‘We are sick of being put in racial boxes’

As the US presidential election approaches, Kamala Harris is struggling among black and Hispanic voters. Barack Obama was even dispatched to lecture black men for not dutifully backing the Democratic candidate. Many minority voters seem mystified by the notion that the mere presence of a black female president in the White House will instantly lift their prospects and self-esteem. Meanwhile, Donald Trump – smeared by the liberal-left media as a fascist and white supremacist – appears to be picking up more non-white voters than ever before. Are we witnessing an electoral revolt against identity politics?

Best-selling author Lionel Shriver, whose latest book is Mania, spoke to spiked’s Fraser Myers last week to discuss why the Democrats’ pork-barrel identity politics isn’t working, whether either side will accept the result, and more. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the full video of the interview here.

Fraser Myers: Do you get the sense that Harris’s campaign is losing ground with some of the Democrats’ traditional constituencies – particularly ethnic-minority voters?

Lionel Shriver: This touches on what has become an overpowering irritation for me. There’s a way that the media routinely discuss electoral politics in the US that I have come to resent – not just as a member of the white majority, but also on behalf of minority groups.

We are constantly being instructed that we have to think about the electorate as chunks of homogeneous races. The level of support for every candidate is constantly being reported in terms of being X proportion of the black vote, Y proportion of the Hispanic vote, Z proportion of the white vote. Sometimes this is cut up a little bit more to become the black female vote or the black male vote or the college-educated vote.

This is all fake. This is not the way that the electorate is actually subdivided. Yes, there are black men who support Trump. They might have their political reasons and it may not have anything to do with them being black. But we’re led to believe that what completely dictates people’s vote is their membership of these groups. I don’t think that’s true.

This kind of reporting tries to reinforce a certain way of thinking. It doubles down on the idea that if you’re Hispanic, then you have to vote for Kamala Harris, because Hispanics vote for Democrats. It’s a racist way of thinking about electoral politics and I am sick of it.

I don’t like the way that the media are so attached to this way of thinking. They’re holding the actual electorate back. They are forcing people back into boxes. This way of thinking and this way of reporting the news and the polls is actually evil. It’s socially regressive.

Myers: After election night, which side do you think will be the sorest loser of the two?

Shriver: Of course, one instinctively wants to say Trump. He has basically told us that he’s going to be a sore loser – especially since he was a sore loser last time. But I think we underestimate what could happen on the Democratic side if they lose, especially if it’s close.

The Democrats have form in claiming that the results of elections are illegitimate. Hillary Clinton thought that Trump was elected in 2016 only because of Russian interference. Stacey Abrams still claims she won the gubernatorial race in Georgia and that the result was illegitimate. There are any number of examples of Democrats claiming that they were cheated out of a victory in 2016 and that there’s some explanation other than the will of the people for the ‘wrong’ person winning.

The left also has plenty of form when it comes to political violence. If you look at what happened after the George Floyd killing in 2020, those riots went on for four months. They caused billions of dollars worth of commercial and domestic damage. The arson was awful. Dozens of people were killed. When the left doesn’t get its way, it can be pretty scary. I’m not saying there’s nothing to be concerned about on the right, but I think it may be a toss-up for who could be worse.

In some ways, the big story of this election is not so much going to be who wins, but what happens afterwards. I can’t say and nobody else can, either. But it feels as if both sides are expected not to accept the result and to make a big stink about it. The question is, who’s scarier and what does that stink constitute? What are you expected to do? How many neighbourhoods are you expected to burn down? What public buildings are you expected to assault?

I hope we’re disappointed. The best result is that, whoever wins, the other side doesn’t rise to the occasion. That the media are poised for all this rioting and it just doesn’t happen. That all the energy has been used up before the election and everyone stays home. That’s what I want to happen anyway.

Lionel Shriver was talking to Fraser Myers. Watch the full conversation here: