The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

MANY Americans who are also parents of college-aged kids will often wonder out loud to each other that their children will describe a friend (or even a love interest) without adding as one of the adjectives the colour of their skin.

Such is the effect of societal change in the US. Over the past six decades or so, a lot of Americans would describe the evolution of their society as trending toward colour-blindness, or at least toward colour-neutrality.

The process forward has been slow and laboured, but almost inexorable, many Americans would tell a visitor. Television viewers across the country have remarked on the fairly precipitous rise in mixed-race married and dating couples featured on mainstream, prime time advertising.

It’s reasonable to assume that specific governmental, academic and private sector affirmative action and other plans designed to redress race-based imbalances in opportunities for blacks and others versus whites have achieved their desired effect.

After all, the US has elected its first black president, its first black vice-president and has added a second black jurist to the US Supreme Court – all within the past eleven years. There is a sitting senator who is black – and also a Republican, from the Deep South. There is a black secretary of defense, and there has been a black secretary of state. Lots of barriers are falling.

The growth and development of black wealthy and middle-class groupings in the US has been well documented and recognised. Many Americans take pride in the progress the country has made in trying to achieve a better balance between blacks and whites in terms of access to the American Dream.

A common sentiment is often expressed like this: “We have come so far in America in guaranteeing an equality of expectations and opportunities for all races. But we have so much farther to go.”

All of the above may be valid and true. But a recent extensive study of race as a factor in American political life by the well-respected American Political Science Association certainly underlines the “long way to go.”

The APSA study indicated that one single factor most distinguishes Republicans from Democrats and most divides supporters of the two main American political parties. That factor is not gender, education, income nor religion.

It is race.

One of the authors of this voluminous report writes that “religion, economic concerns and factors like education, age and gender also divide us politically, but the reality is that as America becomes more diverse, it is also becoming more racially divided in the political arena.”

Another contributor to the APSA report stated that “the process of social sorting allowed the Republican Party to represent the interests of traditional white, Christian America while the Democratic Party was increasingly representing those who were still struggling to overturn centuries of social inequality”.

“This type of disparity is not easily corrected. Democrats and Republicans have widely differing understandings of who should hold political power in America and about how much (racial equality) progress has been made.”

The recent election results of candidate Donald Trump, not surprisingly, are cited as illustrating this persistent racial divide. In 2020, Trump won 58 percent of the white vote, while gaining only eight percent of the black vote. There were also 39-percentage point gaps in support for the respective party candidates in 2020 between whites and both Hispanic and Asian-American groups.

No other single factor approached this amazing degree of disparity.

Further, the study found that 90 percent of votes cast for Republican nominees John McCain, Mitt Romney and Trump between 2008-2016 were from white voters. Half of Democratic votes were cast by non-whites.

“Race and ethnicity stand out today as the single most important factors in American electoral democracy,” the report concludes. Furthermore, the authors note that Americans widely believe that their two main political parties have “evolved to a place where they emphasise differences, stoke (racial) fear and animosity and incite conflict.”

Most Americans blame Democrats and Republicans collectively for “the highly undesirable and dangerous place where they currently reside”.

When the rapid proliferation 50 years ago of the Muslim minority population helped to make Russians an ethnic minority in a Soviet Union otherwise comprehensively dominated by those same Russians, there was great angst and unease in the world’s largest empire.

Even in an era of tight Communist Party censorship of the media, the public concern about this racial and ethnic turnaround was everywhere in the media, in Moscow and all around the country. Strong ultra-nationalist sentiment crept into the public discourse, and there was much discussion of how the new Russian minority could (and should) maintain power.

Disenfranchisement and economic suppression of the new majority ethnic and racial groups in the USSR were often advocated publicly. The Soviet government did its best to comply.

Something very similar is at work in American politics today. It is evident in the continuing Republican-led efforts to sequester black and other minority voters in specified congressional and state legislative districts to minimise their overall elector power and influence.

Republican demagogues like Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis only thinly veil their invective and overt appeal to racist and white supremacist elements in American society. Even the most consequential black politician in either party, South Carolina senator Tim Scott, decries most affirmative action programmes, as does black Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas of Georgia.

Where does the US go now from where the APSA survey reveals its body politic resides? Nowhere fast in the direction of a broad mandate for electoral equality among races and ethnic groups, it seems.

What a wearisome prospect.

Ukraine’s war could pivot on whims of a billionaire

This week, the role of a prominent non-state actor in the 18-month long Russo-Ukrainian war came to light again. This enormously influential civilian is not a politician or Defense Department employee. Nor is he a retired general pontificating for profit on television.

It is none other than SpaceX and Tesla founder and current Twitter (“X”) owner Elon Musk, who also is likely the richest man in the world, with an estimated personal fortune of $270bn. That’s billion, with a “b.”

According to a recent article in the politically influential American magazine The New Yorker, Musk became involved in the war in Ukraine soon after Russia invaded in February 2022. Here’s how:

Along with conventional assaults, the Kremlin was conducting cyberattacks against Ukraine’s digital infrastructure. Ukrainian officials and a loose coalition of expatriates in the tech sector identified a potential solution: Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which manufactures a line of mobile Internet terminals called Starlink. These tripod-mounted dishes, each about the size of a computer screen, connect with a network of satellites.

The Starlink units have limited range, but their sheer numbers deployed on the battlefield meant that it would be difficult for Russia to completely dismantle Ukrainian connectivity by destroying its cell tower network. Musk came to the rescue, and for over the first year of this war, provided Starlink terminals to the Ukrainian military. For free.

This meant that for around 16 months, until the US Defense Department began contracting for Musk’s support, the mercurial mogul could alter on a whim the course of a critically significant conflict. Now, a new Musk biography reports that he did just that on one occasion last year.

“Congress needs to investigate what’s happened here, and whether we have adequate tools to make sure foreign policy is conducted by the government and not by one billionaire,” Massachusetts Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren told Bloomberg News this week.

Warren is not the only sceptic about Musk’s influence. “Living in the world we live in, in which Elon Musk runs SpaceX and it is a private business under his control, we are living off his good graces,” a senior Pentagon official told The New Yorker. “That just sucks.”

The magazine reports that in the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatisation, the American state has receded. Top officials in several key departments said that they now treat Musk like a sort of unelected and unappointed senior official.

The Pentagon and other US government agencies continue to search for ways to ensure that Musk “couldn’t wake up one morning and just decide, like, he didn’t want to do this anymore”.