"Inside the Fandom of Sanders and Trump"

[pnwmom]

“The White Man Pathology: Inside the Fandom of Sanders and Trump”

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/10/white-man-pathology-bernie-sanders-donald-trump

You feel your whiteness properly at the American border. Most of the time being white is an absence of problems. The police don’t bother you so you don’t notice the police not bothering you. You get the job so you don’t notice not getting it. Your children are not confused with criminals. I live in downtown Toronto, in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in one of the most open cities in the world, where multiculturalism is the dominant civic value and the inert virtue of tolerance is the most prominent inheritance of the British empire, so if you squint you can pretend the ancient categories are dissipating into a haze of enlightenment and intermarriage.

SNIP

I’ve never been to a place as white as Iowa. That’s the honest truth. . . .

SNIP

The Bernie Sanders rally in Davenport was the precise opposite of the Donald Trump rally in Burlington and yet precisely the same in every detail. “Make America Great Again” was replaced by “Feel the Bern”. Hawkers sold pins, three for $10. They read “Bernie Sanders is my spirit animal” and “Cats for Bernie” and “I supported Bernie Sanders before it was cool.” Davenport, at least near the Adler Theater, is the same Brooklyn-outside-Brooklyn that has conquered every corner of the world that is not a strip mall. The tattoo artists of Davenport do not go hungry. The cornfed hipsters at the Sanders rally look like they have probably attended a party at which somebody played a bongo. They may even have attended a literary reading.

There were hype men as with Trump, too, although in this case they were twentyish women in glasses screaming “Feel the Bern!” and “We’re Going to Build a Revolution!” Somebody with a camera from NBC asked a group who has brought their precocious children because they want them to be engaged in the political process “Can I get you guys to look like you’re excited about Bernie?” They carefully placed their drinks on the floor, out of sight, to oblige.

The same specter of angry white people haunts Saunders’s rally, the same sense of longing for a country that was, the country that has been taken away. The Bernie crowd brought homemade signs instead of manufactured ones, because I guess they’re organic. They waved them just the same. They were going to a show. They wanted to be a good audience.
The fundamental difference between the Trump and Sanders crowd was that the Sanders crowd has more money, the natural consequence of the American contradiction machinery: rich white people can afford to think about socialism, the poor can only afford their anger.

SNIP

Sanders’s exasperation was the principal fact to be communicated, more than any political content. Trump was about winning again. Sanders was about having lost. The vagueness of American politics is what astonished the outsider. It’s all about feelings and God and bullshit. Sanders actually uttered the following sentence out loud: “What we’re saying is when millions of people come together to restore their government we can do extraordinary things.” Nobody asked what he meant. Nobody asked for numbers. They applauded. Better to take it in the spirit in which it’s given, like a Catskills resort comedian.

SNIP




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Marche

Stephen Marche (born 1976) is a Canadian writer. In 2005, he received a doctorate in early modern English drama from the University of Toronto.

He writes a monthly column for Esquire, "A Thousand Words about Our Culture". In 2011, this column was a finalist for the American Society of Magazine Editors award for columns and commentary.[1] His articles also appear in the New York Times and The Atlantic.[2]

Marche wrote an opinion piece published by The New York Times on August 14, 2015, titled "The Closing of the Canadian Mind".[4] In this article he was critical of Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada, linking him with Rob Ford, former mayor of Toronto who was involved in a crack cocaine scandal.

[BlueMTexpat]

1. I read this article when it appeared

and thought it an excellent one.

Thanks for posting, pnwmom.

[pnwmom]

2. You're welcome, BlueMTexpat.

[JustAnotherGen]

3. Great read

Much like Charles Dickens - sometimes it takes an outsider to clearly define who we are and what we believe about ourselves.

[betsuni]

4. The most fervent supporters of both candidates seem to agree

that "If we don't ______ , we are doomed."

Thought it was funny that in the comment section of an article about angry people there were lots of angry comments. The Sanders supporters mad about being stereotyped as wealthy immediately stereotyped Hillary supporters and/or Canadians as being smug elitists. Heh.

[pnwmom]

6. I read another article about how the supporters of both resembled each other

and was trying to find it again when I ran across this one.

As I recall, what the other one talked about was what the two candidates had in common that attracted supporters. It was the way they conveyed certitude and black and white thinking.( As opposed to someone like Obama, of course, whose thinking recognizes complication and nuance.)

[JustAnotherGen]

7. The thing is

I've never had the belief that the vast majority of Sanders supporters are poor/in poverty.

From what I've seen just looking through my facebook page - they own homes, cars, are well educated, own their own businesses.


Maybe it's my 'circle' but I've never seen them as being poor.

Trumps supporters I do see as insecure at any given time in at least one of their basic living needs - but instead of blaming themselves for being complacent they are looking for someone they THINK took something from them.

[wildeyed]

8. It was worth the read just for the description

of Trump's hair as tripartite and polyvalent.

I stayed to watch Trump work the line. Up close, in person, the hair is much more intricate than it appears on screen. Its construction is tripartite, its significance polyvalent. First and foremost, there is the comb-over, although it can be called a comb-over only in the sense that the mall in Dubai with a ski hill inside it can be called a building. It is hair as state-of-the-art engineering feat, with the diaphanous quality of a cloak out of Norse legend or some miraculous near-weightless metal developed in an advanced German laboratory. It floats over the skull, an act of defiance not only against ageing and loss but against time and space, against reality.

But the serious question is this:

To me, the best question ever asked about race in America has always been the one that James Baldwin asked, when an interviewer wanted to know if he was optimistic or pessimistic about the future of America. “What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place,” he said. “If you invented him, you, the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that.” The obsession of intellectuals over the question of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr active or passive resistance – was moot; the pressing matter was why white people were blowing up churches filled with children.

WHY. What is it in our cultural consciousness that demands this? Is it just greed? Anger over the idea that someone else might get a smidgen more, a morsel they did not deserve? Is it because racism is woven into the very fabric of our history and the majority of the country can't stand thinking about the work it will take to unravel, confronting the evil head on?

Or the author's thought:

What if the answer to Baldwin’s question is as banal as it appeared to be in Fun City? What if it white people make the nigger to make themselves a little less lonely?

Or is it just a tribal default, designed to make as feel connected to a group?

-------------------------------

As far as candidates and their supporters, they all think they are mad that politics is "broken", but that is because they don't understand politics in the first place. Politics is more or less the same as it has ever been. Holy crap, other generations went through the Civil War and the Depression, and the country lived to remember. As frustrating as it is right now, it's been worse. What they are really mad about is economic change and doing less well than their parents. I see this in a bunch of Sanders supporters I know in the real world. Mostly white males who are doing OK by most standards, but no where as well as they EXPECTED to do.

And the other thing I notice, they were mostly raised in very white and affluent pockets where they never interacted with either Black or conservative citizens in any great numbers. Even though they consider themselves anti-racist, they don't have the experience of being the only white person in a room. They "hate" the GOP but don't know more than a few Republicans.


And this bit about the music at the Sanders rally was funny, because many of them were cool back in the day, but totally missed the rap train to good modern protest music. They are all still mooning over Neil Young or Dead Kennedys, depending on when they grew up.

And it was all, so obviously, a nostalgia act, the indulgence for a longing of a time when music encouraged politics, when activism possessed an artistic face, and vice versa.

More hair!:

Bernie Sanders’s hair is as much a statement as Trump’s. It looks like the hair of a tenured professor whose wife has stopped nagging him to get a haircut because the nagging doesn’t work. You couldn’t muss Sanders hair. The disorder is just as much an aesthetic as the comb-over. I mean it always looks the same. Somebody is cutting it to droop that way over the ears.

And finally, this might be true. Because they really are suffering.

Race gives us all double bodies, “double consciousness” in WEB Du Bois’s phrase, whatever you want to call having to live mortally through the judgment of others. The new white distortion, the sickness at heart, the pathology, may simply be the arrival of the awareness of two bodies: the dizziness and nausea that arrive with the onset of double vision.

Because they have to be like everybody else, their hearts are breaking in half.

Thanks for posting this. I had seen it before, but just now had the time to read through it carefully. I LOVE long-form journalism. Very worthwhile!

[JustAnotherGen]

9. I thought it was a well written piece

Kicking it because it needs to be read by more!

[rpritchard93]

10. Opposites...

In every way possible. I hate the comparison.

[randys1]

11. No, similarities are obvious. We have lived through the reality of some of them here in AfAm

You are a new poster.

I wonder where you usually post, probably not DU.

I wonder where

[rpritchard93]

12. I don't understand

Genuinely. Could you elaborate?

[randys1]

14. No thanks...Have a GREAT Martin Luther King day

[JustAnotherGen]

16. Search (use the DU search function)

Search Zimmerman July 2013.

That's a good starting point. Just keep going from there.

It's not Randy's job or mine to do the work for you.

[JustAnotherGen]

17. Our opinion in this

Is the opposite in every way.

Welcome to DU!

[mcar]

13. An interesting read

[rbrnmw]

15. Bookmarking thanks for posting

read some will read the rest later