Why are racists surfacing now? Because they're finally losing

More than 50 years ago, in the second week of 1969, NBC’s Star Trek aired a morality play titled “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.”

The plot focused on a culture that destroyed itself in deadly race riots between two factions with bi-tone facial pigment. One group had black on the right side of their faces and white on the left; the other was the mirror opposite.

No one on the U.S.S. Enterprise noticed the difference. The hypothetical year was (or would be) 2268.

Three centuries before that fictional future, when the very real Star Trek episode aired, the United States wasn’t much different. It had been less than five years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had passed. Thanks to this landmark legislation, it was no longer legal in the United States to discriminate based on race, religion, sex, or national origin.

A lot of people didn’t like it. There had been race riots, assassinations, bombings, and beatings. More to the point, it coalesced opposition over the ensuing decades.

The 1968 election is a case in point. So many people were pissed off by the very idea of racial equality that “law and order” Republican Richard Nixon and Southern segregationist George Wallace won nearly 58% of the vote between them in the 1968 presidential contest. Wallace won five states, but Nixon still won the election. But the divided nature of that vote, together with Nixon’s subsequent resignation — in disgrace — masked just how strong the white racist undercurrents still were.

White majority rule

Watergate shifted the balance of power, but only ephemerally.

A Democrat was elected in 1976, but Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter was, notably, a white Southern Democrat. Though his policies were inclusive, he still looked like “one of us” to white voters in the formerly Confederate, Jim Crow South. But when another tough guy Republican — a more charismatic and conservative version of Nixon — came along, it was no contest. Even though Carter was the incumbent, the cowboy actor-turned-politician (Ronald Reagan) won convincingly with a campaign that targeted the white American suburbs.

The next Democrat to win the White House was another Southerner, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who persevered in a three-way race with incumbent George H.W. Bush and Texas businessman Ross Perot.

The accepted wisdom was that Clinton won because Bush was presiding, at the time, over a brief economic downturn. But two other factors were key: Many Republicans had become disillusioned with Bush because he’d broken a promise not to raise taxes and, more viscerally, he just wasn’t Reagan. Sure, he’d won a war with a Middle East dictator, but Reagan had faced down the Soviet Union. Bush, by comparison, wasn’t enough of a tough guy.

Perot, an independent, was. He actually led the race early before dropping out. He later jumped back in, and although it was too late to recover his initial support, he still won nearly 20 million votes. He and Bush together won 56% of the vote — roughly the same percentage that Nixon and Wallace had split 24 years earlier. Not that much had changed.

In fact, every election with the exception of Carter’s post-Watergate victory over Gerald Ford had resulted in lopsided victories for the Republican:

In 1980, Reagan routed Carter in an electoral landslide, winning more than half the vote even though he also faced an independent candidacy from Republican John Anderson. Together, Reagan and Anderson won 57% of the vote.

Four years later, Reagan won another landslide against Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, winning 59% of the vote.

G.H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis with well over 53% of the vote in a 1988 Electoral College landslide. After trailing in early polls, he rocketed past Dukakis with the help of a race-baiting TV ad tying his opponent to a convicted murderer — who happened to be Black.

So, from 1968 to 1992, the white “law and order” tough guy vote was remarkably consistent, with the only exception being the post-Watergate backlash election of 1976. To recap:

1968 — Nixon + Wallace, 58%

1972 — Nixon, 61%

1980 — Reagan + Anderson, 57%

1984 — Reagan, 59%

1988 — G.H.W. Bush, 53%

1992 — Bush + Perot, 56%

Turn toward diversity

Then, however, things started to turn a bit. Clinton, helped by a strong economy and the power of incumbency, won a two-way race against a weak Republican candidate (Bob Dole) in 1996. Clinton’s vice president, another Southerner named Al Gore, outpolled Bush’s son in the popular vote but lost the Electoral College in 2000.

Four years later, propelled by another “tough guy” issue — anti-terrorism in the wake of 9/11 — the younger Bush became the last Republican to date to win the popular vote. And even then, he won by just 2.5 percentage points.

After his second term, in 2008, the United States elected the first non-Southern Democrat to win the presidency since John F. Kennedy in 1960. But far more than that, the winning candidate, Barack Obama, became the nation’s first Black president. This wasn’t just a temporary victory for the “coalition of diversity,” it was an outright repudiation of the white majority politics that had governed the country ever since the Civil Rights Act. It was blatant. It was in your face. At least that’s how the deposed “old guard” of white Republican men saw it.

All the implicit racism that had been simmering under the surface, obscured by Watergate, three-way races, and Southern Democrats in the White House, came crashing to the surface.

Is it any wonder that these outraged “victims” of diversity lashed back by electing their own blatant, in-your-face candidate, Donald Trump? It is, of course, absurd to equate an educated, civil patriot with a corrupt, bullying narcissist. But to the shrinking former white majority, it was just a matter of (to use Donald Trump’s word) counterpunching.

Trump managed to win the presidency, despite losing the popular vote, by hearkening back to the old “tough guy” imagery (even though he’d avoided military service) and tapping into lingering distrust of the feminine, personified by his opponent, Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t that the country was any less ready to elect a woman than a Black man; it was simply that Clinton lacked Obama’s political gifts and was far less popular than her predecessor.

Muddied waters

But just as previous elections had masked the persistent white majority, Clinton’s defeat, together with a built-in Republican edge in the Electoral College, obscured an emerging, persistent diverse majority. Remember, only one Republican since 1988 has won a majority of the popular vote — and that happened in the aftermath of a terrorist attack that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.

Trump’s immovable “base” isn’t loyal to him so much as they’re desperately loyal to the idea of a vanishing white-majority nation. He’s made himself a symbol of that by pandering to white supremacists and defending Confederate symbols, so they’ve latched onto him as a “savior.” But the fact is that, despite their panicked fervor, they’ve never pushed Trump’s popularity into majority territory.

We might have thought we’d conquered bigotry with the Civil Rights Act, but politics just concealed and/or diluted the white voting majority in its aftermath. Now, the tables have turned. Trump’s victory in 2016 concealed the diverse voting majority.

The trend toward diversity is unlikely to reverse itself. Republicans know the only way they can stay in power is by suppressing the vote, maximizing their edge in the Electoral College, and packing the courts with ideologues.

And, importantly, they have to excite and rouse the most vocal, committed members of constituency to action. Why? So they don’t disappear. The bad news for the rest of us is that those vocal, committed members tend to be closed-minded loudmouths. Some of them are bigots, some of them make threats, and some of them carry guns.

The good news is that, despite all the noise they make, they’re in the minority — and that minority is shrinking. It may not be obvious, any more than the white-majority bias was obvious through the early 1990s, but it’s there — hidden behind the Electoral College bias, Trump’s bluster, and fallout from the 2016 election.

Given the shifting demographics, this may be white supremacy’s last battlefield. Let’s just hope it doesn’t turned that battlefield — our nation — into scorched earth by the time it’s defeated.