We Have a Problem With White Men: They Support Trump

We Have a Problem With White Men: They Support Trump

We Have a Problem With White Men: They Support Trump

Kai Wright on misogyny and racism, Jill Lepore on Trump’s place in history, and Michael Kazin on Hubert Humphrey.

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Sixty-two percent of white men voted for Trump, 31 percent for Clinton. Kai Wright has our analysis—he’s host of WNYC’s podcast The United States of Anxiety, and he’s also a columnist for The Nation. It’s easy to get confused by the crosscurrents of misogyny and racism and xenophobia, he argues; they are not discrete issues but rather “the interlocking tools of white men’s minority rule.”

Also: Trump’s place in American history. Jill Lepore of the Harvard history department and The New Yorker talks about her new book These Truths, which starts in 1492 with Christopher Columbus and ends in 2016 with Donald Trump.

And we’ll recall the 1968 presidential election, when Richard Nixon won, and many of our current problems began. The man who almost defeated Nixon was Hubert Humphrey, the onetime Minnesota senator who had become LBJ’s vice president. Anti-war activists hated Hubert Humphrey in 1968—Michael Kazin explains.

We cannot back down

We now confront a second Trump presidency.

There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.

Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance. We face the enactment of Project 2025, a far-right supreme court, political authoritarianism, increasing inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis, and conflicts abroad. The Nation will expose and propose, nurture investigative reporting, and stand together as a community to keep hope and possibility alive. The Nation’s work will continue—as it has in good and not-so-good times—to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further solidarity in a nation divided.

Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation—to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.

The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

I urge you to stand with The Nation and donate today.

Onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

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