The real reason Donald Trump got elected? We have a white extremism problem
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The election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency on a platform devoted largely to themes of ethnic nationalism and racial and religious intolerance was a wake-up call to those of us who believed our ethnic group was largely benign, but for small pockets of zealotry at the margins.
As white people, it was our turn to experience the cold shock of discovering that a significant part of our community has been radicalized, sometimes over the Internet, into a form of intolerant extremism that rejects conventional Western values and threatens the integrity of entire countries. That it has so far manifested itself in ballots rather than bombs shouldn’t mask its gravity: Because we are so numerous, our zealots are capable of paralyzing nations.
We need to do what we have long told other groups to do when they face an extremism problem: Speak up about it, identify it, try to understand what has happened to so many people like us, find a way to lead them away from extremism.
His election was the work, almost entirely, of white people. More than 90 per cent of Americans who voted for Mr. Trump were white, and most white U.S. voters, both men and women, cast a ballot for him (even though his opponent got more votes over all). And at least 90 per cent of non-white Americans did not vote for him. This was a white riot – an angry, rejectionist turn by a deeply pessimistic majority within the white population against the far more hopeful and inclusive politics of the rest of the country.
The scores of white Americans I’ve met over the past 12 months who eagerly embraced, or at least tolerated and voted for, the politics of Mr. Trump are usually, in many respects, impossible to distinguish from other white people. They tend to be normal, middle-class; the largest Trump-supporting sub-segment of them are, like me, men over 45 with only high-school educations. With a few exceptions, they are not overt racists or far-right zealots. Many of them are otherwise quite uninterested in politics.
But these white people have developed a set of beliefs that have led them to see a sort of strongman nationalist politics of ethnic exclusion as being perfectly acceptable, only two generations after their country fought a global war against that very thing. They see it as acceptable, even welcome, that a president-to-be has promised to ban all Muslims from entering the country (“temporarily”), to mass-deport millions of Latino American families who have been living in the United States for decades, to describe those immigrants as “rapists,” to question the citizenship and loyalty of minority Americans.
These white voters, while they don’t consider themselves racist, do not see a problem with a president-elect whose only response to black Americans is to speak of violence and moral degradation. Or a commander-in-chief who has not seen fit to disavow the phalanx of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan figures who have accompanied and cheered his campaign.
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