When asked, my mother loves to say that she has achieved the American Dream—the elusive yet alluring one many immigrants strive for when they arrive in the United States. It became tangible for my parents who are immigrants from China and Taiwan. You probably know their type: upper-middle class, quiet, keep-to-themselves neighbours. And, of course, up until the recent US election cycle, politically moderate. In my view, this is a defining trait of the Asian-immigrant community: to be moderate and play it safe. Yet, this cautious moderatism is starting to subside as our community sees America’s greatness threatened by the conflicts and revolutions of the modern age. And Donald Trump, with his various promises to restore it, is emerging as our saviour.

When my dad graduated from Cooper Union with a degree in engineering, his mom encouraged him to take a job at Con-ed over a higher-paying role elsewhere. Her thought process: everyone will always need electricity, therefore you will never be out of a job.

He eventually decided to take a series of calculated risks—some suggested by my mom—and ended up working in finance, where he remains till this day. My mother derives a sense of pride from the lifestyle we are able to afford. However, the thing that always brought her the most pride was knowing that, despite pushback, she had succeeded in making America her home.

When my mom moved to the States, the overwhelming sentiment was that America was a gamble. In an interview with American journalist Anna Louise Armstrong, 1956 China’s once glorious and later cruel leader Mao ZeDong referred to America as a ‘paper tiger’—strong on the outside, but hollow on the inside. My parents like to say that theory has been debunked.

However, there is recurring rhetoric at our dinner table conversations that America’s greatness is being challenged by a series of jabs provoked by the Democratic party. This includes matters such as exaggerated identity politics, mishandled welfare, cancel culture, and censorship—all traits akin to the political climate in China around the Cultural Revolution era.

On the grand political spectrum bookended by communism on the left and fascism on the right, Democrats give off the impression that they’re edging closer toward the political reality that many Chinese immigrants fought hard to escape.

It makes sense then, that the Chinese community has been slowly shifting right over the last decade. In my hometown New York, Donald Trump won 17 per cent more votes from Asian voters in the 2024 US presidential election than he did in 2020. Across the board, we saw Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters shifting an average of 5 per cent to the right. Their pro-Trump votes come from a genuine fear that America’s fate will follow a road that trades personal freedoms for collective thought.

Moreover, their fears are not completely unwarranted. Cancel culture has similar features to pīdòu dàhuì, a Chinese term meaning “struggle session.” They were violent public spectacles for shaming individuals who expressed morally deviant thoughts or behaviours that went against the state agenda. The significance of cancel culture in the US is evident, socially as well as politically.  In 2024 an entire cohort of elite university presidents was shamed into resigning after their awkward and supposedly anti-Semitic remarks regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict received backlash. This trend extends to social media, where we saw Trump’s previous X account banned before Elon Musk purchased the platform and rebranded it as a censorship-free zone.

Cancel culture and censorship have been adopted by both sides who seek to leverage conversation in their favour, but it’s Trump and Musk’s bromance that has solidified the Republican Party’s stance to fight against this supposed censorship.

It is also the Republican Party that promises smaller government, more regulated welfare systems and an end to liberal identity politics. Democrats claim to be the poster child of multiculturalism, yet they are losing the loyalty of Asian Americans who feel elbowed out of cultural discourse and programs designed to support minorities. An overwhelming majority of the Asian community opposes Affirmative Action, as they fear the ‘race over merit’ qualifications works against their interests, especially in the competitive college application process. It’s important to mention that while Asian Americans make up around 6 per cent of the American population, they represent an average of 21 per cent of the student body across the Ivy League as of 2023.

Nevertheless, it can be frustrating for Asian kids who watch their lower-scoring non-Asian classmates test into institutions they were rejected from. This dilemma further isolates Asian Americans and immigrants from the minority and multicultural communities the Democrats claim to fight for. When the Black Lives Matter protests turned violent, my dad turned to X, bonding with conservative commentators who lauded law and order. When the extent of welfare extended to illegal immigrants came to light, he listed the ways that money could be redirected towards legal migrants and local communities. With limited dialogue and aid to the Asian community, Democrats have inadvertently pushed this demographic into the arms of conservatives intent on dismantling identity politics as a whole.

As Asians, we have long struggled with the identity of being a nominal minority. Culturally, Asians are quieter—it is ingrained in our upbringing to keep our heads down, get the work done, and fit in. Instead of aligning with other minority groups, identifying with white America offers the easier route—one that offers the chance of being accepted by the mainstream if we assimilate just enough. Rather than uniting in cultural pride and lobbying for our own representation, as we’ve seen in many other minorities, we are more inclined to play it safe.

We are so intent on sticking with the status quo that we will even swallow racist rhetoric from the president-elect himself. The growing Asian American support of the right is more indicative of a community searching for a stable and secure home, away from the fractured noise of the Democratic Party than it is support for Trumpism. If Democrats wish to win back more Asian support, they will first have to reconfigure how to include Asians in the dialogue around the country’s pervasive racism and systemic inequality. They must also acknowledge the community as a vital addition to its voter base rather than taking it and many other minority groups for granted.

My mother used to tell me that my father has done incredibly well, professionally, as an Asian man. However, “had he been white” he could have done even better. She left the conversation that way indicating that they were content with the cards they had been dealt. They were happy to have a spot at the table, even if it would never be at the head. What she didn’t consider, however, was how things could have been different had there been practices in the system that allowed us to build our own tables.