Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Trump is a passing phenomenon
In the mid-1800s, there was a mass
migration to the United States. Although it included Jews and Muslims, the ire
of the Protestant American population fell on the Catholics, the majority of
migrants, who came from Ireland, Sicily, Poland and other European countries.
In the 1850s a major political party (“the Know Nothing Party,” later named the
American Party), was established for the single purpose of resisting the
migration and naturalization of Catholics. The Catholic Church was accused of
demonic practices and the Catholic migrants of being drunkards and criminals
not worthy of citizenship. To many they were the spearhead of a conspiracy to
change the religion of the country to Catholicism. Violence erupted here and
there and tension persisted between the two communities until World War II,
when the common enemy became the heathen communist regime of the Soviet Union.
Then John F. Kennedy, a Catholic,
was elected president in 1960. He still had to assure the electorate that his
faith would not interfere with his decisions as president. “I am not the
Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for
president who also happens to be a Catholic,” he said during his campaign. “I
do not speak for my church on public matters – and the church does not speak
for me.” Kennedy’s election was heralded as the end of prejudice against
Catholics in the United States. Yet, although Catholics have constituted, for
some time now, close to a quarter of the American population, no Catholic was
elected president since. In fact, almost every president, since independence,
has been a white Protestant (Hoover and Nixon were Quakers and Jefferson and
Lincoln were of unknown religious belief).
Until 2008, of course, when Barack
Obama, the first black president was elected, and Joe Biden, a Catholic, was
elected as his vice president. What happened all of a sudden?
It was certainly not that white
Americans became racially and religiously more tolerant. It was simply
demography. The proportion of the white (and Protestant) population had shrunk
drastically during the past several decades.
According to U.S. Census Bureau
data, the “non-Hispanic white” population, which accounted for almost 90
percent of the population in 1950, at present accounts for around 60 percent.
According to official projections, this percentage will fall to under 50
percent within the next 25 years.
The American religious landscape is
changing concurrently. According to the most extensive and recent survey on the
subject, undertaken by the Public Religion Research Institute during 2016, only
43 percent of those covered by the 101,438 bilingual interviews identified as
white and Christian compared to 81 percent in 1976. The fall under 50 percent
seems, coincidentally, to have occurred around 2008, the year Obama was
elected.
Together with these demographic changes
came, of course, a change in social outlook: a greater tolerance for abortions,
for LGBTQ rights, for gay marriage, and for a wider acceptance of a
multicultural way of life.
More alarming to many, was that the
white population was losing its political hegemony. In the presidential
election of 2008 Obama received only 45 percent of the white vote and made it
to the presidency. In the 2012 he received 41 percent of the white vote and
won. This has never happened in the past.
This is when Trump came on the
scene. He promised to reverse the march of history, as I wrote last year (The
Daily Star, Dec. 7). He was going to rid America of illegal Hispanic migration,
build a wall on the border with Mexico, stop Muslims from entering the United
States, and, in return, invite white Europeans to come and settle in the United
States. He was going to “make America great again,” which was translated by
many of his supporters to “make America white again.” For much of the older
white population this meant the return to old family values and the more
traditional society that they still remembered.
Trump’s election brought into the
open the feelings of the alt-right, the neo-Nazis, the anti-Muslims and other
white or religious supremacist groups. At a celebration meeting immediately
after the elections, one of the leaders of the alt-right, Richard B. Spencer,
put the position of the white supremacists most succinctly: “America,” he said,
“was, until last generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our
posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”
The choice before the whites, he said, was to “conquer or die.”
What happened in the 2016
presidential election was a clear reflection of this white upheaval. First, the
percentage of white voters in the total of voters went against the trend. This
percentage had been normally declining by 2 to 3 percentage points between
presidential elections, that is, every four years. Thus, in 1996 it was 83
percent; it fell to 81 percent in 2000; to 77 percent in 2004; to 74 percent in
2008 and to 72 percent in 2012. In 2016 it reversed the trend and rose to 74
percent. Second, while, as indicated earlier, the first black president
received 41 percent of the white vote for his second term, what seemed to be a
record low, Hillary Clinton received only 37 percent. (Of the senior’s vote she
received 45 percent.) In spite of all this, she had around 3 million votes more
than her opponent, but not enough electoral votes to win.
But the march of history cannot be
stopped no matter what Trump does. The “wall” will not be built. Even if it
were, it will, at best, slow down the immigration from the south but not stop
it altogether. The differential rates of natural increase, between whites and
nonwhites, and the comparative youthfulness of the nonwhite population, will
take care of the rest.
The fertility of the whites (less
than 1.8 children per woman) is considerably lower than that of nonwhites,
especially that of Hispanics (2.1 children per woman). This has resulted in a
natural increase of whites close to nil, compared with a natural increase of
1.4 percent for Hispanics.
The median
age of the white
population is around 42 years, compared with 32 for blacks and 27 for
Hispanics.
An older white population with lower
fertility means that the decline in its proportion of the total, and in its
political clout, will continue in the foreseeable future, and cannot be
reversed.
This does not mean that American
society or polity will be better; it only means that it will be different.
While extremism will probably never
die, the white supremacists brand of it will soon become a minority in a
minority, and will disappear, or be largely marginalized. No significant group
would be able to claim that America was made by it and for it exclusively,
since America will be a country of minorities, a more balanced multicultural
society, at least for the foreseeable future. Populist presidential candidates
will continue to exist, as they did throughout American history, but will not
be carried to the presidency on the votes of white supremacists as was Trump.
To historians, Trump will probably
represent the last gasp of the American white supremacy movement. On the other
hand, the election of a black or Catholic (maybe Hispanic) president (one dare
think a Jew or even a Muslim) will be a clear possibility, not because
prejudice would disappear, but because of the new demographic reality.
Riad Tabbarah is a former ambassador
of Lebanon to the United States.
A version of this article appeared
in the print edition of The Daily Star on September 26, 2017, on page 7.
