Ian Boyne's article is certainly a different view than how most of the Churches of God groups are reacting to the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. Almost all COG splinter leaders are reacting to his election as a good thing to bring back credibility that they think was lost under the rule of a gentile President. That view is deeply entrenched in the British Israelite thought processes and white superiority that is still pervasive in the church in 2016.
The world is a different place than when the church was evolving during the 1940's - 1980's. Globalization, the internet and world populations immigrating to most Western Nations has led many Church of God groups to proclaim propehtic melt down of civilization and the dilution of the white race.
Ian takes a different approach to this belief, particularly with observations and a perspective that is outside the United States and as a person of color, two things that do not sit well with so many in the church.
Ian Boyne | White Power Trumps Good Sense
It is not enough to say that Donald Trump's victory is a 'whitelash' against eight years of a black man's being in the White House. It is, indeed, true that Trump's ascendancy as American president-elect is the culmination of the Tea Party insurgency started just one year after Obama's first victory in 2008. White people, particularly marginalised white males, swept away by the tide of globalisation, have risen up to take back their country and to put America first.
No election in American history has left in its wake so much resentment, bitterness, anger, disappointment and fear - not just in America but around the world. Jamaicans at home and in the US are terrified of the consequences of this Trump victory which, they catastrophise, is likely to torpedo their dreams of a better life. Jamaicans, various minorities, and progressive, forward-thinking people are being counselled that "it's not the end of the world," but for many, Trump's victory certainly seems like that.
'Stunning', 'shocking', 'astonishing' are just a few of the adjectives being used to describe the victory that was not seen by pollsters and pundits. Almost everyone had written off Trump. Except the Silent Majority. Yet, hidden in academia were some books that speak plainly about the phenomenon that the media are now widely reporting on after the fact. One book that narrates the crisis of the white working class and its alienation from the elites is Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America (2016). Before that, in 2012, the well-known social scientist Charles Murray had published his Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.
In September, the respected Atlantic magazine did a long piece titled 'The Original Underclass: Poor, White Americans' Current Crisis Shouldn't Have Caught the Rest of the Country as Off Guard as it Has'.
Then there is also Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016) by J.D. Vance, whose views are now being sought belatedly by American journalists to understand what escaped them. But if you want one book that grippingly and comprehensively explains the Trump Phenomenon, you have to get The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics. I notice it is now being featured as 'One of the Six Books to Help Understand Trump's Win' and it has been given the thumbs up by the most intellectually astute media host in America, GPS's Fareed Zakaria.
There is a lot of hasty, half-baked commentary being dished out, but this Trumpism deserves a serious and surgical analysis. Yes, white power has been asserted in a most ferocious and aggressive way, and Trump, like all neo-fascists, was able to exploit the fears and anxieties of the majority against "the deplorables". But remember, that's the same country that voted for a black man as president not once, but twice. Barack Obama did better than Trump's opponent among white voters. Did those white people temporarily lose their ingrained racism when they voted Obama? What happened between 2008 and 2016?
In a review essay titled 'The Great White Nope: Poor, Working Class and Left Behind in America', in the November-December issue of Foreign Affairs, which features "The Power of Populism", History Professor Jefferson Cowie says: "Most Americans are optimistic about their futures but poor and working-class whites are not. ... Poor African-Americans who face higher rates of incarceration and unemployment - are nearly three times as optimistic as poor whites". He quotes one economist as saying poor whites suffer from "unhappiness, stress, and a lack of hope" . Says he: "That might explain why the slogan of the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump Make America Great Again! - sounds so good to so many of them".
