WashPo's Dana Milbank: 'Fading White Hegemony Is Inevitable'

Former Obama White House official Ben Rhodes, in his forthcoming memoir, tells of a moment of doubt the first African American president had after the election of Donald Trump on a campaign dominated by white grievance.

“Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” President Barack Obama said in the passage, first reported this week by Peter Baker in the New York Times.

I hate to say it, but I think the former president was correct.

Ten or 20 years from now, America will be much closer to the majority-minority nation it is forecast to become in 2045. A racist backlash to a black president wouldn’t matter as much.

But what was naively proclaimed in 2008 as post-racial America was instead kindling for white insecurity, and Trump cunningly exploited and stoked racial grievance with his subtle and overt nods to white nationalism. He is now leading the backlash to the Obama years and is seeking to extend white dominion as long as possible, with attempts to stem immigration, to suppress minority voting and to deter minority census participation.

It won’t work for long, but it might work for now. These are the death throes of white hegemony. And they are ugly. This week alone:

● Trump had no criticism for Roseanne Barr […]

Let’s not be deceived: The racial wedge Trump has driven through the United States cleaves us deeper all the time. It has been shown in innumerable studies and regression analyses that the main predictor of support for Trump is racial anxiety — far more than economic anxiety.

[...] This will resolve itself naturally as 2045 comes and goes. The outcome of the struggle — fading white hegemony — is inevitable. What wasn’t inevitable is the Trump-led ugliness, while Trump’s fellow Republicans look away.