New Threats to Freedom Series

Jason L. Riley

• Publisher: Templeton Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781599475905
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Economic inequality continues to be one of America's most hotly debated topics. Still, there has been relatively little discussion of the fact that black-white gaps in joblessness, income, poverty and other measures were shrinking before the pandemic. Why was it happening, and why did this phenomenon go unacknowledged by so much media?

In  The Black Boom, Jason L. Riley—acclaimed  Wall Street Journal  columnist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute—digs into the data and concludes that the economic lives of black people improved significantly under policies put into place during the Trump administration. To acknowledge as much is not to endorse the 45th president but to champion policies that achieve a clear moral objective shared by most Americans.

Riley argues that before the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, the economic fortunes of blacks improved under Trump to an extent unseen under Obama and unseen going back several generations. Black unemployment and poverty reached historic lows, and black wages increased faster than white wages.

Less inequality is something that everyone wants, but disapproval of Trump's personality and methods too often skewed the media's appraisal of effective policies advocated by his administration. If we're going to make real progress in improving the lives of low-income minorities, says Riley, we must look beyond our partisan differences at what works and keep doing it. Unfortunately, many press outlets were unable or unwilling to do that.

Riley notes that political reporters were not unaware of this data. Instead, they chose to ignore or downplay it because it was inconvenient. In their view, Trump, because he was a Republican and because he was Trump, had it in for blacks, and thus his policy preferences would be harmful to minorities. To highlight that significant racial disparities were narrowing on his watch—that the administration's tax and regulatory reforms were mainly boosting the working and middle classes rather than 'the rich'—would have undermined a narrative that the media preferred to advance, regardless of its veracity."

As with previous books in our  New Threats to Freedom  series,   The Black Boom  includes two essays from prominent experts who take issue with the author's perspective. Juan Williams,  a veteran journalist, and Wilfred Reilly, a political scientist, contribute thoughtful responses to Riley and show that it is possible to share a deep concern for disadvantaged groups while disagreeing on how best to help them.

PART 1

The Black Boom

CHAPTER 1

Black Progress: Trump vs. Obama

A FEW MONTHS AFTER Joe Biden took office, the New York Times published a column by David Brooks about Donald Trump supporters and how they were responding to the young Biden presidency. According to Brooks, there were “increasing signs that the Trumpian base is radicalizing” and that Republican voters were exhibiting “apocalyptic pessimism” regarding the new administration. “What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack,” he wrote. “Since the election, large swaths of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.”¹ Though Brooks never says so in the column, these reactions were every bit as applicable to the political left’s end-is-nigh rhetoric surrounding the election of Trump four years earlier. Less than two weeks after Trump took office, one commentator even claimed that his presidency posed an “existential” danger to America. That commentator’s name was David Brooks.²

If Brooks’s take on Trump loyalists displayed a stunning lack of self-awareness, his own “apocalyptic pessimism” regarding Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton was hardly unique among media elites. Slate magazine said that Trump’s win revealed “our unjust, racist, sexist country for what it is.”³ The New Yorker magazine wrote that the outcome was “nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.”⁴ The reason why such feverish reactions to Trump’s election are worth revisiting at the outset of this short volume is because they went on to inform media coverage of his presidency from start to finish. During the 2016 campaign, influential news organs that already tended to lean left politically became more openly ideological and oppositional in their White House reporting, not just on their editorial pages. In February 2017, the Washington Post added the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” below its masthead to convey, according to the paper’s spokesperson, “who we are to the many millions of readers who have come to us for the first time over the last year.”⁵

The New York Times went even further in discarding any pretense of objectivity in its coverage of Trump. An August 2016 front-page story by the paper’s media reporter, Jim Rutenberg, said that it was necessary for his colleagues to “move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional” when writing about the Trump campaign. “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies,” wrote Rutenberg, “you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century.”⁶ Moreover, this move to suspend professional standards was enthusiastically applauded by self-styled guardians of journalistic ethics. Writing in a 2016 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review, a leading industry publication, media studies professor David Mindich offered his imprimatur to political journalists who were abandoning “the practice of steadfast detachment” in favor of “pushing explicitly against” Trump’s White House bid. Around the same time, a journalism professor at New York University wrote in the Washington Post that reporters must “do things they have never done.” Specifically, he instructed, they must “call Trump out with a forcefulness unseen before” and “explain to the public that Trump is a special case, and the normal rules do not apply.”⁷ The Washington press corps largely obliged the professor, but Trump won the election anyway, which not only annoyed, but confused and even angered, a media establishment that had spent the previous year telling the public that Hillary Clinton would win easily.

The problem was not that the prognosticators called it the wrong way. The consensus view at the time, which I shared, was that Trump would be rejected by an electorate who saw him as unsuitable for the presidency. I predicted that Trump’s inexperience and character flaws—his repugnant birtherism and his disparaging remarks about women and immigrants—would prove fatal to his campaign. I was wrong. Perhaps not surprisingly in hindsight, the sensibilities and priorities of political journalists based in places like Washington and New York turned out to be quite different from those of Middle America. But upsets are not unheard of in politics, and Trump was an unconventional candidate who pulled a genuine upset. The problem was how the media responded to his victory. Having failed to anticipate the outcome, journalists proceeded to actively resist it, and then spent four years willfully misinterpreting the reasons it happened. The narrative that gained the greatest currency among the elite media was that Trump’s political rise was evidence of racial retrenchment. “Trump opponents take his racism for granted,” wrote Martin Gurri in a long, astute essay that recounted the former president’s media coverage. “[H]e stands accused of appealing to the worst instincts of the American public, and those who wish to debate the point immediately fall under suspicion of being racist themselves. The dilemma, therefore, was not whether Trump was racist (that was a fact) or why he flaunted racist views (he was a dangerous demagogue), but rather, how to report on his racism under the strictures of commercial journalism. Once objectivity was sacrificed, an immense field of subjective possibilities presented themselves.”⁸

Reporters insisted that a surge of white bigotry had put Trump in the Oval Office and that his victory over Clinton proved beyond any doubt that racism, sexism, and xenophobia in America were ascendant. This view prevailed even though numbers-crunchers—at the New York Times and elsewhere—had pointed to empirical evidence that called it into serious question. For example, Trump won a smaller share of the white vote—and a larger share of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians—than Mitt Romney had won four years earlier. He also carried a majority of white women, even though he ran against one.⁹ And then there was the matter of which tranche of voters most likely put Trump over the top. It turns out that they were the very same people, in battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, who had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. “It’s clear that large numbers of white, working-class voters shifted from the Democrats to Mr. Trump,” reads a New York Times analysis from 2017. “He flipped millions of white working-class Obama supporters to his side. The voter file data makes it impossible to avoid this conclusion.”¹⁰ It’s certainly possible that millions of white nationalists had spent the previous eight years hiding out in the Democratic Party and throwing their support behind the first black president, but it’s not very plausible.

Nonetheless, this is the narrative that drove four years of Trump media coverage and is a major reason why the Trump economy, which benefited low-income minorities more than anyone, didn’t receive nearly the amount of credit it deserved. What’s more, this narrative—that Donald Trump ushered in a new era of white supremacy in the United States—became so entrenched that it persisted even after Trump significantly increased his level of minority support in his losing bid for a second presidential term. In 2020, Trump saw a dip in support among whites and an uptick in support among black, Asian, and Hispanic voters. The black increase is less impressive when put into context but still notable. Between 1976 and 2004, Republican presidential candidates averaged around 11 percent of the black vote. John McCain won just 4 percent in 2008 and Mitt Romney 6 percent in 2012, but they ran against Barack Obama. In 2016, Trump, who didn’t have that excuse, managed only 8 percent support among blacks, which was an improvement but still below the pre-Obama norm. Trump’s 4-point increase among blacks in 2020—which included a remarkable 6-point increase among black men—got the GOP back to its traditional share of the black vote in recent decades, even while the president was regularly portrayed as a racist in the press.¹¹

Trump’s performance in 2020 among Latinos, which jumped to 32 percent from 28 percent, is more remarkable because it expanded well beyond the reliably Republican Cuban American voters in Florida. There, Latino support overall for Trump grew by 12 points to 47 percent, and among Puerto Ricans, who generally lean much more heavily Democratic than Cubans, he won 30 percent. But he was likewise competitive among Hispanic voters of Mexican and Central American descent in places like Arizona, Nevada, and South Texas. In 2016, Starr County, Texas, which abuts the border with Mexico, went for Clinton by a 60-point margin. Biden won it four years later by just 5 points.¹²

Regardless, the growth in support for Trump among these racial and ethnic groups during his second White House bid had little impact on the prevailing view in the press that the former president made common cause with fascists and that his policies were harmful to minorities.¹³ Instead, the uptick was downplayed or ignored. And when it was acknowledged at all, it was often treated with something closer to befuddlement or disbelief. A journalist for New York magazine, for example, attributed Trump’s improved performance among minorities in 2020 to a Republican “disinformation” campaign. There “was a disconnect between the reality of the [Democratic] party’s platform and how it was perceived,” he wrote, as if black and Hispanic voters would never have pulled the lever for Trump unless they had been hoodwinked into doing so.¹⁴ Elsewhere, there was simply shock. “Even in New York City, Trump’s Support Grew in Many Communities,” read a December 2020 headline in the New York Times. “Trump’s Surprising Multiracial Appeal,” read another headline the same month in the Christian Science Monitor.

Yet none of this was surprising to anyone not taking their cues from social media or MSNBC. Following Trump’s victory, two academics—historian Stephanie Muravchik and political scientist Jon A. Shields—conducted an ethnographic study of long-time Democratic strongholds that went Republican in 2016. One of the places they visited was Ottumwa, Iowa, a Rust Belt town that had consistently voted Democrat for president since 1972. Another was Elliott County, Kentucky, a small rural community in Appalachia that had never voted Republican since it was formed in the 1860s and where the ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans approximated San Francisco’s. The resulting book was titled Trump’s Democrats, and it was motivated, according to the authors, by dissatisfaction at how the mainstream media depicted Trump voters:

“We are struck . . . by the fact that the dominant explanations of Trump’s appeal all have one thing in common: they all assume that something must be seriously wrong with Trump enthusiast[s],” write Muravchik and Shields. “Trump won, we are told, either because of racial prejudices or economic distress or various diseases of social despair, such as drug abuse, family breakdown and suicide. Thus, in these accounts, Trump voters are driven by anger or desperation. How else could one cast a vote for Trump. Though it is never stated explicitly, such views rest on the assumption that any well-adjusted, healthy, flourishing citizen would reject Trump.”¹⁵

The authors had not themselves supported Trump but they showed respect for people who had, and they offer a mostly objective perspective on these voters that avoids the typical liberal condescension that was so prevalent among Washington reporters. The book posits, with mounds of reporting and data to back it up, that geographic and cultural isolation may explain why these white working-class Trump supporters had so thoroughly flummoxed the pollsters and the press. Despite Trump’s wealth, these voters saw him as someone with working-class sensibilities. He was a nonideological, transactional, you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours politician. He was a counterpuncher who refused to let even small slights go unaddressed. He surrounded himself in office with family and friends and valued loyalty above all else. Ultimately, in their estimation, Donald Trump was a kind of old-school machine Democrat. And while he was a serial violator of coastal-elite norms, he was someone who behaved like the politicians they had encountered day-in and day-out for decades. In an interview given shortly before the 2020 election, Shields predicted that these Trump Democrats would remain loyal to the president. He was correct. Trump not only held on to them but increased their numbers. And while there weren’t enough of them to deliver Trump a second term, more attentive Democrats understood that there were too many of them to ignore.

David Shor, a data scientist and Democratic strategist who analyzed the 2020 election, said it was very likely that the party’s focus on progressive policies had cost it votes among blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, as well as working-class whites. “In the summer [of 2020], following the emergence of ‘defund the police’ as a nationally salient issue, support for Biden among Hispanic voters declined,” Shor said. “The decline that we saw was very large. Nine percent or so nationwide, up to 14 or 15 percent in Florida. Roughly one in 10 Hispanic voters switched their vote from Clinton to Trump.” Shor allowed that Hispanic voters “are more liberal on immigration than white voters,” but said that “the extent to which Hispanic voters have liberal views on immigration is exaggerated.” Democrats who assumed that decriminalizing illegal border crossings was supported by most Hispanics, for example, were mistaken. “In test after test that we’ve done with Hispanic voters, talking about immigration commonly sparks backlash.”¹⁶

Shor’s take on black voting patterns was equally revealing. Since 2016, white liberals have become a much larger share of the Democratic Party. Because whites tend to be more highly educated, and because better-educated people “tend to have more ideologically coherent and extreme views” than the working class, the party’s moderates have had less influence. The political left tends to take the liberalness of blacks as a given, and in 2020 that proved costly to Democrats. “Roughly the same proportion of African American, Hispanic and white voters identify as conservative,” said Shor.

So as Democrats have traded non-college-educated voters for college-educated ones, white liberals’ share of voice and clout in the Democratic Party has gon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Black Boom
• Part 2: Dissenting Points of View
• Notes
• About the Contributors
• About the Author