Will Trump’s
racist rhetoric become US policy?
By Peter Certo
Namely, that Americans voted for the unabashedly anti-democratic alternative offered by her rival.
And
they did it despite his almost cartoonish shortcomings.
Trump
didn’t just offend pious liberals with his hard line on immigration, disdain
for democratic norms, and disinterest in policy. He transgressed standards of
decency across all political persuasions.
He
bragged about sexually assaulting women. He disparaged injured war veterans. He
was endorsed by the KKK. And now he’s America’s voice on the world
stage.
How
could that happen? Here’s one theory you might’ve heard:
After
years of seeing their jobs outsourced, their incomes slashed, and their
suffering ignored, the white working class threw in their lot with the
candidate who cast aside political niceties and vowed to make their communities
great again.
It’s
a nice story — I even used to buy a version of it myself. But while Trump surely did clean
up with white voters, the evidence simply doesn’t support the idea
that they were as hard-up as the story goes.
For
instance, pollster Nate Silver found during the GOP primary that Trump
supporters pulled in a median income of $72,000 a year — some $10,000 more than the national median for white
households.
And while many did come from areas with lower social mobility, they
were less likely to live in the stricken manufacturing communities Trump liked
to use as backdrops for his rallies.
So
if it wasn’t the economy, was it Hillary?
Clinton
was clearly unpopular, in many cases for defensible reasons. She was cozy with
Wall Street. She backed poorly chosen wars. Apparently people didn’t like the
way she emailed.
But
when you consider that we chose to give the nuclear codes to a man whose own
aides refused to
trust with a Twitter account over a former secretary of state,
it hardly seems like Trump voters were soberly comparing the two candidates.
Instead, Vox writers Zack
Beauchamp and Dylan
Matthews poured through scores of studies and found a much more
robust explanation — and it isn’t pretty.
It’s
what pollsters gently call “racial resentment.”
That
is, Trump’s core supporters were far more likely than other Republicans to hold
negative views of African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims.
They overwhelmingly
favored the mass
deportation of immigrants. And they were the most likely Republicans
to agree that it would be “bad for the
country” if whites comprised a smaller share of the population.
What’s
more, another study found, racially resentful voters flocked to the GOP
candidate regardless of their views about the economy. Their views on race drew
them to Trump, not their job prospects.
Scores
of other data back this up. Despite years of job growth and the biggest
one-year bump in middle-class incomes in modern history,
another researcher found, Republicans’ views of both African
Americans and Latinos nosedived during the Obama years.
Not
even a slowdown in immigration itself staunched the venom. Net migration
between the U.S. and Mexico fell to 0 during
the Obama years, yet Trump still launched his campaign with an infamous tirade
against Mexican “rapists” and “murderers.”
None
of that is to accuse all Trump voters of racism. But even if the bulk of
them were just Republicans following their nominee, the social science strongly
suggests that one of our major parties has been captured by whites so
anxious about the changing face of America that they were willing to vote
alongside the Klan.
That fringe
has turned mainstream. The Trump years to come may herald any number
of horrors, but the scariest part may be what we’ve learned about ourselves.
Peter
Certo is the editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies and the
editor of OtherWords.org. Distributed by OtherWords.org.