People my age who know a little bit about history were worried that the anger in the streets would lead to white backlash from the suburban types who think everything is fine until the dispossessed act up. The only thing that matters then is to protect themselves and theirs. Reagan is widely embraced as a great American president not because he was great but because he found a way of reassuring these white voters that he'd get things back to normal after the disruptive 60s and 70s. Get those welfare queens out of their Cadillacs, etc.
He created a delusional bubble for a certain kind of oblivious, mostly white American to live within, and the people living within that bubble are the same ones who voted for Trump--Republicans and Reagan Democrats. And so we've been living in a kind of Reaganite collective delusion ever since. And the result is as expected--the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. The Democrats like the Clintons rather than resisting, just went along for the ride driven not by principle but by political expediency. They were living in the bubble, too, in their own way. Democrats call it Neoliberalism or the Third Way. The result--the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
So Trump gets elected mainly by the same people who supported Reagan, and his support from those mostly white Americans has been rock solid around 45% for the last three and a half years. If these people really believed that Trump would be a good president, and were capable of denying the overwhelming evidence that he was anything but, who'd a thunk that protests provoked by police brutality toward Blacks would undermine that rock-solid support? It makes no sense on the face of it.
But it might be explained, at least in part, by assuming that most people are oblivious. They are living in a foggy daydream of everydayness, and nothing much of reality penetrates the fog. I'm not talking about the people who go to Trump rallies. I doubt their minds have been changed by recent events. I'm talking about the rank-and-file resident of a red county, the people who don't care much about politics one way or the other, whose opinions are not firmly held, but are influenced by whoever is most opinionated in their sphere of influence.
This go-along-to-to-get-along m.o. is as true among Liberals as it is for conservatives--just a different kind of daydream. Very few people have genuine, strongly held opinions because very few people think things through. They simply go with the flow, take the path of least resistance. And so when your pastor supports Trump, you do too. When all your friends and family watch Fox and listen to Rush, you do too.
So there are many in this group who are just decent folk who don't pay much attention, who just live in this foggy political daydream. They're more interested in paying their bills, mowing the lawn, and saving for retirement. And as long as nothing is personally affecting them, they have no problems with whoever is in the White House. If Trump does some unsavory things, so do the Democrats. They don't expect much from politicians, don't think much about them one way or the other. They really are truly unaware of how over-the-top bad Trump is. He's just another politician, no better--or worse--than most.
So what makes things different now? A confluence of things--the hunting down and killing of Ahmaud Arbery, the Central Park confrontation between the two Coopers--Christian, the Black bird-watcher and Amy, the White dog-walker, and now the blasé, what-else-is-new killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. It's as if the fog has lifted, for a moment anyway, so that this kind of racism is on full display in its true ugliness.
These are not extraordinary events in America. They are routine. It's just that most people are unaware of it if they are not Black or Brown. If you would tell this Reagan-Democrat type that police brutality is a thing, they would look at you and say, "Well not in my experience. The police I've encountered are fine public servants." And as individuals most are. And if you would accuse these Reagan Democrats and the police they admire of being racist, they would in all sincerity be offended. That's not how they think of themselves.
Do you think someone like Amy Cooper thinks she's a racist? In her mind racists use the N word, not "African American". She couldn't possibly be racist. The problem for her, for the police, or for even the yahoos who shot Arbery does not lie on the individual level, though, but on the level of culture--a culture that that programs individuals in attitudes and behaviors that they are mostly oblivious of. That's what culture does, and the whole point of a liberal arts education used to be to find ways of questioning that programming, sifting through it to make conscious choices about what parts to keep and what parts to discard. But who can afford a liberal arts education anymore?
And as in most other areas of life, it's not realistic to expect the policeman as an individual to be an independent thinker, or to be heroic enough to go against his group. To get along, you have to go along. lt's all about loyalty and being a team player. Like most other Americans, your typical policeman just wants to go with the flow and to take the path of least resistance. He doesn't want to be seen as soft. He doesn't want to be that guy whose instinct was to check to see if Martin Gugino, the 75-year-old Catholic Worker activist whom his colleague shoved to the ground, hadn't cracked his head to badly. Back in line, soldier. No room for humanity here.
The video of Floyd and Gugino concretizes what's going on, and makes it impossible for people to deny the evidence of their own eyes. It's not just their being appalled by police brutality, it's the blasé routineness of it. That's the thing that struck me most about the image of Derek Chauvin kneeling there with his hands in his pockets and his knee on Floyd's neck. Ho-hum. The every-day banality of it appalls me as much as the brutality of it. Floyd was nothing more than a fish flapping on the dock gasping for air to Chauvin. Ho hum.
And so these not-too-well informed, just go-with-the-flow folks want to go with a different flow now. Who'd have thought? They want to join with those who are revolted by this kind of routine brutality as any normal, decent person would be. They would have reacted like this before, except for their obliviousness. And so now instead of a white, fear-driven backlash, we're seeing a broad white decency backlash. It's driven not by white fear for their own safety but by many finally being able to feel some compassion and empathy for those who never feel safe.
There are many decent white people in America who are just oblivious, and they need clarifying moments as we've had in the last several weeks to wake up to what's really happening. If you asked me two weeks ago whether I'd see this huge swing of white anti-Trump opinion, I'd say not likely. I'm very glad to be proved wrong.
Are they past being won back by Trump? We'll see. But for the first time I'm hopeful that reality is capable of penetrating that Fox News/Talk Radio bubble that so many of these otherwise oblivious people live within. Most people want to do the right thing, but they must have some level of awareness about what's actually happening in the world so they might have some genuine sense of what's called for. Until the last couple of weeks I despaired that simply was no longer possible in America.