As I write this piece, the results of the 2020 United States Presidential Election are as yet unknown but tending towards a Joe Biden win (the press has already started calling him 'President-Elect' but things are always subject to change). As it currently stands Biden is expected to hold 294 delegates to the Electoral College but only needs 270 to win. Donald Trump's path to victory means that he'd have to mount some kind of legal challenge which would bring the results of the election into dispute and disrepute, and then have it head to the Supreme Court where he would win 6-3. I do not think that any evidence presented by Joe Biden in a Supreme Court case would make even an iota of difference, such is the level of hyperpartisanship of both the Supreme Court and indeed the modern politics which created the current makeup of the court.
Politics in the second decade of the twenty-first century has been increasingly about identity politics and nothing else. When it comes to actual policy decisions, the cultural right hand side of politics across the Anglosphere has decided to play this game far harder than cultural left side of politics. I make this distinction by declaring my own bias as an economic leftist but far more culturally conservative than most people expect.
Politics for the last 40 years has largely been about the economic right dismantling the mechanisms of the state and privatising them out again. That was certainly the case in Australia and the United Kingdom but in the United States where the state owned fewer pieces of large scale infrastructure, the right spent its efforts fighting a very different fight.
Entities like The Moral Majority which sprung up in the wake of Jerry Falwell's tax disputes with the IRS over the legal status of various Christian Colleges. What brought Falwell and other white evangelicals into common cause with political conservatives in that 1978 taxation ruling issued by the IRS was that the ruling stripped tax-exempt status from all-white private schools formed in the South in reaction to the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling to desegregate public schools.
Falwell's reaction in founding the Moral Majority is really the beginning of the modern Christian 'conservative' movement; which has over the past 40 years, been able to coagulate the Christian right into a relatively unified voting bloc, and has also attracted what used to be overtly racist demographics to that same cause.
As the Republican Party shifted to the cultural right, the Democratic Party took up positions on the cultural left but not necessarily the economic left. When the Democratic Party nominated and then successfully got the first Black President in the White House and then was able to enact a slightly economically leftist health care policy, the Republican Party went into overdrive and the Tea Party faction and then the so-called Freedom Caucus still fought over economic issues but there was still an undercurrent that the cultural shift which explained why Obama became President and not some other Democratic candidate, absolutely needed to be fought against. The man to fight against that undercurrent, was Donald J Trump.
If Obama was the first Black President, then Trump was explicitly a White President. His political career began by bringing into question Obama's birth certificate and claiming that Obama was illegitimate to be President. His Presidential Campaign which began by coming down a golden escalator and which never really ended, was almost purely about prosecuting the case of Whiteness.
Mexicans were accused of being rapists (even though Trump himself would be shown to have had improper dalliances), black people were either accused of being lazy, or criminals, and Muslims were accused of being terrorists. Trump's policies were mostly about wall building, either literally in the case of the proposed wall along the Mexican border, or culturally in the case of starting a trade war with China, pulling out of NAFTA, or accusing European countries of not paying their way in NATO.
There have been more votes counted since this table was produced by the Associated Press (11pm 07th Nov AEST) and the first thing that it tells you is that through sheer brute force, white people still swing entire elections in America. Raw Votes is a very blunt instrument but it does tell you that white people who voted for Trump outnumbered all non-white people.
Raw Vote (millions) 143.9
R D
White Men 27.629 18.419
White Women 27.068 20.419
Black Men 1.439 5.756
Black Women 0.907 9.166
Latino Men 3.367 5.267
Latino Women 3.454 8.058
All Other Races 5.180 7.771
69.043 74.857
Taken as a percentage, white people make up 65% of the vote (for both sides). Also of note that if you solely look at white people who voted for Trump, you end up with 38.01%. For context, Trump's approval rating peaked on 23rd Jan 2017 at 45.5% which was 3 days after his inauguration. The long term average for Trump's approval rating, taken on a weekly rolling basis since 2017 is 37.98%. Now correlation doesn't imply causation but that experiment has been repeated enough times now for causation to produce a correlation. Trump's hard core approval rating has been solidly made up of white people.
% Of Votes
R D
White Men 19.20 12.80
White Women 18.81 14.19
Black Men 1.00 4.00
Black Women 0.63 6.37
Latino Men 2.34 3.66
Latino Women 2.40 5.60
All Other Races3.60 5.40
47.98 52.02
If you take the percentages of the votes and just look at them on a partisan basis then you get this:
% Of Votes
R D
White Men 60 40
White Women 57 43
Black Men 20 80
Black Women 9 91
Latino Men 39 61
Latino Women 30 70
All Other Races 40 60
This election has been a sad reminder that white people are ignorant to the fact the majority of them refuse to give up their racism and privilege. Actually, if you really want to see who the agents of change are, then the data also provides a very very strong spike. This election, insofar as much as there is a balance of power, is actually Non-White Women. Non-White Women account for 36.01% which means that they cancel out all Non-White Men's votes and the difference between White people's votes generally.
Therein lies a problem in itself. Whilst it is true that demographically white people have had power for a very very long time and specifically white men have been the direct beneficiaries of the single greatest affirmative action program in the history of the world (namely the last 400 years of the history of the world) and that anything which tilts it a little bit, starts to look like reverse discrimination, it is not the same white people who benefit now. They are all dead.
Categorically, white privilege exists because of historic, enduring racism and biases but that's still mostly irrelevant if you still happen to be on the losing end of structural change. Remember, Brexit and Trump are actually aspects of the same root cause; namely, white people throwing other white people out of the boat, upon the basis of class.
Trump offered the hope that someone who at least pretended to be outside of the system. might be listening to them. Trump's voter base which is made up of a lot of less than college degree, rural and/or poorer white people, voted for him not because his policies benefit them, but because his racism resonates with them. Trump as the logical end point exactly articulated what people were against; rather than enlarging people's vision of what they could be for.
The real breaking of the Democratic Party in the South was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At the time, President Lyndon B. Johnson said "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come."
Four years before that, to a staffer by the name of Bill D. Moyers he said:
“I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
- Lyndon B. Johnson, 1960.
It's not at all surprising that The South voted just 13/167 in favour of Biden which is 7.7% of all delegates for what would have been the Confederate States of America. The number of members of the House and Senate who voted in favour of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was 9/115 or 7.8%. That central core of racism in The South; plus the mid-west, is what has defined the Republican Party base since about 1980.
Domestically, the rise of Trump gave the same kind of people who would have wanted to exact brutality on people of colour, the implicit permission to give voice is to those opinions. When people actually did start organising to protest at the treatment that they'd be given, in response to police brutality, in movements such as the Black Lives Matter movement or Antifa which grew in response to actual Neo-Nazis, the act of speaking us was decried as being unpatriotic. Patriotism, fealty, and Americanism as expressed by President Donald Trump, while not necessarily being overtly white supremacist, definitely titled in that direction and excused actions which resulted in the death of people who appeared to be other.
Demographically speaking, the detail is in the data and apart from the stark geographical divide which tends to separate the United States (with Democrats tending to poll better in the more populous parts of the country) the split of voting tendencies along the lines of race is perhaps the most important distinction which explains the last decade of politics.
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