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Campaign 2016: The Angry White Mans Last Stand
When Donald Trump says, Lets make America great again, is he feeding into a segment of the population that is really saying, Lets make it white again?
BY: CHARLES D. ELLISON
Posted: Aug. 31 2015 3:50 PM
Sanders (always quick to big-up his civil rights bona fides) commands massive crowds of millennials in places like Portland, Ore., where fewer black faces are found than those in the first Republican debate, rolling out a racial-justice plan in a city barely 6 percent black. Less talked about is what exactly makes Sanders qualified for a diverse Democratic Party nomination when he has represented a state for decades that has fewer than 8,000 black people in it.
But in that sense, its not so much angry as it is downright frustrated white people led by the downright frustrated white man. Not necessarily bigotry in our wake, yet, also, another form of loud, white populism; whereby at the end of a recessionary day, there are huge pockets of once safely privileged white folks (especially young ones) who now know what it feels like to lose everything.
Trump, of course, is unapologetic-and-rugged white nationalism. Yet he has rebranded it into anti-immigrant rants as clever coding for people of color as a whole; Make America great again snuggled up close to a whispered, Make it more white again (translated: Lets get this back under control).
Notice, though, Trumps very laser-targeted aim regarding whom he publicly shoves around, a calculus that assumes that to bully politically unrepresented illegals is much easier than thrashing quick-to-organize blacks. But his crowds get it, and play along. Trump gives no apologies when called on the suspiciously bigoted static of his rhetoric and followers, tapping into xenophobia as a core belief system, talking proudly of the violent passion of hate-criming white guys in Boston who follow him, while his representative creatively avoids criticizing folks who yell White power at said Alabama event.
A key question: Where did that sudden spurt of xenophobia come from in the first place? A 2014 Brookings/PRRI study (pdf) unveiled the reticence of many whites faced with overblown feelings of electoral insignificance. When asked about whether the idea of an America where most people are not white bothers me, roughly 20 percent of whites said it did, along with 33 percent of Republicans and 19 percent of Americans overall. Interestingly enough, a solid 15 percent of Democrats said they were, too, shattering myths of the left as being completely comfortable in its feel-good-on-race skin.
Republicans are acutely aware of this change as they see the writing on the wall, smelling a pronounced existential threat in 2020, when the combined minority electorate will be 30 percent or more. The white vote will be down even more, to 69 percent, a dramatic drop from 88 percent in 1976 and 72 percent in 2012. A majority of American children under the age of 18 will be nonwhite, and by 2060, the total population will be 60 percent of color.
In essence, its a sweaty, red-faced paranoia and fear of the rapidly changing complexion of the nation, an inability to grasp demographic realities perceived as impending doom. White politicos like Trump feverishly work against that clock; fear of the nations rapidly changing complexion his Oz-like trick. Darkly comical is the collective reaction of a media-industrial complex feigning shock at what went amiss and why the nation seems so willing to go off script and crash in brush fire glory. But paraphrasing the immortal words of old-school strategist James Carville: Its the white people, stupid.
http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2015/08/campaign_2016_the_angry_white_man_s_last_stand.2.html