As the Democratic Party scrambled to make sense of Donald Trump’s electoral victory, some of the American “moderates” and rightwing analysts, including long-standing New York Times commenter David Brooks and former Fox news anchor Megyn Kelley, began generating a falsehood that could have serious implications on how this moment is to be seen by future generations.
Central to this untruth is the following: the fact that Trump was able to win over a relatively significant portion of the Black (and Hispanic) vote is sufficient evidence that racism is no longer a prominent feature of American society. Following this logic, such an outcome only proves that the left’s commitment to racial equity is not only no longer necessary but, indeed, that it appears now to have been rejected even by those who stood to benefit from it.
Trump’s Black and Hispanic voters become compelling symbols of America’s racial maturity where class (along with other measures of societal standing), as opposed to race or ethnicity, has finally become the foundational determinant of political and electoral behavior. While this argument may at first sight seem credible — how else are we to explain the not so insignificant Black and Hispanic support for Trump if not by invoking class consciousness? — it ultimately does not stand up to scrutiny.
Brooks’ recent NYT opinion piece claims “politics is no longer organized rich vs. poor, and ethnicity is becoming less important as a predictor of how you vote and how you think.” Instead, the true divide is now between the college-educated and those with high-school diplomas — what he terms the “diploma divide.” Trump’s re-election, concludes Brooks, exploits this divide and, in its recruitment of a fraction of Black and Hispanic votes, ultimately manages “to build a multiracial working-class majority.” There is some truth to this thinking, of course: class politics cannot be ignored in accounting for electoral conduct in this economically uneven country. Yet, the wedge Brooks appears to be driving between race and class seems less compelling.
Let me show what I mean by this. Even if we were to grant recognition to Brooks’ view — namely, the diploma divide — this alone does not erase the fact that the distribution of educational opportunity in this country still adheres to the racial legacies inherited in this century. The attainment of a college degree, which would probably be a strictly class issue to Brooks, is indeed a racial matter that can only be divorced from economics through a willful ignorance of this country’s history. Speaking of class, by indexing it to the diploma divide, does not so much decenter race as a predictor of electoral behavior as complicates what racial identity looks like. In itself, it is a useful analytic development, but not sufficiently so as to so drastically diminish the import of race in American electoral politics.
Similarly, if the diploma divide were as explanatorily salient as Brooks suggest, then it would follow that Trump should have won an even greater percentage of the Black vote than he actually did. If, as one recent study shows, only 22.6% of Black residents aged 25 and above had college degrees in 2021, then, according to the diploma divide thesis, we would expect for Trump to have easily won the remaining 77%. Rather, as exit polling is starting to show, he received only 20% of the Black vote, which, admittedly, is a larger percentage than he had in 2020 (13%) and 2016 (8%). This, however, is by no means reflective of the majority of the Black vote, which went overwhelmingly (80%) to Kamala Harris — degreed or not.
Yes, the upward trend in Blacks willing to support presidential candidates like Trump should alarm Democrats and, hopefully, will lead to a reimagining of their strategies in four years’ time. However, any reading of this numerical development that wants to say that race or racial identity are no longer as prominent in determining electoral behavior as before would strike me as being too premature to advance at this point. Such a framing of Trump’s victory risks elevating his legacy to heights which, to many, would simply be too hard to justify. I would, instead, suggest that this move should be seen for what it truly is: the right’s attempt to capitalize on this moment as part of its ongoing assaults on programs of racial equity, as was the case with last year’s ruling against affirmative action.
In that affirmative action case, as others have shown, Black college students were pitted against their Asian counterparts through a series of myths and fabrications that were intended to put an end to policies meant to diversify (mostly elite) college campuses. At Washington University in St. Louis, one such elite institution where I work as a professor, the result has been a 4 percentage-point drop in Black/African American first-year students, with negligible changes to the Asian, white, and Hispanic student bodies. Whatever one’s views on affirmative action may be, and there is a spectrum of these spread across the political divide, it should be clear that the same strategy is now at play on the electoral front.
In upholding Trump’s Black vote as an exemplar of America’s racial progress, the right is essentially creating a new category of black people that it can then politically (ab)use to augment its case against race-conscious projects at every level of society. It is not implausible, should this continue unchecked, to have a situation in the near future where the economic and other concerns of this emergent pro-Trump Black voter base may be blamed directly on the policies designed to serve those Blacks who may choose not to vote Republican.
I should be clear here and say that it is not my suggestion that Blacks cannot or should not vote for Republicans; such electoral paternalism, I deeply believe, has no place in a mature democracy like the one we have here in the United States. Rather, my point is less controversial: the expansion of the “Black vote” for the right is not a sign of racial progress at all, as some are claiming, but, rather, may be an insidious way of ushering in a pro-white agenda that masquerades as racial enlightenment.
Perhaps, we are about to tragically learn that the most sinister (and insidious) aspect of Trumpism 2.0 might be its acquisition of a new discursive outlet with which to sell its validity to the politically disenchanted: Trump can now say, with empirically backed aplomb, that he speaks not only for the American working class, but for Black and Hispanic people as well. The left would do well not to allow itself to be gaslit into political acquiescence and a relinquishment of its progressive racial politics by such sophistry.
It is the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant who speaks of a “cruel optimism” that haunts the average citizen’s pursuit of the American dream. Cruel optimism, contends Berlant, marks the position of being attached “to an object [that] sustains you in life at the same time as that object is actually a threat to your flourishing.” Perhaps what we have with the pro-Trump voter is yet another instance of this cruel optimism. It is a political subject who, discontent with the economic and political direction of the country, has become susceptible to what Berlant calls the “clusters of promises” advanced by Trump and the Republican machine even as these threaten to undo this subject. Thus, what Democrats will have to investigate as they continue to recover from the November 5th loss are the causes behind the discontent and the specific role they may have played in amplifying it. What clusters of promises — after all, what else are presidential campaigns for, if not the narrativization of clustered promises — should have been made and why were these not part of this year’s ballot?
Now, those who voted for Trump mostly did so for reasons related to the economy and the border. It was not Trump’s racial enlightenment that drew them toward him. Rather, his messages to strengthen the economy and to crack down on illegal immigration offered an affective (and effective) vehicle through which the exasperations of a mostly precarious working class could find expression. Inflation and xenophobia won Trump the election. Not his multiracial credentials.
Of course, as with any political campaign, much of this was pure performance — what, realistically, does Trump know about the struggles of the working class? Still, this should not matter as much as the fact that it was a performance that ultimately worked for the Republican Party. And as Democrats return to the drawing board, they would be best served by considering how to sharpen their own performances next time such that they may be able to appeal to both the anxieties and aspirations of the working class. Bernie Sanders was quick to make a similar observation in the immediate aftermath of the electoral result: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
If the lesson from this election is that Democrats no longer appeal to the working class, then so be it. Nevertheless, responding to this rightful call to reengage the working class need not come at the expense of the fight for racial redress. Any multiracialism that wants to enter through the backdoor of democracy, as the right’s framing of Trump’s victory tries to do, is really no such thing. Rather, it may in fact be, on further inspection, nothing more than the specter of a dark past wanting to surreptitiously reimpose itself in the guise of historical progress.
Lest we become the unwitting victims to a premature political triumphalism, it behooves us to resist the allure of a cheap post-racialism (a cruel optimism) that some on the right will no doubt be selling to an increasingly manipulable electorate over the next few years. And more immediately, it may only require looking at some of Trump’s recent Cabinet picks to truly appreciate the potential dangers that lie in wait for the country.