The most significant political story in America this year had nothing to do with politics. It was an article in The New York Times headlined “Whites account for under half of births in the US”.
If you want to understand the fear and rage that many Republican voters direct towards Barack Obama, some of it surely lies in the sense that the president represents “the other America” – the non-white America that will eventually form a majority of the country’s population.
You can hear that anger in the popular slogan “I want my country back”. You can see it in the demands at the party convention for ever tougher policies against illegal immigrants. You can catch traces of that anger in the racially-tinged denunciations of “Obamacare”, which aims to extend healthcare to 44m uninsured Americans.