In the fall of 1940 after the Battle of Britain – when a handful of plucky pilots had fended off a Nazi invasion – Winston Churchill said victory was “not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning” of Hitler’s defeat.
He was right. And that defeat, the slaughter of that war, led to the creation of the European Union.
The British decision to leave the EU, the Brexit, is not the beginning of the end for the EU, but it does signal the end of the beginning for the Caucasian race in Europe that has dominated the world since 1492.
It’s the demographic “bomb” that drove that bare majority of Brits to head for the Brexit as if a V-2 rocket was coming down on them. Much has been written of jobs lost, factories shipped abroad, the indifference of elites – and all to my mind quite correct.
But a deeper look reveals that it was immigration (read: non-white people) that drove that slim majority to overlook the obvious crushing blowback an exit would cause to their pocketbooks.
A similar situation holds here in America.
Early in the 20th century, the great African-American writer and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois famously said “the problem of the twentieth century (will be) the problem of the color-line.” By which he meant the “color bar” that kept black people from being accepted as citizens and granted the rights and protections white citizens had always had.
In 2016, the question of the 21st century is the question of the color bar.
The “question of color” also has to do with the fact that Caucasians who have run this country since its founding are on their way, too, to minority status.
And so on these shores we have the popularity of Donald Trump as a twin to the Brexit vote – both overwhelmingly a response, unconscious or not, from white people who hear the clock ticking down on their dominance of the West and much of the world for the last 500 years.
This is not news. Way back in the 1980s Time magazine ran a story on what America would look like by mid-21st century – a Hispanic or Latino face graced the cover. I thought at the time “the face” looked Puerto Rican. I was discussing it with white friends of mine, all undergraduates at UMass, when one of them archly commented, “Oh good, so we’ll all be people of tan.”
Yes, that comment is glib if not insulting. But for a conversation between white people about white people it indicated one of two poles of a response: “So what?” Or, “Oh my God! Battle stations!”
The latter could be a rallying cry for Trump’s overwhelmingly white supporters and the Brexit voters from the hinterlands of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
But look at a map of the world. The Hispanicization of the United States and the North Africanization of Europe (which also means the Islamicization) comprise one of those historical paradigm shifts that overtake us every few hundred years, rather like the fall of the Roman Empire or the Western colonization of the world.
When Columbus landed in the New World, the Native Americans already here were doomed. They could no more have built a wall to keep the Europeans out than Trump or the Brexit can keep out Latin America or North Africa.
Some numbers: A US News and World Report article last year pointed out that “The minority population is expected to rise to 56 percent of the total population in 2060, compared with 38 percent last year.”
As long ago as 1999, the UN’s State of the World Population predicted that “98 percent of the growth in the world’s population by 2025 will occur in lesser developed regions, principally Africa and Asia … (owing to) lower birth rates in 61 countries, mainly the rich ones, (where) people are no longer having enough babies to replace themselves.”
Indeed, a report in London’s The Telegraph after the Brexit vote shows that with immigration, British’s population will grow from about 65 million now to 76 million in 2045. Without immigration, Britain’s population will peak in 2038, at about 68 million, and begin to decline after that.
The Caucasian race is on its way to demographic demise. You can cheer it or boo it, but it is an unstoppable force of history.
That doesn’t mean folks won’t try. White people here and in Britain hear that demographic clock ticking. As such, they can feel desperate and give in to the demagogues of despair. Especially if being “white” is central to your identity.
It doesn’t need to be. Unlike Britain, we were never a nation based on blood, but an idea: all people are created equal and have an unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The color of those guarding those values does not matter, so long as the idea thrives.
But we have never as a nation or people embraced the difficult mission bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers. Ideals gave way to politics and westward expansion, and white supremacy knocked Lady Liberty from her pedestal.
And that is why Trump’s candidacy is a clear and present danger. He represents a rear-guard action – conscious or not, it does not matter – by the heretofore unchallenged white majority, those who would hold back the tide of history and demographics.
In that sense Brexit was a pyrrhic victory in a war the Caucasians are losing. And if Brexit can win there, Trump can win here.
Not that he will, but he must be defeated, because white folk are feeling wounded, and this is a dangerous time for us all.
Joe Gannon is a novelist and teacher. He can be reached at jgannonoped@gmail.com.