The chilling dawn of multiracial fascism

WOKE DOOD: WAT NOU?

I’ve never watched a single episode of the West Wing and I don’t think I ever will now. At the time it was still on, a colleague tried to persuade me to give it a go but cautioned that it could get a little earnest and at one point features the American president in an extended monologue with God - and that put me off forever.

Unfortunately, many people in British political life spent their adolescence watching the show and feel deeply invested in US elections, and care about who wins ‘the House’ or opine about ‘swing states’. While this makes me cringe deeply, and like Ian Leslie I am also reluctant to give my thoughts on the US election and what it entails for the future, I also can’t help myself.

Voting for their economic interests

The simplest explanation for the result is that the Democrats are unpopular. In fact , governments are losing everywhere, and across the world. In short, everyone hates inflation. As Dominic Sandbrook correctly pointed out, most people don’t care about political discourse, but they do care about prices going up. It’s almost disappointing for cultural warriors, both of the woke and anti-woke variety, but the price of butter probably has more influence on elections than anything we care about.

The class realignment in US politics has been happening since the 1960s but has accelerated in a ‘staggering’ way. As one analysis has it: ‘The Democrats are now the party of high education *and* high income voters... On these terms, the Trump coalition was closer to Obama 2008 than the Harris one!’ 

This is not just false consciousness, either. As Sam Ashworth-Hayes in the Telegraph pointed out: ‘Under Joe Biden, the net worth of the bottom 50pc of American households grew by 8.5% in real terms. Under Donald Trump, it grew by 127%.’ 

Imagine a world without wokies

Trump has united the tribes of the world and depolarised racial politics in America – and that really is quite impressive. It’s also a pretty strong case against the conservative argument that greater diversity threatens to destabilise and undermine the unity of a country (one I’ve made). Indeed, it’s one of the strongest real-life examples that diversity actually works; he’s imagined a ‘world without wokies’ and made it happen.

In Texas, Trump won a majority of Asians and Hispanics. He won Starr County in that state, the most Hispanic in the entire US, by 16 points, and with a 75 point swing. It hadn’t voted Republican since 1892.

Trump won Anson County, North Carolina, which is 40 per cent black, only the second Republican to do so since the 1870s. He also did well both with Orthodox Jews as well as Arabs and Bangladeshis in Michigan. Native Americans voted for him by the largest margins of all, but then Trump, of course, is a great friend of these people.

Mass immigration and especially illegal immigration harms the economic interests of lower-paid workers, including minorities, who also have far less progressive views than educated white liberals.

Right-wing populism in Europe tends to be quite racially-based, even if it’s only implied, because Europe is not historically diverse. But this is not the case in Latin America, for example, where plenty of non-whites vote for right-wing radicals - perhaps the US is just becoming more like its neighbours. Indeed, a Latin American-style left-wing populist is not impossible in future.

As Yascha Mounk wrote: ‘it is now clear that Trump put into action the advice which Reince Priebus gave Republicans after their second consecutive defeat to Barack Obama, to court minority votes the party had traditionally conceded to Democrats. His victory is not due to old white men but rather due to his success in building a deeply multiethnic coalition—as his crushing victory in Florida, a state that long ago became “majority minority,” attests.’