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One America? Presidential Appeals to Racial Resentment from LBJ to Trump
Nathan
Angelo
Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2020 (Paperback reissue, first
published 2018) xi+304 p. ISBN
978-1438471525. $26.95
Reviewed
by Charles J. Holden St. Mary’s College of
Maryland
Political commentators,
political scientists, historians continue to fill television and podcast airtime,
newspaper opinion sections, and their Twitter feeds trying to make sense of the
Donald Trump presidency. Nathan Angelo’s One America? contributes to the
reckoning by asking the fundamental question: “How did we get here?” [xi] A political scientist, Angelo
examines the use of racial rhetoric by American presidents from Lyndon Johnson
through Donald Trump. Part of Angelo’s methodology employs “quantitative
content analysis” [7] to determine how often presidents referred to race in
their public speeches. Angelo then digs in, using a “close textual analysis”
[7] of the speeches. His textual analysis produces the most rewarding sections
of his work. Angelo spends perhaps more time than is necessary explaining what
he is going to do and explaining what other scholars have already done, but
when he turns his analysis to the speeches themselves, the insights are many
and well-founded. While the main argument –
that American presidents since the 1960s have aimed their messaging on racial
matters at “White Middle Americans” [16] – will not come as a surprise to some
readers, Angelo deftly traces the important differences along the way. Even
Lyndon Johnson, he notes, seemingly at the height of his power following
passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, adjusted
his public messaging to assuage White Middle Americans who feared that the
federal government, at their expense, was doing too much to help the country’s
long-marginalized populations. But, Angelo continues, it was Richard Nixon who
set the tone for how many white Americans understood race relations and what the
role the government should play in that relationship. It was primarily Nixon,
with input from white nationalist speechwriters such as Pat Buchanan, who framed
his public rhetoric on welfare around racially-coded images of welfare
recipients as predominantly urban, the product of broken families, probably
lazy, and potentially dangerous. Nixon then contrasted that image with
references to “Americans” generally as hard-working, patriotic, tax-paying members
of stable, two-parent families. Thus framed, Nixon did not need to add that by
the latter he meant White Middle Americans. Angelo shows how Nixon’s
rhetoric set the lines of debate over welfare programs over the next five
decades. To progressives, a successful welfare policy was one that received
robust funding in order to lift up those who had unfairly been held down. To
conservatives, a successful welfare policy was one that shrank in size by forcing
the poor to “work” and “do their share” as a measure of their being “real”
Americans. Either way the essentially racist subtext persisted. Subsequent
presidents have not strayed – or been able to break out – from this pernicious
framing, Democrats included. After the Ronald Reagan-led Republican Party began
to shift even further to the right, a moderate Democrat like Bill Clinton
positioned himself in the middle by pledging to “end welfare as we know it.”
[138] Even Barack Obama, who spoke candidly about the tragic history of
American race relations in other contexts, employed the hard work, good
families, patriotic American trope as the primary goal of welfare reform. Angelo also shows how
Republican presidents, before Trump that is, were at least somewhat sensitive
to the party becoming the home of white voters exclusively. Even putting the
morality of such politics aside, in a country with an increasingly diverse
population, this made poor political sense for the party, it seemed. Therefore
from Nixon through George W. Bush, Republican presidents when discussing
welfare expanded the narrative boundaries of acceptability beyond White Middle
Americans to include “ethnics” in the late 1960s and Asian-Americans and
Latinos by the early 2000s. While on the surface this seemed to contradict the Nixon
era normalization of “white” as properly American, these demographic additions
to the ranks of the acceptable were, if not traditionally “white,” also not
black. Angelo’s makes his concluding point here convincingly. As long as this
rhetorical framing remains, American welfare policy will always be constrained
by the racist coding within the debate itself. And beyond policy debates the
stakes are even higher: the “repetition” of this narrative, he concludes,
“risks the perpetual construction of an American identity that is intimately
connected to racial and ethnic resentment.” [196] As Angelo notes in his first
chapter, “rhetoric reinforces norms.” [6] This is certainly true and one could
add that presidential rhetoric in particular can shape what become new norms. But
even presidential rhetoric needs the support of an enabling media. Therefore
one wishes that Angelo had given a bit more of a nod to the rise of right-wing
media in the American market. The rise of the right-wing media aligns almost
perfectly with Angelo’s timeline. Nixon, once again the trendsetter, with a big
assist from his vice-president Spiro Agnew, strategically inserted into the
public discourse the allegation that “the media” was liberal and therefore
hostile to Republicans. This immediately became an article of faith on the
Right and led to the cynical yet successful branding of FOX News later as “fair
and balanced” despite its track record of programming that if not outright
racist was, and is, certainly white supremacist-friendly, one might say. Angelo concludes with an
epilogue entitled simply “Trump,” thus taking readers back to the fundamental
question of “How did we get here?” [xi]. Angelo at first answers his own
question by asserting that Trump’s victory “fits nicely” [x] into his argument
about appeals to White Middle Americans. In the epilogue he notes that Trump “did
not stray far from any of the major norms or tactics used by Nixon”
[202]. The epilogue also suggests some uncertainty, however. We find that
“Trump is not really an exception, but his campaign may still reflect change in
American political rhetoric” [202]. Later, Angelo again posits that “the Trump
presidency is not normal, but his campaign may be more normal than we might
assume at first glance” [214]. And Angelo also reminds us of Trump’s shocking
(at the time) description of Mexicans as rapists and accusations of Muslim-Americans
dancing on 9/11. That these appalling statements did not hurt him during the
campaign, indeed they seemed to help, indicates that “Trump reflects a change
in the Republican party” [214]. The “which is it?” tension
within Angelo’s last chapter is understandable not solely because the book was
going to press in the early stages of the Trump presidency, but because, I
suspect, of the Trump movement itself. I can relate. Given that the hard cover
version of One America? came out in 2018, one can assume that the manuscript
was going through the final stages of publication in 2017 (the final chapter
refers to Trump’s victory). I also had a (co-authored) book going through the
publication process at this time. In Republican Populist :
Spiro Agnew and the Origins of Donald Trump’s America, my co-authors Zach
Messitte, Jerry Podair, and I found clear connections between Nixon vice
president Spiro Agnew’s style of political attack and Trump’s. At the same time
we could not shake the sense that Trumpism was something different. Now that a
full-on white nationalist, anti-democratic, revanchist movement has taken
ownership of the Republican Party, it seems so obvious. I cannot speak for
Angelo, of course, but perhaps part of our hesitation in arriving at that
conclusion sooner was us not wanting to believe the worst. But here we are. To
be certain, Trumpism did not appear out of nowhere. One only has to look at the
seemingly deliberate distortions and provocations of a mid-1990s Newt Gingrich
to see its antecedents. But having now witnessed Trumpism in all its white
nationalism, xenophobia, sexism, corruption, paranoia, and authoritarianism – and
given the violent defiance of his supporters on January 6, 2021 – we are indeed
living in different times.
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