Ethan Grey
@_EthanGrey
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Leaving my threads as a resource for anyone who has appreciated them. Vote Democratic.
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This is a thread on Republican messaging. The press doesn’t want to have a direct conversation with you about this. So as a former Republican who is now a consistent Democratic voter, I will. Thread.
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Here is the Republican message on everything of importance:
1. They can tell people what to do.
2. You cannot tell them what to do.
This often gets mistaken for hypocrisy, there’s an additional layer of complexity to this (later in the thread), but this is the basic formula.
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If this has been a source of confusion, then your assessments of what Republicans mean by “freedom” were likely too generous. Here’s what they mean:
1. The freedom to tell people what to do.
2. Freedom from being told what to do.
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Anyway, I made this thread mostly because I realize that the press has a "messaging problem." Namely, in the sense that they seem extremely averse to explicitly identifying the message of the Republican Party. It's called white male supremacy. Thanks for reading.
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When Republicans talk about valuing “freedom”, they’re speaking of it in the sense that only people like them should ultimately possess it.
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1. Donald Trump won the GOP primary and the presidency because campaigning on whiteness-first messaging still has potency in the 21st century. Plenty of people don’t want to directly engage with this fact, but this thread will be getting into it in full.
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You've watched the Republican Party champion the idea of "freedom" while you have also watched the same party openly assault various freedoms, like the freedom to vote, freedom to choose, freedom to marry who you want and so on.
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Anyway, gun violence in schools is not a problem, but their children having to wear masks in schools is. Because somebody is telling their children what to do. Dead children don’t bother them, but telling their children what to do? Only *they* should do that.
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The reason they say they are “pro-life” when they are trying to tell women what to do with their bodies is not out of genuine concern for human life, but because they recognize that in this position, they can tell women what to do with their bodies.
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This is because the press has chosen to accommodate the Republican Party in a very specific way:
1. It normalizes the Republican agenda.
2. It normalizes framing the responsibility for stopping that agenda as ultimately being on Democrats.
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They claim to be for “small government”, but that really means a government that tells them what to do should be as small as possible. But when the Republican Party recognizes it has an opportunity to tell people what to do, the government required for that tends to be large.
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All Republicans saw were certain people trying to tell them what to do, which was enough of a reason to make it their chief priority to insist that they will not be told what to do. Even though what they were told to do could save lives, including their own.
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That’s why when you use that same appeal—“pro-life”—when you ask Republicans to do something about gun violence in schools, it doesn’t work. Because you are now in the position of telling Republicans what to do. That’s precisely why they don’t want to do anything about it.
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Now here’s where things get interesting: when you explain to Republicans you want them to do something and explain it’s on the basis of benefitting other people. Now you have really crossed a line. Not only did you tell them what to do, you told them to consider others.
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As you can see, this is a very stunning commitment to refusing to be told what to do. So much so that it is not in fact “pro-life.” But Republicans will nevertheless claim to be the “pro-life” party. That is because they recognize “pro-life” can be used to tell people what to do.
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Let’s start with the COVID-19 pandemic. We were told by experts in infectious diseases that to control the spread of the pandemic, we had to socially distance, mask, and get vaccinated. So, in a general sense, we were being told what to do. Guess who had a big problem with that.
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So let’s add one more component to the system for who tells who what to do:
1. There are “right” human beings and there are "wrong" ones.
2. The “right” ones get to tell the “wrong” ones what to do.
3. The “wrong” ones do not tell the “right” ones what to do.
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If Republicans could do this in every social space—tell the people who aren’t like them too bad, get the fuck out—I’m here to assure that would be something resembling their ideal society.
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As you can see, I've just been talking about white male supremacy and the accompanying caste system structure it enforces all along. And I'm talking about this because the message of the Republican Party is that they quite like it.
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The reason Republicans are so focused on the border isn’t because they care about border security, it’s because they recognize it as the most glaring example of when they can tell other people what to do. That's why it’s their favorite issue.
You want in? Too bad. Get out.
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Furthermore, you are conceiving the planet as a thing that all human beings should have to share. I am here to assure you that the GOP’s main concern with the planet is to ensure that they don’t have to share it.
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The whole point of an arrangement where you can tell people what to do, but you can’t be told what to do, is precisely to avoid having to consider others. This is why this is their ideal arrangement: so they don’t have to do that.
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So with this in mind, let’s examine some of our political issues with an emphasis on who is telling who what to do. And hopefully there will be no ambiguity about what the Republican Party message is ever again.
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On the issue of climate change, a lot of them don’t regard it as a serious issue to the extent that they think it is a hoax. This is because when you tell Republicans to do something for the sake of the planet, you are still ultimately telling them to what to do.
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What you didn’t understand from the very beginning is that Democrats should not ultimately be in the position to tell anyone what to do. Only Republicans should be in the position to tell people what to do.
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Now, there are economic policies that we’ve proposed that we can demonstrate would be of obvious benefit to even Republican voters. So how do Republicans leaders kill potential support for these policies? Make the issue about who is telling who what to do.
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They focus on the fact that Democrats may raise taxes. Even when it’s painfully obvious that Democrats aren’t going to raise taxes on everyone (or on very few people), what’s important here is that Democrats are the people telling certain people what to do.
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If you want to know why Republicans can easily be talked out of proposals from the Democratic Party that are shown to be of benefit to them, it is precisely because they have to entertain the idea of Democrats telling certain people what to do.
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As you can see, this is a very toxic relationship with the idea of who can tell who what to do. So much so that it seems like the entire point is to conceive of a “right” kind of people who can tell other people what to do without being told what to do. Yep, that’s the point.
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But I realize that we are operating in an environment where white male supremacy is so entrenched that the press can’t even conceive of the Republican Party’s agenda of sorting the “right” human beings from the “wrong” ones as maybe presenting a “messaging problem.”
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Think about it: white supremacy is not allowed to be viewed as a “messaging problem.” Even when it’s a threat to democracy. Because if it’s a “messaging problem”, to Republicans, that sounds you're telling them that's a problem they have to solve.
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Former GOP here.
If you're a Democrat who is open to or has called for replacing Joe Biden, the only two things you've demonstrated is that GOP messaging works on you and that you aren't listening to rank-and-file Democratic voters.
That's precisely where the GOP wants you.
President Biden is a tremendous patriot and public servant.
One thought I cannot escape:
Americans have made clear they don’t want this rematch.
If either party nominee stepped aside for someone new, that party would be seen by voters as the party that listened.
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17. Trump won the GOP primary and was propelled to the White House because a swath of white voters wanted to send this message to people of color after 8 years of a Black President who successfully governed: “The worst of us should still be given deference over the best of you.”
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Over 100 newspapers called for Bill Clinton to resign.
There were calls to replace Obama with Hillary.
There were calls to replace Hillary late in 2016.
There are calls to replace Joe Biden now.
If you are a Democrat, the press will at some point just demand that you get out.
Stepping back for a second, I wonder why the political press shifted so hard, so fast into an anti-Biden campaign. It wasn’t the debate, they all knew he was 80 years old. The debate was the excuse, and I know it’s personal pettiness for the NYT, but what was it for the rest.
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15. What white supremacy greatly fears is a genuine meritocracy, a society where anyone, regardless of race or gender, can rise according to their talents and diligence.
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34. Now that this thread is getting a lot of attention, I think it's only fair for me to add that many of the observations in this thread conform to what people of color have been saying for years and years. That shouldn't go unacknowledged.
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5. But these theories do not have any explanatory power regarding why the vote broke down the way it did demographically. Only one broad demographic seemed to be receptive to the kind of campaign that Trump ran on: white people.
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6. We must be cognizant of what Trump ran on: calling Mexicans rapists, banning Muslim immigration, building a wall to keep undocumented immigrants out, national stop-and-frisk. And he has a track record of questioning the legitimacy of Obama's birth certificate.
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16. For white supremacy to guard against a trajectory toward meritocracy, this requires everything of merit must be sacrificed, which brings us to a terrifying conclusion: the various ways Trump was unfit for the Presidency were features to his voters, not flaws.
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14. We can’t just say “Donald Trump won by cultivating bigotry” though because that still leaves some things ambiguous. Donald Trump won because affirming the primacy of whiteness is still an issue of importance to too many white voters.
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2. All too often I see the framing that “Hillary lost to the worst candidate in history.” But I think this framing has always been wrong, and it allows people to bypass a question that they don’t want to grapple with: why was Trump electorally viable to the degree that he was?
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33. I made this thread because I am sick of the bullshit excuses for voting for Trump as well as the attempts to obfuscate what happened in 2016. Regardless of your opinion of Hillary Clinton, this was my attempt to explain what happened in 2016. Thanks for reading.
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31. The unfortunate truth is Trump is the culmination of a force that has always been here, namely the tendency to undermine and destroy institutions that do not show extraordinary deference to whiteness, and instead, propping up new and regressive systems in their place.
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7. We know that denial of racism, alongside hostile sexism, predicted a vote for Donald Trump significantly more than other factors like economic dissatisfaction.
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25. Here’s a specific example: we could have had something akin to single-payer during the Truman years. But white southerners opposed it because they feared a national health insurance program would force hospitals to integrate. Seriously.
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24. This is actually why many fiscally left-leaning policy positions that we support run into brutal opposition; the real undercurrent is too many white people do not want to share the safety net with anyone else. Then they wouldn't be on top.
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In this thread, I will be discussing the behavior of Donald Trump’s base throughout the viral pandemic—everything from their disdain towards wearing masks to their reluctance to getting vaccinated—but I will be doing it through a very specific lens: caste.
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19. In W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, he wrote about the psychological wage of whiteness; in exchange for experiencing potentially low economic wages, white people were given a psychological wage in the form of ubiquitous deference.
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9. Lack of education predicted support for Trump because of its strong relationship to ethnocentrism, not so much income and occupation. Trump voters thought that a hierarchy that prioritized white people was under attack. Trump helped cement that belief.
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18. Furthermore, this entitlement is so profound that many white voters have been willing to sacrifice benefits to their class in exchange for seeing institutions uphold the primacy of whiteness.
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27. Reality: This country was founded upon building an economy on top of exploiting Black labor, concentrating wealth produced from that labor in the hands of white people, and deploying all kinds of terrible tactics to ensure that rigid social stratification was upheld.
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13. We know Trump’s temperament is horrible, he lacks the qualifications to govern effectively, he doesn’t know the ins and outs of the issues, he has no real desire to learn, he is obsessed with denigrating his opponents and not being humiliated, and he’s a lecher.
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30. As minorities increasingly got to participate in democracy—both in terms of voting and participating in government—we saw a decline in bipartisanship, a trend which effectively exploded when Barack Obama was elected President. This isn't a coincidence.
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22. Wild, right? People will opt for a job that pays absolutely less so long as they know they make more relative to everyone else over a job where they make absolutely more but relatively less than everyone else. Because people want to know they’re on top.
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21. A Harvard study asked people if they’d rather make $50,000 when everyone else around them makes $25,000 OR if they’d rather make $100,000 when everyone else around them makes $200,000. Fifty percent of respondents opted for the former.
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3. Do not construe this as me arguing that Hillary’s campaign didn’t make mistakes, but I want to laser focus on why people voted for Trump, and what that says about where we are as a country.
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23. But if that’s how people behave in non-racial contexts, then it’s actually not a wild leap to conceive of white people forgoing economic benefits so long as they get institutions and politicians upholding white supremacy. They want to know they’re on top.
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8. This kind of correlation between racial resentment and the probability of voting for Trump has been observed in other studies.
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28. And when that status quo has been challenged, our country has experienced its most significant upheavals. The U.S. fought its bloodiest and most destructive war over whether the enslavement of Black people should continue.
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11. We’ve seen something analogous under President Obama; racial resentment predicted perception of the economy (note the blue curve). The more racially resentful, the poorer the perception of the economy.
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10. Separate point: perceptions of the economy don’t really determine political preference. Rather, it’s the other way around; political preferences determine economic perceptions. Bearing this in mind…
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4. We've seen the excuses for Trump:
“He promised to shake up the establishment.”
“His campaign resonated with those who have been left behind.”
“It’s just so refreshing to hear a candidate speak his mind.”
“Trump voters responded to economic anxiety.”
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32. The White House did not show extraordinary deference to whiteness for the past eight years because the President was Black, so the institution was undermined by a majority of white people who voted for a man thoroughly unfit to run the institution but promised bigotry.
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12. So yeah. You see the theme. Of course, it’s not enough to grapple with what the appeal of Trump’s campaign was. We must also be cognizant of the fact that that appeal was propelled to the White House while Trump has demonstrated he's thoroughly unfit.
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20. If you find it hard to conceive of people forgoing fiscal wages for the sake of a psychological wage, consider that similar behavior has been observed in non-racial contexts.
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The moment that it was understood that COVID-19 disproportionately affects communities of color, the immunocompromised, and other vulnerable populations, Donald Trump’s base decided that the viral pandemic was acceptable.
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26. The 60s marked a period of significant success for the Democratic Party and civil rights. It also led to a flight of white southerners from the party and the end of bipartisanship on redistributionist policies.
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1. In this thread, I’ll be delving into the psychology of white supremacy to answer the question of why Donald Trump’s base has stuck with him. You may know what white supremacy is ideologically, but you may not see how it could come to be viewed as the most important thing.
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Democrats calling for Joe Biden to be replaced don't understand that once that scenario occurs, Republican messaging will be relentless about framing Joe Biden being replaced as a Donald Trump achievement, and the press is just going to relentlessly accommodate this narrative.
SCOOP: In new candid vid Trump states as fact that Biden is "quitting the race" after debate—"I got him out"—and calls him an "old broken-down pile of crap." Trump says he'd prefer to run against Kamala Harris, calls her "pathetic."
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29. Eras of relative stability for the United States, on the other hand, usually relied on people with power tacitly (or explicitly) upholding racial exclusion from democracy.
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The reality: Donald Trump’s base has a sense of occupying the dominant caste, they want to think of COVID-19 as a lower caste issue, and the dominant caste being forced to go out of its way to protect people perceived as lower in caste is a supreme violation of caste rules.
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You’ve been rationally approaching the pandemic as a threat to your health & to the health of the people you care about. Trump’s base has approached the pandemic with a paranoid suspicion that the pandemic will be used as a pretext to upset a caste order that privileges them.
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The most important thing to Trump’s base is not ending the pandemic. The most important thing is ensuring the pandemic cannot be used as a pretext to alter the rules of society, and this is based on an awareness of who COVID-19 significantly affects.
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1. Donald Trump ascended to the White House in 2016 because sexism still has electoral potency in the 21st century. This thread will comprehensively delve into all the evidence supporting that conclusion.
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Donald Trump himself best channeled how his base views the pandemic when he said this: “if you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at.” From Adam Serwer’s book “The Cruelty is the Point.”
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Donald Trump did not see himself as being under an obligation to act as a President for all Americans, and his base was with him that regard. In him, they saw their own desire to ignore the issue if they perceived it was just Democrats being significantly impacted.
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Donald Trump recklessly holding rallies throughout the viral pandemic was precisely what they wanted. Because it was about reasserting the power that comes with being in the dominant caste: you can go where you want, do what you want, and behave how you want without consequences.
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When they speak of “freedom”, they speak of the “freedom” to not bear any responsibility in controlling the spread of the virus. Any responsibility to act better. The virus is beneath them. Therefore, the people who care about the virus are automatically viewed as beneath them.
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All subsequent discussion of how caste intersects with the pandemic will be based on this summary of the temperament of dominant caste behavior from Isabel Wilkerson’s book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”
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Members of the dominant caste view it as important that you treat their views as the correct ones. This is a very different energy from a genuine desire to hold correct views. When you tell members of the dominant caste to get vaccinated, all they see is your lack of deference.
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So that’s it. No more wondering what’s ultimately driving the behavior of Trump’s base during the viral pandemic. Their behavior during the pandemic is completely synonymous with their behavior before the pandemic. They are upholding America's caste system: white male supremacy.
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I want to thank my friend,
@HawaiiDelilah
, a social scientist and a woman of color, for taking the time to review a draft of my thread.
And if you haven’t picked up Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste” or Adam Serwer’s “The Cruelty is the Point”, please do. Thank you for reading.
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Bear in mind the priorities of the dominant caste as you read ahead: to see itself as most correct. To refuse instruction from people outside of it. To ensure it has the power to put people in their places. To deny shared basic human experiences with anyone perceived as lower.
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But according to caste rules, the dominant caste does not get told what to do. Not when it comes to protecting themselves, and most *definitely* not when it comes to protecting people perceived as beneath their station.
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I'm convinced that the people who want Hillary Clinton to stop talking about 2016 feel this way because they know full well what they did in 2016, and they don't want anyone potentially calling attention to it.
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Nothing in this thread will be news to people of color. And the views posted in this thread are not original. Isabel Wilkerson, who wrote the book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent”, greatly informed my understanding of caste.
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Their sense of identity is tied to being able to impose upon others and celebrating invulnerability from being imposed upon. That is why they view everyone who is laser-focused on following measures to reduce the spread of the virus as beneath their station.
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Why was forgoing a life-saving vaccine worth it? Why was the logic of “This will greatly lower your chances of dying from COVID-19” not enough? Because Democrats became the “Get vaccinated!” party, and that alone was viewed as sufficient reason to distrust the vaccines.
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@everywhereist
"Another course – a citrus foam – was served in a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth."
This is and the accompanying picture was the precise moment I understood I was reading cosmic horror.
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The intended audience of this thread: well-intentioned white people who are rightfully angry and still bewildered that the pandemic has persisted because of the malevolent recklessness of Donald Trump’s base. You may not see what caste has to do with this, but you will.
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For if those perceived as occupying the dominant caste are forced to go out of their way to protect people perceived as being outside of it, then their sense of dominance is a lie and their humiliation as seen through the lens of caste is complete.
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Obviously, wanting to conceive of the pandemic as a Democratic problem is not rational. But this calculation to not take the pandemic seriously was not being made with rational considerations in mind. It was made with notions of caste in mind.
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So let’s name the precise reason the pandemic has played out as it has: it’s because a society that responds to the viral pandemic with an earnest desire to protect the most vulnerable is a threat to caste, and that alarmed Trump’s base way more than the threat of the virus.
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When the pandemic started taking off, the most heated debate was over having to wear masks. Why was there a debate? See this through the lens of caste: the dominant caste was being told to wear masks to protect themselves and potentially people outside of their caste.
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You’ve no doubt mused at some point why the logic of “If we all just got vaccinated, the pandemic would be over. We wouldn’t have to wear masks anymore!” didn’t work with Trump’s base. For starters, you’re projecting your rational desire to see the pandemic end onto them.
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See this through the lens of caste: the dominant caste, viewing itself as the zenith of society, is the one endowed with the power to put people in their places. To decide where people can go. Nobody is allowed to usurp this power from the dominant caste for any reason.
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What you see as rational measures to control the spread of the virus, they see as people outside the dominant caste attempting to seize their sense of power with respect to being able to put other people in their place.
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See this through the lens of caste: people perceived as being outside the dominant caste were telling the dominant caste what to do. Again, the dominant caste does not get told what to do, even if what they’re told to do could save their lives.
Why was forgoing a life-saving vaccine worth it? Why was the logic of “This will greatly lower your chances of dying from COVID-19” not enough? Because Democrats became the “Get vaccinated!” party, and that alone was viewed as sufficient reason to distrust the vaccines.
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Which brings us to the most infuriating part of this pandemic: we now have life-saving vaccines available to all Americans that prevent or mitigate COVID-19 cases, and Trump’s base was so reluctant to take them that that led to the resurgence of the pandemic.
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Not acknowledging shared human experiences is the entire point of caste. Not acknowledging shared vulnerabilities is the entire point of caste. Because shared vulnerability ruins the entire point of feeling invincible, unassailable, compared to other human beings.
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