This is a Rubicon election. There is a fundamental philosophical choice. Many would argue, and I won’t dispute, that the election is about whether we’ll have a democratic or authoritarian future. But I think something even more fundamental is going on: This election is about race and ethnicity, about the American identity. Do we cross the Rubicon into a country that is proudly multi-racial or do we allow the bitter-end white nativists pull the country back into its monochromatic-power past? Thirty years ago, I predicted that the gringos would have a last stand, and this may be it.
It’s not as simple as that, of course. The Democratic Party has played a suicidal brand of identity politics in recent history, following the academic left down the warren of grievance, special pleading and ethnic bean-counting. It is easy to imagine Latinos and Asians, and members of the growing black professional class, voting against a party that has eschewed merit for “equity.” Kamala Harris still hasn’t been asked the tough questions about whether she favors Diverty, Equity and Inclusion programs, or the ultimate divisive fantasy: reparations. Too many Democrats still believe in the simplistic colonialist v. oppressed model of world history.
But Harris is campaigning in a manner that suggests that it’s time we turned the page. She has refused to make much of her own identity, but that identity—West Indian black and East Indian Asian—is powerfully symbolic. But more important, she has refused to make much of identity politics, period. There was, for example, an interesting article in Politico last week about how the Harris campaign has decided to attract Latino voters:
It’s a major shift in how Democrats are targeting Latino voters this cycle — and a rebuke of the belief long held by many Democrats that overt appeals on race and progressive policies on immigration are key to winning Latino votes.
But after Democrats hemorrhaged support from Latinos over the last decade, Harris is attempting to chart a path away from identity politics, including in the way she’s courting Latino voters in states like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Imagine that. Treating Latinos as if they were Americans. Not only that, but she has shucked off the usual hucksters, looking for a piece of the campaign action simply because they are black. And her appeals to black voters—especially black men—have been race-neutral: she has concentrated on opportunity, offering cash incentives to first-time home buyers, entrepreneurs and parents. This is the liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan not Bernie Sanders or The Squad. Although I’d still like her to go to the whitest, poorest heart of Appalachia, and make the pitch that her policies would bring tangible benefits to them, too.
Contrast that with the Donald Trump Republicans who are descending willy-nilly into the racial sewer. Identity politics—white identity politics—is Trump’s default position. This week, he retweeted and then deleted a photo-shopped deepfake of Kamala Harris partying with P. Diddy. That is not just racist and sexist, but a classic Trumpian projection: he’s the one who was pals with Jeffrey Epstein.
Indeed, Trump’s attempt to make a big deal of Harris’s mixed heritage has trickled down to the limited intellect of Janet Jackson:
The unusual turn of events began when The Guardian published a wide-ranging interview with Ms. Jackson timed to promote the European leg of her concert tour. When the reporter, Nosheen Iqbal, said the United States “could be on the verge of voting in its first Black female president,” referring to Ms. Harris, Ms. Jackson responded by saying: “Well, you know what they supposedly said? She’s not Black. That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian.”
When Ms. Iqbal replied that Ms. Harris, the Democratic nominee, is the daughter of an Indian woman and a Jamaican father who is Black, Ms. Jackson responded, “Her father’s white.”
That’s what happens: trickle-down racism, a game of race-telephone where the message is distorted, as it descends the ladder, where lies become truths. And it is dangerous, as Catherine Rampell pointed out in the Post, comparing Trump’s rhetoric with, yes, Hitler’s:
In recent weeks, the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) have ramped up their baseless claims about violent invasions from impure foreigners, echoing “blood and soil”-style rhetoric deployed nearly a century ago.
At a rally this past weekend in North Carolina, Trump declared that “a vote for Kamala Harris means 40 or 50 million more illegal aliens will invade across our borders, stealing your money, stealing your jobs, stealing your life.” Chillingly, he added that migrants were already “attacking villages and cities all throughout the Midwest.”
This followed earlier remarks in Arizona, in which he alleged that “young American girls” are “being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens.”
The worst trickle-down effect of Trump’s racism has been the real-life hell visited upon the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio. There, the campaign has been led by the despicable J.D. Vance, who has defended his lies about pet-eating in Springfield as a form of, well, metaphoric truth. Again, Rampell:
Vance has likewise baselessly accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of not only butchering and eating people’s pets, but also of killing people. “Murders are up by 81 percent because of what Kamala Harris has allowed to happen in this small community,” Vance said on CNN.
The Clark County, Ohio, district attorney, a Republican, unequivocally refuted Vance’s claim, noting that local murder rates were higher under Trump. What’s more, across his 21 years in the prosecutor’s office, Daniel Driscoll said, “we have not had any murders involving the Haitian community — as either the victims or as the perpetrators of those murders.”
Vance is peddling incendiary stuff and I hope Tim Walz calls him on it, in their vice presidential debate next week. Something like: Young man, have you ever stopped to think about the impact—the paralytic fear you’ve inflicted—on hard-working Haitian parents who wonder if their kids are going to be attacked on their way home from school?
The amazing thing is that Vance has a couple of mixed-race children of his own. Doesn’t he understand the toxins he’s injecting into the public square? Doesn’t he care? Of course, his rhetoric feeds the nativist proclivities of the Republican base. According to The Washington Post:
A new CNN poll showed that a majority of the Republican Party now agrees that “an increasing number of people of many different races, ethnic groups, and nationalities in the U.S.” is mostly threatening (55 percent) rather than enriching (45 percent) to American culture.
And there it is. The great American divide. The most essential question in this election. We can argue, at the margins, about tax and energy and foreign policy, but this election, at bottom, is about whether we will be that rare thing in history: a country in which an ethnic ruling class was peacefully supplanted, over time, by a multi-ethnic successor…or will we join the ranks of empires devoured by their own cosmopolitan success.
“Old man, have you ever stopped to think about the impact—the paralytic fear you’ve inflicted—on hard-working American parents of all creeds and colors who wonder if their kids are going to be cajoled into gender reassignment without any parental consent while at school? Or the anger that immigrants of all races feel when illegal immigrants with criminal backgrounds are allowed unfettered access to the American dream that they toiled to become through legal channels?”
Joe, don’t you agree that culture is and always has been upstream of politics wherever you are on the planet?
Blindness to the fact that, for many Americans, immigration and multiculturalism has little to do with race and everything to do with cultural degradation is hard to understand.
Flying the race flag as a political argument is equally objectionable and intellectually shallow on both sides of the political spectrum.
First, as Joe knows, despite the simple fact that in terms of the welfare of the country, it’s hard to comprehend not voting’for’Harris, my own view is that Trump will win. And god knows what then happens. And second, isn’t it time to cut her some slack? I am not at my core likely to be a Harris enthusiast. I suspect I will hate some of her policies in the unlikely event that she gets the chance. But let’s recognize that 3 months ago or so she wasn’t going to be a candidate, she did not have a phalanx of long term senior advisors’ she had not thought through a campaign or a presidents agenda. She has had to do averything on the fly. I think she’s done better than anyone could have expected. But the media - all of it - really does grade her and Trump on completely different scales. She has to have a detailed economic agenda, Trump gets to skate. (Has anyone in the entire f**k**g media ever pointed out that American companies not foreign countries pay the tariffs?) Even Joe does this - even in the middle of a really good essay. So Harris is not allowed just to walk the talk on identity - and, by the way, she has done it superbly - she has to, for the benefit’ of our media, also talk the talk. For christs sake, why? I think the country is far’better’off’having a candidate not talk incessantly about identity but rather acting in an adult way. Every once in a while I have an optimistic moment and think we might actually be seeing a candidate evolve into something very’special in front of our eyes.