Allister HEATH

Trump’s anti-lockdown gambit helped break the Left’s dominance among ethnic minorities

It was the most bitter, inflammatory and uninspiring US election in living memory, but there is one ray of light among the chaos: race now matters less in America, contrary to everything we keep being told. The fascistic racists, the hard-left woke provocateurs and other purveyors of hatred are losing the culture wars, and supporters of Martin Luther King’s colourblind vision are winning, in the most unlikely of circumstances.

For it was class divisions, not the colour of voters’ skin, that determined the US election. Donald Trump narrowed the racial divide, making gains with Latinos, blacks and Asian Americans of both genders, only falling back among white men, according to an exit poll. He increased his share of white women, demolishing all of the nonsensical “data science” concocted by a discredited polling industry, which failed to see just how close and complex this race would turn out to be.

But the educational voting gap increased further, with Joe Biden grabbing a record 55 per cent share of university graduates, against 43 per cent for Trump. This was a huge achievement, and his lead among younger graduates was even larger.

The university-educated, criticaltheory worshipping, secular, workingfrom-home classes may have given him a narrow edge.

Biden’s gains among this growing demographic look like having been larger than Trump’s increased share among non-white voters, and better distributed. Graduates and non-grads were tied as recently as during the George W Bush years, and Ronald Reagan, a true one nation president, seized 58 per cent of graduates in 1984.

America’s long-running class war was exacerbated by Covid. The biggest losers from lockdown were blue-collar workers, small business owners and the self-employed, of all races, and those who weathered the crisis best were Biden’s core urban professional classes. Without Covid-19, Trump would have triumphed, taking even more working-class and middle-class voters with him; but his “keep America working”, anti-lockdown gambit allowed him to retain most of his supporters, though perhaps at the cost of losing some pensioners. In the end, while it may not have been enough, the strategy worked better than America’s second-rate punditocracy would have liked us to believe.

Trump grabbed 35 per cent of the Hispanic male vote. One CNN exit poll found that the Democrats’ lead among Hispanic voters was slashed from 27 points in 2016 to 8 this year in Florida, from 40 to 25 points in Georgia and from 41 to 24 points in Ohio. Matt Bruenig, an analyst, calculates that women and ethnic minorities made up 59.6 per cent of the Trump coalition in 2020, with white men accounting for just 40.4 per cent.

This was not just about Covid. There were two other reasons: Trump’s economic policy, his pro-growth approach, his tax cuts and deregulatory initiatives went down well with the gogetting, self-reliant immigrant classes. It is wrong to see them all as socialist. Many, most even, are economic and social conservatives. One day, under a better, less personally flawed candidate, a majority of Hispanics and Asian-americans will vote Republican, and the party will be unstoppable. Demographics isn’t destiny, and majority-minority America doesn’t have to be Left-wing.

The Democrats’ embrace of wokery was also a turn-off for many ethnic minorities: they had no truck for a revolutionary ideology that seeks to pit race against race and men against women in neo-marxist fashion, or for the violence of the BLM and Antifa movements. Many Latinos cannot stand the fact that upper-class white Harvard graduates with Phds are telling them what to think, and that they are hopeless victims. The abominable Proposition 16, which would have legalised “positive” discrimination in California, was crushed.

Trump’s better-than-expected performance, the Republican gains in the House and the party’s continued control of the Senate and Supreme Court all mean that Biden, a weak character, will find the going tough if he wins. It won’t be as bad as 2017 was for Theresa May, but there are parallels: Corbyn lost, but it felt as if he had almost won.

So what are the lessons for Boris Johnson? The first is to realise that the politics of the West are now all about class and education. The Tories can only win again if they maintain or increase their grip of workingclass voters. That means, among other things, a Covid policy that doesn’t condemn them to permanent impoverishment. The second lockdown is a mistake. Johnson must put his new core voters first, not the professional classes and their Zoom meetings. That also means doubling down on the anti-crime agenda, on Brexit, on human rights reform, on abolishing the BBC licence fee. The Tory working-class base doesn’t want to pay more for green energy, and they hate the Government’s awful, anti-car roads policies.

Secondly, Johnson needs a progrowth, pro-entrepreneurial agenda: Trump was better at this, even if his reforms would be undone by Biden. The Tories seem too keen on taxes and regulations. Yet an entrepreneurial, pro-private sector jobs, self-help message would chime with aspirational ethnic minority voters. The Tories must appeal to their economic and social values, rather than genuflecting to nonsensical “woke” ideologies that ethnic minorities don’t approve of.

Thirdly, Johnson must halt the Leftwards drift of the upper middle classes, something that Trump miserably failed to do. How? By ceasing to subsidise the creation of a woke generation, by preventing cultural warriors from taking over schools, museums and corporations, and, crucially, by reforming universities. Education is vital, and we need more of it, but it doesn’t need to take place in universities. At least a quarter of students would be better off gaining high-quality technical or practical training, rather than wasting time studying useless social science degrees at second-rate institutions.

A new dawn is rising in America, though perhaps not before the lawyers battle it out. The next episode of America’s vicious, polarising class warfare is about to play out, but is it too naive to hope that the next two years will be a little calmer, more civil and less insane?