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Trump and racism are not Republican creations

Donald Trump is America's best excuse. The mainstream media, sections among the Republicans and most Democrats have used his larger-than-life personality to deflect attention from structural racial fissures in American society. However, Trump may not be the cause but the most visible symptom of a society whose subterranean racism has acquired for itself a megaphone.
America was celebrated for entering a post-racial phase with the election of its first African-American president, Barack Obama. But the country's electoral college system, designed to be geographically proportional, camouflaged key statistics in the popular vote of the 2008 presidential election that first elected Obama. According to the Pew Research Center, Obama lost the popular vote among both male and female white voters to Senator John McCain, his rival at the time. This happened in a year when the Republican brand was at its all-time low, affected by the disapproval of the sitting president, George W. Bush, a disastrous war in Iraq and a collapsing economy.
In fact, Obama has lost the white vote to every white candidate he has run against since 2008. The New York Times found Obama lost the white vote to his then Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in 2008. He also lost the white vote to his Republican challenger in 2012, Mitt Romney, by 20 percentage points.
Obama won two presidential elections because the diverse coalition he assembled - comprising whites, African Americans, Hispanics - overwhelmed his rivals. However, his overwhelming margins among coloured voters in America seen against the constant rejection by a majority of white voters in successive elections only demonstrate a racially polarised society.
The progressive Left in America likes to view the Democratic Party as exempt from racial and cultural bias because the party's voters twice elected an African American. The explanation given by most pundits and news media is that it is mostly Republican voters who may have hidden and vocal race antipathies towards Obama as they have been primed against other races by successive Republican politicians. The Republican Party's war against welfare schemes, such as food stamps, healthcare and social security, are cited as racist dog whistles, considering a significant proportion of welfare recipients continue to be America's black and Hispanic population.
The Democrats are right in their analysis of Republican campaigns. However, blaming the Republicans for their mistakes has helped Democrats hide their own racial fissures from scrutiny. Obama was never a popular figure among blue-collar Democrats. In the 2008 primaries, the social fissures were evident in the voting patterns. While Obama won resoundingly among African Americans and a 'decent' proportion of white voters, Clinton took the majority of the white and the Hispanic vote. In the 2008 general election, all three Democratic voting types did vote for Obama, but it is safe to say the coalition was more of an existential alliance than a racial rapprochement.
In 2016, the trends repeat themselves. Clinton has completely embraced Obama and made issues close to the black community, like Black Lives Matter and gun control, center pieces of her campaign. She has overwhelmingly won the support of the African American communities, who are suffering under police brutality and poorly regulated gun ownership. The Democratic Party is loath to admit this indicates a racial divide, and credits Sanders' success to his crusade against income inequality. Clinton and Sanders, who are both equally pro-immigrants, have almost equally divided the Hispanic vote.
These patterns clearly indicate the Democrats have a loose coalition of voters, who have had to protect each other for survival so far. The Democrats have not actively pitted races against each other as the Republicans have, but somehow their better record against the shockingly low bar of the Republicans has been hyped as a resounding success in race relations.
These are the chinks in the Democrats' armour that Trump has exploited. He has blamed the Hispanic community for taking up jobs meant for white America, while remaining platitudinous towards the African American community. This yields him three benefits. It drives a wedge between the white working class and the Hispanics, two blocks in the Democrats' coalition. It helps in keeping the African American community from energising against his candidacy. The difference in his approach towards two racial minorities, Hispanics and African Americans, also gives him an excuse to point out his campaign's theme is not so much racist as economic. Trump isn't only a Republican Frankenstein; the Democrats have handed Trump a culturally loose coalition that he can carve into without too much effort.
In 2016, racial antipathy remains a Republican problem. But the lack of strong interracial solidarity, outside political compulsions, is a Democratic problem. This implies racism, whose spectrum extends from indifference to antipathy, is on the whole not a one-party political problem but an American sociological problem.
Sampad Patnaik is a student of modern Indian studies at the University of Oxford. Prior to that he was a financial journalist with Thomson Reuters
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