4 Ways White Political Forces Steal Elections and How We Can Stop It

[Stellar]

A personal tweet I sent out this week said: "Let's be clear -- and Christian: A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for racism."

In one of the many postmortem discussions on Tuesday's primary results, Cokie Roberts on Morning Joe said we were leaving race out of the questions we're asking. She's right. Donald Trump's success isn't just because of his entertaining flamboyance, his marketing brand, his experienced self-promotion, his business boasting, and his other fabricated "outsider" identities that appeal to people who genuinely feel outside of American politics and life. At its core, Donald Trump's campaign is about race -- which is why this is about far more than politics and partisanship for many of us religious leaders. When Roberts asked Trump if he was proud of the growing reports about white schoolchildren verbally attacking students of color and telling them they will soon have a wall built against them to keep them out of America, Trump reacted by saying it was a "nasty" question. No, it was one of the few good questions from journalists that morning.

Donald Trump is the race candidate, projecting white nationalism and xenophobia, appealing to fear and resentment, and always blaming people of other races for the problems of low-income white people. There is a long history of that in the United States, recently exemplified again by the KKK and other white supremacists coming into the electoral conversation and Trump's unwillingness to be quick and clear about his rejection of racial politics.

The pundits say working class Republicans are in revolt against the Republican establishment, which makes sense as those elites are ones who have supported and benefitted from rigged market forces and globalization that have turned all our economic rewards to the top 1 percent while abandoning working and middle class people. Bernie Sanders is getting many of those angry white votes, too, in the Democratic primaries. But Sanders doesn't blame "the others" as Trump does; he instead focuses on the richest institutions and people in America who have managed all this -- the same ones Trump loves to brag about being part of with his ostentatious lifestyle. (How many press conferences have you seen with the candidate's expensive wines and steaks on display while he proudly lists all of his properties? Is this really happening in America?) There is also a long history of uniting working people from all races against the forces that would both ignore and divide them. One kind of populism tries to divide those who have been marginalized; the other kind tries to bring them together.

Donald Trump is clearly appealing to our worst instincts, as many have said, but let's be more clear: Donald Trump is appealing to the worst instincts of white people, and Amer...

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