Judging people by their skin color is one of the most pernicious notions in American life. Years ago, this kind of noxious racialism was the province of Southern segregationists. Today, it is too often peddled by the progressive Left.

The good news is that the 2024 presidential election showed us that Democrats’ rickety voting coalition, glued together by an array of minority groups, is probably a lot less durable than many people assumed.

Remember, President Donald Trump expanded the minority vote for Republicans despite running against a black candidate, promising to disband diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and explicitly rejecting the idea of racialist politics. None of that is even to mention the fact that no one in American history has been compared to Hitler with more regularity.

Perhaps more people are coming to the realization that immutable characteristics should never define a person. And perhaps that realization is leading to diminishing political returns for those who cynically divide people by race.

Now, the number of minority voters who have moved into the GOP column shouldn’t be overstated. But Trump significantly chipped away at the Left’s coalition in 2024. Some of this movement likely has to do with Trump’s celebrity appeal, but surely, some of it is a repudiation of Democrats’ obsession with race.

To be fair, crass identity politics isn’t what it used to be. The United States isn’t a black-and-white nation anymore. Pitting numerous ethnic groups against white people is far more complicated. Your messaging can’t possibly appeal to every minority coalition group all the time. The black experience doesn’t always speak to Hispanics and Asians, who have their own perceived interests, and vice versa. Indeed, there are often political tensions between these groups that Democrats have long taken for granted.

Even more importantly, treating ethnic groups as monolithic entities can backfire. Take Hispanic voters, once a reliable cog in the Democrats’ coalition. The Left has long tried to pull Latinos into its racial aggrievement racket. But there’s no such thing as “brown people.” Indeed, many Latino voters don’t share the same race or ethnicity, much less the same anxieties or expectations. The Dominican American living in New York City and Mexican American living in Arizona have about as much in common as a Jewish lawyer in Washington, D.C., has with a WASP soybean farmer in Idaho.

According to the Associated Press, Trump won 43% of the overall Latino vote — an 8-point swing from 2020. Exit polls are notoriously imprecise, but whatever the true number is, the trajectory is clear. Heavily Latino districts in rural Texas and elsewhere have turned red over the past few years. If Democrats lose anywhere near 45% of the Latino vote, it becomes a huge threat to the Left’s national fortunes.

But Trump didn’t hire a bunch of pointy-headed pollsters to craft talking points in Spanish to entice Latino voters. He aimed his rhetoric at working-class concerns.

Many Hispanic voters are first- and second-generation immigrants who hold, if not ideologically, then dispositionally conservative worldviews. One imagines they are infinitely more concerned about inflation, unemployment, and taxes than they are about pronouns and late-term abortions.

It’s not surprising, then, that Trump’s campaign, a melding of economic populism and normie values, would appeal to them — especially when contrasted with the message Democrats tend to prioritize for the Latino voter: illegal immigration. It is, incidentally, quite presumptuous of Democrats to believe that most Latino voters, Americans who followed the law and became citizens, want to see the anarchy at the border continue.

Even now, Democrats, led by well-heeled urban whites who are completely out of touch with the concerns of average people, are out on the streets, protesting for “gender-affirming care” (the mutilation of children) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (a place rife with corrupt foreign spending). Esoteric social science quackery has a limited appeal for people building families and businesses.

It’s not just Latinos. Many black neighborhoods, run by Democrats, are plagued by failing state-run schools, drug use, and infrastructure problems. Plenty of poor white neighborhoods also suffer from those maladies. Indeed, a working black family has more in common with a working Irish family than with a racialist African American professor running a DEI program in some Ivy League school.

There are, of course, ingrained generational voting patterns in America that are difficult to break. But how long can they last? Modern Americans are more organically divided into classes. The “working class” isn’t merely about economic strata but a set of sensibilities. Plenty of “working class” people live wealthier lives than white-collar urbanites. However it’s defined, the working class is surely the most diverse group in the U.S. Now, some don’t believe class warfare is optimal, either, but at least it’s propelled by real-life problems and apprehensions rather than an irrelevant immutable characteristic of the voter.

Not that Democrats themselves have caught on yet.

At a recent forum of the Democratic National Committee, moderator Jonathan Capehart asked candidates for chairman if they believed former presidential candidate Kamala Harris lost in part because of “racism and misogyny.” “Yes” was the unanimous answer.

“That’s good, you all pass,” responded Capehart, a writer at one of the most prestigious newspapers in the country and host on one of the nation’s biggest cable news networks.

The Left’s elite is still consumed by identitarianism and victimhood. Harris, the weakest presidential candidate in memory, a person who was hidden from the electorate due to her inability to convey coherent thoughts, didn’t lose because the electorate was bigoted. At this point, suggesting her misfortune was due to sex or race smacks of desperation. The charge no longer holds much political currency.

It is, no doubt, difficult to kick race-baiting politics, which has been a central tactic of the Democratic Party for decades. 

There was perhaps a fleeting moment after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 that one could have believed the racial acrimonies of history might be left behind. The opposite occurred. Democrats leaned hard into a racialist agenda as a means of holding together their coalition. Remember when then-Vice President Joe Biden accused Mitt Romney — Mitt Romney — of harboring a desire to put black people “back in chains”? This was the general tenor of discourse.

The problem, regrettably, is this kind of ugly political opportunism began to seep into normal society and capture our institutions.

It was only a few years ago that anyone who pointed out that “systemic racism” was a fiction would be accused of being in league with Ku Klux Klan members and slave traders. Not only was it the norm to treat all “people of color” as victims of the system but also to accuse white people of harboring racist goals, knowingly or unknowingly, as if bigotry was a hereditary condition.

Virtually every major public and private institution in the country promised to “fight racism” by instituting DEI programs. Walmart, the world’s largest company, for instance, spent $100 million erecting a new center for “racial equity.” Across corporate America, companies funded Black Lives Matter initiatives, even after the movement sparked the most destructive mass riots in American history.

It’s true that “DEI” has become something of a catchall for conservatives who are critical of affirmative action and (unconstitutional) race-based policies. All these programs, though, hinge on the corrosive notion that the U.S. is a fundamentally prejudiced place where black citizens are unable to take advantage of the meritocracy.

The same people who push the notion black people aren’t smart enough to procure IDs to vote are intent on creating a permanent victim class for political reasons.

The reality is that most companies, schools, and institutions go out of their way to find talented nonwhite candidates to diversify their operations without being directed to do so. If black people in the U.S. formed a nation unto themselves, they would have a higher living standard and more wealth per capita than nearly any other country. The idea that black Americans reside in the most racist place in the world, a claim I often hear, is unmitigated paranoia.

As racism corrodes the soul, it also comes with real-world consequences. When Stanford accepts a candidate who writes “#BlackLivesMatter” 100 times on an application, the school makes a mockery of itself by corroding its standards and undercuts the achievement of other black students. When Brown University’s medical school institutes policies that give diversity, equity, and inclusion more weight than “excellent clinical skills” in its promotion criteria for faculty,” it is endangering lives.

Brown did this only recently. So, yes, there is still a lot of work to do.

Public school systems, initially built to meld Americans into civic-minded, educated people, have also exacerbated the problem. Pseudohistorical texts such as the 1619 Project, which teaches children that the nation’s founding was wholly based on the effort to preserve slavery, are taught in big-city public school systems across the country. It’s a pernicious lie meant to create racial tensions and convince minority students that the country they live in is inherently evil.

The irony, I suppose, is that no institution has fought harder to preserve segregated communities than teachers unions, which continue to keep poor students stuck in failing schools. So, there’s that.

Now, none of this is to say there has never been an injustice visited upon a minority or there aren’t bigots in America. For the most part, they inhabit the fringes of our discourse, shunned by average people. Even those who entertain racist sentiments understand that their ideas are stigmatized. There is a national expectation that we embrace people regardless of color as equals. This was once the goal of early civil rights leaders as well.

If we’re lucky, maybe it will be everyone’s goal one day.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer for the Washington Examiner.