In September, Zack Beauchamp penned a long essay for Vox entitled “White Riot: How Racism and Immigration Gave Us Trump, Brexit, and a Whole New Kind of Politics.” Fiddling with a heap of sociological data purporting to show a strong correlation between “racial resentment” and right-wing voting, Beauchamp announced that “racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia” are what unite “far-right politicians and their supporters on both sides of the Atlantic” — “far right,” in the case of the United States, being Donald J. Trump.
Beauchamp’s was one of the more substantive contributions to what long ago became liberals’ preferred explanation for Trump’s inexplicable ascendancy: He is a racist and rose by exploiting widespread, latent bigotry — and now he has ridden that wave all the way to the White House. This narrative was refined to its purest form on Election Night, when Slate columnist Jamelle Bouie, ever a hammer looking for a nail, suggested that Trump’s campaign and victory were a recapitulation of the assault that “angry, recalcitrant whites” waged on blacks in the wake of Reconstruction.
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