Racism Is Why Trump Is So Popular: Trump’s popularity with his base in the U.S. isn’t the result of economic anxiety, as many claimed in 2016. It’s about race and demographics.
Racism Is Why Trump Is So Popular: Trump’s popularity with his base in the U.S. isn’t the result of economic anxiety, as many claimed in 2016. It’s about race and demographics.
Trump’s popularity with his base isn’t the result of economic anxiety, as many claimed in 2016. It’s about race and demographics.
In 1980, white people accounted for about 80 percent of the U.S. population.
In 2024, white people account for about 58 percent of the U.S. population.
Trump appeals to white people gripped by demographic hysteria. Especially older white people who grew up when white people represented a much larger share of the population. They fear becoming a minority.
While the Census Bureau says there are still 195 million white people in America and that they are still the majority, the white population actually declined slightly in 2023, and experts believe that they will become a minority sometime between 2040 and 2050.
Every component of the Trump-Republican agenda flows from these demographic fears.
The Trump phenomenon and the surge of right-wing extremism in America was never about economic anxiety, as too many political reporters claimed during the 2016 presidential campaign.
It was, and still is, about race and racism.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
A great many people in the US, Trump supporters certainly included, are experiencing uncertainty living in an economy in which the lifestyle earlier generations took for granted gets further out of reach every day - in which they find themselves ever further in debt with less all the time to show for it, and in which they're one catastrophic illness away from destitution.
Trump has cynically exploited that uncertainty by beating the racist, and especially anti-immigrant drum. People are primed to find somebody to blame for their misfortunes, and he's provided them with somebody.
And yes - to the degree that they've responded to his rhetoric, it's because they were already racist enough that when he led them in that direction, they willingly followed. So as far as that goes, yes - racism really is a driving force. But their racism isn't just some atbitrary thing that appeared out of thin air - for a great many, it's a specific reaction to a specific set of circumstances, and those specific circumstances are largely economic uncertainty.
It's sort of akin to people with chronic respiratory problems ending up hospitalized during a period of high air pollution, then other people arguing about whether to blame their respiratory conditions or the air pollution. Rather obviously, "or" is the wrong conjunction - it should be "and."
And by the bye - that whole dynamic is a good part of the reason that Musk and Thiel and many other billionaires are supporting Trump - because they and their actions comprise the lion's share of the real reason that that economic uncertainty exists, and Trump is not only determined to hide that fact, but to self-servingly make it so that they'll be free to cause even more harm.
Spot on. Racists will scapegoat people groups for the corruption within their own system, in effect blaming someone completely innocent of any wrongdoing against the economy, because that will always be and the politicians fault.
But of course, historically speaking, you screw up the economy and you you go "oh no, it's the Jews" or "the Darkies" or whatever people group you can find, because at that point you'd be stupid to not play that card.
I mean, what are you gonna do? Fess up and make amends? No. That's dumb, optically. Better hope it blows over and we can just forget the whole thing... or, you know what we can do...
There's no question in my mind that the oligarchs in the U.S. want to encourage racism and culture wars, in order to keep lower-class Americans at each others' throats rather than united against the bourgeoisie. It's also true that populist dictators have leveraged, and continue to leverage, anti-immigrant and other racist viewpoints in order win support and push their twisted ideologies on their entire country. Trump is, without question, an example of a would-be dictator who's in the pocket of billionaires and is appealing to Christofascists in hopes of going back to the White House in lieu of jail.
That being said, articles like these which insinuate that Trump's campaign is primarily about racism is a repetition one of the key, fatal mistakes that Hillary Clinton's campaign made in 2016. It's also not a good way of fixing the "us vs. them" environment that allows the oligarchs to keep thriving.
While it's hard for us to understand their motivations for doing so, some voters in the black, Latino and Asian communities still support him. It's irresponsible and short-sighted to pretend these voters don't exist, so it becomes necessary to concede that while many of Trump's supporters are indeed racist, there are still some legitimate ideological reasons why certain people continue to embrace conservatism. And if you actually want long-lasting change in this country, you have to engage with those people and not dismiss them as being just as deplorable as the rabid Trump cultists.
Granted, it's getting harder with each passing week to justify supporting Trump for non-racist reasons, as seen by the fact that some conservative influencers have started walking back support for him. That being said, there remains a perception (no matter how invalid) that Kamala Harris is an insider, a cog in an inherently corrupt political machine, while Trump is the guy who's going to drain the swamp. I know perfectly well that Trump is way more corrupt than Harris, but the 'drain the swamp' narrative sticks because some Democrats have been just as subservient to the oligarchs as Republicans. Even when they controlled the White House and Congress, they didn't undo the Reagan-era tax cuts for the wealthy, or cut the billions of dollars in spending on defense contractors, or pass any reforms that would make our government more accessible to non-elites (like term limits or ranked choice voting).
The status quo isn't working out too well for the majority of Americans, and the Democrats represent a continuation of that status quo. A lot of these disaffected Americans just want to see the system "shaken up" in hopes of seeing an improvement. The "vote them all out" sentiment is popular for a reason. Hopefully, those people realize we already gave Trump a chance in 2016, he didn't fix a damned thing, and it's not going to be any better for them if he gets a second term. However, Democrats in the U.S. (just like Labour in the U.K.) are going to have to deliver some significant improvements in the quality of life for the common folk instead of serving the oligarchs first and foremost. Otherwise, we're just going back to conservative leadership in a few years, and the next would-be dictator might be less incompetent than Trump was in staging a coup.
articles like these which insinuate that Trump’s campaign is primarily about racism
It's not insinuating anything. It's make a very factual statement. It's so exhausting that you and others come to the defense. Their core is 100% racism. Accept this and then we can finally start moving forward.
Okay, so if we take it as a given that Trump's supporters are largely, even mostly racists, how does that allow us to 'start moving forward'?
I'm honestly less and less sure that pointing fingers, even for good reason, is politically useful at all. To those who are already convinced, it seems heroic, sure. But for those who aren't? All it does is put them on the defensive and entrench their position.
I'm not saying we shouldn't call out racism when we see it, because we should. The left needs to call out injustice, because the right isn't about to do it. But like, that can't be the entirety of our political strategy. It doesn't work. It makes us look preachy and more importantly it puts the impetus for us getting our goals accomplished on racists.
When we're focusing all our political energy on decrying the wrongness of the right, our visible political identity becomes just that: criticism. That's not what wins elections. If anything, it signals to the racists on the right that this is a rallying point for them, and it gives them the opportunity to turn to others who tend to lean Republican and say, "See what monsters they think you are? We know what you're really like."
If we want to win the election, we need positive energy. We need to motivate our own base, and we need to give people on the fringes of our ideologies something that draws them in rather than something that makes them feel defensive. That doesn't mean we can't also call out injustice, but we have to do it with empowering language, not with language that shifts power to those we see as an obstacle.
This is why the Obama campaign's "Yes We Can" slogan was so effective. It allowed Obama to have a platform for addressing the obstacles he wanted to direct attention at, but it did it in a way that highlighted Democratic agency rather than simply saying "this is wrong". Each time one of these problems was touched on, he could again touch back on the positive energy of "Yes We Can" and it energized crowds and voters rather than making them feel bored and doomed.
"Or We're Fucked" isn't a very good campaign slogan, as we've seen with Biden. Harris has a chance to move away from that, and seems to be doing so. You can already feel the power shifting, because her campaign uses her personal confidence and magnetism to show voters that she can handle it. Yes, we have problems, but they're not going to crack her armor and make her stop expressing joy. Yes, the right is sinister, but we don't have to obsess over it. We can call them weird and move on with our actual work, while building confidence that we have the ability to get it done.
Dress for the job that you want.
If you want to get something done, you're a lot better off if you know that you can do it. We need to know that the injustices of the right are just some ill-tempered old fogies spouting off about a time that's passed as they slowly fade away. We need to know that their weirdness is ultimately going to lose.
Their threat is real, to be sure, but if we focus on the threat and give it power, we give ourselves nothing. We need to build that power inward, and for that we need energy that focuses on our own confidence in our ability to get things done.
Harris and Walz seem to know this, which is a great sign. Once they're in, we can put their feet to the fire on taking care of this stuff, but just pointing at the Republicans and identifying the reasons they're a large ideologically motivated threat just makes the optics seem more and more hopeless for us and more and more like the wild thrashing of a dying prey animal to the right.
If we focus on our goals regardless of any crazy bullshit they run up their flagpoles, we get to pick the focus. If we let ourselves be led about with patter and distracting hand-waving, we may well miss the plot.
Are a lot of Republicans racist? Obviously. Is laser focusing on it to the point of in-fighting going to give us the ability to render their racism irrelevant to public policy? I'm skeptical.
There's also a significant percentage of people there for the patriarchy and misogyny, and just think they're "one of the good ones so the leopards won't eat MY face", so they ignore the parts of the MAGA platform that target them. For example, women who vote for Trump usually aren't doing it because they're misogynistic, the racism and transphobia might be bigger draws but they believe the misogyny won't be applied to them. Same with Black and Latino men who are there for the patriarchy, misogyny, transphobia, but think the old white guys will accept them. Same again with the "Gays for Trump" folks, and the TERFS who support him.
There's a big difference between saying "a majority of his supporters are racist" and "their core is 100% racism." This is exactly the trap you have to avoid if you want to start moving forward.
There's also a big difference between defending racism and pointing out the fact that-- like it or not-- some Trump supporters are minorities, and that forces us to accept that there's something besides racism at play here.
Is this exhausting? Absolutely. Trump should not even be eligible to run for public office as far as I'm concerned, and yet here we are, dealing with the third straight Presidential election where we have to ask ourselves why his polling numbers are as high as they are despite how thoroughly awful he is as a human being. And because people are tired, we're willing to accept an easy answer rather than dig deeper.
But if we dismiss this recurring nightmare yet again by saying that only racists voted for him, there's no point in trying to debate a racist, so we should never engage with any Trump voter, ever, until the End of Time? Then progress isn't going to last very long, because we'll have failed to understand why some people believe so strongly that the system is broken that they'd rather vote for a convicted felon than someone who is actually qualified to be President. That sentiment is only going to spread if we don't figure out why so many people are feeling so disaffected.
It's like we've discovered a weird lump on our collective pancreas. It's uncomfortable, we don't want to think about it, and we all hope that it'll just go away, but no. You have to biopsy that thing. Ignoring it would be irresponsible.
This is a huge over simplification of a complex problem. Sure some people are bigoted and support trump but it doesn't follow that all folks that support trump are bigoted. Wingers on the left and right use the same strategies of othering folks they disagree with. It's ignorant to assert that people only support trump because they're racists or people only support Harris because they're communist/woke.
If you read it, it's not saying simply that all Republican voters are racist, it's saying that Trumpism and the surging Christian-Nationalist movement is, in a way that other Republican and conservative candidates in the past has not been, and that is the x-factor that makes them so appealing to many of their base right now.
If you live in those spaces and can "pass", you'll hear it come out. People start spewing racist shit when they think they're in safe company. It's not all Republicans, to be sure, but I'm my experience it's definitely the majority of (remaining) Republicans. A lot of the ones who weren't on board with that abandoned the party when Trump took over.
I have a side of the family that still supports Trump. That same side of the family has interracial marriages and there are black babies that are very loved upon (and no, it wasn't some scandalous thing, the relationship and the marriage was uncontroversial).
Clearly, those members of my family are not voting for Trump because they're racist and afraid of skin colors.
They're (in my understanding) voting for Trump because the older members when they were younger had more economic opportunities and felt more attached to their community and their faith. I don't agree with them on priorities, but it's not racism, it's in more ways a sort of nostalgia for a time period when life didn't involve so many complex and nuanced topics.
Sure some people are bigoted and support trump but it doesn’t follow that all folks that support trump are bigoted.
Most of his supporters are bigoted and every single one of them who isn't mentally deficient certainly knows that they are supporting a bigot, so they still don't get a free pass.
This is just saying the primary motivation wasn't economic anxiety, it was and still is racism. It does not say that it is the only reason or that it is universal for all of his followers.
For no particular reason I'll leave a parody of one of my favorite poems here:
Trump’s presidential campaign wasn’t racist.
And if it was, it hardy had any effect on the election.
And if it did, it was really more about class than racism anyway.
And if it was actually about race, I wouldn't obfuscate that.
And if I did, I’m not racist.
And if I am, it’s only because you talk about racism so much.You might say he was the first "white" president.
If Trumpers try to start shit they're gonna become a minority even faster.