America had outright legal racial segregation little more than a generation ago, and there were many people who fought for it, and other anti-civil rights things since. But that’s the past, and you can’t conceivably imagine many of those people or attitudes are left.
So even when you see a movement that polls as primarily motivated by racial concerns, supporting a candidate who demonizes other races in nigh every damn speech, you wouldn’t want to presume it’s related to any of that. These are our coworkers and neighbors, not at all like the common civil rights opponents of the past, who lived in some sort of alternate reality that has outright vanished in the last few decades.
I hate this narrative so much. Look, it’s very plain a lot of this election had to do with Clinton not reaching people. The primary reason she lost is that relatively few people turned out to vote, not enough to overcome effects like voter suppression and the odd weighting of the electoral college. And it makes perfect sense to consider why that was, and the way the Democratic party has neglected left-wing concerns like labor is probably a key part of that. That’s stuff people should have been worrying about even in the absence of Trump, because it’s important to making a better world.
But let’s stop pretending that racism and misogyny were somehow not part of Trump’s victory. He ran on them, evidence suggests they were a major part of at least him winning the primary, and lots of people are celebrating their triumph now. If we want to deal with them, I don’t think closing our eyes and pretending America doesn’t have a serious problem with them is any part of the answer. It has for a long time, and this is it showing up again. That’s the reality we need to deal with.
We need to reach out to more people, but some things should be polarizing. I think I’m going to just include this comic every time I say something, maybe for the next four years.
