Grew up in the US. I'm a minority. I think this is the only time in my life I've ever felt like I didn't belong in America.
Tonight a large portion of the country confirmed that the US is for whites. That it's not a melting pot. This demographic has been angry for a generation because they've felt like their culture, their socio-economic status and way of life is slipping away and this election (after 8 years of a black president), the line in the sand would be drawn. The numbers don't show any division in voting based on class, but an entire chunk of whites (women, men, making under or over 100k+ a year, college education or not), all voting for Donald Trump.
I don't know what the future looks like now for America.
I'm a white Trump voter in flyover country. You belong in America as do all Americans. This was a push back against an out of touch corrupt elite in Washington and mass immigration. Not all immigration, but the massive increases of the past several decades. Yes, we do want to preserve the culture - not white culture but American culture. I fully expect that Trump will reach out and moderate. If not, there's always another election that's just two years away.
I'm a third-generation American, with family that immigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1900s to escape anti-semitism. I'm Jewish, my wife isn't. Her family is Scottish, English and German. She had a Cuban-American step dad. Our wedding was equal parts Jewish, Cuban, and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. A conga line and the Hava Nagila... why not?
We've lived in towns big and small, in FL, GA, CA, and NC. We have families all over the US. Relatives who are millionaires and relatives who live in trailer parks.
It goes w/o saying that our respective families have very different ideas of the American experience.
Besides our differing families, because this is a country of immigrants, every place I visit in the U.S. is a bit different. Even within NC we can't even agree on a single style of BBQ. At the state fair the other day, I had a Cuban egg-roll (the innards of a Cuban sandwich deep fried inside a Chinese egg-roll ... genius!)
I recently learned that literally within the Koreatown portion of L.A. has sprung up a Little Bangladesh. And you know what, those immigrants will only contribute to the great melting pot that is America.
So I'm really at a loss to describe a single American culture, much less one that is under threat from today's immigrants.
I'm not just talking about what sports and music people like as being the foundation of culture.
Culture includes more important things. Just one example is casual corruption, like having to pay off the police for phony offensives. That's common in the western hemisphere south of the U.S. and many other places on the globe.
Individual immigrants as fellow human beings are fantastic and welcome. Problems arise when you try to integrate too many people as a large block from disparate societies too fast.
Problems arise when you try to integrate too many people as a large block from disparate societies too fast.
I grew up in Miami. I lived through the Mariel boatlift. And I just don't think that's what this election was about. The democratic party has ignored blue collar workers for too long. That's what this was mostly about.
I think many minorities are terrified this morning just because of your answer. Because when we peel back the rhetoric behind opposition to illegal immigration among many people (which is a legitimate position), we find opposition to the legal immigration that changed the racial fabric of America after 1965.
I'm Indian-American - my parents likely would not have ever been able to immigrate to America if the racist, pre-Hart-Cellar quota laws were still in effect.
and if he does what he's said and re-implements stop and frisk and every non-white citizen has to frequently deal with the indignity of being searched all the time?
Your sentiment while delightful isn't in line with the sort of policies Trump has been promoting during his campaign.
But he wants that authority, and has tremendous power as a republican POTUS with 2 or even 3 SCOTUS picks, a republican congress, and a republican senate.
This is indicated by his repeated attacks on Clinton for having been a politician for 30 years and not fixing, well, everything. He is an autocrat.
One can only hope that he subsides his autocratic ambitions or that there are still some hurdles left in place that prevent him from becoming the American Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Ok, non-white writing here. I've never been stopped and frisked and neither have most of my non-white friends. And it certainly doesn't happen "all the time", at least to me in my part of town. Although anecdotal, admittedly.
I'm just reminded of a story shared in New York in the 80's where a teacher asked his mostly 14-15 year old African American class if they had been stopped and frisked and every single one of them held their hand up.
> Yes, we do want to preserve the culture - not white culture but American culture.
I respect that that's how you think about it, and maybe that's even how Trump thinks about it; but I don't think you can credibly make such a blanket statement about Trump voters in general. There are still people in America who believe American culture is white American culture.
The arguments of the more moderate Brexit voters sounded similar to yours, but after the referendum they found out that an uncomfortably large number of their allies really are deeply bigoted. That in itself doesn't make their point invalid, but they can't claim that their opinion defines the whole movement.
I think that if you actually articulate in great detail what it is that you think comprises American culture, as something which is distinct from white culture and is threatened by immigration, you'll find that you are actually talking about white culture.
But, aren't you also from an immigrant family? Isn't 99% of the country from immigrant families? I genuinely don't understand how a country that is built on and by immigration hates immigrants so much.
I think this attitude drove more people to trump. The real reasons most people voted for him were things like party loyalty, they dislike Hillary, perceived him as anti establishment etc etc.
People like you took the narrative from the big news networks of the mass numbers of bigots and racists and just ran with it. Problem was that story smelled like bull, which pushed more people to his camp.
The extreme/regressive left was too busy frothing about white tyranny to pay attention to the true tyrant, Trump, "he'll never get voted in." At the same time, the majority of that vote was being called names. Hillary made the mistake of constructing her lies in order to gain favor with the loudest crowd.
I'm very far left and completely agree with you. The American left is an abysmal disgrace in terms of what I consider social progress. Instead of attempting to spread progressive thinking, the American left spreads hatred and name calling.
Next time try making friends and not enemies. More of this[1] and less of this[2].
> They reacted the exact same way any political party would react against their opponent.
No, no they didn't. "any political party" does not react against their opponent winning an election by spending 8 years denying they have any legitimacy and stonewalling them entirely.
> sure they could have, by not voting for him (Obama)
Where do you get the idea that the people who voted for Trump also voted for Obama?
The closest she came to it was an aide's campaign memo suggesting pointing out Obama's "lack of american roots" (in the sense that much of his boyhood was spent outside mainland US). It was not about doubting Obama's citizenship or birthplace, and that line of attack wasn't even used in the campaign.
Haven't been reading the Podesta emails eh? The Clinton campaign was polling on how effective it would be to criticize Obama because "Obama's father was a Muslim and Obama grew up as a Muslim in the world's most populace Islamic country."
Even Obama agrees with me here. He apparently confronted Clinton about it in 2007.
As much as the media tried to make this about racism vs liberalism, I don't think it was really about that.
Yes, it's a snub that the pro-Trump wing doesn't give a shit about women and minorities and LGBT. That much is clear. No matter what, to vote Trump you have to see certain people as "acceptable losses".
And yes, Trump is backed by a lot of vitriolic racists.
But the key thing, I think, that won Trump the presidency was anti-globalism, and the fact that he's a gigantic asshole.
Americans wanted an asshole. Pro-Trump voters see him like Apple saw Steve Jobs - the guy who cut through the BS and saw simple problems with simple solutions, and demanded that those problems be fixed.
Faced with the problem of America's increasingly anemic industrial jobs, the political wing and the press collectively said "we're okay with this". Trump said insane things like making Apple build stuff in the USA and pulling out of trade agreements.
Faced with terrorism in Europe, the press and the left collectively said "well there's not much we can do about that, we have to take care of the refugees". Trump said "screw the refugees, I'm closing the border and kicking out the muslims".
Trump offers simple, brutal solutions to complex problems. His solutions are generally pretty stupid, but they sound like solutions, which is better than the complex rationalizations we hear from everyone else.
This also explains why his opinion on the middle-east oscillates between "let's just pull out and let them kill each other" and "let's just carpet-bomb the crap out of ISIS". Simple, brutal solutions.
My dad's family in India are very anti-gay, anti-muslim and they are elated at the result. When my aunt came for my wedding, she asked "Why is an African the president?" There's a amount of people inside and outside of the US that think it's only for whites, not knowing America's history or its current diversity.
I think you need to let things sink in a bit. There often seems to be an element of panic with the losing side of these presidential elections, but life goes on.
Ignoring the characters involved in this campaign, at a basic level, this sort of party switch is pretty normal, as there is often a party change once the President completes his second term. Its a pendulum swinging from left to right and back again. Reagan to Bush was an exception, but we know what happened with his re-election attempt. So, in 4 or 8 years, I wouldn't be surprised if things moved back to the left.
> Grew up in the US. I'm a minority. I think this is the only time in my life I've ever felt like I didn't belong in America.
It's not that simple.
There was a large section of the Indian-American community that voted Trump; presumably this was also true of "non-minority" minorities like assorted Asians and Jews.
Did he outperform the 70-30 Clinton support that polls were showing for Indian, 75-20 from Jewish, and 70-20 non-Indian Asian peoples that support that polls had him at? He won because of non-collection educated Caucasians, with whom he outperformed models by 15% points.
I don't know; don't think there is a ethnic post-vote poll out. It's also not clear how accurate the pre-poll figures were.
What follows is a long-winded take on why I think Trump would've enjoyed support, and generally about Indo-US relations.
(TLDR; Trump is actually an anti-"White" vote for Indians, in many ways.)
India is going through a phase of sticking it to the "liberal elite" too; this might just be a pullback of that sentiment (note: those who are US citizens don't care much about immigration).
Spend sometime at Indology depts. in American universities, and you'll understand the derision the American elite have towards Indian-Americans. This is the place that gives rise to people that inform Americans about India, and is generally full of people who hate our kind (for various time-varying excuses); this even while they help digest cultural things like Yoga and claim it to be their own creation. Indeed, if you read about India in WaPo, NyT and their ideological retainers in India - sites like Scroll.in, Indian Express & The Hindu (yes, what an oxymoron) - it's not hard to infer that Hindus in India are equivalent to "White trash" of the US.
Media in native languages are, thankfully, are more grounded, and don't sell-off so pathetically; thus, given the source of their Indian experience, even the likes of Noam Chomsky come off as colonial missionaries (well he does speak like one). Chomsky's Indian friends are all members of the Anglical elite, most of whom believe either that the British state/Mughal empire was the high-point of the Indic civilization. Neither Chomsky, nor the liberal elite of the West, would ever dream of doing that with the native Americans. This of course is assuming Chomsky himself isn't intrisically biased (like the liberal hero, John S. Mill), which is would appear unlikely if you've heard him talk about Indic linguistic traditions.
Ironically, support for Trump amongst Indians likely stemmed from the fact that Hillary was seen as being too keen on pushing the evangelical agenda in India. This in India, is aligned well with that of the cultural Marxists, who are more akin to the Conquistadors of South America and the Whites in apartheid S.Africa, than to Liberals in the US (it's a bit more complicated, since there is no "race" per se). USAID and assorted Western NGOs generally run by this crowd [1], are seen with a lot of suspicion, since most of them are extremely powerful in what is essentially a vestige of the British colony. Much as in Russia & China, they are seen essentially (and correctly IMO) as instruments of the US State dept. [2].
The way forward ? No one knows. It's really quite difficult. One's own country is essentially a Labour factory for the Anglo-sphere; yet, one wants to stick to the vestiges of a dying culture, but not so much that it might make it necessary to return to that dirt poor nation, and face the realities of bringing change. (I sympathize with this bunch.) Not surprisingly, no one that matters, no matter their political inclination, wants India to become anything more than a periphery of the Anglosphere; if Trump adopts the old British understanding of keeping away Bible-bashers (because the Indian state lacks the will) everything will be good and dandy for this crowd. India may even become an honorary member of NATO, now that Phillipines and Malaysia are breaking up with the US. This is essentially what has been in the making (and continues to be) for more than two decades.
There are other sides to it too. There are attempts to ally with the Jewry, partly because one's past appears to be the others' future, partly due to the shared bad experience with Islam. It's not clear what the end goals of all these state/non-state actors (unlike say Israel) are, to be honest. India is very strange, and in ways that are very alien to other nations in Asia.
Tonight a large portion of the country confirmed that the US is for whites. That it's not a melting pot. This demographic has been angry for a generation because they've felt like their culture, their socio-economic status and way of life is slipping away and this election (after 8 years of a black president), the line in the sand would be drawn. The numbers don't show any division in voting based on class, but an entire chunk of whites (women, men, making under or over 100k+ a year, college education or not), all voting for Donald Trump.
I don't know what the future looks like now for America.