There is little doubt that white racism played a role in the U.S. presidential election of 2016. As Zach Beauchamp demonstrates in a 10 November 2016 article at Vox.com, white voters in mostly white geographic areas supported Trump at a rate of about 25%. However, in areas of growing ethnic and racial diversity, the percentage goes way up. Beauchamp quotes the research of the University of London scholar Eric Kaufmann, who surveyed Trump's white supporters. Kaufmann's original findings are reported in the policy blog of the London School of Economics. One result was that in areas that had experienced a 30% rise in Latino population, the number of whites who supported Trump rose to 70%.
Trump's own racism had been on public display during his entire campaign and often (although erroneously) merged the phenomena of immigration and violence. Here he found a ready and responsive audience. Beauchamp goes on to demonstrate that white supporters of Donald Trump saw immigration and terrorism as the country's major problems. Moreover, they connected these two issues to their fear of the country's growing diversity. Of course, economic woes were also a concern, but they too were exacerbated by fear of the fact that the country was then under the leadership of a black man, Barack Obama.
Then, to broaden their outlook of the xenophobic and sectarian impact on politics, both Beauchamp and Kaufmann point out that the racist underpinning of Trump's electoral success parallels the Brexit voting patterns in the United Kingdom in June 2016. There too, ethnocentric "anxiety over a changing society" appears to have spurred on the vote to leave the European Union.
Netanyahu stood for reelection in March 2015. His main opponent was Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog. During the election campaign, one of Herzog's consultants was the American political adviser Paul Begala -- a long-time political ally of the Clintons. Soon after Netanyahu's reelection Begala explained how Netanyahu had won. "He won because of race. ... In the U.S. you could never get away with those kind of racist appeals. But, man, did it work [in Israel]." He went on, "I have never seen anything like Bibi's furious surge to the right in the last 4 days [of the campaign]. He had robo-calls calling the [U.S.] President 'Hussein Obama, the Muslim,' he had ads saying the Arabs will vote in droves. He accused Herzog of wanting to divide Jerusalem."
The fact that "man, did it [this racist approach] work" in Israel should have been no surprise. A year later, in March 2016, a Pew Research Center survey of Israeli society reported that "that nearly half of Jews in the country [48%] say they support the ethnic cleansing of Arabs." The Israeli prime minister and fellow travelers certainly knew this ahead of the Pew report.
As it turned out, Netanyahu's appeal to fear of the Arabs was roughly equivalent to Trump's appeal to fear of immigrants in the United States. Bagala readily recognized the importance of the racist factor in Netanyahu's success. Where he was wrong was to think that "in the U.S. you could never get away with those kind of racist appeals." It turned out that many white U.S. voters were as receptive to such a race-based fear campaign as were Israeli Jews. As with Netanyahu, racism helped Trump win.
Part III -- Part of a Broader Phenomenon(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
