Revolting!: How the Establishment are Undermining Democracy and What They’re Afraid Of. Mick Hume
the scaremongers were playing a new version of the race card.
In America, protesters angry at the election of Donald Trump lost no time in branding his millions of voters as racists, ‘white supremacists’ and even Nazi sympathisers, and therefore unfit to choose a president.
Alongside the allegation that a vote for Trump was a ‘hate crime’, post-election protesters chanted ‘No Trump, No KKK, No Fascists USA!’. Meanwhile on CNN’s election night coverage, commentator Van Jones made international headlines and inspired many imitators by immediately branding the Trump vote as a racist ‘whitelash’ after eight years of a black president.49 Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman tweeted his shock at discovering the extent of the ‘deep hatred in a large segment of the population’.50 Jamelle Bouie, chief political correspondent for Slate magazine, rejected the very suggestion that any Trump voters might be viewed as non-racist, good people: those who once ‘brought their families to gawk and smile’ at racist lynchings, he wrote, were ‘the very model of decent, law-abiding Americana. Hate and racism have always been the province of “good people”.’51
As with the dismissal of ‘low-information voters’, much of this stuff says more about the prejudices of the elites than about political realities. True, the same authoritative exit polls suggest that non-Hispanic white voters backed Trump over Clinton by 58 to 37 per cent. But the headline-grabbing argument about this being due to a racist ‘whitelash’ lasts about as long as it takes to glance at the figures. Both of the main 2016 presidential candidates were white; Hillary Clinton got a lower percentage of white votes than Barack Obama did in 2012 – and Trump got a lower percentage of white votes than Mitt Romney did that year; indeed, as one rational anti-Trump blogger put it, ‘The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than five per cent was white people.’52
As for the idea that anybody voting for Trump must have been a racist, a white supremacist, an ‘alt-right’ zealot or a Ku Klux Klan fan, and that the ghost of Hitler was now stalking the USA – these ridiculous claims make some of the Donald’s own ramblings and rants seem almost reasonable by comparison. (Note to the historically confused: whatever Hitler was – a genocidal Nazi racial supremacist – he could not be accused of being a buffoonish celebrity loudmouth who made up and tore up policies as he went along.)
Take the alleged Ku Klux Klan links, which many anti-Trump protesters seemed keen to highlight. According to Wikipedia, ‘As of 2016, the Anti-Defamation League puts total Klan membership nationwide at around 3,000, while the Southern Poverty Law Center puts it at 6,000 members total.’ Trump, remember, won more than 60 million votes. Which means the top estimate of KKK membership in the entire US is equivalent to less than 0.01 per cent of his support.
No doubt any group of 60 million people will include racists and all manner of others of dubious outlook. However, anybody not blinded by their own prejudices would have to recognise that, as with the UK, attitudes towards race across American society have changed fundamentally in recent decades. In 1960, for example, some 50 per cent of white Americans told Gallup pollsters that they supported racial segregation in schools and would move home if a black family moved in next door; by the late 1990s that figure was down to between 1 and 2 per cent.
As even the film-maker and Democratic Party propagandist Michael Moore was moved to concede, it makes no sense to equate voting Trump with racism: ‘You have to accept that millions of people who voted for Barack Obama – some of them once, some of them twice – changed their minds this time. They’re not racists. They twice voted for a man whose middle name is Hussein. That’s the America we live in.’53
Indeed it is – an America ruled over by a Democratic Party administration for the previous eight years. Might that political experience have had something to do with why many Americans were prepared to vote for somebody like Trump this time? Could his election be seen as the legacy of Obama’s and Clinton’s politics in power? No, that was unthinkable. Far simpler to blame it on a racist ‘whitelash’ against Obama’s skin colour.
As a writer on ‘cool’ online magazine Vox declared, ‘Trump’s win is a reminder of the incredible, unbeatable power of racism.’54 How convenient. If the popular power of racism is really deemed ‘unbeatable’, then Clinton and the Democrats surely cannot be blamed for the incredible, catastrophic failure of their campaign.
The dangerous driving force in this discussion is not race hate but fear and loathing of the masses. Branding opposing views as offensively racist or supremacist has become a trendy all-purpose insult, a way to delegitimise votes and opinions that are not to your taste. They can then simply be dismissed, or possibly banned, rather than debated; after all, who wants to engage with racist nutters or Klan fans?
Such permissive use of the insult ‘racist!’ trivialises the term, and diminishes the importance of real racism. It can sound like a simple reversal of old-fashioned racist notions about anything black being inherently inferior.
After the election Gretchen Reiter, who describes herself as a professional ‘Washington insider’ living in rural America, wrote of her anger during the campaign at seeing ‘my friends and family reduced to a label given by elitist, intolerant talking heads: uneducated white people’. For her, ‘the last straw’ came a few days before the election, when she heard a New York Times columnist on PBS say ‘that voters are supporting Trump because of their “gene pool”. It was insulting and ignorant’.55
As insulting and ignorant, some might think, as old-school racial notions about the ‘natural’ inferiority of those enslaved and excluded from power.
‘Democracy’ against the demos
The third common strand in the backlash against the Brexit and Trump votes is the attempt to justify these attacks on the demos – the people – in the name of democracy.
Few in the West feel able explicitly to reject democracy these days. So the trend is to try to redefine its meaning instead. According to this new definition, ‘upholding democracy’ means protecting the political status quo – if necessary, against the people, in whose name democracy exists.
Professor A. C. Grayling was once more to the fore here, loftily informing British MPs that it was their ‘democratic duty and responsibility to reaffirm continuation of the UK’s EU membership’. To do otherwise would apparently ‘subvert our representative democracy and our constitution’.
How, exactly, could it ‘subvert our representative democracy’ to accept the democratically expressed will of 17.4 million people? The key word here is ‘representative’. As we shall see, our society’s idea of democracy has been redefined over the years to mean a system where a political elite can ‘represent’ the people as it sees fit.
Grayling captured the elitist essence of this order by arguing that the EU referendum was only ‘advisory’, that parliament is sovereign, and that most MPs disagreed with their constituents and backed Remain. In which case, he insisted, the constitution decrees that the people’s representatives should ignore the result and vote to remain in the EU, since British democracy was actually about power being in the hands of 645 MPs and the nearly 800 peers in the House of Lords, not the voters.
To accept the referendum result, the wise professor suggested, would be to give in not to democracy but to ‘ochlocracy’; a word meaning ‘government by the populace’ or, in elite-speak, ‘mob rule’, which has barely been used since the oligarchs – the powerful few – of ancient Athens looked down their aristocratic noses in horror at mass democracy.
Grayling was clear that mere numbers are not the decisive issue in a democracy, since a lack of proper education apparently prevents the general public from expressing ‘the general will’, which he seems to think