Opinion: How white identity politics will shape the GOP’s future
Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images By Paul Waldman Paul Waldman Opinion writer covering politics Email Bio Follow Opinion writer March 15 at 12:58 PM The manifesto left by the alleged shooter in the horrific mosque attack in New Zealand contained one mention of Donald Trump, in which the man expresses mixed support for our president. “As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policy maker and leader? Dear god no.
Many of the losing candidate’s supporters saw him and President Trump as victims of the same unfairness. Here’s a passage at the end, preceded by a man complaining about Black Lives Matter: It’s no accident that the members of Congress who have these folks so worried are a Latina and a Muslim woman, because what is coming to define a good portion of the Republican Party is a sense that white people are not just losing something today but are under the threat of cultural, political and even physical annihilation.
The presidency of Barack Obama had a great deal to do with the current white identity politics, and in hindsight we might see it as inevitable that a racist demagogue would emerge to exploit the backlash Obama produced. That’s why Ta-Nehisi Coates referred to Trump as “the first white president,” arguing that his 2016 campaign should be understood as an assertion that whites had to retake power and restore their rightful place atop the hierarchy.
The neo-Nazis in Charlottesville — the ones Trump called “very fine people” — chant “Jews will not replace us!” On the president’s favorite news network, Tucker Carlson tells viewers that immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier and more divided.” Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, used to serve as the chairman of an anti-Muslim organization that published a tract warning of a “Great White Death” in Europe resulting from too much dark-skinned immigration.
Many Republicans would protest that their party affiliation is based not on racial fears of extinction but on things such as support for small government and tax cuts, or opposition to abortion rights and marriage equality. And they aren’t lying. But it’s also undeniable that with Trump in charge — and with the party having given itself over to him so completely, at least for now — white identity politics now defines the GOP.
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