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USA : It Is Not Our Election But Their Election

14 November 2016, 13:24

In the days following the victory of Donald Trump in the presidential election, the Democratic Party and media have attributed the results to the ignorance, backwardness and inherent racism and sexism of the “white working class.”

“Why Trump Won: Working Class Whites,” read the headline of a Wednesday article in the New York Times. Columnist Charles Blow wrote in Thursday’s Times op-ed page: “I can only assume that President Donald Trump will be a bigot. It is absolutely possible that America didn’t elect him in spite of that, but because of it.”

The so-called “left” press has advanced the same racialist narrative: The Nation’s Monica Potts noted with hateful sarcasm, “This election season has seen no shortage of tender, worried portraits of the white working class and its economic grievances…”

Potts explains Trump’s victory in terms of identity, race, and gender. The working class in rural communities “make[s] more money than their poor neighbors,” she writes. “They think they work hard, and they think other people—their neighbors, immigrants, the African Americans in ‘inner cities’—do not… While they could be doing better and surely struggle, it is their cultural identity that is important in this election… This wasn’t about anguish. It was about identity.”

This identity-based presentation of Tuesday’s election is a false narrative exploded by the most basic analysis of the data from the election.

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