people who refuse to accept their guilt and responsibility.
Embracing some level of white guilt is one of the primary ways upper class and gentry whites assert their moral superiority over middle and lower class whites. Middle and lower class whites don’t believe in white guilt. As a result, they often have more rational views about race. Middle and lower class whites can say and think rational things about race that upper-class whites cannot do without losing their class status. Lower and middle-class whites can believe that black people are sometimes just as racist as whites. They can believe that black supremacist groups can be just as bad as the KKK. They can believe that the Civil War was a complex event that wasn’t just about slavery and white supremacy, or that just because South Carolina or Mississippi were slave states and have a bad racial history doesn’t mean there are no good parts of those places or that people from there can’t be proud of their state.
Upper-class whites cannot believe any of that. No upper-class white would ever wave a Confederate flag. No upper-class white would ever say that the Black Panthers are as bad as the KKK. If they are conservative, they might say the KKK is insignificant but they would never say that a black group is qualitatively just as bad. To do any of that would necessarily call into question the idea of white guilt and mean being kicked out of the class.
So when Trump tried to force a rational conversation about white nationalism Washington, D.C., that most white and upper class of cities, lost its collective mind. It was all hands on deck — Left and Right — to save and assert the white guilt moral privilege. The responses to Trump were predictably irrational and counterfactual. For the crime of saying not every incident is entirely one sided, Trump was accused of being a white supremacist. In other words, the president everyone feared he would be. Some of the reaction was so counterfactual it can fairly be called insane. Mitt Romney and John McCain described the counter-protesters as fighters for justice and equality against the forces of prejudice and racism. People who showed up waving Communist flags and carrying pepper spray and bags of feces and urine are now fighters against evil and prejudice. Really? The entire response boiled down to a giant guttural groan of “How Dare You!” by the white upper class. Trump had attacked their most sacred moral privileges and they were not going to take it lying down.
What will be the fall out of all this? Like most things involving Trump, a lot less than people think. First, I don’t think it is going to make a bit of difference politically. The people who voted for Trump are almost to the person people who reject the concept of white guilt. So, they won’t see it the way the media and the Washington Establishment has. They will see it as Trump saying entirely fair and rational things. I don’t see Trump’s support dropping one bit. Trump’s enemies will just have a new reason to feel aggrieved.
Second, I don’t think we are going to see much white nationalist vs. antifa violence. Trump tried to force a conversation the left doesn’t want to have. For the left, white guilt is not just about class it is also how it enforces identity politics. The left needs white guilt. Trump also tried to force the left to talk about its role in this violence. And that is also not a conversation anyone on the left wants to have. The left has condoned and enabled antifa violence for years and gotten away with it. They do not want to have to answer for that.
I think that police departments in Democratic cities are going to start doing their jobs. Instead of standing down at these marches and counter-protests, the police will start keeping the two sides apart, arresting people who show up with weapons and bags of urine, and cracking down hard on any fights that break out, and maintaining order. Deprived of the ability to riot with impunity, antifa will find better things to do. They don’t want to go to jail any more than anyone else and protests get pretty boring if you no longer have free reign to attack people. Deprived of any violence to use to slander the Right, the media will lose interest as well. Over the next few months, these marches are going to return to being the small events of paper-hanging losers they have always been. So, I wouldn’t stock up on ammunition for the coming civil war just yet.
Lastly, I think that the drive to tear down Confederate monuments will likely fizzle as well. They will tear a few more down in Democratic cities but the issue will fade away as well. Trump did another thing yesterday: he laid down the mark that if this stuff didn’t stop they would be calling for tearing down George Washington statues. Of course, all right thinking people are today dismissing this. They, however, know that it is true. There are already calls to tear down the statues of Theodore Roosevelt in museums in New York City. You can tear down Confederate statues and largely avoid a rational conversation. Most people really don’t know who the people were and you can always use the “but it’s racist” charge to keep the average observer from objecting. George Washington or Teddy Roosevelt are different. People do know who they are and can’t be scared off by the racist charge. And the Left doesn’t want a rational conversation about that any more than they want a rational conversation about last weekend.
The statue controversy, like all leftist causes, is entirely manufactured. We had a century-long struggle for black civil rights in this country. During that time not a single person to my knowledge — not Martin Luther King, not W.E.B Dubois, not Booker T. Washington, not Malcolm X — ever cared or said a single word about those monuments. Yet, suddenly, in 2017 they are a threat to all that is right and good. Give me a break. Once the left decides tearing them down is no longer to their advantage, and they will if they haven’t already, no more will be heard about the subject.
Published in Culture
Actually, why not call into question the concept of guilt, period? Not “guilty” in a legal sense, but guilt in a psychological sense?
What do guilt feelings accomplish? Are actions performed because of them better than actions we perform when free of the sense of guilt?
Once the milk is spilt, don’t lash your conscience over it. Just clean up. Easy. You can do right without feeling guilty about wrongs you’ve done.
Spin keeps saying things which which I agree! The end must be near!
All of them? Every single left-of-center American believes this?
Who’s painting with the broad brush now, eh?
And when we don’t try to fight the media, how does that work to our advantage?
We’re perpetually in a fight with the media because the media is always fighting us. The only difference is that when we hit back, the media overplays it’s hand and looks more stupid.
We approach fighting the media like the left approaches fighting aggressive foreign powers and terrorists, operating under the naïve assumption that if we don’t hit them they won’t hit us.
The media buried Bush, McCain, and Romney and none of the three “played into their hands” by fighting back. Maybe what Trump’s doing will work, maybe it won’t, but at least it’s not what we’ve been doing ever since Reagan and thus guaranteed to fail.
Don’t know about that – they’re equally evil. Period. Full stop.
And BTW. All this talk about the KKK, civil rights opponents, and the like: backed by the Democrats from the beginning. But the protesters against them have no idea about the actual history of their origins.
Agreed. But sometimes stating truths isn’t the politic thing to do or will result in predictable responses. Kind of like how Obama didn’t score any points with conservatives for his constant insistence that not all Muslims are terrorists. And then there’s the question of which truths to serve or highlight and when. It would have been just as truthful for Trump to specifically call out the driver of the car as a murderer (it took him almost two days to get around to that). Instead, he chose the moment, at least by your analysis, as a teachable moment on white guilt. Fine, just don’t act hurt and put upon when the predictable caterwauling from the left and the MSM ensues.
If you spilled the milk or, better, if you flung it in someone’s face then yes, you should feel guilty. Guilt is painful, and we learn from pain. What the OP is talking about is guilt for milk that you neither spilled nor threw, and if it hasn’t been cleared up by now, you certainly aren’t going to be able to do it.
Vicarious guilt is being pushed as virtue; it’s not. It’s a vice. First, because it’s a lie (‘we’ didn’t enslave anyone; they (the long dead) did) and second because it represents a kind of moral theft. I can’t pick up the burden of your guilt and carry it for you and to attempt this is to cultivate a kind of collective messiah complex that is unattractive, unhealthy and very unhelpful to the people that the wanna-be saviors seek to save.
Bush won 2 terms in the White House, not exactly my definition of “guaranteed to fail.” Remains to be seen if Trump will be as successful or not.
That’s certainly what a lot of people who voted for Trump hear. And I’ve spoken with “center” and “left” anti-Trumpers who tell me that is what they mean.
Good Post John,
I agree that the media’s reaction on the face of it was irrational. Trump was right; both sides and particularly the Police Authorities should share the blame for the death at Charlottesville. However, the media’s ” irrational ” response is really not all that irrational because it seemingly is part of a coherent strategy that is working all to well to demonize the right.
What was really irrational was all these people, RINO’s and soft conservatives principally among them, that claim to follow the Constitution, American Values and the rule of Law, particularly John McCain, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, who jumped in with both feet to loudly criticize Trump and those by inference that defended the rights of the Unite the Right group. Trump was right- these goody two shoe Republicans were clearly not.
As to the motivation of these lying cowards, I do not think it is white guilt – it something a little bit different – it is the fear of being called a racist and a white supremacist, and also tinged with a bit of yearning to be accepted by the “in crowd” fashionable Left.
Did you notice how the media, the Left, and their favorite Rino’s forcefully conflated, almost immediately, any attempt to defend the civil rights of the Unite the Right protesters as a full blown endorsement of White Supremacy, with hardly any pushback by our supposed civil betters in the middle?
What is happening here are two enormously consequential and interrelated problems: the ever increasing phenomenon that our justice system and police authorities no longer will fairly and equitably enforce the law, succumbing time and again to the will of the Left, and the ever increasing tendency of those in supposedly the civil and high brow middle to let the Left run roughshod over people, often in the hinterland, that this civil and high brow middle feel are culturally inferior to themselves.
What is at stake here is the very soul of our Republic. If we let this travesty continue on as it is, we will surely in short order lose forever our rights and our Republic.
However special condemnation should be reserved for Law Enforcement and particularly the person of Jeff Sessions, our Attorney General. You could see this riot at Charlottesville coming a mile away. Antifa was growing more violent and aggressive with each riot they incited. The Authorities at the University of Virginia and Charlottesville knew what had happened at Berkeley and elsewhere, but chose to let Antifa, BLM and others run wild.
Sessions should have stepped in long ago and stopped the inciting of political riots across state lines, but as with every other crime by the Left, he chose to do nothing.
When you choose not to enforce the law equitably, and you let one segment of society terrorize another as Sessions has done, the breakdown of civil order and civil society is not far behind.
By the time he left office, Bush was about as popular as diaper rash. Yes, he won reelection, but his anemic responses to the press’s incessant attacks did not work. At. All.
And it didn’t work for McCain and Romney, either.
We don’t know what the ultimate result of Trump’s approach will be. However, the way Republicans have responded to the press in general (and on race issues especially) has been a spectacular failure. We’ve got to try something new.
W left office with an approval rating of 34%. Trump’s RCP average is 37.8. Trump is already well into diaper rash territory, and he still has 7 1/2 years to go (if he even makes it that far).
Sorry, but I don’t trust the polls in the slightest. This media is determined to portray Trump in the worst possible manner in every respect, so I fully expect the polls to reflect that.
But even if they’re correct, the midterms are a long way off, and considering the constant viciousness of the coverage, he has to be doing something right or his approval would be under 10%.
By the time Bush left office damn near everyone was sick of him. Trump has his haters, but he still has enthusiastic supporters, something Bush lacked by the time he was gone.
Besides, every “smart” person out there knew Trump had no chance of winning last November.
Exactly@katebraestrup.
And what infuriates me is that everyone in the world, except Americans, gets this kinda treatment. “Collective guilt” for even humanity’s most reviled crimes is anathema: does anybody call Merkel a Nazi? Is the massacre of the Armenians brought up every time Turkey makes the news, like during the recent failed coup?
And who is left holding the bag for African Slavery:
the Portuguese, who initiated it? (And imported more slaves to its colony Brazil than any other New World colonial power)?
The English, Dutch, Spanish and French, whose nations were all involved in the Atlantic slave trade for approx 200 years ?
The English and French , whose people, if not their reluctant governments, enthusiastically supported the “brave planters” of the slave-owning South during the Civil War?
Nah.
It’s the USA, and every white American, (despite the fact that many of our ancestors came here as slaves, convict labor or indentured servants);
the USA, which ended involvement in the slave trade only 32 years after becoming a nation;
the USA, which fought a bloody Civil War less than 100 years after we bacame a nation to abolish the practice the departed colonial powers had established here.
This is not “collective guilt”.
This is “selective guilt”.
I find this tiresome canard ever more grating. No, the Civil Was was not JUST about slavery — but seriously, can you point me to an argument that suggests that it would have happened without the visceral undergirding provided by that issue? Remember, as with all wars, it was engineered by the elites of the age — in this case, the class of people who depended upon slavery and who saw (mild sarc alert) the preservation of the pristine flower of white womanhood as a sacred calling. Everything else looks pretty negotiable.
As to the Charlottesville unpleasantness, it’s actually simple: No one present with a stick and a helmet who was not a police officer was innocent. Full stop.
Kudos for fascinating discussion of white guilt. Definitely a keeper for my Unified Theory of Everything.
Sorry but you are never going to convince me that lying or pretending the facts are not as they are is the right thing to do and especially if your justification is because telling the truth will make people angry or uncomfortable. The truth is what it is and not telling it never makes things better.
Would the Civil War have occurred absent the slavery issue? Probably not. That, however, does not mean that slavery was the entire cause or that everyone who was a part of it was acting in response to slavery. For some people involved it was entirely about slavery. For others, it was about states rights. Most people who fought for the South didn’t own slaves. Many didn’t even like slavery. And many people who fought for the North had no objection to slavery and fought because they wanted to save the union. There is no one right answer to the question of “what was the Civil War about?” It is too large of an event to lend itself to simple and definitive answers.
I understand the distinction you’re making here, but I think your conclusion is silly, and I doubt you would accept it yourself if it were made about any other war.
For example, many non-Germans volunteered for the Foreign SS because they wanted to fight the Soviet Union. Does the fact that this happened render what World War II was about so complicated and difficult to understand that we can only throw our arms up in the air and give up trying? Do you really believe that particular historical event is so large and complicated that we must declare “what was World War II about?” an unanswereable question?
Let’s maybe test a simpler example: the 1991 Gulf War. Some Americans fought in the Gulf War because they joined the Army to get free college tuition under the GI bill. Some Americans volunteered for military service because they want to kill people and not break the law doing so. Some Americans volunteered for military service because they wanted to fight the Soviet Union, but the Cold War ended. Pretty much nobody volunteered to fight in the Gulf War because they wanted to defend Kuwait; very few Americans to this day can find Kuwait on a map. Does this superposition of motives make the cause of the Gulf War complex and indecipherable, or is the answer “Because Iraq invaded Kuwait?”
I would make it about any war. World War II was about a lot of things. What is silly is drawing cartoons about complex events. Sorry but I don’t do that. Saying that does not make it an unanswerable question. It says the answer varies depending on the perspective. That is how truth and reality work. You can get it clear or you can get it right. How far you go in either direction usually comes directly at the expense of the other.
I’m not saying to lie or put your head in the sand. You’re acting as if the only relevant truths at Charlottesville were the ones Trump chose to highlight. Other relevant facts were that a white nationalist supporter killed a woman and not everyone in the counter demonstration contributed to the violence. But if Trump had chosen to point out those truths instead would you be as enthusiastic in your support?
Then how on Earth do you claim to know this:
Did you travel around the country and personally interview millions of people to reach this conclusion?
Hi! Enthusiastic W supporter here, then and now. Nice to make your acquaintance.
So now you know one.
No, but near the end of his term I was interacting with Republicans from virtually every ideological part of the GOP from a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds in multiple states, and “enthusiasm” was the last word I’d use to describe people’s feelings about Bush. His support was almost entirely of the “at least he’s not a Democrat” variety.
Trump can fill stadiums. In 2007, could Bush?
He was a little busy governing the country. Something Trump doesn’t spend enough of his time doing.
Joe P: “He was a little busy governing the country. Something Trump doesn’t spend enough of his time doing.”
If only. Dubya phoned in at least the last three years of his Presidency. You remember that little banking crisis? If only Bush had been on top of things that would never have happened.
Trump may be a loudmouth and may say some things on Twitter that are ill advised, but at least he will dare to speak the truth once in a while like he did in his last news conference. If only McCain, Rubio, Romney and Corker could do the same.
Trump is also busy defending the country against it’s domestic enemies that want to trash the Constitution and destroy our many rights, particularly the freedom of speech, something Dubya, McCain, Rubio, Romney and Corder never seem to want to do.
And maybe Bush should have made time to keep citizens abreast of what he was doing and why. His failure to counter the “Bush lied, people died” meme allowed the Iraq war to plummet in popularity, thus inspiring the election of a president who lost all the gains the blood of our soldiers and marines won for us. His PR was a dismal failure in every sense, and it resulted in disaster.
But the point still stands that he couldn’t have filled a stadium near the end of his term if his life depended on it.
And the point still stands that the jury is still out on whether Trump will make it through his first term, let alone win re-election, let alone have any enthusiastic supporters left in 7 years. Time will tell, but it’s way too soon to conclude that Trump’s approach is more successful by any measure than W’s was.
Like I said earlier, we don’t know the results of Trump’s approach yet, but we do know Bush’s was a failure.
(Winning reelection doesn’t define success. It merely puts you in a position to achieve success, even though losing is definitely failure.)
It certainly prevented 4 years of a Kerry administration, just as Trump’s biggest accomplishment to date was preventing 4 years of a Clinton administration.