Article content continued

Parents fretted over what to tell their children about this new AmeriKKKa. “Well the world changed late last night in a way I couldn’t protect us from,” Hollywood producer Aaron Sorkin wrote his daughter. “That’s a terrible feeling for a father. I won’t sugarcoat it — this is truly horrible.”

As proof of this new heartland rebellion — almost of the kind foretold in white supremacist fantasies of racial holy war — people cited acts of racist vandalism and vulgar social media behaviour. Even in Canada, there are now hate crime investigations into flyers promoting blogs of the “alt-right,” the term of choice for far-right ideologues who indulge in the same identity politics that traditional conservatism prefers to ignore. And several petty conflicts on public transit or at grocery stores have been interpreted as evidence of this whitelash.

There are reasons to be skeptical, though, and not just because whites voted less strongly for Trump in 2016 than they did for Mitt Romney in 2012, and not just because the whitelash thesis allows a failure of the left to be recast as the simple villainy of the right.

White men, who make up about a third of the electorate, went 63% for Trump, with white women at 52%. Non-white voters, who represent 30% of the electorate, went 74% for Clinton, short of what Obama achieved in 2012. In fact Clinton underperformed Obama in nearly every voting bloc.

The whitelash theory, however, allows liberals to feel morally superior while selectively ignoring what angry white male voters said were their reasons for voting Trump. It also lends undue credence to the efforts of actual neo-Nazis, whose tried and true publicity strategy is to opportunistically exploit news cycles in an effort to boost their own apparent influence, for example by posting anonymous flyers in parks.