America’s Emerging Nationalism Crisis

The election of Donald Trump as our next president heralds a new political epoch for the United States. Whatever his shortcomings as a candidate, the Republican nominee, a political neophyte, slayed both of the political dynasties that had more or less run our national life for the last three decades. There won’t be anyone named Bush or Clinton around the White House for a good long while now. This is no mean feat, not to mention something for which all Americans who dislike dynasties should be grateful.

{snip}

At a certain level, how Trump won is so simple that most pundits — the same people who gave the president-elect no chance of winning — can’t see it. The Republican nominee got enough white votes — especially among the working class, particularly in the upper Mid-West — to offset huge Democratic advantages among minorities and white professionals. This was the Sailer Strategy, named after the insightful blogger who coined the notion back in 2000. Steve Sailer’s essential idea, that the GOP needed to max out the white vote to keep winning national elections in the face of changing demographics, was rejected by most Republicans as smacking of racism.

It cannot be stated too many times that the GOP establishment repeatedly rejected Sailerism. Indeed, leading Republicans often seemed to run in the other direction from its commonsense logic. The facts are clear: that Mitt Romney failed to get many votes from working-class whites in the very places where Trump just attracted them in droves caused the GOP to lose the White House in 2012.

Predictably, the vanquished GOP in November 2012 determined that they needed to get more Hispanics voting Republican.

{snip}

Trump adopted the Sailer Strategy — whether he knew it I have no idea — and won handsomely. It would be wrong to impute huge numbers of down-market whites voting for Trump simply to racism, as many on the left predictably are doing. Quite a few Trump voters in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio turn out to have voted for Obama — twice. They wanted change, Obama didn’t deliver, so they gave Trump a chance to be the change-agent in Washington they have long sought. The roots of their dissatisfaction are social and economic more than racial, and bien-pensant efforts to portray their legitimate grievances as “hate” reflect the worst of post-modern progressive intolerance.

All the same, it cannot be denied that ethno-racial concerns played a role here — and that it was the Democrats who opened that can of worms. Since the beginning of the century, liberals have been crowing about the “emerging Democratic majority” being delivered by changing demographics, heavily fueled by immigration (legal or not). President Obama’s reelection four years ago seemed to conclusively prove that the “new” America — morally superior to the old, white-dominated one — had arrived, and the Republicans were on life support, waiting for GOP voters to go the way of the dinosaur. As one of Obama’s media acolytes hailed the 2012 victory:

President Barack Obama did not just win reelection tonight. His victory signaled the irreversible triumph of a new, 21st-century America: multiracial, multi-ethnic, global in outlook and moving beyond centuries of racial, sexual, marital and religious tradition.

This was more of the Marxistoid “right side of History” blather that Team Obama has indulged in for the last eight years — and it was utterly wrong. To the surprise of no one who understands human nature, many whites didn’t appreciate being told that they had to die off for “progress” to be achieved. They didn’t like being derided by their betters as “bitter clingers” with their guns and Bibles, and they especially didn’t like being termed “deplorables” unworthy of compassion or consideration. In the last days of Hillary’s doomed campaign, its contempt for a huge chunk of the American population had become so blatant that one of her top celebrity surrogates publicly hailed the “extinction” of straight white men as a step in the right direction.

{snip}

Yet progressives somehow managed not to see the nose right on their face. Hence President Trump. What commentators term “identity politics” has now become normative, thanks to the Democrats indulging in it, and Trump is now aping them. It would be more correct to term this what it actually is: nationalism. Ethno-racial nationalism is an enormously potent political force; wise politicians know this and employ it cautiously. Nationalism arouses genuine passion and is a political motivator like no other, which it explains why a majority of white women voted for Trump, to the bitter consternation of outraged feminists.

{snip}

Nationalism transforms politics from ideology to tribe. As Lee Kwan Yew, whose founding and prosperous running of multiethnic Singapore for three decades made him one of the most successful politicians of the 20^th century, expressed it concisely, “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”

{snip}

Trump’s winning our presidential election heralds a new era in American politics. The Democrats decided to bet everything on their emerging “new” America, and lost big. Obama’s two terms have overseen the destruction of the Democrats as a national party: they control nothing in Washington now and their performance at the state level is nothing short of dismal. Democrats dominate our big cities, California, and the Northeast — and little else. Barack Obama’s real legacy is putting Donald Trump in the White House.

There’s not much for Republicans to crow about, however, despite their enormous political windfall. Trump won precisely because he ignored or repudiated most longstanding “conservative” policies. Working-class whites have little interest in privatizing Social Security or open borders or engaging in endless losing wars in the Middle East. The GOP has changed, only their leaders seem not to have noticed. The Republicans are now the White party, de facto, whether they want to be or not. American politics will never be the same, and 2016 looks like a landmark election in the manner of 1980, 1932, or 1860, each of which transformed the United States. Buckle up, it looks to be a bumpy ride ahead in the emerging era of competing American ethno-nationalisms.