The Deplorables sounds like the name of a band that might have been playing clubs in the Bowery in the early 80s. Now it's been used, notoriously, by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to denote a sub-set of Trump supporters whose attitudes and beliefs are, in liberal democratic terms, beyond the pale-racist, sexist, bigoted, xenophobic, unfitting for a great nation working out over centuries the inner meaning of the premise of its founding-that all human beings are created equal. A staunch supporter of Secretary Clinton since Bernie Sanders endorsed her, I nevertheless regret her use of that expression-to me, it's proof above all of the perniciousness of Trump's divisive political discourse that even Secretary Clinton could not avoid at least one fall from grace. The beliefs of the Deplorables fully deserve to be deplored-but we have to remember that they got to that place not through some kind of incurable evil in the heart but through poor education, troubled family life, often mixed with substance abuse and untreated mental illness. A person who had the opportunities that people like Secretary Clinton (indeed myself) have had, educational and otherwise, but ended up with those opinions might arguably be called deplorable. But such are not the backbone of Trumpianism.
One of the most pertinent questions in responding to Trumpianism and its variants elsewhere-the new extreme right in Europe, the Leave movement in the UK-is the extent to which activist social and economic policies to deal with the losers in globalization, or a partial retreat from economic globalization itself, could push the Trumpian support base toward the political center, blunting the taste for radically xenophobic policy change whether in trade or immigration.
In a recent article in Vox, examining a range of public opinion studies, Zack Beauchamp concludes:
This research finds that, contrary to what you’d expect, the "losers of globalization" aren’t the ones voting for these parties. What unites far-right politicians and their supporters, on both sides of the Atlantic, is a set of regressive attitudes toward difference. Racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia — and not economic anxiety — are their calling cards.
I leave it to the social scientists to debate the soundness of the studies cited by Beauchamp, but to a layman's eyes, the conclusions he draws appear to be sound. On the eve of the first debate, they have some important implications for how Hillary Clinton positions herself on trade. Briefly, though a more balanced view of globalization and a more realistic view of the costs as well as benefits of free trade are important for folks like me who are Sanders/Warren/Teachout Democrats, few votes will be pried from Trump by imitating his tough nationalist discourse about trade. That nationalist discourse, like his racialist talk, responds to xenophobia not economic globalization's discontents.
So what is to be done about the (misnamed) Deplorables? Trump and other politicians of his ilk have successfully mobilized them politically in part through promising to say racist and sexist and anti-Muslim things through a megaphone that have become (rightly) disrespectful even to whisper in civil discourse. That this kind of talk has floated to the surface of mainstream political life is of course frightening. But it is also an opportunity for the left: crypto- or veiled racism is difficult to fight in an open and vigorous way. When it spills out into individual episodes of violence or other intolerance, we all regret those episodes but all too soon forget their deeper roots. The new openness of the bigots has made it clear for all reasonable decent people to see that members of minorities-and women-have not been sounding a false alarm in stating that a lot of prejudice remains out there, even if for a while it has been concealed in many quarters.
Enter Damon Linker, a conservative intellectual of sorts, who seems nervous about what happens when prejudice comes out of the closet and has to face the spotlight. Linker tries to dismiss liberal assaults on the Deplorables as a kind of cosmopolitan fanaticism, aimed at eradicating any kind of particularist loyalty or attachment:
cosmopolitan liberals presume that all particularistic forms of solidarity must be superseded by a love of humanity in general, and indeed that these particularistic attachments will be superseded by humanitarianism before long, as part of the inevitable unfolding of human progress.
Now Linker doesn't name a single such liberal. Perhaps because none exists. There might be a few eggheads around who still argue for a global government or a world state. But liberals today worry more about the weakening of the state in liberal democracies than its excessive strength; in particular, we recognize that no viable global mechanism exists for redistribution, and this alone means that the case for preserving sovereign states-and allegiance to those states- is watertight, if one cares about social and economic inequality.
The real question is whether the state, the bounded political community, ought to be grounded in some exclusionary subpolitical identity-race, religion, etc. If it is, then there is the further question of how minorities can enjoy legal, political and social equality in such circumstances. And as far as beyond the state goes, we can owe special duties to our own and more general duties towards others as human beings, as was well-appreciated in the thought of the ancient stoics, or even in Homer's Greeks with their ethos of hospitality toward friendly foreigners. As my late colleague Ronald Dworkin argued in a posthumously published work on international law, global cooperation can be understood as serving the very principles and purposes that underlie the domestic regime in liberal democracies-protecting human rights, saving the environment for future generations, and so forth.
What Beauchamp has dredged up from the evidence is not subtle thinking more on the communitarian as opposed to liberal side of answering such concerns, but visceral resentment and rejection of the other.
Linker's next move is to say that particularist attachment to one's own (which he persistently confounds with rejection or denigration of the other) has a basis in human nature, a more solid basis, he asserts, than liberal cosmopolitanism, which bids us to see the common humanity in others, across divides of nationality, race, and religion. Linker is simply wrong to suggest that cosmopolitan notions don't have an ancient pedigree in human thought. Classicist/philosopher Martha Nussbaum has written about this in a fine essay in the Boston Review. There are elements in the cosmopolitan outlook in Plutarch and Cicero, for instance, and even in the imperial practice of Alexander the Great who sought to impose a universal legal code on other peoples, not because of a belief in the superiority of Greek ways to their ways (Alexander was quick to adopt the customs of others that he found appealing), but rather as a means of uniting human beings across cultural boundaries.
What is frightening about Linker's argument is that having dispensed with liberal cosmopolitanism by conjuring an absurd straw man, he hands the Trumpians a justification for xenophobia that has no limiting principle-so-called "human nature". Are all forms of exclusion of others justifiable by the purportedly natural preference for one's own, for the particular and the near? Chillingly, and perhaps intentionally, Linker offers no clue as to where to draw the line.
As far as refugees are concerned a litmus test about human nature is before our eyes: Greece. Despite being impoverished and disempowered by economic crisis Greeks have generally speaking opened their arms to the refugees flowing into their country at rapid pace and in large numbers. Are the Greek grandmothers taking care of Syrian babies on the beaches of Lesvos slaves to some unnatural ideology of liberal cosmopolitanism? Or are they a better reflection of human nature than Trumpian white male irredentists? Human nature is arguably very distorted in the detached, deluded, disturbed and disrupted and often drugged-out lives of the so-called Deplorables.
Linker implies that the future is on the side of the irredentists. But the evidence is clear,-whether its Brexit or Trump, the reactionary xenophobic vision is one that doesn't catch on with young people, the rising generation of democratic citizens. It's unlikely we can persuade many of the Trumpians, in whatever national version, but the large-scale political mobilization of the young, the reduction of the voting age, and similar measures can in the medium or longer run, decisively counter the political salience of a dangerous and disturbed minority. Here Bernie Sanders, in the primary, showed the way.
