New York Times columnist Charles Blow says he is shocked and stunned that more blacks and Latinos are breaking away from the lockstep diversity coalition to vote for President Donald Trump.
Under the headline, “Exit Polls Point to the Power of White Patriarchy,” Blow wrote November 4:
… what was shocking to me about the exit polls … [was that] A larger percentage of every racial minority voted for Trump this year than in 2016. Among Blacks and Hispanics, this percentage grew among both men and women, although men were more likely to vote for Trump than women.
Trump doubled his support among black women to eight percent and spiked his support among black men to 18, or almost one-in-five black men, according to the media coalition’s exit polls.
“I am still stunned,” said Blow.
However, Blow is likely stunned and shocked because he tries to fit the black voting numbers into his “woke” progressive view of politics. This view says the heartless engine of American politics is racial self-interest — not economic self-interest, or competition for social status, nor the self-interested push by the SAT-class for chaotic diversity and the competing desire for national solidarity by the middle class.
In his view, black men are obliged to align themselves with each other — under the guidance of their lightening-smart progressive allies at the New York Times— in a diverse coalition to collectively elevate the racial group against the eternal enemy of progressivism — the dull and degraded “whiteness” of “the White Patriarchy.”
And if that push for racial advantage were to cause a bitter pushback from un-diverse whites or Latinos, then everyone could see the racism inherent in the system, according to progressive activists.
And whatever happens, black men should not march with their fellow Americans in a color-blind national movement to force up wages or cut housing costs, for example, by barring investors (and their progressive allies) from importing more cheap workers and taxpayer-aided consumers.
But that is the zig-zag economic offer in President Donald Trump’s promise of immigration reforms — and that policy is being welcomed by most Latinos and many blue-collar blacks (and some white-collar blacks). In turn, that positive response evokes more GOP support for blacks, according to a February 2020 study:
We find that Republican elected officials have increasingly made substantive appeals to blacks on the issue of immigration reform, that exposure to this type of substantive appeal leads blacks to more strongly support a fictional Republican candidate, and that this support is moderated by a respondent’s level of linked fate.
But this conventional, time-tested, easy-to-compromise focus on economic self-interest in politics is just too much for progressive Blow to cope with.
So he suggests that blacks who align themselves with Trump’s national solidarity economic and political agenda are soiling their own blood.
All of this to me points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it. It reaches across gender and sexual orientation and even race. Trump’s brash, privileged chest trumping and alpha-male dismissiveness and in-your-face rudeness are aspirational to some men and appealing to some women. Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.
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