So, what really happened on Wednesday? No sooner had the shock result of the US presidential election come in, than the blame game began.
As the statistics piled in, distraught liberals and progressives laid the blame on everyone from third party candidates and voters who "took votes away" from Hillary Clinton, to the media that gave Donald Trump endless publicity and downplayed his sexual assault allegations even as it crucified Clinton for her email servers, to the disenfranchisement of the anti-establishment white working class.
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'Whitelash': Black fears over Trump victory
African American pundits reflect on the fear and pain of Trump's election, calling it a "whitelash against a changing country" and "white supremacy's last stand".
Let's deconstruct. First, I want to say I am coming at this from the perspective of someone who was not as emotionally invested in a particular outcome as many others. Despite my antipathy towards Trump, my firm opposition to US interventionism meant that I was never fully #WithHer, although I certainly agree Clinton would have been a far wiser and fairer choice for the majority of Americans. As such, I am not seeking to find fault so much as understand how such a shock outcome came to be and to explore its possible consequences.
With that in mind, to blame third party voters is, frankly, to make a gross mockery of democracy. No candidate or political party is "owed" a vote, and yet, there seems to be a mentality that the Democrats were entitled to the third party votes that went to Libertarian Gary Johnson and the Greens Jill Stein, and, that giving them to these candidates was tantamount to betrayal.
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The disdain for third party voters lies in the futility – it is seen as essentially throwing away a vote, or – worse – indirectly voting for the rival candidate. But this is where democracy lies. A vote is valuable not only because it may help elect a desired candidate but because it provides a means for all voters to demonstrate their vision of what they want politics and society to look like.
Those with enough moral conviction to vote for a candidate they know has no chance of actually winning do so, not merely to protest, but to lay the foundations for something other than today's limited two-party system that seems to be inching towards a future in which there is increasingly less to differentiate the two main parties (this applies both in the US and in Australia).
To scorn those who vote for a third party is to essentially demand that there should only ever two options. But, as a friend of mine who used to work in retail where she was instructed to always provide customers with three options, wrote yesterday, to be forced to choose between only two can appear not so much a choice as a dilemma.
Trump won, not because a relative handful of people voted for Stein and Johnson, but because far more people voted for Trump than expected. Anyone upset at the result needs to take a hard look at these statistics rather than at the people who practised democracy by voting for their conscience.
Despite doing worse than expected with black male voters and all Latino voters, Clinton was the resounding victor with every racial category – including garnering a massive 94 per cent of the vote of black women – except one: the white vote.
According to exit polls, 63 per cent of white men and 53 per cent of white women voted for Trump. This matters. This means that, far from being a class war, white voters united across the political, economic, and educational spectrum.
Working class or wealthy, conservative or liberal, educated or non-educated – in all categories white people voted for Donald Trump in droves.
So when distraught white women who had so hoped for a Clinton victory – and I do understand their grief even if I don't entirely share it – lament about how society still does not take women seriously, or on how women will never be allowed to succeed, or how powerful women will never be fully trusted, what they need to acknowledge is that it is not "society" that is failing them – it is whiteness.
When it comes to this election at the very least, is not "society" that does not care about women, it is white people who don't care, or at least don't care enough. When even a majority of white women vote for a candidate that boasts about grabbing women "by their pussy", then you know they have opted to throw their lot in with a white supremacy that at least validates their whiteness even as it scorns their femaleness.
It seems being a second-class citizen in a white dominated society is preferable to being a first-class citizen in a racially just one.
It is surprising how commentators continue to overlook this in favour of the class warfare narrative that has dominated the wake of every shock right-wing triumph that has occurred this year. From Brexit to the return of Pauline Hanson's One Nation, to Trump's election, with every surprise victory that spells the resurgence of right-wing nationalism, the aftermath has inexplicably been one of meekly reaching out to talk with these entitled white voters who genuinely seem to think Western society belongs to them and them alone.
Third party voters did not elect Trump. Working class voters did not elect Trump. The media certainly did not elect Trump. White people elected Trump. And it is high time that all white people faced down the racist core that drives white society. Then, and only then, can we really "talk".
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