Adam Serwer Day

I just ponied up $49 for a digital year of The Atlantic because I wanted to read Adam Serwer's most recent article, which is about the recent brouhaha among historians over the New York Times' 1619 Project. This was on the same day that I had spent time reading his November 2017 article about how Mafia Mulligan came to be elected, The Nationalist's Dilemma.

I think I skimmed that piece back when it came out, but now, two years after publication, it's more relevant than ever. In it, Serwer goes back to explore the way David Duke's 1990 run for the Senate in Louisiana presaged Mulligan's election. At the time, there was lots of media analysis about how white voters supported Duke because of economic anxiety or wanting to stick it to Washington. Sound familiar?

Serwer reminds us that just days after that election, Mulligan himself was on Larry King's show discussing that race:

“It’s anger. I mean, that’s an anger vote. People are angry about what’s happened. People are angry about the jobs. If you look at Louisiana, they’re really in deep trouble,” Trump told King.

Trump later predicted that Duke, if he ran for president, would siphon most of his votes away from the incumbent, George H. W. Bush—in the process revealing his own understanding of the effectiveness of white-nationalist appeals to the GOP base.

“Whether that be good or bad, David Duke is going to get a lot of votes. Pat Buchanan—who really has many of the same theories, except it's in a better package—Pat Buchanan is going to take a lot of votes away from George Bush,” Trump said. “So if you have these two guys running, or even one of them running, I think George Bush could be in big trouble.” Little more than a year later, Buchanan embarrassed Bush by drawing 37 percent of the vote in New Hampshire’s Republican primary.

So there you have it: Mulligan is describing the playbook he would use in 2016, with two additional "qualifications" under his belt: his racist Birther bullshit and years of The Apprentice on national television, portraying him as a successful businessman. So he was both better-known than Duke (or Buchanan) and not quite as clearly identifiable racist as Duke in his Klan robe, but blowing the dog whistles loudly enough to be cat whistles.

At a later point in the article, Serwer summarized Trumpism more succinctly than anyone else I've read:

The specific dissonance of Trumpism — advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated —provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.

As many have noted since, as each new policy of this administration is announced: the cruelty is the point.

I think this article of Serwer's was also one of the earliest to document that it wasn't the "working class" or "economically anxious" that elected Mulligan: it was white people of all classes. Well-off white people voted for him, too, and working class and economically anxious people of color — especially Black people — did not. As Serwer writes,

The answer cannot be that black Americans were suffering less than the white working class or the poor, but that Trump’s solutions did not appeal to people of color because they were premised on a national vision that excluded them as full citizens.  When you look at Trump’s strength among white Americans of all income categories, but his weakness among Americans struggling with poverty, the story of Trump looks less like a story of working-class revolt than a story of white backlash. And the stories of struggling white Trump supporters look less like the whole truth than a convenient narrative...

There's lots more in the article, including pre-2016 analysis from a political scientist named Michael Tesler. Whew.

If you aren't already reading everything Adam Serwer writes... check him out.