Exit poll data taken by Public Policy Polling after the South Carolina Republican Primary revealed some astonishing truths about Donald Trump supporters that testify to the barbaric and violent nature of the United States.
The Public Policy Poll found 31 percent of Trump supporters want to ban homosexuals from the U.S., 33 percent would outlaw Islam and Time Magazine reports almost 20 percent think freeing the slaves was “a bad idea.”
These results demonstrate this nation is not the civilized, advanced, peaceful, tolerant one it claims to be. The sentiments exhibited by this faction of Donald Trump supporters may not be held by the majority of the population, but they’re held by far too many people to be written off as the outliers or the radical lunatics of a society.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates there are about 247 million adults in the United States. Gallup estimates 30 percent of Americans are Republicans. Donald Trump’s average national support, among those Republicans, is about 35 percent. Twenty percent of those people advocate for slavery.
I won’t suggest South Carolina is an extremely fair and accurate representative sample of the entire national population, but if you extrapolate its results to all Trump supporters and use the statistics stated above, then there are roughly 5.1 million Americans who disagree with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
That’s two percent of the population. That’s one in every 50 adults. That’s a problem.
That six people in your lecture class of 300, one of your 50 coworkers or the couple at the table in your favorite restaurant could think ending slavery was a bad idea, 151 years after it happened, is repugnant.
And I can’t decide which is more terrifying: the results of the polling data from South Carolina or the complacency of the American people toward these results.
This isn’t a small enough group of people for us to have the luxury of ignoring.
The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates the Ku Klux Klan has somewhere between 5,000 to 8,000 members. Those are outliers. Those are the people a society can never rid itself of, no matter how much it’s progressed. If only a few thousand people of 321 million think slavery is a good idea, I could live with that ratio. They have no participatory power.
But in 2012, President Obama only won the popular vote by 4.9 million votes. 5 million people could sway an election.
And this data from South Carolina tells us people who want to enslave minorities have potentially serious voting power in this country.
So, yes, we may have our rules, our law, our order, we may have jobs and 401ks, we may have structured our lives, made plans and abided by the invention of time, but we are still a savage nation.
We have a police force that systematically executes blacks on the streets at a clearly prejudicial rate, an entertainment industry that largely ignores black talent and corporate employers who refuse to hire applicants with black-sounding names.
The justice system, the workplace and the myriad of institutions we’ve established to call ourselves “civilized” prove only that we’re not.
We don’t admit it, but we are truly a barbaric nation.
thshowal@indiana.edu
@TherinShowalter
This article originally incorrectly stated the number of adults in America as 321 million, not 247 million. The IDS regrets this error.
