What Clinton missed in ‘basket of deplorables’

Hillary Clinton made a mistake when she put half of Donald Trump’s supporters in a “basket of deplorables.” She had already given her big speech on Trump’s ties to the alt right. And she had talked before about some of his supporters being “deplorable.”

This time her words became controversial and gave the Trump campaign an opening because she assigned “half” his supporters to the bad basket. Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence, said Clinton had slandered millions of Americans.

So her remark was impolitic. Was it mistaken in any deeper sense? That depends on the answer to two questions: How racist, sexist, etc., are Trump’s supporters? And how deplorable does that make them?

Polls have found that most Trump supporters believe President Obama is Muslim. A Reuters-Ipsos poll taken over the course of the spring found that nearly half of Trump supporters consider blacks more violent than whites. Most Republicans polled during the primaries favored a temporary ban on Muslim immigration. Also during the primaries, a poll found that nearly 20 percent of Trump supporters, shockingly, regretted the Emancipation Proclamation.

Sounds pretty ugly. But there are a few things to keep in mind.

First: Not all of those polls can be taken at face value. The wording on that last one was sufficiently confusing that 10 percent of Bernie Sanders supporters, 6 percent of Clinton supporters and 5 percent of blacks chose the pro-slavery answer.

Second: Some of these views may not be rooted in prejudice. The response that blacks are more violent, for example, may just reflect statistics showing that blacks commit more violent crimes in proportion to their population than, say, whites do. This fact doesn’t justify suspicion of the vast majority of law-abiding black people. But it may help explain why more than 30 percent of Clinton supporters, too, view blacks as more violent.

Third and most important: You can hold deplorable views without being a deplorable person in general. For example, the view that our government is naive about violent Muslim extremism – which a lot of political rhetoric, including some from Clinton, reinforces – could lead someone to answer “yes” to a pollster’s question about banning Muslim immigration. But you might be able to convince some of those people that a ban is a bad idea (as I believe).

Bill Clinton understood this point when he was president. He saw that a lot of white voters had some legitimate concerns – about crime and welfare, for example – mixed up with some worse impulses. He spoke up for racial tolerance and addressed the legitimate concerns, and refrained from condemning millions of people for harboring prejudices that he must have deplored.

That was the right approach. And his wife was right to clarify and apologize.

This story was originally published September 19, 2016 at 5:07 AM with the headline "What Clinton missed in ‘basket of deplorables’."