Everyone is at least a little racist. But hardly any Whites really actively want to hate Blacks and people from other racial-ethnic minority groups. And I bet that includes a lot of people who are thinking of voting for Trump. So this is for people who don’t want to be haters, or even seen as haters.
Think about it this way: Voting is pretty symbolic. Your individual vote is really not going to make the difference. But it says something about who you are, to yourself at least, and to anyone else who knows.
So look at these polling results for African Americans in five key states. Between 2 and 5 out of every 100 Black voters says they support Trump:
If you vote for Trump, because you’re angry about politicians who never get anything done, or you don’t trust Hillary, or you think it’s time for a change in Washington, think about this: do you want to spend the next four or eight years knowing that you voted against virtually every Black person who you will know or meet during that time?
Maybe they’re wrong. But I think, if you’re not the hating kind, it might gnaw at you, and you might feel better if you didn’t take that stand against them. I’m not trying to change your political views in a short blog post, but I do think we’ll get along better – and you will too – if you don’t vote for Trump.
These are polarizing times in America. And what better to understand that then a highly polarized measure?
I took the forecast margin of victory for each state for Clinton and Trump, as of today, on Five Thirty Eight. The scores range roughly from -28 to +28, and I reverse them to get the positive score for each candidate (I excluded DC). Then I asked Google Correlate what searches were most correlated with each list of state scores. All the searches here are correlated with the candidate margins at .83 or higher.
Here’s the map as of today:
The Clinton list is dominated by vegetarianism and yoga, Top Chef, and the kind of annoying movies that liberals just love (Before Sunset).
The Trump list is racist anti-Obama stuff, patriotism, and, mostly, the kind of guns you don’t use for hunting. Google gives 100 for each list; I deleted those that weren’t easily categorized. (You can see the full lists here and here.) Here are the highlights:
Really, you people are so predictable.
But what of the Before Sunset-lover working in the Obama Jokes town? The Biggest Gun husband and the Vegetarian Sushi wife with their Ayurvedic Massage therapist next door? Of course, this method will never show the nuances of social life, the moments when people reach out from their silos and grasp, however fleetingly, the hands of those whom the winds of fortune and arbitrary social divisions have attempted to sweep away from them forever. And it won’t show the big, messy middle, the people who do use guns for hunting, eat tofu but aren’t vegetarian, listen to Tom Tom Club and also learn country guitar. I’d be happy to see something about them out there today.
The Inter-Parliamentary Union has a great archive of women’s representation in parliaments in most countries, from 1997 to 2016. I made this figure using the numbers for the lower houses (or single houses, if only one), which in the USA is the House of Representatives.
From 1997 to 2016, women rose from 12% to 19% of House members. During that time, for 163 countries, the average rose from 10% to 21%. When I cut the list down to 137, arbitrarily excluding a lot of very small countries, the USA slipped from 54th place to 84th place. Here’s the breakdown of changes in those countries (click to enlarge):
At this rate, in just 36 more years the House will get to the level of women’s representation that Hanna Rosin said Congress was at in 2012.
[This was posted on July 27 and then revised on July 29 after Hillary Clinton’s speech]
It’s all harmless political shenanigans until a racist mob murders Vincent Chin.*
It’s amazing how the new figureheads of both major parties are now pretending to oppose globalization, outsourcing, and the corporate “free trade” agenda that they both have spent their professional lives furthering. It wasn’t long ago that I taught in my stratification class that this agenda was the one thing we could be sure both parties and the big money behind them wouldn’t give up. Never say never, but I’m still pretty sure that’s still true.
There are good reasons to oppose this agenda, but most of them aren’t in America. If you want to talk about slave labor, exploitation, and environmental degradation in the new manufacturing centers of the world, then I would be happy to listen to you talk about the harmful effects of those practices “here at home” too. But if you just want to bash China, then you’re a racist, and no thank you.
Case in point, Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey at the Democratic National Convention the other day. Here’s his speech, followed by some of the text and my comments:
Casey quoted his father, the former governor:
“The sweat and blood of working men and women who built Pennsylvania forged the industrial revolution in our country, and outproduced the world.”
How touching, attributing the industrial revolution the efforts of the working class. It reminds me of when another brave Pennsylvania governor, Democrat Robert Pattison, reached across the aisle, helping out Republican industrialists by lending them the National Guard to put down the Homestead steelworkers.
I assume today’s Democratic politician will now go on to recognize the working class of today’s manufacturing centers, who, through their sweat and blood are outproducing the world and building the middle class in their countries. Oh right, Casey is American.
What about Donald Trump? Donald trump says he stands for workers, and that he’ll put American first, but that’s not how he’s conducted himself in business. Where are his, quote, tremendous products made? Dress shirts: Bangladesh. Furniture: Turkey. Picture frames: India. Wine glasses: Slovenia. Neckties: China. China! Why would Donald Trump make products in every corner of the world, but not in Altoona, Erie, or here in Philadelphia? Well, this is what he said, quote, outsourcing is not always a terrible thing. Wages in America quote, are too high. And then he complained about companies moving jobs overseas because, quote, we don’t make things anymore. Really? … [examples of stuff made in America]. Donald Trump hasn’t made a thing in his life, except a buck on the backs of working people. If he is a champion of working people, I’m the starting center for the 76ers! The man who wants to make America great, doesn’t make anything in America! If you believe that outsourcing has been good for working people, and has raised incomes for the middle class, then you should vote for Donald Trump. … We need to making good paying jobs for everyone here at home, so that everyone who works hard can get ahead and stay there.
Yes, the great conflict of our time is between “China” and “working people.” Maybe one we can all link arms and together put down striking Chinese workers to keep the price down on our iPhones and Wal-Mart junk.
The Democratic National Convention was very on-message. In Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech the next day, she said:
If you believe that we should say “no” to unfair trade deals, that we should stand up to China, that we should support our steelworkers and autoworkers and homegrown manufacturers — join us.
She gave no definition of what it means to “Stand up to China,” though her website says she will insist on trade deals that raise wages and create good-paying jobs (presumably meaning in the US). That’s not important — the important thing communicated to her audience is she’s against China and for American workers. Then she went through the same list of Trump production locations that Casey did, before concluding, “Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again – well, he could start by actually making things in America again.” The current U.S. trade deficit in goods (as opposed to services) is about $62 billion — per month. Virtually all Americans are dependent on imported goods (including, apparently, Clinton, whose Nina McLemore suits are made from European and Asian fabrics). No major politician is seriously against this. Trump hiring U.S. workers to make his ties would make about as much difference as Clinton buying clothes with U.S. fabrics, which is basically none. It’s just symbolism, and the symbolism here is China is bad. Unless you join this kind of talk with explicit concern for the (much greater, obviously) suffering and exploitation of Chinese workers, I think this just feeds American racism.
Decades later, Vincent Chin resonates with me. There is debate about whether racism was the real motivation behind Vincent Chin’s murder, and it wasn’t as simple as a random lynch mob. Despite the legend, it is not the case that the auto workers just killed him because they falsely believed he was Japanese. But a witness at the bar said they blamed him for them being out of work before they fought. She said:
I turned around and I heard Mr. Ebens say something about the ‘little motherfuckers.’ And Vincent said, ‘I’m not a little motherfucker,’ and he said, ‘Well, I don’t know if you’re a big one or a little one.’ Then he said something about, ‘Well, because of y’all motherfuckers we’re out of work.’*
After losing the first round, Ronald Ebins and his stepson, Michael Nitz, hunted Chin down and killed him with a baseball bat, a crime for which they ultimately served no jail time.
My 8-year-old Chinese immigrant daughter, who learns all about how racism and bullying are bad and MLK is great in her neoliberal public American elementary school, is routinely offended and hurt by the China-bashing she hears from Democrats as well as Trump (she supported Bernie but is willing to back Hillary to stop Trump).
Hillary says we should protect our children from having to listen to Trump’s nastiness — she even has ad on that, which I’ve personally witness liberals tearing up over:
So, what about the people making speeches at your convention, spitting out the word China! like it’s a disease? “What example will we set for them?”
If the new normal of politics is both parties bashing foreigners while they pretend to oppose globalization — and then pursue the same policies anyway, which, face it, you know they will — then what have we gained? It seems to me there is a small chance Clinton will negotiate better trade deals, to the benefit workers (U.S. or Chinese), and a much greater chance her rhetoric will stoke nativism and racism. As Trump’s megaphone has drawn the White supremacists out from under their rocks, the new fake-anti-TPP Hillary has given a bigger platform to this kind of obnoxious chauvinism.
* The 1987 documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin, which includes that clip, is worth watching (it’s online here, for now).
It’s been hard for me to stay out of electoral politics debates lately (follow the elections tag if you’re having the same problem).
The latest is another piece with Sean McElwee in Salon. It again features my analysis of the ANES 2016 pilot survey, with Sean’s write-up, this time focusing on attitudes of White Trump supporters toward Blacks. The short answer is White Trump supporters stereotype Blacks more than other Republican or Democrat Whites, and people with self-described “cold” feelings toward Blacks are most likely to support Trump. The biggest difference was on answers to the question, “How well does the word ‘lazy’ describe most blacks?”
This ANES data has lots of potential for addressing the pressing questions on a breaking-news basis. Whether it holds up (it’s an opt-in online survey) is yet to be seen, but I haven’t seen a reason to think it would be biased toward producing racist Trump supporters. So I think it’s worth doing. (I’ve also discovered that when you criticize Trump on a popular website like Salon, and have a Jewish name, you attract anti-Semitic Twitter.)
My 3 Qs
In other news, I did a short interview with Molly McNulty, the Council on Contemporary Families pubic affairs intern at Framingham State University. It’s reprinted here from the CCF site on The Society Pages:
TSP readers likely appreciate Philip Cohen for his provocative blog, Family Inequality, which—based on a look at who retweets him—regularly has material valued by undergraduates, senior scholars, data nerds, policy wonks, and journalists alike. Cohen is a Council on Contemporary Families senior scholar and a professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. His research focuses on the sociology of families, social demography, and social inequality. His family textbook, The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, was published in 2014. Cohen gave me these useful answers to my “3q”:
Q: First, a challenge: What’s one single thing you “know” with certainty, after years of research into modern families?
PC: Family inequality is remarkably resilient, but when it changes it does so under the influence of external forces. When women’s opportunities increase (or men’s decrease), when public investment in education increases, when the legal environment changes when technology permits reductions in household labor, when policies lighten (or compensate) the load of caring labor — that’s when inequality within families shifts. There is a dialectic here, and micro-level interactions within families matter, but these external forces are in the historical driver’s seat.
Q: Give us the “Twitter” version of your current research—in 140 characters (give or take), what are you working on now?
PC: This is what I’m working on today, in 140 characters: The culture wars over family politics always return to gender difference itself; it’s what’s at stake when left & right fight over families.
Q: How would you encourage a scholar of family life to work to get their research into public life, affecting policy and challenging assumptions about “average families”?
PC: The public loves to argue about families. There are lots of opportunities to get your work out there and make it relevant. Unlike some areas of sociological research, if you’re working on families, almost everything has a potential angle — in fact, one of the challenges is to not oversell the implications of our research. There is also a lot of translational work to do — interpreting and explaining new data and research as it comes out, helping people figure out what to make of the latest findings in the context of what we already know rather than participating in the whipsaw advice machine that thrives on contradicting conventional wisdom. I recommend that junior scholars get involved with the Council on Contemporary Families, which helps organize and transmit new research responsibly and effectively, and to look for opportunities to publish popular pieces in online venues that encourage well-reasoned and empirically-grounding discussion and debate.
Sean McElwee and I have a piece on Salon about the relationship between hating Muslims and supporting Donald Trump. The empirical facts are that people who support Trump hold nasty stereotypes about Muslims, and dislike them, more even than the average Republican.
Sean did most of the writing, and I produced two of the figures. I hope you’ll read it (and check out Sean on Twitter if you like funny leftism). The data, the ANES 2016 Pilot Study, which was collected in January, is available free (with registration) here. I put my code for these figures here; feel free to use it if you’re interested in the data (lots of good potential there).
Here are the two figures. The first shows the responses to the question of how well the word “violent” describes “most Muslims.” The Trump supporters are in gray, all Republicans are red, and Democrats are Blue.* Trump supporters have by far the nastiest views:
The second is from models predicting whether respondents support Trump, identifies as Republican, or identifies as Democrat, as a function of their feelings toward Muslims. In the models, hating Muslims increases the odds of being a Trump supporter or Republican, and lowers the odds of being a Democrat. The slopes for Trump and Republican are significantly different, meaning the nasty relationship is strongest for Trump support.
Here is the conclusion:
The explanation of Trump’s success is simple: The latent racism, xenophobia and other powerful social forces fostered by the right for decades have simply been extended by Trump to their next logical extreme. As racial scholar Ian Haney-Lopezwrites,
“[George W.] Bush was careful to cabin his remarks in terms of extremists and ‘a perverted visions of Islam,’ but the global terms in which he framed his analysis belied such fine distinctions.”
That is, Bush’s language “was operating more in the register of a dog whistle, a way to advance a basically racial message while still maintaining plausible deniability.” Even today, Bush is seen as more moderate on issues related to Islamophobia. But the aggressive domestic surveillance policies he pursued, and the rhetoric of the last few years indicate Islamophobia was ripe on the right. Trump is just the most successful politician to date at picking the fruit.
* We restricted Trump supporters to those who identified as Republican or independent, since everyone was asked to pick their favorite Republican and we didn’t think Democrats were likely to really support Trump.
Of course, I have no idea how anyone can win any election, but that’s what this post is about anyway, and no one ever got clicks by admitting they aren’t sure. This is just a little election nervous energy, dedicated to David Brooks, who says “data driven” campaigns have been a fiasco. (Follow this series at the elections tag.)
With all this talk of political realignment, and the impending fracturing of the Republican Party, I was wondering how the parties might shake out if something serious really did happen. I struck me that the GOP establishment is really upset right now because the beast they have been cultivating (the racist, xenophobic, sexist, anti-gay, anti-science beast) is suddenly turning on them in way that threatens the things that really matter: keeping taxes and regulation from impeding their accumulation of wealth. As if what they really want is their mass of gullible voters back from Trump.
Anyway, I looked at the American National Election Studies 2016 pilot data, which asked 1,200 people a lot of attitude questions, as well as how they feel about the candidates. My question was, how are left and right divided now, and what might happen if things broke differently.
Breaking away
The results are all in the figures below. To make these I used Stata’s cluster kmeans command, which breaks a sample into the number of clusters you specify according to the distribution of means on the variables you list. Using math. This is nice for politics because it forces each person to choose a cluster, just like voting for a party. I used the feelings and issues you see in the top part of the figure to create the clusters, and then checked to see how the members of each cluster feel about the candidates. I ignored voter demographics, just taking into account their opinions. I used Excel’s conditional formatting to color-code from green to red (but check the coding because left and right don’t run the same way for each question — note if the item is “oppose” on a scale of 1-7, then 3 or less is “favor”).
The first figure is a two-cluster scheme. Every potential voter has to pick a party. In the two-party scheme a few major differences stand out. The left feels much better about scientists, gays and lesbians, and feminists. They are more interested in action on climate change, paid leave, equal pay for women, and big government generally. They favor affirmative action at universities and raising the minimum wage. They think legal immigration is good. Issues that don’t divide left and right so much are feelings about the police, free trade, and crime. The death penalty is not huge. The left’s favorite person is Sanders, but they like Clinton, too. They hate Trump. Here’s the first figure (click to enlarge):
The left here is only 45% of potential voters, so come November they need to raid the right somewhere – but where? To answer that I specified four clusters instead of two. This gives the left and right two center categories to fight over. Now the two left parties together sum to 45%, so for the left to win, I figure they need to find issues they can use to pull people away from the right, so I’m especially looking for big differences between the right and center-right. The good news for the left here is that the right is only 22%, so there is a lot of potential for poaching the center-right. In this figure, I highlighted a few key left-right divisions arbitrarily. Here’s the figure, with my comment below (click to enlarge):
Fortunately for the left, the right is blinded by their hatred of gays and lesbians and feminists. The center-right is much more tolerant, especially of gays and lesbians. So that seems like a good wedge. I say “tolerant” because the center-left isn’t really crazy about gays and lesbians or feminists, so going all the way to awesome in that area might be a turnoff to them.
The other good ones for the left are equal pay for women and legal immigration. The right hates them but everyone else is positive. Science is also good for the left, as the right doesn’t like scientists much, and the center-right is very into vaccination.
On the other hand, the center-right is very pro-police, so that may not be a winner for the left. The anti-police right isn’t coming all the way over, so it doesn’t help that they’re not pro-police. Also, affirmative action and the minimum wage aren’t good for pulling out the center-right. In general, the Chamber of Commerce type issues — climate change action, free trade, and big government, don’t help the left split the right much.
One caution is that the center left doesn’t like Clinton much — no better than they like Rubio, in fact. They are more positive about Sanders.
Obviously, how to work this into a campaign — with all the other issues that entails — is way beyond me. That’s why this is free.
RT @ewout: The sample size (<10) is too small. The number shouldn't have been reported in this way bc it encourages wrong and misleading in… 4 hours ago
