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Racecraft

And yet Trump won this year’s U.S. presidential election with a significantly increased share of non-white voters. The progressive-leaning cable news network MSNBC analyzed the result as showing Trump’s electorate was now the “most diverse” Republican electorate “in modern political history”—and cited statistics to back that up: In the last presidential election Trump wasn’t running in—2012—black people voted for the Democratic candidate by 87 points; Latinos, by 44 points; and Asians, by 47. In this election, those numbers had slumped to 72, 6, and 15. Within days, commentators in various quarters of American media began speaking of Trump as having built a “multiracial coalition”—by building a new working-class coalition. Has he?

Adolph Reed is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, and the co-author of No Politics but Class Politics. Reed says the idea that the Republicans have begun to win over non-white groups is misleading because they’re not electoral groups, properly speaking. There’s no “black vote,” as Reed sees it, because black people don’t vote as a bloc but as individuals, each with their own economic interests and political priorities. And the chronic failure of American politicians from either major party to see this reality has meant a chronic failure to act on it …

• “Since the 1980s, people have attributed economic inequality among non-white populations to behavior and values, while thinking that the upper strata of those non-white populations represent the interests of these groups as a whole. It’s a kind of racial trickle-down policy: If you make rich black people richer, that’s somehow supposed to help other black people too. Which is why so many people think narrowing the racial wealth gap is a black issue, when it’s really an issue for 10 percent of black people. It makes sense to think of it as a racial issue only if you believe blacks as a racial category think with a single mind; and in America, a lot of people seem to think this—that blacks have a hive mind.”
• “Somewhere between 7 and 9 million people who voted for Trump in November voted for Sanders in the Democratic primaries and for Obama at least once. So you need something a little more nuanced than racism to explain their support for Trump. It has much more to do with economic inequality and economic hardship. After Trump won the election in 2016, some people argued that the economic worries of Trump supporters were really about “status anxiety,” which they thought of as a racial term. But how can you imagine separating the economic well-being of normal Homo Sapiens in today’s America from their sense of status? People seemed to believe you can, but it’s made me wonder if they’d been raised by wolves.”
• “I don’t even know what it means to say that America is a racist country. There have been periods in American history when race didn’t exist. Then there’ve been periods when it did—but American society wasn’t organized principally on a racial basis. And there’ve been periods and places when and where it has been central. The way a lot of Americans have come to talk, you’d think the point of slavery was to produce white supremacy, not cotton or tobacco. Undergraduate students now, both black and non-black, take issue with the idea that slavery was a labor system, since they think that’s demeaning toward slaves. But if slavery was about racism, the Americans could’ve just left the slaves in Africa; they wouldn’t need to bring them here.”

Looking for a holiday challenge you can take with you—around the world and through life?

The madman theory

Two days after the U.S. announcement, Vladimir Putin signed off on a revision of Russia’s nuclear doctrine. What the revised doctrine says is that Moscow will treat an attack by a non-nuclear country backed by a nuclear country as if both countries had jointly attacked Russia—meaning that the Kremlin could respond to Ukraine’s use of U.S. weapons with Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

The Kremlin had proposed this revision in September; but the day after Putin signed it, Russia launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile—one that could carry multiple nuclear warheads—at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. How serious is this?

In June—shortly after the last time Moscow threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine—Sergey Radchenko explored how the Kremlin sees its nuclear arsenal and uses rhetoric about it. It’s a key, Radchenko says, to understanding the entire trajectory and pace of the war—its offensives, counter-offensives, and stalemates: They’re all driven by Russian threats and Western responses—anxiously calculated to keep both Russia from winning and Europe from catastrophe.

—Michael Bluhm

• At the annual climate conference COP29, which concluded on November 22, developed countries agreed to pay developing countries US$300 billion annually to help the latter transition away from fossil fuels, beginning in 2035—though the latter are unimpressed: According to a delegate from Nigeria, “That the developed countries are saying that they are taking the lead with $300bn by 2035 is a joke.” India’s negotiator called the deal “a travesty of justice.” Developing countries had been asking for $1.3 trillion a year, and the final figure of $300 billion won’t be adjusted for any inflation to come. … Meanwhile, global emissions of greenhouse gases hit a record high last year.
• A South Korean court has found a 26-year-old man guilty of binge eating to avoid mandatory military service: “He was categorized as obese, allowing him to serve in a non-combat role at a government agency. The defendant received a one-year suspended sentence. A friend who devised a special regimen that doubled his daily food intake got a six-month suspended sentence.”
• Bob Dylan has a beautiful thought about Nick Cave: “Saw Nick Cave in Paris recently at the Accor Arena and I was really struck by that song Joy where he sings ‘We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.’ I was thinking to myself, yeah that’s about right.”

• For all the challenges facing humanity, we’re not doomed—though you mightn’t always know it from reading the news. Want to stay informed without the drama? Read the Donut. It’s unbiased, quick, engaging—and free. Sign up here.

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