Duke students have been quick to deem the election of Donald Trump as president “a tragedy,” if not a very dangerous event that threatens their core values and ideals of racial minority rights, LGBT rights, multiculturalism and feminism, among others. Many students told me that they were less horrified about the election of Trump than about the racism and xenophobia that they realized was inherent to American society.
But such moralizing rationalizations of Trump’s election are not useful to grasp the deep reasons why millions of Americans elected Trump, and ultimately foster understanding and unity between the different demographic groups making up American society. Although it is undeniable that many of Trump voters are white supremacists who dream of a racially-pure American society and are nostalgic of an era when an institutional segregation granted superiority and domination to white America, putting all or even half of Trump voters into that same “basket” would be a disservice made to truth.
Much has been said in liberal media outlets about the vote of white working class communities in the Midwest that ultimately decided the election. In fact, many of such communities voted massively in favor of Trump because their jobs have been decimated by the automation and outsourcing of industrial production—a consequence of the free trade agreements that Trump has virulently opposed during the campaign. In addition, by voting for Trump, an outsider candidate, many of these communities have expressed both a feeling of being abandoned by the political establishment—which they perceive as being more accountable to big donors and big-money interests than to their vote—and a desire for change.
But my sentiment is that liberals attempting to understand “acceptable” or “valid” reasons that drove people to vote for Trump have been generally missing one key element: national identity.
Academics ascribe to identity two meanings: “achieved” identity derived from personal endeavors, and “ascribed” identity based on innate characteristics. In previous decades, when America had not yet entered into that era of deindustrialization and rising inequalities, the “achieved” identity of white working class communities was very strong due to their economic success and the new opportunities offered to them by mass consumerism.
However, as the economy evolved and these communities came to realize that millennials would be worse off than their parents and grandparents, their achieved identity waned and an ascribed identity based on communal belonging to an ethnicity or nation came to fill that vacuum. Thus, Trump’s nationalistic and anti-immigration platform appealed to these communities.
I am convinced that national identity played a key role in electing Trump independently from the economy. In fact, the white working class negatively affected by global trade is far from being the only demographic group that opted to vote for Trump.
In reality, what many voters expressed in the ballot box is a rejection of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, which threaten America as a nation with a shared cultural inheritance. Many Americans think that their country and culture are exceptional, thus they think that they should do anything they can to preserve them. They also think that their government should serve the interests of their country and its people before serving the interests of other people and countries.
Such a view is what Reihan Salam, executive director of the National Review, calls “conservative patriotism.”
It is also precisely what many Duke students call “xenophobia” and “racism.”
Yet, Jonathan Haidt writes in The American Interest, “There is nothing necessarily racist or base about this arrangement or social contract [based on 'conservative' patriotism]. Having a shared sense of identity, norms, and history generally promotes trust. Having no such shared sense leads to the condition that the sociologist Émile Durkheim described as “anomie” or normlessness. Societies with high trust, or high social capital, produce many beneficial outcomes for their citizens: lower crime rates, lower transaction costs for businesses, higher levels of prosperity and a propensity toward generosity, among others.”
In reality, most people who voted for Trump do not deny that America is a country of immigrants, and certainly do not dream of some sort of Ku Klux Klan rule taking over the country (particularly if these voters are black, Hispanics or Asian Americans). Rather, what they simply ask for is an immigration policy that is consistent with the American tradition of the “melting pot.”
The melting pot is the idea that the United States should welcome immigrants from all around the world, but under one condition: that they assimilate to mainstream American society. These immigrants will be offered freedom and opportunity to succeed but in exchange, and quite naturally, the melting pot requires them to adopt the United States’ language—English—but also the United States’ fundamental values and ideals (individual freedoms), historical narrative (America as the leader of the free world), institutions and legal system (democracy, constitutional government, etc.). Of course, the melting pot, as the name suggests, recognizes that America’s culture is not fixed but will rather be enriched by the diverse art, food, music, literature, ideas and experiences of the ethnic groups making up its immigrant population. However, this will only be tolerated as long as all these cultures “melt” together into one culture, which is only possible if immigrants adopt America’s fundamental values and ideals rooted in its Anglo-Saxon, European and Protestant tradition.
Such a beautiful and unique amalgamation of diversity and necessary oneness can be only made possible if immigration is controlled and limited. In fact, if immigrants arrive in mass, they will be numerous enough to settle in separate neighborhoods and keep their own language, values and norms for many generations. It is true that in the past huge populations of immigrants like the Italians or the Irish have settled in separate neighborhoods before assimilating over the course of a few generations. However, I believe that today new waves of immigrants are less likely to do the same because the new transportation and communication means allow these communities to keep contacts with their country of origin and run a parallel society.
Through mass and uncontrolled immigration, as well as the current discourse of the left on minority rights that practically allows immigrants to retain their own language, the historical narrative of their country of origin (often hostile to the U.S., as that of many countries in Latin America and the Middle East) and values and norms that are alien to those of the United States, the melting pot has been slowly dismantled in recent decades. This is why, for example Spanish or “Spanglish” has replaced English as the lingua franca in certain southwestern parts of the U.S. and Florida; or this why Sharia law—the Islamic law based the Koran and the Hadith—is sometimes being consulted in U.S. courts to resolve issues of marriage contracts or commercial agreements.
This, and nothing else, is the main reason why Trump’s immigration and security platform, which notably involved building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border and having Mexico pay for it, temporary banning Muslims from entry in the United States, deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants and more, resonated with a lot of people during the campaign.
Although during the campaign I did not agree with Trump’s most extreme policy prescriptions and rhetoric, which I found divisive and counterproductive, I believe that the core of his message, the intuition behind his platform, is sane. But most importantly, I believe that we need to have a calm and cold-headed conversation around immigration on this campus and in this country; not one that is filled with hate or bigotry, as many liberals would like to picture it and as Trump would like (at times) to embody it, but rather a conversation filled with mutual respect and genuine goodwill for the United States and its people.
Emile Riachi is a Trinity sophomore. His column, "a political night vision," runs on alternate Thursdays.
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