The Weekly Screed (#582)

The same horse, the Hate Faction
and the power of “changeism”
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — I watch the talking heads talk election-year politics on TV, parsing down to tenths of percentages the likely leanings of every demographic group from blue-collar vegans to Dade County Guatemalans. Predictably, all these expert calculations overlook — as they always have — two groups who, this year, will very likely determine the next President of the United States.

I call the smaller of these the Same Horse Faction.

These voters vote because voting is an adult duty, like packing your kids’ school lunch and not picking your nose at a red light. For such folks, the election, except for that one actual day in November, holds little interest. It all just passes them by. They are capable of being bombed by months of campaign ads without any discernible effect.

(This is possible because humans have a limitless talent for sifting persuasion. For instance, one of my favorite recent TV ads is a series of “discount double-check” spots featuring football star Aaron Rodgers. However, after seeing the commercials dozens of times, I cannot today think of the company being advertised. I’m not sure I ever knew.)

These voters don’t care what any campaign says about any candidate because they don’t vote based on information, or propaganda. They follow a simple, serene and infallible maxim: “Never change horses in midstream.” They always ride the incumbent.

If this seems a dumb way to choose a president, it probably is. After all, the Same Horse Faction — without getting a syllable of credit from Chuck Todd or Wolf Blitzer — probably swung the 2004 election in favor of George W. Bush.

(You wonder how the Same Horses manage to choose when neither candidate is incumbent, like 2008? Well, why else did God give us “eeny meeny miney mo”?)

This year, for obvious reasons, the Same Horse Faction belongs to Barack Obama. This represents probably less than five percent of voters but Obama will need every horse because the other hidden demographic, the Hate Faction, is a lot bigger. 

Pollsters don’t track the Hate Faction. It would require an algorithm that turns passions into numbers, and things like pride, fear, stubbornness, family heritage and epidermal loyalty into equations. The Hate Faction is furtive, reticent, disorganized and inchoate, but it persists — partly because the establishment media don’t know how to talk about it. It can’t be mobilized into rallies or invited to a respectable town hall meeting, but every sly politician who can turn it to his advantage knows it’s there.

The latest proof of the Hate Faction surfaced in France, where Marine LePen, and the National Front got 18 percent of the popular vote in April’s preliminary election.

The beauty part of the National Front is that it offers no credible program beyond hatred — of Jews, blacks, Arabs, Muslims, of any non-white outsider, and a few who are white. Because the National Front is so openly the Party of Hate, it provides a sort of international benchmark for the Hate Faction. Every nation has a Hate Faction, and every Hate Faction, like the National Front, composes 15 to 20 percent of the voting public.

(From this month’s Vanity Fair: Asked which national holiday they would eliminate if they could, 22 percent of Americans chose Martin Luther King’s birthday.)

The importance of this 15-20 percent struck me first when I pondered the troubles of former Wisconsin Senator Russell Feingold. Feingold, always a fiscal hawk and a maverick among Democrats, was exactly the sort of senator with whom Wisconsin voters fall in love. He fit the tradition of great Badger State independent spirits, like “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, Gaylord Nelson, Les Aspin and Bill Proxmire.

But Russ never got the love. He skated always on the brink of rejection — for one reason: he’s Jewish. In 2010, the Hate Faction, in the guise of the Tea Party, contrived to evict Feingold. The guy who beat him was a Koch brothers plant whose strategically non-Semitic name — Johnson — gave him a 15-percent head start. He won by five.

Black being the same as Jewish, Barack Obama starts every campaign 15 — maybe 20 — points in the hole. The Hate Faction… hates him. They’ll vote against him more angrily this year than they voted against him in ‘08 — because he surprised them. They didn’t believe that millions of fellow white Christian patriots would vote for someone who is clearly, visibly — look at him, for Pete’s sake! — not One of Us.

(OK, minorities have hate factions, too. We can logically estimate that possibly 15 percent of African-Americans hate all white people. But a black hate faction rarely has any electoral effect. It’s not big enough, nor does it tend to splinter from the majority. If a black candidate runs against a white guy, the black candidate’s going to get virtually every black vote, including the hate faction. By the same token, if both candidates are white, the black hate faction makes itself irrelevant by refusing to vote.)

Even if you try, you can’t get Feingold-haters to admit they’re judeophobic or Obama-haters to admit their negrophobic. Hate Faction voters reliably, sincerely deny that they’re bigots. Maybe it’s true. Not long ago, they saw — or thought they saw — an America homogeneous in hue with a universal faith, where the few non-white non-Christians were a tiny cohort of jewelers and usurers, or members of a compliant servant class deprived of both social status and civil rights. Now, they see a churning harlequin multitude, demanding equality, showing no respect, driving cars and mingling indiscriminately with their similarly indiscriminate children. Changing everything.

And that might be the real issue. The Hate Faction might not be, at heart, the racists they seem. Perhaps, more accurately, they’re changeists.

In this light, by running in 2008 on the motto “Change,” the black Obama was waving a red flag at the white bull. He was asking for trouble, especially if he won.

Whatever his motto this time around, Obama starts with a handicap. I’m thinking, however, that he might not have to make up the whole 15 points.

After all, in the eyes of the Hate Faction, Mormon Mitt — despite being the whitest white guy in America since Lawrence Welk — is no more Christian than the Muslim in the Oval Office.