There are many sobering, weird and depressing aspects to the American elections. However, it is still an exercise in democracy which reflects the schism in American society pretty accurately.
Covid-19 was the ultimate disruptor in 2020. It’s likely that Donald Trump would have prevailed without the fight being so tight. Covid-19, however, upended everything and Joe Biden took the lead. It is much too difficult to pin down any single issue that influenced the votes for each candidate.
The schism wasn’t started by Trump: the Democrats and the leftwing media made Trump the focus of their ire from the day he was declared president.
In this respect, the Left spent every day of the four years of his term in office trying to discredit the man, irrespective of what he did, good, bad or indifferent. His alleged misogyny and racism were not matched in his deeds as president. His speaking style is awful and his vocabulary sparse; every poor exercise in communication was leapt on by his opponents.
However, he grew the economy and in so doing achieved an unemployment rate of 3.5% – the lowest in 50 years. Although Covid-19 turned the mood against him, some votes for him were probably as a result of people feeling that he was still much more likely to improve the economy after Covid-19 than Biden and the Democrats. Biden is in favour of wider, harder lockdowns.
Stark issue
The stark issue facing America today is that Trump didn’t create the schism in American society; it’s more likely that he was the result of an increasingly fractured society for which the Left must largely take responsibility.
The Democrats have moved further Left, away from liberal opinion. A coterie of young Democrats in the House of Representatives represent this shift. They are often ahistorical, sometimes plain ignorant, anti-semitic, and supportive of the sort of societies that disintegrated when the Berlin Wall fell.
A patronising coastal elite gave less consideration to Middle America. A glance at the maps reflecting the patterns of voting in this election largely shows this. The blue (Democrat) areas cover the East and West coasts – the states with the most populous cities. The red (Republican) states fill most of the centre. Many of these states, except for Texas and Florida, are large but more sparsely populated than the blue states. The highest turnout in 100 years is a sure sign of a fractured country.
Zeitgeist of wokeness
The New York Times (NYT) probably reflects the zeitgeist of wokeness better than any mainstream media house in America, evident in its publishing the historically dubious ‘1619 Project’, which claims that the country was actually founded in 1619 when the first black slaves came to America. Notwithstanding its winning a Pulitzer Prize, the NYT has to regularly update the 1619 project by removing false information.
In June 2020, Senior NYT editor James Bennett resigned after a backlash by mostly young staff. He had published an opinion by a Republican senator that the president should send troops in to deal with the Black Lives Matter-inspired riots.
While most NYT readers are unlikely to have agreed with the senator, newspapers with the pedigree of the NYT should be expected to present opposing views. That’s uncontroversial, but not at the NYT. Management did nothing to put the young woke staff in their places.
A month later, Bari Weiss, writer and editor of the opinion department, resigned, citing ‘bullying by colleagues’ and an ‘illiberal’ environment. Her letter of resignation can be read here. The NYT seems to have become the ‘Lord of the flies’ of 2020.
‘Resisting tribalism’
Weiss’s letter says ‘… the lessons that ought to have followed the election [Trump’s] – about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society – have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.’
One the most disturbing articles was by Charles M. Blow, Opinion Columnist of the NYT, on 4 November 2020. He argued that it was ‘obscene’ (at the time of writing) to say the election was still too close to call.
He writes: ‘After all that Donald Trump has done, all the misery he has caused, all the racism he has aroused, all the immigrant families he has destroyed, all the people who have left this life because of his mismanagement of a pandemic, still roughly half of the country voted to extend this horror show.
‘Let me be specific and explicit here: White people — both men and women — were the only group in which a majority voted for Trump, according to exit polls. To be exact, nearly three out of every five white voters in America are Trump voters. It is so unsettling to consider that many of our fellow countrymen and women are either racists or accommodate racists or acquiesce to racists.’
No sense of irony
With no sense of irony he then goes on to note: ‘A larger percentage of every racial minority voted for Trump this year than in 2016.’
Blacks have always voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats. Only 3% or 4% voted for the Republican candidates in 2008, 2012 and 2016. In 2020 that number doubled to 8%.
Five percent of black men voted Republican in 2008, 11% in 2012 and 13% in 2016 for Trump. In this election 18% voted for Trump.
‘These men were specifically targeted by the Trump campaign’ and Blow realises that Democrats have to put energy into ‘listening to and understanding these Black men.’
Blow was astounded by the fact that the majority of white women voted for Trump ‘despite the fact that Trump has spent his first term, indeed his whole life, denigrating women’.
‘This one pushed me back on my heels’: LGBT votes for Trump increased from 14% in 2016 to 28%. ‘In Georgia the number was 33 percent. This for a president who has attacked trans people in every way imaginable. As the Human Rights Campaign president, Alphonso David, pointed out in June, “The Trump-Pence administration is the most virulently anti-LGBTQ administration in decades”.’
‘White patriarchy’
Blow then said all of this ‘points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it. It reaches across gender and sexual orientation and even race. Trump’s brash, privileged chest-thumping and alpha-male dismissiveness and in-your-face rudeness are aspirational to some men and appealing to some women. Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.’
A conclusion that is so offensive and demeaning of people’s agency to decide whom to vote for and why suggests that the Democrats have learnt nothing.
A Democratic president and a Republican senate should be fun to watch. The crusty old white men will either eviscerate Biden or prove him to be one of them.
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