It only took a little more than a week for Democrats to go from crying foul over a pro-Trump comedian’s insulting remarks on Puerto Rico to hurling insults at minorities whose electorates had shifted to the right on Election Day.
Other than old fashion revenge, what much of the invective had in common was a desire to see how poorly those ungrateful minorities would fare without the protection of newly jilted liberals.
“I guess those Latinos [who voted Republican] will enjoy watching the Trump Presidency from wherever it is he deports them to,” wrote one Air Force veteran who calls herself a Democrat. “Fu** Latinos and Arabs,” wrote another man who publicly identified as LGBTQ and pro-Black Lives Matter. “There I said it. Hope you all get deported and banned.” Even a top writer for “Mother Jones,” a leading liberal magazine, joined the fray, writing, “Perhaps massive deportations will affect how they see Trump.”
Never mind the fact that voters are, by definition, U.S. citizens and therefore not subject to deportation. What matters is the source of this bitterness and what it tells us about the state of contemporary American liberalism.
If asked, a political scientist would tell you that politics in a democracy is simply the struggle among competing interests. And they’d be right. Group A is likely to have different interests than Group B and, since neither group is powerful enough to grab hold of the levers of government by itself, each will weigh whether joining forces with Group C or D or E would likely get them whatever they’re after. The groups don’t all have the same priorities. Indeed, some of their issues may be in direct conflict. But the hope is that all groups will get at least some of what they want from the party they support.
The currencies any given group can bring to a political coalition are many. Some groups bring a lot of money–cash from large donors helps to get the word out; another group may have privileged access to media sources; another may have a network of political organizations that can help push people to the polls, and some groups have lots of actual voters who can punch cards or tap touch screens at campaign’s end. Put the resources of the coalition’s groups together and maybe they’ll carry each other over the finish line.
But particularly since the 1960s, when a combination of the civil rights movement and the New Left injected a stronger current of morality into modern politics, another more subtle cultural currency came into play in political alliances, the politics of benevolence. While politics in America has always involved some level of pretense that high-minded principles trumped material interests, of the two major parties the Democrats became more convinced that politics was, first and foremost, the collective expression of virtue.
Talk to a Democrat from the Westside of Los Angeles and they’re more likely to mention their party’s generous social policies aimed at the less fortunate than its approaches to the economic sector from which they earn a living. They may even explicitly claim that they vote against their own interests. But that’s not true.
Let’s say our hypothetical benevolent voter belongs to Group A, maybe he or she works or invests in the tech sector. Group A’s political alliance with the less fortunate members of Group H or J can bring their chosen candidate more voters, because let’s face it, Group A is a smaller demographic group than Groups H and J.
But such an alliance can also supply members of Group A with a sense of moral satisfaction. Because multi-group coalitions are inevitably hierarchical, members of the more privileged group can feel that they’ve protected the interests of groups who reside much lower than them on the totem pole. And in return, whether they admit or not, members of Group A often expect gratitude and party loyalty from members of Groups H and J.
But ironically, when people believe their political power is derived from their benevolence, it behooves them to maintain the social hierarchy from which their sense of righteousness arose. When sufficient numbers of Groups H and J abandon their alliance with Group A and join a new coalition, they not only undermine the privileged group’s belief in its own benevolence, they threaten its political power. In other words, if enough members of Group H and J abandon the coalition, Group A doesn’t get its own interests met.
Thus, the vitriol being directed at apostate minority voters is a rearguard effort to reassert hierarchy in a faltering coalition, to bully Groups H and J back into their place at the bottom of the totem pole. In addition to the revenge posts on X, more than a few analysts have suggested–without any evidence–that minorities who voted for Trump did so purely out of animus towards women or African Americans. All that proves is that while terms like racist or misogynist may have come into common use as part of a good faith effort to reform social attitudes, today–with their meanings now stretched beyond recognition–they are just as likely to be used to impose social control over recalcitrant groups and individuals.
One thing is for sure, however, the nasty aftermath of this ugly election has already proven that there were always interests lurking beneath the Democrats’ politics of benevolence.
