Donald Trump is "saying things in public that often people say in private spaces," says Joseph Winters. Rather than writing him off, we'd be wise to pay attention to what Trump's candidacy says about America's unresolved conflicts.
Winters is an assistant professor of religion and African and African American studies at Duke.
Transcript:
From Duke University, this is Glad You Asked, where we consider the question “What should we be talking about this election season?”
“My name is Joseph Winters. I am a professor of religious studies. Also I have a secondary position in African and African American Studies. My sense is that we should be talking about Donald Trump.
You’re probably going to say, ‘Well, wait a minute, everybody’s talking about him.’ What I mean is that to some extent, Donald Trump’s rhetoric speaks to and points to underlying racial tensions that haven’t been resolved. For some people, Donald Trump is a kind of a surprise -- his campaign, the fact that he’s actually a viable candidate. I want to actually suggest he’s articulating and making public certain kinds of sentiments around race, gender, nation, citizenship, certain fears and anxieties that I think are actually more common than sometimes we suggest.
When Donald Trump says, for instance, that ‘Mexico’s sending over their worst citizens,’ for some people who might have political commitments that are different than that, they might say 'This is a ridiculous statement; how can you say this?‘ If you look at, let’s say, certain blogs or certain websites and you look at the comments underneath, that kind of rhetoric is actually very common.
There’s a way in which Donald Trump is kind of resisting what you might call a kind of political correctness in our culture. What he’s actually articulating is what I want to call, this is a term that Frederic Jameson kind of coined, a kind of political unconscious. Within our politically correct society, there are certain things people won’t say even if it’s on their mind. He’s saying things in public that many people say -- often men say, right? -- in private spaces.
So I guess for me as somebody who was very dismissive at one point and has very different political commitments than he does, his rhetoric is resonating with a lot of people and I want to think about why that might be.
One danger of not talking about that is that we see someone like Donald Trump as just an outlier. If we see him as an outlier then many people would assume ‘Yeah, we’re on this path of progress when it comes to equality, when it comes to understanding.'
We should be talking about how his rhetoric and his speech acts are indicative of more fundamental problems. We need to have more of those kinds of discussions it seems to me."
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