How minority America woke up

Samuel L. Jackson’s electoral battle cry went out, and the people responded. America ‘woke the f*** up’, and while attributing the US election to any one factor is severely reductive, it is a different kind of confidence that the USA exudes at present.

Obama won for many reasons. Commentators were keen to highlight the ethnic factor - that 44 per cent of the Democrat vote came from the non-white public next to a measly 11 per cent of the Republican vote.
They also pointed out that many women voted for Obama - around 55 per cent (that’s a lot of binders worth).

Now, neither of these points are revelatory. Conservatism on the whole appeals to those who stand to gain most by preserving the status quo - the clue’s in the name.

White males in America, Europe and Australasia most frequently find themselves in positions of more power, and it should surprise no-one that this group have voted on-brand. But Obama’s re-election is about more than mere skin tones - it represents a social consciousness that has come to the fore in recent years.

I wouldn’t dare to state that the America of the past 20 years was a selfish, callous place - it was not. The last Bush administration nearly quadrupled direct bilateral assistance to Africa to over £2bn, whilst the Bill Clinton presidency was the first to make a serious case for a more socially inclusive healthcare system. A drive that was fought bitterly in Washington’s second chamber, the Senate, before being abandoned during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

However, Obama’s re-election represents the shifting social paradigm to the left, and that means that you can no longer win an election in America on a Republican traditionalist platform: home, family, God and the economy.

Romney learned this the hard way - his handsome family were no match for the incumbents, whilst Obama’s religion - he describes himself simply as a ‘devout Christian’ - remains to many voters, a preferable alternative to Romney’s Mormonism.

He probably did win the economic debate but this is a subject that makes everyone’s brain ache.

Additionally, Romney was too easy to vilify as the ‘bad guy’. The truth is that the only thing worse than being President during a time of high unemployment is being a former CEO who laid off thousands. 

The question of home is slightly more complex - whilst the likes of Donald Trump have tried to undermine Obama’s transitory upbringing, the majority of the public are unmoved by this. America is, after all, an immigrant nation.

What was certainly more damaging than any unhinged Trump tweet was the article Mitt Romney wrote about his own place of birth: ‘Let Detroit Go Bankrupt’. Americans love to serenade their own heritage, whether it be Irish, African or Italian, so the apparent lack of sentimentality in the article’s headline undermined Romney’s own story and played into the image of him as a callous industrialist.

The fact that Detroit IS bankrupt was sidelined. Sometimes we prefer politicians to lie than to tell the truth.

Fundamentally though, this is a country that’s emerged out of a lackadaisical stupor determined by decades of wealth control by the whites. Like Europe, trust in the industrial aristocracy has evaporated, and non-white America is taking itself seriously for the first time since the civil rights movement. America is awake.