Teen Vogue has come out with a headline in the wake of the 2020 presidential election declaring that President Donald Trump did not lose the race by a landslide because the United States is racist.
In an article written by Lily Herman for the publication aimed at young people, she admits that there was no “resounding repudiation” of Trumpism that the left had been hoping for.
Herman wrote:
The 2020 election is not going to be the resounding repudiation of Trumpism that many had hoped for. I hate to break it to those people, but that was never going to be the case. There was a certain kind of traumatic shock that came with the 2016 election, particularly among liberal white voters. Who knew that white America was that racist? they asked. Who knew it was so misogynist? Who knew so many people could be so easily duped?
This time around, there was hope that Biden could pull off a landslide and prove that 2016 had just been a fluke. But that faith was predicated on the ahistorical notion that Americans — especially white Americans — would rise to the occasion, and that Biden’s promises of a return to an immediate normalcy would in fact hold true
Herman went on to explain that the reason for Biden’s lack of success is a result of “white supremacy, misogyny, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and so much more.”
She wrote:
To be completely honest, while various pundits may say otherwise, I’m not sure any other Democratic candidate would’ve fared much better than Biden. That’s not due to the fact that he was some sort of ultra-unifying candidate of sheer perfection, but instead because it’s hard to go up against a gigantic machine of people who are actively and enthusiastically voting for white supremacy, misogyny, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and so much more.
All this is despite the fact that President Trump secured a far higher percentage of the minority vote than he did in 2016, especially among Hispanics, Jews, and African-Americans. He received 26 percent on the non-white vote, the highest percentage for a Republican president since 1960. Meanwhile, the only group Trump lost ground with was white men. Yet according to Herman, those people were “very loudly advocating for a white Christian ethnostate.”
“Throwing blame on a lone scapegoat is easy; acknowledging and then dismantling a structurally oppressive system filled with people very loudly advocating for a white Christian ethno-state is much harder, less convenient, and more violent,” she wrote.