The Revenge of the White Man

Trump is the first U.S. presidential candidate to flirt with the idea of white supremacy and has placed it at the center of his rhetoric. With this he has brought into the mainstream the ideas of reactionaries fearful of social change who previously found themselves marginalized in the political system.

Of all the polls and stats published about next month’s U.S. presidential election, there is one group of figures that stands out and provides one of the key clues in helping us understand one of the most important elections in the country’s history. One analyst has classified the election as an “extinction level event”; that is, an event which has the potential to erase all that we know about the U.S. According to figures from ABC/Washington Post, among white voters, Trump leads Clinton by 12 points. If we break this down further to white male voters, that lead increases to nearly 30 points, and among white male voters without a college education to 40 points. If, on the other hand, we look at the preferences of non-white voters of either sex, the difference is reversed dramatically with Clinton holding close to a 60-point lead over Trump.

Although the GOP has for the last 50 years been winning a large proportion of the white middle and lower middle class vote – above all in the south and in rural areas where many still have not forgiven the Democrats for passing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965 respectively – the configuration of and motivation behind the vote this time around have various points of interest that are worth further consideration.

Just what has changed? What does Donald Trump have that the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush, the friendly charisma of Reagan and the astute political sectarianism of Richard Nixon did not to warrant such a high share of the vote from this demographic?

Trump has become the first presidential candidate with a realistic chance of winning to have openly flirted with the idea of white supremacy and has made it the cornerstone of his public discourse. Author Philip Roth wrote about a similar fictional scenario in the 1940 presidential election in his extraordinary 2004 book “The Plot Against America.” White supremacy is a current of American political thought as old as the country itself but has never been used so directly by someone running for office, nor at such a high level of politics.

Never before has a presidential candidate from one of the two main parties articulated a proposal based on the political ideals and priorities of such a limited group – white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Nor has any done so with the celebrity, high profile style so particular to and effective for Donald Trump – he defames, he verbally attacks, he incites violence, he divides, and, depending on the reaction, adjusts his comments to limit the damage and avoids taking any responsibility whatsoever for anything he says. He has waged a verbal war on the press which has greatly degraded the quality of public debate in the U.S. and has led some observers to label the phenomenon that of a “post truth democracy.” That is to say, a democracy in which political discussion ceases to be in the facts and instead takes account of only the ideological narratives of the corresponding faction.

Trump has not only broken these unwritten rules of presidential elections; he has given this trait pride of place in his electoral strategy. As rigorous analyses from the likes of FiveThirtyEight, The Upshot and the New York Times have already shown, Trump has just one viable path to the White House – significantly increasing his support among white voters. Above all, he must target the votes of white males without a college education – a demographic that traditionally votes in low numbers. Only by significantly increasing his support among those voters would Trump be able to win the election from his position of ideological extremity, thus defying the country’s institutional architecture which is designed to channel the vote toward the center ground.

One of the most accurate explanations of this phenomenon can be found in a book published this summer, whose title nicely sums up the question at hand – “The End of White Christian America” by Robert P. Jones, director of the Public Religion Research Institute in Washington, D.C. The book opens with an obituary and closes with a eulogy and also takes the end of white predominance as a given. It explains the white Protestants’ abandonment of the center ground, in political, demographical and cultural terms, and outlines the rapid transformation of the U.S. into a country in which a majority are Hispanics, Asians and have no religion. While in 1993 53 percent of Americans identified as white Protestants, in 2014, just one generation later, that figure had fallen to 32 percent – a huge change in the country’s social composition.

The general profile of the average Trump voter is that of a conservative, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant – not necessarily from a poor background – who sees in Trump the last chance to stop and even reverse the changes that the country has experienced in recent decades. Without a doubt, one of the most important characteristics is the rage that many still feel at the election of the first black president in 2008 – this is the racist hand that Trump played to launch his presidential campaign.

However, it would be wrong to think that the Trump phenomenon has sprung up out of thin air. Trump’s main achievement has been to take advantage of the gradual intellectual hollowing out of a stagnant Republican Party – a party reduced to standing for just two main causes: lowering taxes for the rich and putting into practice the famous Reagan quote that the government isn’t the solution to the problem but the problem itself. In the context of this barren political wasteland, Trump took the party by storm and is currently in the process of turning it into an ethnic nationalist movement, something that is unprecedented in U.S. history.

One final dangerous figure that completes the picture of the election on Nov. 8 is the number of Republican voters who say they would trust the results if their candidate loses – just 11 percent according to the Pew Research Center. Whether Trump wins or loses, the social reality that has propelled the candidate to this point has been revealed, and has now taken on its own identity and political force. This will be his true legacy. Trump has brought in from the political cold and given a voice to reactionaries whose views were previously considered unacceptable and had been sidelined.

To paraphrase the recent words of Swedish ex-Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, a candidate for the presidency of the United States of America has himself become the greatest threat to Western security. Four weeks out from the election, the country and the entire international system that it has championed since World War II are staring into the abyss.