Yet there comes a time when no other words are adequate. When the President of the United States tells four women that they must go back to where they came from there is no other term that can possibly be used other than racism. Especially when he clearly can’t grasp the idea that 3 of these women were born in the USA. When the insult is deliberately repeated at mass rallies where crowds chant their hatred and Trump deliberately sets out to frame the next Presidential election as a contest between a good old white American boy and a bunch of ethnic minority loving Democrats then we have to start using the term fascism.
It doesn’t matter that Trump claims to not have a single racist bone in his body. He has chosen to try and plug into the emotions of the US electors that he thinks will win him the contest and they are the worst and most ugly ones it is possible to imagine.
The impact of his choice has been rapidly detected in his approval ratings. Instead of plunging they went up amongst his core Republican supporters. With this group they climbed 5 percentage points to reach 72%.
That is a scary. The myth is that Trump is speaking for blue collar former industrial workers who have been left behind as industry moved to China and who are solidly behind a President who understands their hopes and fears and isn’t afraid to challenge political correctness. The reality is that factory jobs have continued to leach away throughout the Trump Presidency, farm workers across the states are seeing their livelihoods ruined by extreme climate events and tax cuts have been delivered for the wealthy whilst the standard of living of poorer people have continued to stagnate and decline. There has been no increase in the standard of living for ordinary working Americans for over 20 years. At the same time the share of income and wealth of the top 1% and in particular of the top 0.1% have increased at the fastest rates since records began.
That is where the bulk of Trump’s support really comes from. Some of his most fanatical supporters are very polite upper middle class housewives who are happy to hold their noses over his comments provided that he keeps bringing the votes in and providing their husbands with a tax cut. The polling agencies who asked voters who they had backed in 2016 found that a majority of working class voters backed the Democrats. Yes, you read that right. Despite everything you’ve heard in the media the majority of poorer working people voted Democrat and are likely to do so again. Yet the majority of white college educated women voted Republican.
There is a myth that racism comes primarily from poor working class communities. The reality is very different. The worst and the most persistent racism comes from polite middle class communities who know all the right words to use but don’t want their daughter marrying a black person or going to school with “too many”. Where those middle class communities are already thoroughly integrated, in places such as London or New York, attitudes are usually very positive. Particularly amongst young people. In suburbs on the edge of inner cities some of the things that are quietly said in the privacy of a dinner party are deeply disturbing. Particularly when you talk to elderly people. Too many people in my generation seems to have started out believing in peace and love and the beauty of music and ended up bitterly resentful of change and of “foreigners”.
All of which leads to the most important question of all. Which is what do we do at a time of rising racism when politicians are happy to feed off bad attitudes in order to get themselves elected and push an agenda that benefits the very rich at the expense of the poor.
Whenever possible I have always favoured the approach of avoiding name calling and I prefer to listen, argue back and challenge rather than to try and ban views. I think that it rarely helps to suppress attitudes and that if we aren’t capable of putting high quality rational arguments against low quality base emotions then we need to learn the trick. Yet there are limits to such an approach. There comes a point where it isn’t possible to engage in argument with someone and it is necessary to physically fight. There are also times when you have to call out the rise of fascism for what it is. That is one of the lessons of the rise of fascism in the 1930s. When strong leaders are deliberately mobilising strong emotions and are choosing to whip up hatred in order to win power it is necessary to fight back hard and strong.
I therefore believe there is no point in simply shrugging it off when Boris Johnson calls people Picanninies and who thinks it is a joke to resurrect a term that is even more offensive than nigger. Nor is there any point in holding back when Jacob Rees Mogg tells us that England didn’t need Europe to win the cricket world cup. We needed an Irishman, a guy with a West Indian heritage, and the ability to draw on the talents of our Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities. What we didn’t need were the ignorant comments of a weedy nanny’s boy who wanted to exploit a moment of pride in the achievements of a diverse community to make cheap comments about foreigners.
Pride is the key word here. I grew up in awe of the simple pride of Mohammed Ali and his impressive ability to reject a racist society’s definition of him as of less worth because he was black. His insistence on presenting himself as black and beautiful still stands as a beacon of hope. As do the words of Martin Luther King and, for all his failures to deliver, the sheer dignity of Obama in office.
Compare the quality of the two men who have recently been President of the United States and there isn’t much difficulty about deciding which role model any reasonable and responsible person would wish to follow.
There is something life affirming and immensely positive about the richness of life in our diverse communities like London, Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol. It is right and proper to try and understand and respond to the fears of those who live in neglected less diverse communities in places like Stoke and Sunderland. But the way to help those communities is not to let rich and affluent politicians who know nothing about life in a declining inner city to feed their bitterness and promise them they will take them back to a golden age of secure factory jobs. The way forward is surely to articulate a more positive vision of life in Britain. To invest in change in those communities and in future industries that will survive in a low carbon low plastic economy.
There is no hope in the reactionary nationalism that is stoking bitterness on both sides of the Atlantic. There is only a decline into an increasing cycle of negativity. The only way out of decline is positivity. And that begins when we assert the value of diversity and imagination and insist on looking to the future and to mutual support for our solutions rather bitter divisions and every racist for himself.
So we need to take a very simple attitude to the likes of Trump, Johnson, Farage and Rees Mogg.
Send them back.
By voting them out of office. Before it is too late.