Race and America's Long War by Singh Nikhil Pal;

Race and America's Long War by Singh Nikhil Pal;

Author:Singh, Nikhil Pal;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of California Press


CHAPTER FIVE

The Present Crisis

This war has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars. We are lucky in this country that our civil wars are fought at the ballot box, not on the battlefield; nonetheless it is a true civil war.

Newt Gingrich, remarks at the Eleventh Annual Resource Bank Meeting (1988)

Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency produced shock and disbelief among liberals, progressives, and leftists around the world. Even many who recognize the flaws in the myth of America’s democratic perfectibility and exceptionalism mourn its passing. That said, there is a tendency to read too much into the results of elections. They do not provide us with an objective diagnostic of a country’s political condition: they are voter mobilization projects (conducted, in the main, by elites). The interpretation of the results, their meaning, and their so-called mandate retains a character of political positioning, even score settling. The desire to parse and explain the disastrous outcome of a Trump electoral victory and a Republican Party majority in both houses of Congress is understandable. But because much of the early analysis neglected a longer-term explanation of how we got here, it has only contributed to our collective disorientation. Written in the months following the election, this chapter attempts to take a longer view.

Many first assessments of Trump’s electoral victory had an unseemly character of piling on. The most egregious examples were the gangland triumphalism of some Trump supporters, for whom victory licensed acts of bigotry, intimidation, and humiliation. Some centrist liberals, worried about a loss of proximity to power, similarly aimed their fire at more vulnerable groups, warning that it was the solicitude for so-called identity politics and sectional concerns of immigrants, racial minorities, women, and LGBT communities that caused Clinton’s electoral defeat. The New York Times presented, in the guise of description, a depiction of terminal racial conflict in the language of eugenics, calling the result an electric response by white voters to “long-term demographic decay.”1

We would do well to look beyond efforts to reduce complexity in the current political climate or to presume that demography is destiny, especially when such thinking betrays fear-induced submission to Trumpism itself, by naturalizing some idea of ineluctable or spontaneous racial animus. We did not suddenly awaken in a different country the day after the election. We would have had a very different conversation if fewer than one hundred thousand voters had swung the other way in the upper Midwest, the epicenter of an economic catastrophe whose roots go back to the 1970s and early 1980s. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of 3 million popular votes (winning almost exactly the number of votes Obama gained in 2012, although in a larger electorate). How would we be interpreting her victory if she had mastered the baroque math of the Electoral College?

I do not suggest that we should not be alarmed. In retrospect, it is Trump’s ascendancy with a Republican Party majority that should have worried us most.



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