Dems are repeating Hillary’s mistake

The left has apparently decided that Hillary Clinton was right: Trump supporters are a basket of irredeemable deplorables.

White racism is the reason Trump won in 2016, a growing chorus on the left proclaims. And if he wins in 2020, white racism will again be the reason.

Gee, it seems like it was only yesterday that the left was lecturing Republicans that there weren’t enough white voters left in the United States to win a national election.

No one has quite explained how white racists gained the upper hand in an electorate that is less white than the ones in 2008 and 2012 that elected Barack Obama the first black president, by comfortable margins.

This is a serious misreading of the political landscape and dynamic.

There is a clear and decisive majority of Americans ready to get rid of Trump as president.

If he is re-elected, it will be because Democrats nominated someone pledged to turn the United States into a European-style social democracy. And a substantial segment of the electorate that has a hard time stomaching Trump as president decided that was too high a price to pay to get rid of him.

Now, Trump plays politics with race irresponsibly and reprehensibly. And that undoubtedly animates a slender portion of his base. But it doesn’t begin to explain his political success or account for his prospects in 2020.

The motivation to vote in a particular way is complex. There are often many factors at play. And all successful campaigns attract different voters for different reasons.

Trump’s nationalist agenda in 2016 wasn’t anything new in Republican politics. It was an echo of Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns in the 1990s. Buchanan generally got about a third of the vote in Republican primaries. Trump received slightly more than that in the early primaries, enough to emerge on top in a crowded field.

There are three principal planks to this nationalist agenda.

Reducing immigration is one of them. The left regards this as motivated by racism, a desire to prevent a further dilution of the white majority, given that immigration these days comes primarily from Latin America and IndoAsia.

That’s undoubtedly part of it. But that gives short shrift to a substantial economic argument about the effect of immigration on the wages of American workers — particularly the low-skilled, who are disproportionately minorities.

The other two planks, however, aren’t obviously linked to race. They are protectionism in trade and reducing the U.S. role in international disputes.

For many in the center-right, a vote for Trump was a pragmatic bet that has paid off. Social conservatives got the conservative judges they wanted. Economic conservatives got tax cuts and deregulation.

But those policy gains have come with a higher than expected cost. The assumption was that, if elected president, Trump would act more presidential.

If you will permit a gross understatement, that hasn’t happened. Trump’s boorish behavior appalls many who generally agree with him on policy. Many in the center-right realize that his impulsive erraticism is a liability for both forging domestic policy and conducting international relations.

There is a cultural issue that drove Trump’s political success in 2016 and could again in 2020: rejection and resentment of the left’s identity and grievance politics and suffocating political correctness.

Those in the center-right agree with Chief Justice John Roberts that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

But, according to the left, that’s impossible. White bias is engrained, institutionalized and impossible to eradicate. All but the fully awoke are, indeed, irredeemable. And closet bigots if not openly such.

The condescension is sensed by those in the center-right, even when it is not expressly stated, as with Clinton’s basket of deplorables or Obama’s degrading of those clinging to guns or religion.

Trump’s conduct in office is uniquely loathsome. But if he wins re-election, it will be despite that, not because of it.

And because Democrats alienated a critical mass of voters who find Trump’s conduct loathsome.