Donald Trump, Chicago, and the Lessons of 1968
But it’s also clear that this is only Trump’s public slogan. The implicit one, increasingly difficult to avoid as the campaign winds closer to the nomination, is a masterstroke of racial populism: White Lives Matter.
.. The Chicago Democratic Convention protests were directed at a political establishment that was responsible for Vietnam, and more broadly for a sense that skewed national priorities had victimized ordinary citizens. Trump’s supporters are not animated by any literal war, but they are fully invested in a rhetorical one, and all the indignation, victimhood, and chaos-brokering of 1968 finds its reactionary equivalent in the current Republican front-runner.
Early dismissals of Trump (including mine) were rooted in a presumption that the public would see through the billionaire’s cartoonish braggadocio and ostentatious displays of wealth.
.. Polls conducted during the Obama era have consistently shown that large pluralities of whites believe that they, not blacks, Latinos, or Asian-Americans, are the primary victims of racism in contemporary America.
.. Trump is, in a very real sense, presiding over a White Lives Matter movement.
.. The low-tax, anti-government rhetoric that defines modern Republicanism has its roots in the simmering white resentments that emerged in the late nineteen-sixties, animated by the belief that the federal government had become a tool for redistribution of white wealth into the hands of undeserving black and brown communities. Donald Trump represents the full expression of that belief.
.. Earlier this week, a Trump supporter punched a black protester in the face. (Police for some reason then scrambled to seize and handcuff the protester, not the punch-thrower, though the punch-thrower was later charged with assault.)