Still reeling from the shock of their lives in having their worldview rejected two years ago, our best and our brightest are trying their hardest to find how it all came to pass.
In his book, “The World as it Is,” Ben Rhodes, most memorably seen stunned into silence in the film “The Last Year,” relates a conversation with our most recent ex-president. Former President Barack Obama said that they supported “cosmopolitan globalism” while forgetting how important identity is to most people, who “just want fall back into their tribe.”
But no one loves their tribe more than cosmopolitan globalists, who do not miss a chance to praise its supremacy. This includes Obama himself with his remarks about bitter clingers, and Hillary Clinton in her speech made in India, in which she proclaimed that although she lost, she did get the votes of those whose votes were worth having: “I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.” As opposed, of course, to those moving backwards, where “you don’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs, you don’t want to … see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are.”
She must have forgotten that two very red states — Louisiana and South Carolina — have already elected Indian-American governors, one of whom, a woman, has “gotten a job” at the United Nations.
By the way, that could put her in line to be the first woman president, which would surely irk Clinton to no end.
Obama was also said to have told his faithful recorder that he might have reached power “too soon.” Perhaps he was thinking of demographic projections that show younger voters trending in a more leftward projection; and also of similar findings that this country will have a majority other-than-white population sometime near 2046.
This brings great joy to the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank. But does it make any sense to argue that Americans rejected Clinton out of racial animus? That a country that twice gave the son of a Muslim from Kenya the biggest voter majorities since the late 1980s was just suppressing its hostilities through his two big elections, only to unleash them later against his party’s new white, blue-eyed, blonde leader?
Had Milbank bothered to read his own newspaper, he might have learned from Dan Balz that Trump was elected less by Klan members than by two-time Obama voters in the upper Midwest. The voters who made up the “Blue Wall” that had voted for Democratic presidential candidates since the Michael Dukakis election.
The idea that a demographic majority will deliver the Democrats has been around since 2002, when John Judis and Roy Teixeira wrote their treatise about it. Since then, this chimera, though always emerging, seems never to fully emerge. Part of the problem is that while younger votes seem to tend left, they also grow older and lose their illusions. The other problem is that the non-white part of the population that seems to be gaining is not as non-white as it seems. Most of the new immigrants are Hispanic or Asian. Once here, they or their children often intermarry with whites, as do growing numbers of blacks.
According to the Census, many of these are technically classed as non-white (or not “non-Hispanic white,” anyway). But in reality, they are a huge, new phenomenon, who may grow up with a completely different conception of race consciousness, a lessened race consciousness, or no race consciousness whatsoever. In this respect, the world of the future may not be anything like the world as it was.
