Tag: Jamelle Bouie

Find-the-Matrix: Black Rappers for Trump

Transpartisan Note #137

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

We offer the Transpartisan Matrix as a descriptive, analytical, and energetic snapshot of contemporary American politics. Take a look at NY Times opinion writer Joe Coscarelli’s latest piece, Lil Wayne, Latest Rapper in Trump’s Orbit, Sees Backlash Over Photo from October 30th, 2020 and find the Matrix.

Coscarelli’s article reports how several powerful rappers (including Lil Wayne, Kanye West, 50 Cent, and Ice Cube) flirt with, embrace, or endorse President Trump and explores the backlash they received from other influential musicians and ardent fans.

The article, epically in its last paragraphs, captures the dynamic of the matrix – individual and structural pressures working on the Republican Right and the Democratic Left undulate across the political horizon. Successful outcomes for communities, we believe, result when politics integrates all four of the Matrix quadrants.

Those last paragraphs read:

In an interview, the writer, filmmaker and activist Dream Hampton called it “the hubris of the celebrity” for rappers to “kind of saunter in during the fourth quarter, talking about making demands.” She noted that while Black men will still overwhelmingly vote for Democrats – Mr. Biden leads 78-11 among Black men, according to a recent Times/Siena poll – a macho affinity for President Trump and the allure of economic success could explain his inroads with a certain segment of the hip-hop community.

“It’s the same reason they were referencing him in the ’90s – it’s about the lie of the American dream,” she said. “It’s about the lie of Black entrepreneurship somehow being a panacea to these larger social problems. Hip-hop became a stand-in for that, lifting up individual Black accomplishment.”

We think that the Transpartisan Matrix contributes to understanding what happened on November 3rd. Two days after the election, NY Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote:

…the surprise of this election. Although it is still too early to make any definitive statement about the shape of the electorate (broad white support for Trump notwithstanding), it is clear that the president made modest inroads with Black and Hispanic voters, especially men. This is most apparent in the states of Florida, Georgia and Texas, where Trump outperformed his 2016 totals in several areas where Hispanic voters make up a majority.

We don’t yet know why Trump made those gains — although the aforementioned performances, which figured prominently in his outreach to those groups, may have something to do with it — but this shift is a useful reminder that politics does not move along a linear path. For all of our data, the political world is still a fundamentally unpredictable place.

We use the Matrix to provide a view of the voting from an angle different from Red/Blue, Republican /Democrat, Conservative/Progressive, or any other dualities.  We see dualities as overly linear. We see the Matrix as a small step toward guiding the breakout from dualism.

Read about Lil Wayne’s outreach to President Trump and Find-the-Matrix.

(Images of President Trump [public domain] and Lil Wayne by Chris Allmeid [CC BY-SA 4.0] found on Wikimedia Commons.)

“We are all Republicans, We are all Federalists”

Transpartisan Note #134

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Thomas Jefferson used these words (as shared in Transpartisan Note #29) to bind the nation’s divisions in his first inaugural on March 4th, 1801. In the September 29th, 2020 edition of the NY Times, op-ed writer Jamelle Bouie uses his words to “look at the first and most consequential electoral crisis in American history: the election of 1800” and, in doing so, sets out the contours of the Transpartisan Matrix for the most consequential Presidential election in our early and perhaps our total American Constitutional history until 2020.

Bouie writes in There’s a Reason the Election of 1800 Still Sings Out to Us:

On Dec. 3 of that year [1800], the 138 members of the Electoral College gathered in their respective states to choose between Thomas Jefferson and the incumbent John Adams for president of the United States.

The last two years had been among the most tumultuous in the life of the young nation.

The 1800 US Presidential election squared off “order” Federalists against “freedom” Democratic-Republicans. The Electoral College deadlocked. The House took 35 inconclusive ballots between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. On the 36th ballot, after seven days, the house settled on Jefferson for President and Aaron Burr for Vice President.

The House cast 36 ballots over seven days before it came to a decision. The representatives from Vermont and Maryland were still divided on their choice for president, but rather than drag the fight out further, Federalist holdouts in both delegations abstained. Their Democratic-Republican colleagues then cast their states’ votes for Jefferson. With 10 votes to four for Burr (two states chose not to vote), Jefferson had finally won the presidency. No Federalist congressman voted in his favor.

Read Bouie’s column and see if you can find how Democratic-Republicans and Federalists maneuvered the nation through the Transpartisan Matrix into a position to keep the twelve-year-old U.S. Constitutional experiment alive. Look for the Matrix.

Of all the elements self-government needs to survive, it’s this awareness — the knowledge that power wanes, for you and your opponents — that matters most. When a democracy loses this awareness, when there is a party or a faction or even a demographic that refuses to admit or accept defeat, it finds itself on life-support, risking terminal decline.

Compare and contrast the 1800 and 2020 Presidential elections. In either case, if you see or do not see the Matrix in the 1800 election, let us know what, how, and why you see what you see by sharing your thoughts in the comments below.

(Images from Wikimedia Commons and are in the public domain.)