In his regular Washington Post column Fareed Zakaria offers Democrats some good advice which I suspect will go largely unheeded:
At the broadest level, it is fair to say that the vote was a repudiation of Donald Trump. Presidents rarely lose their bids for reelection — only five have in the past 125 years — and Trump seems on track to lose the presidency. And he will lose the popular vote by a larger margin than when Jimmy Carter defeated incumbent Gerald Ford in the wake of Watergate.
And yet, it’s obvious that the country remains deeply divided. After an impeachment, a pandemic and the worst economic paralysis since the Great Depression, Republicans overwhelmingly voted for their party, and Democrats did the same. Polarization is now deep, tribal and existential — largely unaffected by events or job performance. In fact, as when things get bad in sports, it seems to have become a greater test of loyalty to stay with your team.
Democrats are more disappointed because they had hoped that this would be an election that resoundingly repudiated Trump and realigned politics. Those expectations were fed by their success in 2018 as well as in recent polls, which seem to have been about as inaccurate as those in 2016. The largest disappointment surely should be that in a year in which Democrats fully embraced ideas about multiculturalism and movements such as Black Lives Matter, Trump appears to have won a larger share of the minority vote than any Republican since 1960. He won the largest percentage of the Black vote since 1996 (though he still got only about 12 percent of the Black vote). One poll indicates he won 35 percent of the Muslim vote. What happened?
He offers two explanations:
- It’s still the economy, stupid! Health care was not the only issue and running as the “Lockdown Party” is probably counter-productive for Democrats to some extent.
- Conceptually lumping minorities composed of individuals who have differing views among themselves into a monolithic “minority” grouping depends too much on affiliation.
I found the second more interesting:
The dominant Democratic approach is that minority groups face deep (systemic) discrimination and need to be protected with active measures by the government across a series of fronts. This idea is rooted in the experience of Black people, for whom it is entirely applicable. America’s treatment of Black people has been cruel, with policies that have broken their families and treated them as either subhuman or as second-class citizens. Historical, structural barriers have left a lasting imprint, and discrimination persists to this day.
Other immigrants — almost all of whom came voluntarily, not bound in chains — have had a very different experience. While we have also encountered discrimination and exclusion, we have found a country that on the whole has been far more open and receptive to foreigners than most other places.
That means an ideology born out of the treatment of African Americans will ring false to American immigrants and their descendants. For us, harsh treatment by White Americans is not the single searing experience that shapes our politics. Some of us are socially liberal, others conservative. Some view themselves as self-reliant entrepreneurs, while others demand a more active role for government. Some seek to assimilate by distancing themselves from newer immigrants or Blacks. Some of the most racist Americans I know are themselves “minorities.â€
I think he overstates how true it is even for “Black people”. The dirty little secret of affirmative action is that Caribbean and African blacks benefit disproportionately from it. Upper middle class whites dig their accents. Plus they may have better academic qualifications, personal habits, and other cultural features which means that to the extent that they experience “systemic racism”, a lot of it is in their favor.
I have a friend who’s from Nigeria who tells me he’s never experienced racism in the United States although he definitely did in Europe.
Here’s something Democrats should keep in mind:
Even African Americans vary much more widely on policy than one might imagine. A recent Gallup poll, for example, found that only 19 percent of Black Americans want less police presence in their neighborhoods, while 61 percent want the same amount and 20 percent actually want more. So slogans such as “defund the police,†pushed by the most woke activists on Twitter, might unwittingly turn off mainstream African Americans.
I suspect that if you dig into BLM you will find it composed of at least two disparate groups—black Marxists who in their Marxist thinking substitute race consciousness for class consciousness and middle class whites trying to burnish their social cred. Both groups jettison the interests of the group that sociologist Charles Moskos called “Afro-Americans” (native born Americans of sub-Saharan African descent, the descendants of slaves) in favor of their own.
When elected officials and their families become wealthy and powerful but otherwise the lives of blacks or Hispanics or whatever other minority you care to mention remain largely unchanged, eventually people begin to notice.
