Into the breach

‘There is no such thing as a good Trump voter!’ screamed the front-page headline for a new article by Jamelle Bouie, political editor at online daily Slate. It was the week after Donald Trump’s shocking, earth-shattering election victory, and Bouie’s seventh or eighth article since then. A leading young black writer in mainstream US liberal media, Bouie had identified strongly with the Hillary Clinton campaign and been disdainful of the left insurgency of Bernie Sanders, arguing that Clinton’s approach, emphasising race as much as class, was a more genuinely progressive vision for the Democrats to hold – and, what was more, a winning formula. Now, facing this hideous defeat, Bouie had turned his guns first on the ‘Bernie Bros’ and then on all Trump voters, marking them as the same. In Salon, to the left of Slate, Amanda Marcotte ran the same line with regard to gender. To consider some non-racist, non-sexist reasons why people might vote for Trump (and 42 per cent of US voting women did) was held to be reactionary. Even considering Trump as an option damned such people, no matter how great their sense of being forgotten and excluded by a centrist Democratic process. Trump’s sexism and chuavinism/racism should have been sufficient to rule him out. Across the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, the mainstream and more marginal liberal press echoed the same sentiment. When Bouie was in turn furiously attacked, he returned fire with equal fury, further entrenching himself in his position. This was a position shared by Marcotte and others: that progressives and leftists could have no dealings with working- and excluded-class people who didn’t reach a minimum level of acceptable progressivism.