Blown Opportunity

Much as Republican sold their soul to Trump, the New York Times sold its soul against Trump. After 17,436 (estimate) editorials, columns and op-eds denigrating their nemesis, what do they have to show for it?

A larger percentage of every racial minority voted for Trump this year than in 2016. Among Blacks and Hispanics, this percentage grew among both men and women, although men were more likely to vote for Trump than women.

For Charles Blow, this must have been devastating. But it gets worse.

Black women vote more reliably Democratic than Black men — only 3 or 4 percent of Black women voted for the Republican candidate in 2008, 2012 and 2016. However, Donald Trump doubled that number this year, winning 8 percent of Black women’s votes.

Black men on the other hand have been inching away from the Democrats in recent elections, and continued that drift in this election. In 2008, 5 percent of Black men voted for John McCain; in 2012, 11 percent voted for Mitt Romney; in 2016, 13 percent voted for Trump; and, this year 18 percent voted for Trump.

And if that’s not bad enough, what about their allies?

This one pushed me back on my heels: the percentage of L.G.B.T. people voting for Trump doubled from 2016, moving from 14 percent to 28 percent. In Georgia the number was 33 percent.

So what’s his takeaway?

All of this to me points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it. It reaches across gender and sexual orientation and even race. Trump’s brash, privileged chest trumping and alpha-male dismissiveness and in-your-face rudeness are aspirational to some men and appealing to some women. Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.

When all you’ve got is racism, everything is white patriarchy. Ironically, the only demographic that appears to have voted against Trump at a greater percentage than 2016 is white males.

Are all Blow’s “oppressed” people suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome? Are they willing to bow and scrape to their white patriarchs for whatever scraps they’re will to throw them? Surely, it can’t be anything else because, at least at the Times, everything is about racism and sexism.

Or maybe Blow’s ideological purity isn’t universally shared by black and Hispanic people, by women and gay people, because they hope for a future that offers them their fair slice of the American dream and not one where a nation wallows in perpetual misery and victimhood.

It wasn’t clear by Wednesday afternoon who had won the White House, but one bad idea was soundly defeated on Tuesday: identity politics. The concept that the country should be divided into aggrieved categories based on race, national origin or sex—now a core tenet of the Democratic Party—lost from coast to coast.

In California, Proposition 16, the elimination of equal protection from their Constitution so race-based preferences could openly favor one race over another. was overwhelmingly defeated. While the Cubanos in Miami-Dade are being singled out as unfaithful, they are hardly the only group under the Hispanic umbrella to vote Republican.

Identity politics lost in South Texas: Zapata County, 95% Mexican-American, went for Hillary Clinton by 33 points in 2016—but Mr. Trump won with 52.5% this time. Throughout the Rio Grande Valley, President Trump did better in 2020 than in 2016: In Starr County he lost by only five points (47% to Mr. Biden’s 52%), compared with a 60-point spread in Mrs. Clinton’s favor four years ago. In Jim Hogg County Mr. Trump lost by 18 points, down from more than 50 in 2016. In Webb County Mr. Trump won 36.6% of the vote, up from 22.8% in 2016.

How could these oppressed minorities vote for Trump? While the New York Times, in general, and Charles Blow, in particular, can see no possible reason beyond their ideological devil of white patriarchy, there is the obvious alternative, even if it would deny their worldview. People of all races, genders and sexual orientations reject a future of bare subsistence, mediocrity and perpetual grievance and want what every other American wants: Success, happiness, respect and fulfillment. They don’t want to be victims, even if that’s the best they’ll ever be to the privileged woke.

Did they vote for Trump because they like him, because they seek to curry his favor or appreciate his manliness and rhetorical skills? Hardly. They voted against a progressive future.

In other words, Ms. Kumar sees her job as indoctrination, telling immigrants and their children that the country they have come to is an awful place, which owes them compensatory justice. That such absurd propositions were defeated throughout the country by voters who saw themselves as Americans, not victims, is something to be celebrated, no matter who wins the White House.

Immigrants didn’t come here, risk it all, to be victims. They came to America to succeed, because that’s what America has to offer. Not a guarantee of success, but the opportunity for it. They voted for opportunity, not Trump.