With Trump refusing to accept the election result, a lot of people are assuming he’s just having a bit of a hissy fit. Which he partly is, most probably. But it also suggests most still haven’t caught on to what Trumpism really is….
The people most loudly proclaiming their disdain for identity politics are, of course, the one most driven by identity politics. And that identity is whiteness. Commentators puzzled endlessly over why women would support a serial sex abuser. But they weren’t identifying as women when they waved those flags, they were identifying as white. Whiteness always over-rides.
People mostly associate this mindset with low social status, and the consequent need for compensatory factors. “My pockets might be empty, but they can’t take away my white face,” and so on. Which makes it seem more understandable.
But the hard-line, rally-attending Trump supporters are mostly middle income. Life to them is one long service encounter, where the white is forever the customer and the non-white the provider. If the election result isn’t to their liking they’re entitled to send it back, just like an on-line order they changed their mind over.
It’s important to recognise they genuinely believe what they’re saying, even when they’re making it up from minute to minute. Because this the way they’ve been conditioned to see the world. Throughout their lives, cops and other authority figures have aligned with them. They’re not in denial of reality, they just presume reality is theirs to make. They’re not deranged, they are privileged.
Which is why attempts at dialogue with them are such non-sequiters. Say to them, for example, “actually I‘m pretty sure election counts do have observers.” Their response is essentially “No, because I say so.” This isn’t an argument to be fact-checked or tossed back and forth, it’s an undeniable assertion. They can’t have lost because winning and losing is defined by them. It's not rights for whites. It's white is right.
But what about when other whites disagree with them? Like, you know, most whites. The short answer is this changes nothing. By choosing to side against them we traitors have forsaken our whiteness, and deserve to be treated no better than the rest. Whiteness transforms in that moment, from a birthright, an immutable characteristic, to a political choice, a club you can be kicked out of.
Well, that’s the half of it. Except there’s also an exacerbating factor without which Trumpism could not have come to exist, where their birthright now seems beleaguered. From civil rights and growing diversity at home, to a more globalised world. So they came to believe that whiteness needs reasserting, needed a movement building around it. Whiteness became something simultaneously self-evident and a thing under threat. So privilege becomes weaponised.
So it follows that Trump has nothing to gain and everything to lose by accepting the result. First try, the Supreme Court might just give the Presidency back to him regardless. Mostly, people are assuming that won’t happen because his case has no legal merit. Normally such naivete would be charming, but there’s quite a lot at stake here.
Let’s be clear… More that most such institutions, the Supreme Court is a political body masquerading as a legal one. It’s entirely composed of political appointees, mostly Republicans, two out of nine directly hired by Trump.
Here in Britain, strike ballots have been struck down by courts due to irregularities. Despite no-one disputing they were accidental, or that they made no difference to the overalll vote. In a similar way, the Supreme Court will be searching for petty errors to seize on and magnify.
And even if they can't get anything to stick… well, then they’ve just proved themselves more traitors, right? Trump fans won’t look at the verdict trying to find their own flaws, they’ll just dismiss it. They’ll busy themselves banding together - and around him - in this difficult time. His personal support might even increase from losing the election.
Reasoning them out of this stuff, that was never going to happen. Now, unsurprisingly, their alpha-winner losing, it being proven mathematically they don’t even speak for white people overall… it isn’t and it never was enough to disavow them. They need to be beaten in a much more direct and immediate way. Their supposed super-power, their whiteness, has to be held in front of them and shown to be ineffective. Which can be done. But it’s not over yet…
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