The most devoted Trump support comes from those impatient with the traditional code words and dog whistles offered by Republicans for the last half century.
A fictional advertising executive explains what they want instead.
In the one time television series Mad Men, advertising executives struggle along with cigarette manufacturers on how to sell Lucky Strike cigarettes without violating new, restrictive, federal regulations.
One ad guy comes up with an inspiration. He asks a key question.
How do you make your cigarettes?
One of the Lucky Strike executives walks through it step by step.
We breed insect-resistant tobacco seeds, plant ‘em in the North Carolina sunshine, grow it, cut it, cure it, toast it…
There you go.
He writes on a chalk board:
“Lucky Strike – It’s ‘Toasted’.”
But everybody else’s tobacco is toasted.
No. Everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike…
…is toasted.
I enjoyed those episodes I had a chance to see. I especially liked the weaving of actual advertising history into the fictional world of Don Draper and his crew.
Lucky Strike really did advertise cigarettes as toasted. But the campaign dates back to 1914, a little before the timeline of the show.
What the Lucky Strike story does illustrate is the Frank Luntz philosophy applied to everyday products. Frank Luntz is the Republican strategist whose specialty is effective euphemism. Luntz is credited with rescuing the extremely wealthy from increases in estate taxes. All but those in the uppermost levels of affluence were in favor of raising estate taxes. They affected such a small number of families, and those families were so fabulously wealthy, the popular mood was that they could afford to pay somewhat more for the roads, bridges, and police, and infrastructure that helped their investments to grow.
Frank Luntz came up with the idea of renaming estate taxes. Republican politicians were told never again to say the two words, “estate” and “tax” in the same sentence. You see, very few voters thought they would ever own a vast estate. But everyone will eventually die. So Republicans campaigned hard against increasing the death tax. In fact, as President George W. Bush took office, the estate tax was phased out entirely. It was brought back after a tough fight a dozen years later.
Frank Luntz styles himself a moderate Republican. He opposed Donald Trump, then attacked Trump critics, and finally settled into a safe both-sides-are-guilty middle muddle.
The Luntz style of politics predates Luntz by about forever. A cruder form was expressed in secret by Republican dirty trickster Lee Atwater in 1981. His use of a common racial epithet was so casually sprinkled throughout, most renditions, including our own, blank it out as n*****. Yeah, it’s the n-word.
In other words, you start out, and now y’all don’t quote me on this, you start out in 1954 by saying ‘n*****, n*****, n*****.’
By 1968 you can’t say ‘n*****,’ that hurts you, backfires, so you say stuff like “forced busing, states rights” and all that stuff.
Later in the conversation, he elaborates. He doesn’t use the same descriptive phrasing as Luntz uses to describe his craft. He says that racism is getting more abstract
…you start out in 1954 by saying ‘n*****, n*****, n*****.’
And you’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes and all these things. You’re talking about totally economic things, and the byproduct often is Blacks get hurt worse than Whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it.
In fairness, Atwater was describing what he thought was the death rattle of actual American racism. With abstraction, racism would starve for lack of mutual reinforcement.
What I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me? Because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut taxes, we want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “n*****, n*****.” You know!
If it sounds like a description of hypocrisy, it is. The use of code words, even code concepts, to disguise base racism fits nicely into the definition François de La Rochefoucauld used over 450 years ago:
Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.
More precisely, each racial code word is a compliment that pure evil must pay to what is right.
On some level, euphemisms that must be substituted for clear meaning have to be a little grating. I have written about one incident that occurred a few years ago.
When my loved one attended a church dinner, she found herself at the same table as two elderly members. As the two women talked past her to each other, she began to wonder why she was there. One complained about nearby housing construction. “I heard they’re building houses for those Mexicans, and…” She paused and glanced at my wife, then continued to her companion, “…You know.”
I was late coming from a business meeting. When I arrived, the dinner was over and evening worship had begun. She laughed as she told me about the “you know,” and their assumption that she wouldn’t understand. “Why didn’t they just spell out N‑E‑G‑R‑O? They had to think I couldn’t spell.”
The Trump administration, and those in it, are not quite so un-self-aware. They are not Archie Bunker types. They have a specific well formed racial ideology. Their program is a deliberate reversion to American immigration as it existed half a century ago.
Beginning in 1924, immigrants could only be admitted on a quota system, in exact proportion to the ethnicity, national origin, and race of those already here. The idea was to preserve the racial character of the nation.
A couple of cases made it to the Supreme Court. The court said that one immigrant from India and another from Japan could be prevented from becoming citizens because they were not white people.
A Congressional report delineated the purpose of the system. It was “used in an effort to preserve, as nearly as possible, the racial status quo in the United States. It is hoped to guarantee, as best we can at this late date, racial homogeneity.” That philosophy continued to be US immigration policy until the mid-1960s.
The Trump campaign to discourage immigration is pretty much confined to those seeking to come from the south. Our president was clear from the very first that reducing legal immigration would not apply to every part of the world.
I say to myself, why aren’t we letting people in from Europe? I have many friends, many, many friends–and nobody wants to talk this, nobody wants to say it–but I have many friends from Europe. They want to come in. People I know. Tremendous people. Hard-working people. They can’t come in.
– Donald Trump at CPAC, March 15, 2013
Casual bigots, those you might encounter sitting on the corner stool in any bar on any downtown street, who sit among us in the pews of our churches, who talk to us over back fences in any community, are not invested in such programmatic racialism. Except for a violent few, they are not filled with rage.
They are simply irritated at what they see as scolding for long-standing reasonable views. And they are impatient with the codes and buzzwords that polite society demands they use to disguise what they know is right. They do not crave Luntz and his political followers. They want the real thing. They want Trump.
They do not want him for his tax cuts. They don’t scream for him at rallies because they believe all he says. They will not be deterred by scandal or criminality.
The fictional ad executive explains what they want, in a timeline that occurs decades before they would have heard of Donald Trump, years before Donald Trump’s parents would have paid for his college entrance.
Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And you know what happiness is?
He launches into a poetic description of a new car, of freedom from fear. Then, finally, years in advance, he tells us all we need to know about the Make-America-Great-Again groupies.
This is happiness:
It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is okay.
You are okay.
That is what fervid Trump supporters want. They don’t want Luntz type code words that hide an apology, as if they are doing something wrong.
They do not want to have to spell out the word N‑E‑G‑R‑O at a church supper as they describe who should be kept out.
They are devoted to Trump because only he is willing to provide:
…reassurance that whatever you’re doing is okay.
You are okay.
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