What Happened November 5?
The headlines stated that the swing states might go blue, carried by women angry over the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, or by Latinos who would not hand their states to racists like Donald Trump, or by those who wanted to uphold the Constitution by rejecting the candidate wanting to trample on it.
Admittedly, I was one of those that hoped for a Democratic victory. I too was eager for those swing states to deliver the win for a racially mixed Black woman to become America’s 47th president. But I forgot who the most powerful swing voters were. Fox News might have been correct in noting that many Black men and the Latino community contributed to Trump’s victory, but this merely scapegoated already vulnerable groups. That focus left the biggest and most influential group of swing voters, white males, off the hook.
Before we continue, I need to assure readers this article does not seek to shame white people for not convincing their uncles to learn Spanish or for not being able to change their younger brothers’ belief that a woman’s place is limited to just a single room in the house. Speaking from personal experience, attempting to broaden family perspectives is a tall order, and leads more often to family discord than a “coming to Jesus” moment (pun intended). But these conflicting perspectives are not just important in intrafamily dynamics; they also help us understand the past election’s results. Political influencers set out to manipulate ideas and stoke fear in already homophobic, racist, and sexist members of communities across the USA by amplifying “replacement theory” and other myths. It has proven to be a winning strategy.
When influencers make your high-school-aged brother believe that women need to have more babies to protect his future, it makes it hard for him to hear arguments about empowering women to have autonomy over their bodies. When influencers convince young white people their culture and race will become a minority in the coming decades, that limits potential for intergroup collaboration. When influencers perpetuate myths of the persecution of Christians, it does not inspire believers to open their minds to interfaith dialogue or varying scriptural interpretations. Instead, we get the opposite: more Christian nationalism, more white nationalism, and lots more misogyny while we are at it.
Immigrants Are Not the Problem, So Why Do the Influencers Target Them?
Why has the white working class swung red against its own economic interest? White males should be the backbone of the unions in this country, considering their numbers, but influencer-spread replacement-myth scaremongering has weakened working-class solidarity with fears of demographic change, undoubtedly pleasing the intensely anti-union white business moguls surrounding Trump.
The distribution of demographic change is important in voting outcomes as well. Although recent population trends have begun to chip away at the white majority, white majorities still persist across most American towns and counties. Urban centers may be more diverse, but their electoral influence is diluted by the significantly larger number of these smaller, whiter communities.
And where there are immigrants, few are eligible to vote or take advantage of public aid programs. It is left to the more global/immigrant-friendly religious communities and nonprofits to fill the void left by the government in providing for our new neighbors. Despite this, the Republicans have used anti-immigrant sentiments to turn public opinion against tax-funded programs. In doing so they hurt struggling American working-class citizens—white ones mainly—more than any immigrant seeking to live in America.
Programs funded by tax dollars do many things. They ensure that children in poverty are offered free lunches. They provide monies for public libraries. We only have paved roads, street signs, and stoplights because of taxes. We get the benefit of paid firefighters in many counties due to taxes raised and used wisely. And, while some of these public goods will indirectly assist immigrants living in our communities, they mostly help our own born-and-raised-here US-citizen neighbors.
Nevertheless, tax-based public programs have been slashed across the nation, in the name of “stopping the leak” of goods and services to non-citizens. Fewer tax dollars now go to assist young parents in affording childcare, making it harder to work consistently. It is now more difficult to acquire the funds parents need to take care of their own aging parents, while also raising children. Republicans now malign many forms of health-care assistance because some families use it to support mixed-raced pregnancies or seek treatment for non-citizen elders. They propose shifting tax monies to weaponize local police forces and airports as tools to tear apart families and send them to dangerous and deadly places. This, not immigrants, is one genuine fear I have of Trump’s presidency!
The Influencers of White Male Hegemony
It is the coward that becomes or remains a Republican in America. While I disagree with many political views espoused by Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, they had the bravery to stand up against their party when it blindly followed Trump during the January 6 insurrection. Nor do Republicans demand the party open the door to a broader, more diverse group of partisans. In fact, save for Vivek Ramaswamy and Kash Patel, every cabinet-member pick either ensures or imposes a conservative, mainly white, mainly male, culture on Capitol Hill (even Vivek and Kash are chauvinistic nationalists, despite their Indian ancestry).
However, these ideas about women’s “place,” or immigrant “freeloaders,” or white male superiority arrive via many “influencers,” not just from the party leadership. Republican parents who celebrate these beliefs send them to school with their children. This negativity enters the classroom through discussions and bullying on campus and online, and fills the air on bus rides or walks to and from home. Some parents join or lead their children in bullying girls of color on sports teams. We have seen parents target LGBTQIA+ students on committees or running for school offices. Parents stoop so low as to blame their children’s neurodivergent classmates for poor grades on group projects. And parent groups even exist to stop the creation of anti-bullying or diversity clubs, even though bullying and harassment directly impair learning outcomes. Not to mention the adults, sometimes without children in a school district, who think it is their mission to ban books about children of color or those questioning their gender or sexuality. Republican parents, we should really ask: are you OK?
When book-banning efforts pass, as they have in Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and both Dakotas, they send a chilling message to every non-white, non-Christian, non-male, and non-heterosexual that our lives are not “good enough” to share in public. We, the minorities left out of this vision of America, will be stigmatized and hyper-scrutinized, with a level of critique unknown to Matt Gaetz, Brett Kavanagh, or Donald John Trump. Each of these has committed felonious acts, yet now they wield immense power. Apparently assaulting children or women does not disqualify someone from political office if they are also a white, Christian, straight man. Is that our morality lesson from this election, America?
The second Trump term has arrived. Watch out for a less safe, less family-friendly, less inclusive next four years. Be prepared for more school shootings, more supermarket massacres, and more church slayings from those who imbibe the hateful rhetoric of the influencers. Watch out central Illinois, a new Trump presidency promises an assault on our very morality!
C. Owen has become a librarian at a Christian college in the Chicago-area after almost two years of living in CU, where he worked at The Urbana Free Library. Now, C. Owen helps ensure his college’s collection includes works about every kind of student attending his campus. His pitbull Duke still loves neighborhood walks and barking at passersby from the balcony, just in a different zip code this time. When C. Owen is not raging about the downward-spiraling state of America, he finds solace in cozy builder games like “Dorfromantik” or “Tropico.”
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