In 1976 white voters comprised 88% of the electorate. Today it has fallen to 71%. Yet, in every election in the past 40 years the majority of whites have voted for the Republican Party. Coincidentally or not, the percentage of white voters have increasingly gravitated toward the Republican Party which has become more overtly xenophobic and racist. Hillary Clinton received only 37% of the white vote to Donald Trump's 58%. Barack Obama got 39% of the white vote in the 2012 election.
Voter suppression laws have increased as has gerrymandering strategies in congressional districts which have given the metastasizing Apartheid Republicans 60% control of all the states' governors and legislatures.
In 2016 every single demographic including age, gender, college educated white people got the white supremacist who they wanted into the white White House. Even the white millennials (18-29 years old) voted for Donald Trump 47% to Hillary Clinton's 43%.
Immigration was the number one issue in the 2016 election and the main driver of the nativist support for the 6-time bankruptcy con man Donald who never ran for public office, received 5 military deferments and never served a lick wearing the uniform of the U.S. military with which he now surrounds himself. His "bravery," during the Vietnam War, according to his own words, was avoiding sexually transmitted diseases.
But, Trump arrived on the political stage as a Perfect Storm riding on the crest of a 5-year insidious lie that Barack Obama did not have a legitimate U.S. birth certificate, therefore, was not the legitimate President of the United States.
That mendacious claim was Trump's launch pad which he exploited to the hilt, tapping into the paranoia and white people fearful that they were losing their Anglo-European heritage to those of nonwhite color. But, that claim, repeated enough times, stuck with those who were seething with hatred for the black man who had the audacity to occupy their White House, the edifice built on the backs of black slavery.
One of the often-repeated themes during the 2016 campaign revealed this sentiment and view: "I feel like a stranger in my own country." White Trump voters thought they faced more discrimination than blacks and many rust belt white, blue collar workers said they felt "left out."
Our own country means our own white country like the way it used to be in the idyllic world of Norman Rockwell depicted on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post or Thornton Wilder's fictitious Our Town. The country that former Senate leader Trent Lott waxed nostalgic for when he declared on Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday, "'I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.''
It was never MAGA. It was always MAWA: Make America White Again.
The biggest question we need to answer in the next few years is, are we ready to subsume and sacrifice the integrity and principles of equal protections for all burnished into the U.S. Constitution or are we content to just be the smug alabaster nation that reveres our military might by using our awesome "fire and fury" power to kick ass on shithole countries (any country whose origins are nonwhite) so that we can prove our superior Anglo-European (white) ancestry?
But, "All these problems over all these years" will not evaporate in a wisp of white vapor. The universe, I believe, in time, bends toward justice.
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