News websites today are full of pictures of white women crying. Clinton was defeated and it feels like another act of hatred, committed by men against women.
But it isn’t. More white women voted for Trump than Clinton.
Trump, a man accused of rape, multiple counts of sexual assault, a man who routinely demeans women, got more votes from white women than the potential first female president.
You know who didn’t vote for him? Black people. Latinos. Muslims.
It seems that attacking and demeaning women is less of a danger than a perceived threat against white supremacy.
And Trump is not an aberration. His win follows Tony Abbott’s, it follows Brexit and One Nation and the rise of far right parties in Europe. This is a global problem of white people believing their position of power is under threat.
All the talk about the suffering working class registering protest votes because their economic security is under threat is based on the idea that this economic security is something they earned and should not be denied. It’s not a sudden or modern phenomenon. This started before Columbus.
White Europeans spent hundreds of years fighting a global war of conquest against everyone who isn’t white. We may have lost a few battles here and there, but we pretty much won the war. We shaped the world into a cosy basket for ourselves and settled down into a snug, warm existence, comforted by the knowledge that what we had taken belonged to not-human humans. We spread out across the planet, and used land and resources to create a gigantic white middle class that were taught their place in the sun was their God-given right. The price was paid by non-white people and was therefore not our problem.
Now there’s too many of us, we gave too much of what we had taken to a few plutocrats, and now we’re angry that the world we claimed as ours is broken.
Like thwarted toddlers, we’d rather smash our favourite toy than share it.
Whiteness is the problem. Not other white people, not just the rednecks and bogans and denizens of the outer suburbs. All of us. Even the white people who take such pride in not being racists, in being so progressive, so intersectional, so woke.
We are the problem. We did this. We all benefit from white supremacy and we are therefore all responsible for the consequences.
All those angry white folk who voted for Trump, Abbott, Hanson and Brexit, thinking they’ve found their saviour, are on the wrong side of history. It’s too late to save the toy smashed to pieces by the conflicting demands of capitalism and over-population.
We are living through a revolution we can’t see with our ant’s-eye view, but global upheaval is well over the horizon now, the world is going to change beyond recognition. And it’s going to happen, as it always has to, with colossal destruction before we can start rebuilding.
Trump’s election is not the start of this process, it’s just a huge leap towards it.
It’s going to get so much worse from here.
