[Baltimore Sun] The United States is divided, but not in the way you think | GUEST COMMENTARY
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The standard narrative from the Democratic Party and its supporters is that Donald Trump represents some sort of neo-fascist, white supremacist movement. Trump supporters are Christian nationalists seething with fury at the takeover of “their” country by foreigners and minorities. They yearn for a return to the days when the patriarchy ruled supreme, and non-whites knew enough to mind their place and keep their mouths shut.
In this view, it is Joe Biden and the Democrats who truly represent America as it now exists. Joe is the future. Donald is the angry, racist past.
Is this true? Does the evidence support this? What do the facts and the anecdotal evidence all around us tell us?
Donald Trump made an impromptu visit to a bodega in New York recently. The grocery, known as the Blue Moon, was in the news in July 2022 after an altercation that ended with a clerk named Jose Alba fatally stabbing a man who came behind the counter and assaulted him. Alba was initially charged with murder, but Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg ultimately determined that he acted in “lawful self-defense.”
Trump’s visit to the bodega was an unscripted and largely uncontrolled event. The crowd of average New Yorkers in the area went wild and were overwhelmingly supportive of Trump. Children in the crowd yelled, “We love you, Trump.” This was in Harlem, where white faces are few and far between.
The Bodega and Small Business Group, which represents thousands of bodegas in New York City, issued a statement thanking Trump for his “support on behalf of tougher enforcement for retail thieves,” and slamming local District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whom they said “only backed off after an angry public campaign from store owners and their supporters united behind Mr. Alba and his Constitutional rights.”
If you have been to New York City anytime recently and walked into any of the city’s ubiquitous bodegas, you know the BSBG, which describes itself as a Hispanic organization, represents overwhelmingly minority business owners, including a whole lot of recent immigrants. Don’t these people know Trump is a Nazi?
Last month, an Axios/Ipsos survey showed Biden’s support among Hispanics dropping by 12 points to 41% from 53% three years ago. And a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll from January showed Biden now has the support of just 63% of Black voters; in 2020 87% of Black voters cast a ballot for him.
Even in California, the wheels are coming off. While Democrats still win most seats there, Republicans are making gains in heavily Hispanic districts. In others, they have mounted serious challenges and appear poised to win in the next election cycle. Non-college-educated Hispanic people, Asian people and Black people with conservative views are voting increasingly Republican, like non-college-educated white people.
“The 27% of US adults identifying as Democrats and the 43% identifying as or leaning Democratic are both new lows in Gallup’s recent reporting on political trends,” the polling research company said in February.
What is happening? Don’t these people understand that the United States is divided along racial and ethnic lines? No. They understand the United States is divided, but they also understand that division is mostly along class lines.
On one side of that divide are wealthy individuals, often with graduate degrees who live in the uptown neighborhoods of heavily populated urban areas. These folks espouse all kinds of “progressive” views. They think biological men in women’s locker rooms makes a lot of sense, gender is a social construct and you are simply assigned male or female at birth. They think Hamas is a group of freedom fighters not a collection of murderers and rapists. They are also, and this is critical, largely insulated from the economic impact of Biden’s disastrous economic decisions. They work at Microsoft and live in Bellevue, and the view from their penthouse apartments is pretty good.
Something very different is going on in the rest of the country where people shop at the Dollar Store, struggle to fill up the truck and hope the washing machine doesn’t break down, because they don’t have the cash to fix it. These people, white, Black, brown and shades in between, don’t know exactly what Bidenomics is, but they know for sure it hasn’t made their lives better.
It turns out that a whole bunch of them, particularly those Muslims and Catholics the Democrats think are in a big hurry to vote for Joe, aren’t too keen on this whole “gender fluidity” thing. When you start talking to Juan behind his parents’ back about how he is really Isabella and should wear a dress to school tomorrow, you are going to get a reaction. It isn’t going to be positive.
Increasingly, the guys and gals who run the Democratic Party and its supporting entities are talking to themselves. Increasingly they are self-important, white liberals who have spent their lives isolated from reality and been fed dogma by other self-important white liberals who never left the college campuses where they now teach.
Trump represents something very powerful and very real. It isn’t racism. It is a populist movement. It is the American people.
Sam Faddis ([email protected]), a Republican, is a retired CIA operations officer and the former head of CIA’s weapons of mass destruction terrorism unit.
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