Stacy Writes a Letter

E-Mail to a Liberal Professor

Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2018 9:45 a.m. ET
From: Robert McCain (r.s.mccain@att.net)
To: Joan C. Williams (williams@uchastings.edu)

Dear Professor Williams:

Your article in The Atlantic (“The Democrats’ White-People Problem”)has come to my attention. You make many interesting points, e.g.:

“Why not just wait for the white working class to die off?” asked an audience member at last year’s Berkeley Festival of Ideas. I get this question a lot, and I always reply: “Do you understand now why they voted for Trump? Your attitude is offensive, and Trump is their middle finger.”

This is in some sense accurate, although I think you (and liberals more generally) are guilty of over-interpreting the 2016 election. Isn’t it true that liberals would have been shocked and alarmed if any Republican had won the presidency? That is to say, after eight years of Obama, liberals seemed to assume that the Permanent Democrat Majority was now a fact of history and, with the massive hype of Hillary’s campaign as the next logical step of Progress-with-a-capital-P (the first female president succeeding the first black president), failure in 2016 would have been deeply disappointing to liberals, no matter who the GOP had nominated. Since the shocking result of Nov. 8, 2016, the professional analysts whose job it is to tell us What It Means have seized upon Trump as a symbol of racism and misogyny without considering the possibility that maybe those 63 million Trump voters just didn’t like Hillary.
. . .
What I am driving at here, Professor Williams, is that while working-class white people may not always be articulate in expressing their grievances, it is wrong to suppose that they are incapable of identifying their own interests, and voting accordingly. For more than 20 years, working-class voters have expressed their opposition to trade deals like NAFTA, and also their opposition to an “open borders” immigration policy. Rejecting the standard-issue Chamber of Commerce “country club Republican” line on these issues, Trump gave voice to the grievances of these voters — “Build the wall!” — and won their votes. Insofar as policy issues determine election results, then, Trump’s election was not only a rejection of Clinton and the Democrats, but also a rebuke to the Republican establishment. If racism and misogyny were factors, well, are working-class white men wrong to believe that the Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party are against them? If they are incorrect in this assessment, certainly Democrats have done little since 2016 to persuade them otherwise. And it would appear, based on 2018 exit-poll data, that many white women share the belief that Democrats are the anti-white party (e.g., 75% of white women in Georgia voted for Brian Kemp).
. . .
Well, I’ve now gone past the 2,000-word mark and rather than continue extending my argument, it is better to conclude briefly by mentioning that I was born and raised a Democrat, and didn’t vote Republican until I was in my mid-30s. Almost as soon as I changed my partisan allegiance, I found myself being accused of racism by liberals, and guess what? This only increased my contempt for Democrats. Insults and name-calling (which is what such accusations of racism usually are) are not persuasive arguments, and exactly why was it racist to vote against Bill Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry anyway? Long before Democrats nominated Obama, this tactic of accusing Republicans of racism was already a cliché of liberal rhetoric, and repetition has not made it less insulting.

Sincerely,

Robert Stacy McCain
Correspondent, The American Spectator
https://spectator.org/bio/robert-stacy-mccain/

Well said. Read the whole thing.