There are a lot of reasons why Donald Trump managed to take over the Republican Party. One big reason, as Oliver Darcy notes in a recent Business Insider piece, is the conservative media establishment. Darcy argues that Republican elites encouraged conservative voters to embrace alternative, hard-line right-wing media outlets — which made them powerless when those outlets turned on them by backing Trump.
You can’t explain Trump’s conservative media appeal without talking about race
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images)
Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
Darcy’s piece is thoughtful and well sourced, and you should read it in full. But it misses a basic part of the story. To see why, look at this list of words that don’t appear in Darcy’s story: “race, racism, Mexican, Latino, black, African Americans, minorities.”
Race and racism are a huge part of the Trump story, inseparable from any meaningful account of how he succeeded. That’s because race remains a hugely important motivating force, independent of class or partisanship, in American voters’ political behavior. Ignore that almost entirely, as Darcy does, and you end up with a distorted analysis of Trump’s success.
How ignoring race distorts analysis
Here’s the big hole with Darcy’s analysis: It can’t account for why the media turned on elites.
He does try to explain this in the piece, arguing that the root cause is conservative media’s demand for a level of policy purity elected officials couldn’t match. The more Republican leaders kept disappointing their media allies, the angrier the media became, making some kind of backlash increasingly likely.
“To avoid being called a RINO (Republican in name only), a Republican would have to take a hardline conservative position on nearly every issue,” Darcy writes. “If, say, they were to hold conservative positions on 90% of the issues, the conservative press would focus on the 10% where there was disagreement.”
But the problem here is that Trump is quite heterodox on policy, opposing cuts to Social Security and neoconservative approaches to the Middle East. If it were really about policy purity, conservative media would have lined up behind Ted Cruz — as Darcy concedes in the piece: “It appeared that, for conservative media, only one candidate could be conservative enough to support for president: Cruz.”
Trump is just far more willing to overtly engage in racist rhetoric than any Republican in decades
But it didn’t do that. Instead, many of the best-read outlets backed Trump — a man who has zero interest in purity on conservative policy. Darcy’s explanation is that they were attracted to Trump because of his “combative style,” or because he was good for ratings.
But Ted Cruz was also combative: He was the ringleader, in case you’ve forgotten, of the 2013 government shutdown over Obamacare, and widely hated by the GOP elite. The ratings explanation is simply kicking the can down the road: It doesn’t explain why Trump was so popular with the conservative media audience.
To explain why conservative voters embraced Trump, you need to look at what actually distinguishes Trump from other Republican candidates. And the key distinguishing factor here is race: Trump is just far more willing to overtly engage in racist rhetoric than any Republican in decades.
This mirrors the conservative media outlets that have most nakedly embraced him. Ann Coulter, perhaps the most consistently pro-Trump commentator, has a history of comments like “there’s a cultural acceptance of child rape in Latino culture.”
If you look at Breitbart News, definitely the most consistently pro-Trump outlet, you see a long history of ugly rhetoric about Latino immigration and “black crime” (an actual category tag on the site). These outlets do racist stuff because they know their audience enjoys it. The racism brings the readers, listeners, and viewers.
This also tracks with what we know about Trump supporters.
Trump voters in the primary weren’t especially poor, but they do tend to come from the regions of the country with the highest scores of “racial resentment” (a political science measure of negative stereotypes of blacks). Research on attitudes about immigrants shows that racial and cultural anxieties play a huge role in creating the anti-immigration sentiment that Trump rode to the nomination.
American politics has always been about race
Historically, race has been an incredibly powerful structuring force in American politics. It is the root cause of the only civil war Americans have ever fought. It’s the reason the Democratic Party and the Republican Party transformed after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Race matters, and not just as a subset of partisanship or class.
This means that analysis of race can’t be siloed to pieces on obviously race-related topics, like police violence. Every meaningful analysis of structural changes to American politics or shocking events like Trump’s rise need to grapple with the reality that politics in this country is deeply racialized.
This may make some white elites uncomfortable. But we need to do it if we’re to get American politics right.
