The Bluestocking, vol 39: US election special!
Hello! I've been MIA for the last two weeks because of work, but I thought it was time to exorcise all the great bits of writing I've come across before the US election happens and journalists are imprisoned/collapse with relief that they're not going to be imprisoned (delete as applicable on Wednesday morning).
So here's a pick of a couple of themes of the election - populism, fake news, misogyny, white identity politics - with pieces old and new. I found gifs of eagles too!
Enjoy/Sorry,
Helen
Inside the Trump Bunker
On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”
The first big theme of the election has to be populism, and the Trump campaign's general lack of respect for democratic norms. Of course, this isn't a new phenomenon in American politics - Jane Mayer has chronicled the decisions that allowed money to become such a huge factor in presidential elections, culminating in the Citizens United decision that deemed "corporations are people", and therefore were entitled to free (expensively funded) speech. And there's murky stuff happening with gerrymandering and voter suppression, in ways which seem designed to keep poor, black and Hispanic voters off the rolls.
Inside Facebook's Hyper-partisan Political Machine
This year, political content has become more popular all across the platform: on homegrown Facebook pages, through media companies with a growing Facebook presence and through the sharing habits of users in general. But truly Facebook-native political pages have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture. This strange new class of media organization slots seamlessly into the news feed and is especially notable in what it asks, or doesn’t ask, of its readers. The point is not to get them to click on more stories or to engage further with a brand. The point is to get them to share the post that’s right in front of them. Everything else is secondary.
I'm re-upping this because I think Facebook's effect on political discourse is one of the big stories of the election. For 20 years, US conservatives have built an entirely different media for themselves, denouncing everyone else as partisan, inoculating their followers from fact-checking and pumping them full of conspiracy theories. This election has seen the logical endpoint of that, with a fact-resistant candidate and a slew of incredibly partisan pages operating way outside what we would consider journalistic norms, and a ready audience for that.
It's also a subject that mainstream journalists find utterly baffling - as evidenced by the incredibly uncritical oohing over Dominic Cummings of Vote Leave describing how they built a contact database for the EU referendum. He described a lot of things that are fairly standard (eg assigning likely voting intention to help canvassers direct their work, using Facebook to A/B test political messages) and it got reported like he'd personally invented a new Google.
Since the NYT piece, there have been some great follow-ups, notably from BuzzFeed, which found that 100 pro-Trump websites were being run, often by teenagers, in a single town in Macedonia.
How Hillary Met Satan
It was my third day at the Republican National Convention in 1996, and my notebook overflowed with a one-note theme: “You do know that Hillary Clinton is funding the whole radical feminist agenda?” “She had Vince Foster killed.” “She’s behind many more murders than that.” “It’s well-established that Hillary Clinton belonged to a satanic cult, still does.” The consensus among Pat Buchanan’s supporters seemed ardent and universal, though the object of this obloquy wasn’t even on the opposing ticket.
One of the mysteries of 2016 is the degree to which Hillary Clinton is reviled. Not just rationally opposed but viscerally and instinctively hated. None of the stated reasons for the animus seem to satisfy. Yes, she’s careful and cagey, and her use of a private email server, which the F.B.I. flung back into the news on Friday, was a big mistake. But no, she’s not more dishonest than other politicians, and compared with her opponent, she’s George Washington. Her policies, even where bold, are hardly on the subversive fringe.
Here's Susan Faludi on another key phenomenon of this election: misogyny. Some voters just don't like women, and that's that. Political scientists found that anti-feminism and sexism were strong indicators of Trump support. As well as the chants of "Trump that bitch", there's subtle sexism in some of the descriptions of Clinton as "dislikeable". And the double-bind is that she can't mention it without further alienating those voters, just as Obama had to reassure white voters he wasn't a secret Muslim with a wife who was basically a Black Panther.
There's a link with white fragility, described below - the same insecurity is felt by some traditionally minded men in relation to their gender. They feel that the power balance has shifted: that women can accuse any man of rape, or harassment, or groping - and suddenly his reputation in tatters. Of course, that's not how it feels to feminists (with Trump still in the race, and Ched Evans acquitted at retrial), but there has been an undeniable shift. And for plenty of men who don't feel powerful in other arenas of their lives, who have lost their jobs, or seen their industry die and replaced with the service sector, being "master of the household" was a source of pride and respect. Hence the Hillary Nutcrackers, and the joy in Bill cheating on her.
White anxiety has fueled this year’s political tumult in the West: Britain’s surprising vote to exit the European Union, Donald J. Trump’s unexpected capture of the Republican presidential nomination in the United States, the rise of right-wing nationalism in Norway, Hungary, Austria and Greece.
Whiteness, in this context, is more than just skin color. You could define it as membership in the “ethno-national majority,” but that’s a mouthful. What it really means is the privilege of not being defined as “other.”
I'm getting tired of references to "the people" which unthinkingly elide it with "white people". If this year has taught us anything, it's that white working class/"left behind" voters are a distinct group from others who have comparably low incomes but are recent immigrants or non-white. Trump is supposedly a "man of the people", but is likely to attract only 5 per cent of black voters. His voters in the GOP primary earned more on average than Clinton voters - the difference is, they were more likely to be white.
In the US and Europe, we are seeing a backlash against rapid demographic change, and the feeling that recent immigrants are doing better than white lower-income communities. Next year, we need to talk more about identity politics for white people.
Quick links: Barack Obama's must-read books (all 89 hours of them). Why Mormons are #NeverTrump. The road trip that changed Hillary Clinton. Obama on AI and the future of technology. Why this isn't Weimar Germany all over again, by Margaret Macmillan. The White flight of Derek Black - or how a child raised as a white supremacist renounced his parents' ideology. (A good pair for this earlier New Yorker piece about the woman who left the Westboro Baptist Church.) Where does Trumpism go after 8 November?
And now for something completely different:
+ Why the men doing full-frontals on TV and film are (almost) always white.
+ Heart-wrenching story of the refugees who "won the lottery" by being rehomed in Canada - and still receive pleading messages from their family back in Syria.
+ This Lunch With The FT profiles uber-twat Martin Shrekli, and it has a killer last line.
.... see you on the other side!