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politicaltheatre · 7 years ago

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Team Building Exercises

If there was an irony in the NFL protests of this past weekend, it wasn't that athletes and executives in the NFL rallied around Colin Kaepernick and others who have been protesting during the national anthem - after Trump's attacks, that was entirely predictable - but rather that the result was ever in doubt.

When members of a group are attacked, even unpopular ones, the other members take notice; the more the threat appears to threaten them as well, the more they will step in to protect all of the other members. That is what groups do, they protect each other so that individuals among them can feel safe.

In attacking Kaepernick and those kneeling, arm locking, and raising a fist with him, it would be fair to say that the President of the United States, nominally speaking to support a candidate for Senate who would support him, hoped to gain and/or retain the support of his rally's Alabama audience, people who surely don't want anyone telling them they have to accountable to others, only that others have to be accountable to them.

Choosing as his victims black men who have been making more money than his audience can for playing a game that they can't must surely have seemed perfect to Trump. Kaepernick has effectively been blackballed by his league in a way not seen since the dark days of McCarthyism in the 1950s. Those still protesting, even with the (slowly) growing support of white teammates and the emerging dialogue with NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, had, until Sunday, remained comparatively few and, as more and more games had been played this season, had mostly been forgotten by fans.

Picking on outsiders with little or no support from their group is, after all, what bullies do. That this involves race and violence against unarmed black men and women is important - it's what Kaepernick was protesting against - but that is actually secondary to what was said and done this weekend. This is first and foremost about what bullies will do to gain support from one group and what happens when they finally threaten another group as a whole. This is about what pulls groups together, both for aggression and defense. In no small way, this is just another story about the "game" of politics.

You see, the greater part of what got Trump elected might actually be thought of as something of a team building exercise. When we talk of "dog whistles" and "coded language", we aren't talking about simple, wired-in racism, we're talking about rallying supporters and allies by giving them the justification for fear, anger, isolation, and, ultimately, violence. To take from others anything they should have an equal right to, such as the famous "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", requires all of those things. Bullies from the playground to the workplace to the halls of power all know that and cultivate it. Trump may offering a new brand, but it's the same old, shitty product.

What may be most surprising for many following this past weekend is that Trump and those around him welcome the NFL response. If it seemed strange that he was taunting the league and those playing in it for trying to reduce the violence of the game, remember that he was speaking, and tweeting, to two distinct audiences, one that resists change and fears losing its power and another that welcomes progress and resists losing any progress made.

To the league and its players, past and present, changing the rules to reduce the risk of traumatic and chronic injuries makes sense, but it is change and in a culture in which social and political strength is still associated with brutal manliness it is the wrong kind of change. Is it really a surprise that NASCAR owners stepped in to back Trump after NFL owners - well, all but four - sided with their players? It certainly wasn't to Trump.

He and his advisors no doubt also welcomed the responses to his attacks on Stephen Curry and his Golden State Warrior teammates, and for the same reasons. Trump wants to fire up his base, to draw them closer together, so he gives them an opposing group to fear, to be angry at, and to isolate themselves from. Stephen Curry makes more in a single year between salary and endorsements than perhaps Trump's entire audience in Alabama will make, combined, in their lifetimes. That he has earned it doesn't make it easier for them to take. That his success and wealth have given him a voice others will listen to when they feel silenced only makes it worse.

When Trump talks about Curry, Kaepernick and others as "ungrateful employees", it most certainly is coded language, but not just because of race. His base is terrified of chaos, of the lack of order in the world. When Trump presents himself as a strongman in the mold of Putin, Erdogan, or names we're not supposed to say, he is telling his audience that he will defend them against chaos, that he will restore order, that he will make them feel safe. He is the strong father, the protector, and the enforcer. Employees will respect the will of their employers. Children will respect the will of their parents. And, yes, blacks will respect the will of whites.

This was the core message of Trump's presidential campaign (and the reelection campaign he's already running right now). Trump won't outright say women will respect the will of men, but he doesn't really have to. It's baked in. As Hillary Clinton, who has had her own unfortunate history with coded language, rambles her way through her "What Happened" book tour this month, she has mostly ignored this group and its fearful, angry needs. As she has acknowledged more than once, her most notable attempt to address its culture and Trump's use of it, the "basket of deplorables" comment, backfired spectacularly.

That comment brought many Trump voters closer to him and each other, much in the same way Trump's "son of a bitch" comment just did for the NFL, but that alone could not explain why she lost, not that a political memoir is a good place to look for answers.

Clinton lost for many, many reasons. Many. Ignore, if you can, the quotes and sound bites pulled from the book in which she blames Bernie Sanders and others, including the Trump-crazy media. That's just that very same news media stirring up conflict, which is it's own version of team building. They want an audience, with ratings numbers and clicks sending advertising money their way. In focusing our attention on those quotes they actually make much of her case for her. Then again, that she participates in much of that coverage without drawing attention to that makes another kind of case entirely.

Even though the title of Clinton's memoir suggests that it will explain "what happened" that led to her defeat, the title itself reveals why that answer is nowhere to be found. It's possible that there really was nothing she could have done to prevent losing as she did, but asking what she did rather than what happened is the difference between actively seeking answers and passively accepting the next best thing. Whatever is in the book, Clinton the TV star seems content with the latter.

The world Clinton presents in her book and on tour is one with which she is at war. She is beset on all sides by the same sexism and bullying that plagues women the world over. And you know what? She's right. It was there and has been with Clinton since before her own attempt to reform health care almost twenty five years ago. In that case, sexist attacks on her served as a means to undermine not only women in positions of power but congressional Democrats and her husband, President Clinton. For the right wing, that's Christmas.

That she as the wife of a male politician was expected to have the right hair and the right clothes and not much else was a constant drum beat during her years as First Lady. That role, even after Clinton and Michelle Obama have fought to change it, is still engrained in our culture. It is the vestige of "older, simpler times". It represents a kind of order, a world in which everyone knows their place and doesn't step out of line, which is exactly what appeals to Trump's base.

It's a good narrative and it serves to hold Clinton's own Pantsuit Nation together and that will serve her well as a base going forward. As we've seen in Congress with the seemingly unending Republican war on Obamacare, in today's political world a niche group is all you need. You don't have to build consensus or even try. Clinton writes and talks about achieving the possible, but from the tone of her book and her book tour, we should recognize that it's also kind of bullshit. Clinton sells herself as a political pragmatist, and in some way she may actually want to see herself as one, but "pragmatist" is really just another piece of coded language.

Whatever her political base, Clinton's real group is that of the DNC, the Democratic party elite who work the Beltway and Wall Street in and out of office. It's a community like any other. The argument that she literally ignored white working class voters in the Rust Belt is demonstrably false, but the myth gained traction only because of Clinton's reputation for speaking fees and cozy inside deals. The Democratic party she and her husband have represented for the past quarter century is every bit that, and those members of that group clinging to power in the party since last November are, like her memoir, doing whatever they can to avoid facing reality.

Why Clinton lost can actually be demonstrated in just two interviews from her book tour. In one at the very start of it, she sat down with Jane Pauley on CBS. In the interview Clinton presented herself as we saw her in the campaign. She is stiff, clearly trying to project herself as she wants to be perceived. It wasn't terribly revealing about the campaign or Clinton herself, but Pauley did manage to draw out two phrases that accurately sum up the inaccuracies in the book: "It is my truth" and "what I believe happened". When Clinton said those words, she might as well have called the book "fiction", but the way she said them, oddly, was the most revealing thing about her, her campaign, and politics in America to day than anything else she has said or written.

Her interview with Ezra Klein on Vox went much better, both for her and for us. In it, she was relaxed. She was confident and competent. She was the version of herself her friends have always been telling us was there but we never got to see. She was, above anything, authentic. Really authentic.

Watching her, we don't even have to agree with her on anything she says, but we can't help but like that someone so smart and knowledgable and engaged is so great at talking about it. Imagine this person debating Senator Bernie Sanders. Imagine this person debating Senator Barack Obama. If this had been the Hillary Clinton we saw throughout either of her presidential campaigns, she very well would have done better in both.

That's the shame of it for us right now. She still refuses to accept that her perceived lack of authenticity was a big reason for her defeats, and that in no small way is why she lost. Authenticity builds trust. It builds political capital. It builds a base. Donald Trump has built a devoted, trusting base with tens of millions of Americans, and he lies about everything. They know he lies about everything and they still love him. Why? Because he sounds authentic. Enough.

They love him so much it probably never even occurred to them that their president just used the exact same tactic on Kim Jong-Un and North Korea that he used on Colin Kaepernick and the NFL. Sure, he sounds tough. Sure, he sounds certain. He also just gave North Koreans the best reason they've had in years to stick together and support their lunatic man-child of a dictator. How's that NFL thing working for Trump in the long run? How’s it even working right now?

Yikes.

- Daniel Ward

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