It’s about time someone pointed this out:
To greatly oversimplify matters, Cohn finds that if you look closely at census and voter file data, the electorate was actually somewhat whiter in 2012 than most analysts think. Yet Obama was able to win reelection anyway — because he actually did somewhat better among white voters than is commonly thought. This was obscured by the fact that Obama performed poorly on a national level among whites — yet that overall performance was driven by his truly abysmal showing among southern whites, meaning he did better among northern ones than the national numbers suggested.
People jumped down Bernie Sanders’ throat for his ill-considered comments about his performance in Southern states, but the fact is, the South is a completely different animal—culturally, religiously and politically out of step with the rest of the nation—and to the extent that what’s true in the South (of voter behavior, for instance) is true elsewhere, that’s largely because the South has aggressively attempted to export its violent, authoritarian, anti-equality, anti-labor, anti-black, anti-federal, anti-regulatory ideology to the rest of the nation since the nation first became a nation.
The Republican Party is a neo-Confederate party. The “American Way” is defined by whom you’re talking to—there’s an open, democratic, egalitarian “American Way” and a xenophobic, authoritarian, caste-bound “American Way.” There is a pluralist America and a conformist, white supremacist America, and the latter is rooted in the South.
Donald Trump, despite being a New Yorker, has become the Mouth of the South. If the Republican Party is panicking over his candidacy, it’s because, as a non-Southerner, he didn’t grow up learning that there are things you believe, things you say around other white men, that you don’t dare say in public, in mixed company. You hint at them, but you don’t blurt them out. Trump blurts. And his habit of blurting is our opportunity, because it gives us the opportunity—for that matter, the obligation—to loudly and firmly repudiate the violence, authoritarianism, inequality and outlawry that the modern, neo-Confederate Republican Party stands for.
But as we do so, let’s check ourselves: It’s not white men who are propelling Trump to victory. It’s right-wing authoritarian white men. It’s Southern white men, and white men whose attitudes have been Southernized, either by privilege, by propaganda or by inherited racism (or some combination of the three). Many white men have shed these attitudes or never held them to begin with. To be fair, many Southern white men have rejected these attitudes, though I’m sure they’ll attest that resisting the culture that they’re immersed in is a daily struggle. (I hear stories from my wife, who grew up in Texas, and . . . wow.)
The white man is not the enemy. The enemy is the white man who simultaneously denies the existence of his privilege and fights tooth and nail to maintain and increase it. The enemy is the white man who sees freedom, opportunity and dignity as a zero-sum game, something he cannot succeed in without making sure that all others fail. The enemy is the white man without empathy for anyone who isn’t a white man.
The slaver lives in perpetual fear of slave revolt, as well he should. The paranoid fantasy of the Southern white man is that women, ethnic minorities, seculars, Muslims and gays are out to conquer the nation. Let’s make this paranoid fantasy come true, with a twist: let the conquering coalition include us equality-minded white males. We want to help conquer the nation, too, in the name of human rights, dignity, opportunity and freedom of conscience. We want to show the white men who support Donald Trump that theirs is not the only way to be a white man.