I have no desire to live in an echo
chamber, or to alienate Trump voters wholesale, both of which many of us are
being accused of. But here's the thing: It's impossible to confront fascism
(and the racism and other isms that come with it) without naming it. I tried
the other night in an email to my father and by the time I got done editing it
there was nothing left.
And we cannot pretend that this race
was not about fascism and the racism that is part and parcel of it. How white
were his rallies? Look at the way the vote split along racial lines! The KKK
endorsed him, for God's sake. And so forth and so on, along each -ism you care
to use to measure by.
If the vote were about jobs for the
working class, killing TPP and rebuilding infrastructure, why didn't the white
working class all vote for Bernie in the primaries? How could they not see
all the jobs Mr. Obama has brought back and vote accordingly? The insurance he
provided some 20 million of them with that they did not have before, ditto? The
one-year extension to unemployment voted through by Democrats? and so forth.
If it was really about
"draining the swamp," how do you explain that nobody saw (or cared)
that he wouldn't release his own tax filings and that he surrounded himself
with insiders and lobbyists?
If it was really about being heard,
about bringing about change, don't you think they would have wanted someone
with a track record of concern for the working class (Bernie, for example),
someone with experience who understood how the system works (almost anybody
else running, for example)?
If it weren't about race and gender
and sexual identity or orientation and immigrant status and disability and
religion, then why do you think members of all these non-WASP groups are so
terrified right now? Are we all delusional?
Nope, I'm not buyin' it.
Sure, a lot of perfectly nice people
probably held their noses and voted for him anyway because he was the
Republican nominee. And they probably don't consider themselves racists, and
probably they are not terribly comfortable with a lot of his other -isms
either.
But here's the thing. I, too, know
many Trump voters who seem(ed) "perfectly nice", as one editorial put
it this week, but scratch the surface and the -isms are all there, every one.
Maybe they follow the rules--they grant mortgages fairly, their churches admit
Black families. But is it not racist to perpetuate the myth among themselves
and their children that (mostly brown) illegal immigrants are taking their
jobs, to sincerely believe in their heart of hearts and to teach their students
that all (mostly brown) Muslims are terrorists, to behave as if Black people
account for most of welfare recipients when debating entitlement programs? How
do you define "racism"? To me, merely harboring bias qualifies.
Expressing prejudice is over the line for sure.
In Buddhist thinking, many values
are expressed as negatives--it is, as I understand it, simply the nature of the
Pali language that this is so but it also has profound implications for how you
think about a thing. Take the First Precept, for example, which says, "I
shall endeavor not to harm any sentient being." We could have 1000 rules
about what to do (I shall endeavor to obey the speed limit, eat vegetarian,
wear cotton not wool, catch bugs and put them outside alive and well, etc.) and
they would never manage to cover every exigency. But if you express it as
not-harm, well then. It covers every conceivable base as we try to put it into
play in our daily lives.
So. How about explicitly not-racist
acts? The ethical question each Trump voter faces is, "What is the
not-racist thing to do here?" Ask yourself: Are they calling upon their
candidate to walk back his campaign promise to register Muslims? Have they
asked him for some kind of statement about his old policy of not renting to
Blacks? Have they confronted him about his followers' Jew-S-A chanting? Did
they demand that he forcefully repudiate the Klan endorsement? Are they asking
him now to please not give Brannon a White House job? No? Then where's the
not-racism you speak of?
Buddhism is big on restraint as an
ethic. Most precepts as originally formulated specify that not only do we
refrain, but also we don't cause anyone else to do those things (steal, lie,
etc.) either. We might ask, then, are Trump voters not-racist? Is it not-racist
behavior when they say, "I am not a racist, but. . . ?" Are they
not-racist when they give that man a pass on all this, when they not only
overlook it but actively reward it with their votes?
I'm not seeing it. Are you?
And so I would argue that Trump
voters are overwhelmingly not not-racist, at the very least, and that we would
not be in this pickle right now if that were not so. We could use the terms
fascism and not-fascism and have exactly the same conversation about NATO and
the wall and the registry and on down the list and come to exactly the same
conclusion. And I believe that this not-fascism is going to be the death of
this country if we don't deal with it directly and forcefully.
It scares and saddens me to see so
many thinkers and writers asking us to hunker down and fight what is to come
one symptom at a time as if this were politics as normal. Medicare
"reform"? Tamp it down. A registry for Muslims? Tamp that down. It's
like my physician telling me, "Never mind the virus, that's not important
(and it's your imagination running away with you anyway). Let's just focus on
getting your fever down! You'll be fine. And here's some salve for those
blisters." While my heart is damaged and my kidneys are threatening to
shut down and.
So, no. I am not going to stop
participating in discussions about why/how this happened, about what the real
causes are. I am not going to stop calling out racism or any other -ism when I
see it. And hard pass on the request that we all stop already with the Hitler
metaphors (which isn't metaphorical anyway--look it up). This is not
conservative politics as usual: This was a vote for the very soul of our
country and the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can redeem it from
purgatory.
As the t-shirt says: You thought I was a nasty
woman before? Buckle up, Buttercup.Simply,
