One Year Later

A year ago, the in its quadrennial presidential election cycle, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. It was an outcome that very few people had expected (cartoonist Scott Adams to the side). 

I live in San Francisco, California, in the Pacific time zone, and thus we were still at work when the returns from back east started to come in. As anyone who pays attention to US politics even a tiny bit knows, San Francisco is one of the most reliably liberal, Democratic constituencies that itself has for years been called part of the "Blue Wall" - a bulwark that Democrats have increasingly counted on of populous west coast and northeastern states as part of their electoral calculus. It's close to true to say that there is not a single person living within a mile of me who was going to vote for Trump (confirmed later in reports in the Los Angeles Times here - in my specific precinct of about 500 votes cast, five - one per cent - were for the Republican candidate).

Here is an image of how the San Francisco Bay area turned out in 2016. There were exactly five precincts that went for Trump out of hundreds.

There basically was no mystery as to how our state would go, and given all the polls, most people were not even cautiously excited about the outcome. 

As the numbers from Florida and Ohio began to come in, the excitement turned to a nervousness and then concern. And then Pennsylvania was projected.

Much has been written about just how such a shocking result came to pass - poor campaigning by an unpopular Democratic candidate, Russian meddling, racism, magical thinking about blue collar jobs. 

There has been a lot of ink written in the past year about the rise of the so-called "Alt Right." It's a term I had not heard of until Clinton herself mentioned it in an interview. We all now know to one degree or another about Richard Spencer and Pepe the Frog and "White Nationalism." There has been recently terrible violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a self-identified member of the alt-right drove his car into a crowd and killed a young woman.

Two nights ago, the first broad vote was taken since the Trump victory, and the Democrats this time did a much better job of "turning out their base." In Virginia, the Democratic candidate (Ralph Northam) easily defeated the Republican nominee (Ed Gillespie) - the margin was much wider than anticipated. Though not a national election, the Democrats did very well, and have for the past couple of days been engaged in what, frankly, is a well-deserved round of end-zone ball spiking. The ostensibly "objective" media have been right up to the line of cheering (in some cases, over then line, not bothering to conceal their pom-pons).

There was nothing on the ballot here in San Francisco, and I've personally no great affection for the Republican party (I find the Democratic party loathsome in its current form), so the outcome has not immediate or even secondary impact on me.

The narrative - prior to Trump - had been that the US was changing in such a way (mostly, demographically) such that the Democrats would increasingly become dominant, as more states (Arizona, Texas, Virginia being the canaries so to speak) began to look like California. 

The outcomes in Virginia (and other locations) buoyed the spirits of Democrats.

I am not so sure - in the medium term, the Democrats surely will benefit from these changes.

No other single factor has had such a significant impact on the transmogrification of California from a reliably Republican state to one where the Republicans are more or less irrelevant to politics.

Put simply, the US is becoming Yugoslavia.

As I said, much was written about dog whistles and white identity politics when Trump won in 2016. Equally, though not in the same terms, much has been written the past two days about a different kind of identity politics as the Democrats surged. Or to be more accurate, identities, as the Democrats represent a sort of coalition of disparate groups whose interests do not naturally align. 

At least not to me.

Ultimately, this is going to be trouble for the Democrats. And it's going to be really, really bad for the country.

The future is not particularly encouraging; “white identity politics” in 2017 (often called "white supremacist") can be summed as "white people who vote as an identity bloc" - as black, Latino, Asian, and other groups increasingly have done for years.

And it may have started to happen in 2016.

Genuine “white supremacy” is a concept whose peak was probably in the 1920s, when eugenics was at its highest point of social and scientific acceptability. The US had just had as its president Woodrow Wilson, who praised the racist “Birth of a Nation” and who supported a globalist worldview where the nations of Europe plus the US and Canada would enforce a sort of Pax Atlantica upon the rest of the people of the world. Many many prominent scientists and intellectuals of the era were pretty much openly racist and promoted an idea of a racial hierarchy with whites at the top, Asians somewhere in the middle, and blacks at the bottom.

The Nazis put an end to the idea of racial eugenics as something that was OK in polite society, and in 2016, I do not believe that anyone in the US today can be successful politically advocating for the idea of white “supremacy.” 

You don't really believe it either, if you're being honest.

On the other hand, however, as white people become more and more just one group in a nation with no single group being the majority, it is virtually guaranteed that there will be an emerging “white identity” political body.

While I personally find this appalling, it is entirely predictable. In the 1968 (when the so-called “Southern Strategy” was adopted by Richard Nixon and the Republicans), the US was still 84% non-Hispanic white. Blacks made up 11% of the population (source: US Census Historical Data, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals By Race, 1790 to 1990, and By Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, For The United States, Regions, Divisions, and States" )

When a group is seven out of every eight people, the idea of bloc voting is silly, not to mention, impractical. There are far more differences within the group than without. OTOH, for blacks, who were essentially the only visibly minority group in the country, bloc voting makes perfect sense, as they can concentrate their voices behind a politician who speaks to the top issues of their community.

In the intervening time, the demographics of the country have shifted. Enormously.

In the 2010 census, non-Hispanic whites now make up 63% of the total population. Black Americans have seen their percentage climb slightly, from 11% to 12%. But Latinos, who in 1970 were just 4% of the population, are now 16%. Asians have grown from less than one per cent, to 5% - there are now more Asians as a percentage in the US than there were Latinos in 1970.

The Democratic party has, for several cycles, openly courted ethnic blocs. With success. The Democrats can routinely count on 90% of black voters, and 70% of Asian and Latinos. As an aside, I live in California, one of the most reliably Democratic states in the country. It is believed that California has become “liberal,” partly in reaction to policies pushed by former governor Pete Wilson.

But what has really happened is that the demographics of California have shifted beyond what anyone could reasonably have imagined in 1963, the year our state became the largest in the nation. I’ve written about this before, but needless to say, the evidence is out there for anyone to review - had the demographics of California remained as they were, it would still be a Republican safe state.

The Democrats know this, and they do not hide the fact that their strategic long game is to encourage ethnic groups to bloc vote, at times even pitching their appeals as a way to pay back grievances against a vague, white enemy. 

Here is a graph looking at how vote patterns have evolved, focusing on foreign born (increasingly, Latino) voters have cast their ballots.

If you want to see why the Democrats are so eager to have "immigration reform," (and why Republicans are so against it), this chart should answer those questions. One party is trying, in the words of the former President of East Germany, to "elect a new people."

President Obama in 2013 at a “get out the vote” campaign targeting urged Latino voters to “punish our enemies.”

He tried to walk back the language - that he should have said “opponents” and not “enemies,” but I think that President Obama is a masterful speaker, and he uses his words as a surgeon uses a scalpel. The word “enemies” was not an accident.

Lee Kuan Yew, the father of the nation of Singapore, famously spoke in an interview with Der Spiegel some years ago, that in a truly multi-ethnic state, it is inevitable that economic and class interest will fall to the side, and people will vote with their tribal interests:

In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion. Supposing I'd run their system here, Malays would vote for Muslims, Indians would vote for Indians, Chinese would vote for Chinese.

When you are the unchallenged numerical majority, appealing to tribal voting interests does not work - it can’t work. But that is not the case in California, and it is not going to be the case in the US for much longer.

I suspect that Trump is just the tip of the spear, and that it’s possible, likely even, that a crack-up is coming. The balkanisation of the US is not something to be excited about.

In the long term, it’s not going to be any better for the Democrats as it is for the Republicans.

Our politicians soon will not need to waste time appealing to anyone outside their "base," and will focus on getting those voters to the polls. And increasingly, "the base" is going to be, more or less, defined by your ancestry.

It used to be that marketers surveyed us, and then put us into little boxes. Now, they draw the boxes, and we jump in, all by ourselves.

I think it’s bad for the country, and I think personally, for my mixed-race son who doesn’t ‘fit’ into any of these groups, it’s going to be terrible.