It’s not really in character for Hillary Clinton to speak in terms of vivid imagery, creative metaphors, or striking turns of phrase. But she did it over the weekend, setting off a growing firestorm of controversy that’s defined the week in politics.

“You know,” Clinton said to a friendly crowd of wealthy donors this weekend, “to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.”

With that odd turn of phrase — basket of deplorables — Clinton sent the media-politico ecosystem into a tizzy. Donald Trump’s campaign immediately took offense on behalf of his constituents, and Clinton rather rapidly apologized. But Trump has only escalated. At a Monday night rally in North Carolina, he accused Clinton of running a “hate-filled and negative campaign” and released a television ad built around the remark.

And indeed, while Clinton apologized for painting with such a broad brush as to call fully half of Trump’s supporters deplorables, her campaign is very much sticking to the core accusation that Trump is trafficking in bigotry.

Meanwhile, some liberals think Clinton was wrong to back away from her numerical estimates. Writers like the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, New York’s Jonathan Chait, and Vox’s own German Lopez have all argued that, as best as we can tell, Clinton was, if anything, undercounting the quantity of irredeemable bigots in Trump’s ranks.

The multifaceted controversy touches on two of the more enduring taboos in American politics — frank discussion of racism and disparaging the electorate. And it highlights the contrasting campaign strategies of the Trump and Clinton camps. It started because the Trump camp correctly sensed Clinton had made a mistake.

But it continues so viciously because it covers terrain Clinton is fundamentally comfortable with — reenforcing a dynamic in which Trump, like the television entertainer he is, chases the ever-tighter loyalty of a minority — while Clinton seeks to paint Trump as broadly unacceptable to the general population that will be voting in November.

What, exactly, did Clinton say?

Clinton’s remarks came in the context of what was essentially a fundraising pitch. She expressed her understanding of the fact that despite massive strides in achieving legal and social equality, LGBTQ Americans still face many challenges. “You can get married on Saturday, post your pictures on Sunday, and get fired on Monday,” she said before launching into a litany of specific policy commitments she’s made to the LGBTQ community.

Then she pivoted to the ask:

I know there are only 60 days left to make our case — and don't get complacent, don't see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, well, he's done this time. We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here; I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well. And what I hope is that in addition to your extraordinary generosity, you will go to our website, HillaryClinton.com, or text to join at 47246 to see how else you can get involved.

To be persnickety about it, the problem here is that Clinton is somewhat herself.

On the one hand, she’s saying that Donald Trump’s racist and Islamophobic statements and dog whistles have activated and energized a small minority of hardcore bigots. She’s saying that Trump has taken once-obscure websites and elevated their traffic by a factor of 100.

On the other hand, she’s saying that the “basket of deplorables” contains about half of Trump supporters — which is to say it’s about a quarter of the electorate and not really a small fringe at all.

The upshot of Clinton’s quasi-apology is to disavow the second claim while increasing her bet on the first. Their strategy was boosted when Donald Trump Jr. responded to the controversy by Instagramming a pro-Trump meme image featuring Pepe the Frog, a common white nationalist symbol (that’s an explainer for another day, but Olivia Nuzzi’s primer is a good place to start) and then Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence went on CNN and refused to call former KKK grand wizard David Duke deplorable, suggesting the current Republican Party is in a tough spot when it comes to white nationalists.

Where did this phrase come from?

Clinton’s use of the phrase “deplorables” at the LGBTQ gala was not unique. Earlier in the week, in an English-language interview on Israeli television, Clinton explained, “If I were to be grossly generalistic, I'd say you can take Trump supporters and put them in two big baskets. There are what I call the deplorables.” And then there are the rest — lots of basically good, decent Americans who she believes don’t buy into the ugly side of what Trump is saying but who are so desperate to see change in American politics that they are willing to vote for Trump.

Writing at Slate, Ben Zimmer suggests that the “basket of deplorables” construction entered Clinton’s mind by way of analogy with the term “parade of horribles,” which, starting in the 1920s, “entered legal usage as a dismissive term for imagined concerns about a ruling's negative effects.”

Clinton is an attorney by training, so Zimmer thinks she would be accustomed to that particular instance of nouning an adjective.

Actual English-language use of “deplorables” as a term for a group of people, however, is quite rare, though Zimmer did find Thomas Carlyle in 1831 writing that “of all the deplorables and despicables of this city and time the saddest are the ‘literary men.’”

In general, this type of linguistic term suggests to me the vocabulary of revolutionary France (and, indeed, Carlyle wrote an early history of the French Revolution). This vocabulary is probably most familiar to the mass audience from the musical and book Les Misérables, with its invocation of “the miserables” as a term for the French urban poor. But the revolutionary era also gave us Les Enragés (“the enraged”) as a term for a loose group of radical polemicists, the Sans-Culottes (“the pantsless,” i.e., people who were the opposite of fancy pants) for the Paris mob, and other instances of nouning adjectives to give a name to social classes.

Wherever Clinton got it from exactly, it seems that in her LGBTQ gala she committed the cardinal political spin of mixing up two different spiels.

One spiel, the one that includes the phrase “deplorables,” is intended to set the stage for a rhetorical pivot to the idea that the vast majority of Trump supporters aren’t deplorable. She wants to say that they are, mostly, simply confused. They are frustrated by the political status quo, as is she, and she hopes that if she wins she can deliver change and prosperity and win them over despite their doubts.

The other spiel is intended to recapitulate the themes of Clinton’s speech on Trump and the alt-right in which she denounces Trump individually for elevating a handful of extreme and hateful voices that early Republican leaders would have marginalized. By crossing the rhetorical streams, Clinton wound up saying that fully half of Trump supporters belong in the tiny basket of hateful extremists. Whatever one makes of that as a question of demographics, it doesn’t make sense as a piece of political rhetoric, which is why Clinton backed away from it.

Was she right?

In the overwhelmingly white community of political journalists, it felt natural to take the fact that Clinton had made a political error as the starting point of analysis and proceed from there. But a group of writers, disproportionately and not coincidentally composed of people of color, wanted to press the point that Clinton was probably correct. Her political error, if there was an error, was in breaking the taboo around saying that racial bias is a potent and widespread force in contemporary American life.

As Lopez wrote for Vox, public opinion polling strongly suggests that a great majority of Trump supporters hold unfavorable views of Muslims and support a policy that bans Muslims from entering the US. Most of them support proposals that stifle immigration from Mexico, and they agree with Trump’s comments that Mexican immigrants are criminals. And many — but not a majority — say that black people are less intelligent and more violent than their white peers.

In particular, a Reuters/Ipsos polling analysis of the GOP primary showed that Donald Trump’s supporters stood out from backers of the other GOP candidates primarily in having highly negative attitudes toward nonwhite groups.

Whether the “deplorables” are really half of Trump’s current general election voters depends a bit on how you count, but it’s at least a plausible estimate.

One important nuance about this that liberals sometimes miss is that even though there’s a lot of reason to believe racial hostility was key to Trump’s rise, there’s very little reason to think that white racism in general is more widespread in 2016 than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Rather, as Lee Drutman writes separately for Vox, the issue is that “whites with strong racist attitudes turned much more sharply Republican following Obama's election, including some who had previously been Democrats.”

Back in the 1980s and ’90s, the Democratic Party was already identified as being more aligned with black interests, but the election of an actual black president combined with the growth of the nonwhite population kicked that identification into overdrive. Racially resentful whites left the Democratic Party, and Democrats decided they could build a winning coalition without them, turning racial attitudes into a powerful axis of partisan conflict.

How does this compare with the infamous “47 percent” tape?

Aaron Blake at the Washington Post immediately reacted to the news of Clinton’s remarks by asking “Did Hillary Clinton just make her own ‘47 percent’ gaffe?”

This is a reference to a secret video recording released to Mother Jones in September 2012 that showed Mitt Romney at a closed-door fundraiser explaining that there was a 47 percent floor on Barack Obama’s support:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax.

These remarks rapidly entered the lexicon of political operatives and journalists as a textbook example of a damaging gaffe, so framing Clinton’s remarks as a potential new “47 percent moment” is meant to play up their potential consequences.

However, just as the actual Hurricane Katrina did not have the political impact that the search for “Obama’s Katrina” implies, there is little reason to believe the 47 percent gaffe hurt Romney. Indeed, in their excellent empirical account of the 2012 campaign The Gamble, John Sides and Lynn Vavreck find that none of the many well-covered gaffes of the 2012 season made much of a difference. On a high level, the economic fundamentals favored an Obama victory, which is what happened, and Romney proved more popular than virtually every GOP Senate nominee, which indicates that at the end of the day the party chose a fairly effective messenger.

Why is Trump up in arms about this?

Despite what I wrote above, it is widely believed in professional political circles that the 47 percent gaffe hurt Romney, so it’s natural for practitioners to leap at the chance to relive it. Beyond that, despite some recent tightening in the polls, Trump is still losing.

Indeed, he has been consistently losing from day one of this election. At times he’s made it close, but he’s never been ahead. His best chance of winning would probably be some kind of economic calamity, but it’s already mid-September, so he’s running a bit short on time. (Remember, though, that in 2008 Obama was the beneficiary of a spectacular financial meltdown in October, so anything can happen). He has to try to do something, and the big push around deplorables is indeed something.

Beyond that, the basket of deplorables idea reenforces a longstanding conservative contention that liberal coastal elites fundamentally despise white working-class Americans. They view white working-class culture as backward, white working-class politics as bigoted, and white working-class community problems as fundamentally less worthy of addressing than those of downscale black and Latino communities.

In that sense, the Clinton gaffe is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s characterization of “small town” politics from the 2008 primary as full of people who “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

It’s worth noting, however, that Obama and Clinton were in a sense positioning themselves on opposite ends of the liberal spectrum of views on this matter. Obama was essentially a premature proponent of the “economic anxiety” school of Trump Studies, promoting the view that all of conservative cultural politics is a massive case of false consciousness in which residents of failing economic communities cling bitterly to guns, religion, and racism, which in turn induces them to vote for mainstream Republicans.

Clinton, meanwhile, is offering the considerably more mainstream view that one reason many Americans are planning to vote for a man who says racist stuff is that a large share of those Americans agree with the racist stuff he says.

Clinton’s big problem is you’re not supposed to attack the voters, and she did

While some critics see Clinton’s willingness to back away from her comments as a sign of cowardice or expediency, the norm against attacking the other party’s constituents has a real logic to it.

“We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” said Thomas Jefferson in his inaugural address that marked the first peaceful transfer of power between political parties in American history. “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

This can read as simply banal two centuries later, but it’s worth considering it in context. A losing party whose members fear the other party will persecute them if they lose and go into opposition has every reason to resist giving up power peacefully. And a winning party that fears the other party will resist giving up power has every reason to persecute the losers.

Preventing a downward spiral of violence and civil conflict requires the winners to reassure the losers that they are not losing everything by giving up power. Reassuring the losing party’s supporters that they are not the targets of personal enmity on the part of the winning party’s leaders is key to that.

It’s since become traditional for newly elected presidents to mouth some version of this message almost ritualistically. And like many rituals, it’s actually pretty important, even if cynics are inclined to roll their eyes at it — the quadrennial reminder that we are Americans with policy disagreements, not warring tribes, is crucial civic glue.

What ties together the 47 percent, the bitter clingers, and the basket of deplorables is an apparent tradition of violating this ritual at fundraising talks — badmouthing not the opposition party but its voters in an effort to rationalize away the fact that the candidate won’t be able to secure their votes.

If this controversy becomes about racism, Clinton has an advantage

The fact that he’s been consistently losing tends to obscure this, but Trump has a lot of advantages in the 2016 race. Clinton herself is very unpopular with the American mass public, and she has a notoriously poor relationship with the American news media. People with liberal public policy views but weak institutional and emotional attachments to the Democratic Party overwhelmingly voted for her opponent in the primaries, and there is a real risk of them either not voting in November or else pulling the lever for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein.

The nation’s overall “policy mood” typically shifts in the opposite direction of the incumbent president, and the Obama years have been no exception.

Indeed, in state after state — from New Hampshire to Nevada to Ohio to Florida and beyond — virtually every Republican Party Senate candidate is performing better than Trump.

Trump’s strong personal affiliation with racism is not the only reason this is the case, but it is one of the reasons. In the primaries, Trump’s willingness to court racial controversy worked in his favor because most Republicans take the view that discrimination against nonwhites is an overblown problem in the United States.

This view commands overwhelming support among Republicans, but few prominent Republican Party officeholders have championed it because it’s not popular with the public at large. Trump’s willingness to say and do things that other presidential contenders wouldn’t say or do — that all Muslims should be banned from the United States or that Mexican immigrants are a physical threat to Americans’ safety — thrilled the primary electorate but alienates general election voters.

Trump, by loudly and proudly defending white Americans from charges of racism, intensifies his bond with his core base of racially resentful working-class whites. That’s an excellent strategy for pumping up rally crowds or building a hypothetical future media business, but does nothing to help him reach the people — minorities and racially liberal whites — who find him disturbing.

Back during the heyday of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, Pat Buchanan, then an adviser to the White House, wrote that by playing cultural wedge politics “we can break the country in half and it will leave us with far the larger half.”

Trump, who is backed by Buchanan and advised by the old Nixon hand Roger Ailes, is employing the exact same strategy today — except 40 years of demographic changes mean he’s left with the smaller half.