From The Economist:

Basic instincts Identity politics are stronger on the right than the left

The Republican Party is increasingly unified around whiteness Print edition | United States, Nov 1st 2018 In the popular imagination, identity politics is the stuff of queer-studies seminars and Hillary Clinton rallies. The excesses of intolerant university students raging against misogyny, racism and homophobia have been rigorously catalogued. Rather less attention has been paid to the appetite for a different kind of identity politics—one centred around whiteness and championed by President Donald Trump. This kind of right-leaning identity politics is more potent than the left-leaning version. There is no single cause which unifies the Democratic Party like the sense among some white voters that their status as top dogs is threatened, which binds the Trumpian Republican Party together.

It’s almost as if the Democrats could use a single cause which unifies their Coalition of the Margins … like their sense that whites deserve to be threatened.

For evidence of this, look no further than the president’s closing arguments a week before the mid-term elections on November 6th. Worried about the damage that a Democratic wave in the mid-terms could wreak, Mr Trump has fed his base an artery-clogging diet of red meat.

Isn’t this cliche out of date scientifically?

Recently leaked news that his administration is planning to rip up Obama-era rules on the treatment of transgender people was a poke in the eye for political correctness. The president has also seized on the useful image of a caravan of Central American migrants heading to the southern border. Mr Trump and his allies have claimed that the caravan is an “invasion” harbouring, among other things, criminals, “Middle Easterners” (apparently meaning terrorists) and “diseases” such as leprosy. (At least the last of these can be deterred by a course of antibiotics.)

So what are you white Republicans worrying about? If, say, your child is in increased danger of catching leprosy at school, don’t you know that leprosy can be deterred by a course of antibiotics?

Checkmate, white people!

In summary, white people started it all by racistly noticing the fate that we at The Economist had long been working on for them.



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