The Majority Of The US Lives Under The Tyranny Of Two Minorities
Thomas Edsall did a deeper dive into the exit polling of the 2016 election and discovered, unsurprisingly, that the areas that Trump did best were what Edsall calls “ultra-white” districts. And Trump did even better in districts that were ultra-white but had received a small influx of minorities since the 2012 election.
The graph below shows just how much better Trump did in the ultra-white districts in the swing states of the Midwest, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Basically, in municipalities that were over 90% white, Trump overwhelmed Romney’s 2012 total. As Alan Berube says, “Trump got a particular boost from small, overwhelmingly white communities threatened not only by real forces of technological change and trade, but also by the specter of immigrants and other nonwhites making gains at their expense in America’s economy and society.” Ironically, these districts were “communities arguably most insulated from urban crime, immigration and gangs” but were also strongly swayed by Trump’s message of America being flooded by hordes of illegal immigrants and terrorists and being lost to gangs of African-American thugs and Sharia law.
You can stretch to make a case that these results reflect “economic anxiety” as these districts are getting poorer and losing population but, even accepting that, it is clear the real anxiety is more that immigrants and minorities are getting ahead and these whites are being left behind. That anxiety is perfectly encapsulated in the myth of the “Obama phone”. In other words, there is a substantial racial component to these results.
These ultra-white districts reflect the base of Trump’s supporters. As I wrote last year, however, they are a minority that truly believes they are a majority. And they believe that the voice that Trump gave to their racism and xenophobia and allowed them to vocalize those same feelings themselves is what a majority of the country also believes. As Michael Grunwald wrote last year, “Again and again, Trump supporters told me they appreciated the way he was fighting the forces of political correctness, standing up for their right to primal-scream what they believe about immigrants and terrorists and Black Lives Matter thugs.”
We keep on forgetting that Trump only won 46% of the total vote and only became President due to the anachronism of the Electoral College and the unprecedented interference of James Comey. Reporters keep on focusing on Trump’s base and reporting from places that supposedly reflect that base like Johnstown, Pennsylvania (that actually went for Hillary Clinton by a small margin). But these ultra-white districts are a distinct minority and, as Edsall notes, a minority that is shrinking. When Edsall writes that these districts represent the “the last gasp of white hegemony” and “the last gasp of a small fraction of the electorate set the nation on such a dangerous and destructive course”, he is echoing what I wrote last year, namely, “The Trump campaign is a primal scream, the last gasp from a segment of the country that is seeing its place of privilege disappear once and for all”.
The fact that this may be the last gasp of white hegemony may encourage Democrats in the longer term. But, for now, as we see with Roy Moore in Alabama, Democrats will never win these votes because the party is viewed as the defender of minorities and their rights. More importantly, it is a disaster in the short term. Trump is only interested in satisfying his base. Almost every policy is designed to shore up his base or, worse, targets Democratic voters. The rolling back of regulations on coal, the virtual ethnic cleansing being performed by ICE, the backing out of TPP, the neglect of Puerto Rico, today’s outrageous emergency funding request that completely ignores California, and his attacks on the media and black sports figures, and so much more are solely designed to keep Trump’s base motivated.
Meanwhile, the plutocrats that actually fund and direct the Republican Congressional majority, which itself is in place due to voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering, and the small-state bias of the Senate, are only too happy to let Trump keep the base happy while they go about the greatest transfer of wealth to the top 1% in the history of our nation and cement an oligarchic kleptocracy in place. And if that entails punishing Democratic voters with this tax bill by removing state and local deductions and other measures, then that’s even better.
This is the tyranny of the two minorities we live under. One is the minority of white Republicans that refuse to lose their place of privilege and managed to squeak Trump into office. The other minority is the plutocratic class that sees the looming demographic and political shift that Edsall describes and is determined to cement their oligarchic kleptocracy in place by destroying the safety net, health care, education, and the middle class in order to create an almost feudal state where capital owners live a luxurious life of privilege reaping the rewards of workers who just scrape by for a living. All the while, the majority of Americans will suffer.
