Dear Editor,
A week after Donald Trump was elected President of the US, pundits are trying to understand the role of ‘race’ in his electoral victory. America in 2016 is supposed to be a post-racial society having elected a Black American in Barack Obama in 2008, and re-elected him in 2012. Senators Lindsay Graham, John McCain, Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, and several other leading Republicans (including Speaker Ryan) commented as late as last June that the Republican Party needed to expand its ethnic base beyond being seen as a party of White males if it is to have a chance at winning future presidential elections. I, as well as other leading Republican and Democratic political pundits, concurred. But we were all proven wrong on the race question. Race is such a powerful force in American elections, not much different from say another multi-racially polarized nation like Guyana or Britain.
Donald Trump showed last week that the Republican Party or its presidential candidate can eke out a victory on a narrow ethnic partisan appeal to White voters only. Trump’s political strategists, including one who advised the AFC in Guyana in 2006, studied the American electoral map and they recognized that race, if played right, can elect a White candidate as President, indeed as it has elected Whites in the Senate and as members of the House in Congressional elections in 2014 and 2012, and again in 2016. Trump appealed primarily to White males winning 60% of them, and in the process also got 42% White females (despite being put down by a sexist Trump) taking him to some half of the White electorate, enough to win the presidency. As the numbers show, some half of the voters cast ballots for Trump and with just over 50% of the eligible voters casting ballots, it means some 25% of the American nation endorsed Trump’s White nationalism. This shows that race and nationalism trumps economics, and that that the racial pull is still strong in America as race and nationalism and anti-immigration are in Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, including our own Guyana.
No one factor can account for Trump’s victory. But as analyses have shown, race was a very important factor. There was racial resentment and xenophobia. Hillary Clinton and Democrats fought for the working class and minorities (immigrants and Muslims included). When these factors should motivate people to vote Democrat, they had the opposite effect. Blue working class states, the poor, and workers who lost their jobs because of Republican policies, instead of voting Democrat and Clinton, came out for Trump and the Republicans. Somehow poor Whites feel that immigrants, Blacks and Muslims are responsible for their (Whites) relatively low quality of life.
They never blamed the Republican leadership for their poverty or miserable economic conditions; instead, they see non-Whites as the problem. Poor Southern and Middle American Whites are the most loyal Republican voters, even though Republicans hardly do anything for them to be able to lift themselves out of poverty. Poor states like Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, for example, are loyally Republican even though their poverty is tied to bad Republican policies, and it is the Democrats who pass legislation to provide the poor Whites (as well as non-Whites) with financial assistance. Although Clinton and other Democratic legislators enact policies to benefit these poor Whites, they still vote against Democrats. These poor Whites will not vote Democrat because they view the Democrats as the party of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims. And they want nothing to do with non-Whites. Hence their support for Republicans and Trump. And Trump recognized this fact and appealed to their ethnic sentiments.
Sean McElwee, a journalist in a survey study for Salon website, found that 64% of Whites who voted for Trump, felt that non-Whites were taking away their jobs. Some 59% of Whites without a college education and 57% with a college degree favoured Trump when one would have thought that the college educated would be cosmopolitan and non-racial and the non-college educated would be pro-Clinton because of her proposals to help the uneducated and their children with financial assistance. Some 84% of Whites who supported Trump feel that employers are hiring minorities instead of Whites and as such this influenced them to vote Trump; there was no basis in their racial feelings. Racial resentment and stereotypes were powerful predictors of support for Trump, according to the study released on November 13. In addition, 78% of Whites who felt Blacks and Muslims are violent supported Trump. So clearly, prejudice and hate played critical roles in the Republican victory.
Trump has shown that racism works in America and that “it is a very real driver of Trump’s success”. The study concludes that “it is increasingly clear that white racial solidarity is one of the most powerful forces in American politics and that it cannot be easily wiped away” as many of us, purveyors of non-racial politics, thought. Democrats are in trouble for not accepting this fact and countering it early in the election cycle. How Democrats overcome the rampant racism that characterized the last election and its plan to combat it over the next election cycle is the key question that needs to be addressed.
Yours faithfully,
Vishnu Bisram
