Goldie Taylor comments on how Donald Trump represents the rise of New Dixiecrats whose geographic range is not confined to the American south:
According to the New York Times, Trump carries a full 43 percent of voters who are registered Democrats, but who lean to the right. In the mold of Wallace, Trump has given rise to a modern-day Dixiecrat—only this one is not contained to the American south.
Up north, he is drawing support from "Reagan Democrats"—those who are disaffected by the broadening diversity of the Democratic Party. Reminiscent of Reagan, at least one poll shows that 20 percent of Democrats would defect and pull the lever for Trump this November. . . .
Once thought to be an augur of a post-racial America, the 2008 election instead gave rise to tensions thought by some to be already resolved. For some people, that clear demonstration of black voting power within the highly diverse Obama Coalition was something to be feared rather than embraced.
Up north, he is drawing support from "Reagan Democrats"—those who are disaffected by the broadening diversity of the Democratic Party: these are, to a great extent, white Catholic working-class voters, the kind that "liberal" Catholic commentator Michael Sean Winters still wants to tell us have switched to the Republican party because they're fed up with women being allowed to abort their babies, or with people who want us to think that gender roles are not set in stone and determined by the fact that a human being either has or lacks a penis.
Winters still wants to press this false analysis which strains out the gnat of imaginary culture-war issues among white working-class Catholic voters in the North, while ignoring the camel of thei racism that has driven them into the GOP folkd for years now. Even now, after we have crystal-clear evidence, heaped down and running over, that it's raw, crude, unbridled racism following the nation's double election of its first African-American president which is driving white working-class Northerners out of the Democratic party to Trump — just as racism has driven white Southerners to the GOP for years now — and that it's Donald Trump's adroit use of racism that appeals to so many of these voters, Michael Sean Winters wants to keep pretending that the Democratic party is losing white Catholic voters due to culture-war issues.
Not racism. Which is all Donald Trump is about.
Talk about missing the moral forest by focusing on the imaginary moral trees.
American Catholic political and theological discourse deserves something much better than this blinkered tribalism which goes hand in hand with and accounts for its sinful inability to deal with issues of racial injustice that are absolutely central to American history and culture, and have been from the inception of the nation.