Exodus of College-Educated Whites from the GOP

In my youth, Republicans valued education and knowledge. Indeed, many prided themselves on their high level of education and it was Democrats who were viewed as being "working class."  There was a reason for the term country club Republicans, a majority of which were educated professionals.  Nowadays, the demographics of the two party has flipped and college educate whites have migrated to the Democrat party as the less educated has shifted to the GOP.  Evangelical Christians who studies have shown are the least educated of various religious denominations make up the core of the GOP base, a base that, in my view, celebrates ignorance and is motivated by racism and fears of those deemed "other" - a term that applies to anyone who is not a white, conservative Christian (using the term "Christian" loosely, since these conservatives show little Christian behavior).  A lengthy column the New York Times looks at the exodus of educated whites from the GOP.  Here are highlights:  

In less than a decade, from 2010 to 2018, whites without a college degree grew from 50 to 59 percent of all the Republican Party’s voters, while whites with college degrees fell from 40 to 29 percent of the party’s voters. The biggest shift took place from 2016 to 2018, when Trump became the dominant figure in American politics.

This movement of white voters has been evolving over the past 60 years. A paper published earlier this month, “Secular Partisan Realignment in the United States: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of White Partisan Support since the New Deal Era,” provides fresh insight into that transformation.

The authors, Herbert Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm, political scientists at Duke and Ohio State, make the argument that the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy has produced “tectonic shifts” leading to an “education-income partisan realignment” — a profound realignment of voting patterns that has effectively turned the political allegiances of the white sector of the New Deal coalition that dominated the middle decades of the last century upside down.

Driven by what the authors call “first dimension” issues of economic redistribution, on the one hand, and by the newer “second dimension issues of citizenship, race and social governance,” the traditional alliances of New Deal era politics — low-income white voters without college degrees on the Democratic Party side, high-income white voters with degrees on the Republican side — have switched places. According to this analysis, these two constituencies are primarily motivated by “second dimension” issues, often configured around racial attitudes, which frequently correlate with level of education.

[T]he surge of whites into the Republican Party has been led by whites with relatively high incomes — in the top two quintiles of the income distribution — but without college degrees, a constituency that is now decisively committed to the Republican Party.

According to the census, the top two income quintiles in 2017 were made up of those with household incomes above $77,552. More than half of the voters Kitschelt and Rehm describe as high income are middle to upper middle class, from households making from $77,522 to $130,000 — not, by contemporary standards, wealthy.

It’s higher income/low education whites who are currently still doing well, but fear that in the Knowledge Society their life chances are shrinking as high education becomes increasingly the ticket to economic and social success.

Low-income whites without college degrees have moved to the Republican Party, but because they frequently hold liberal economic views — that is, they support redistributionist measures from which they benefit — they are conflicted in their partisan allegiance.

High-income whites without college degrees were swing voters sixty years ago, pursued by both parties; now, they are rock-ribbed Republicans. Their share of the white electorate has fallen, however, from 42.1 to 22.0 percent. In the 1950s, high-income whites with college degrees were the base of the Republican Party — although in 1952 they made up just 6.7 percent of white voters. By 2016, this cohort had moved decisively toward the Democratic Party, as its share of the white electorate had grown to 26.0 percent. The key bloc for both Trump and the Republican Party is made up of white Christian evangelicals. Eight out of ten of these voters cast ballots for Trump, and intensely religious voters make up 40 percent of the Republican electorate. Carney and Enos see race prejudice as setting itself against the broad category of “other.” They have devised an experiment that addresses the tradition of allowing “humanity to be divided into two groups: one that embodies the norm and whose identity is valued, and another whose identity is defined by its faults, devalued and susceptible to discrimination.” The 2020 election will be fought over the current loss of certainty — the absolute lack of consensus — on the issue of “race.” Fear, anger and resentment are rampant. Democrats are convinced of the justness of the liberal, humanistic, enlightenment tradition of expanding rights for racial and ethnic minorities. Republicans, less so. This may well prove to be a base-vs.-base election, but even so the outcome may lie in the hands of the substantial proportion of the electorate that is undecided — 7 percent according to Pew. And if Democrats want to give themselves the best shot of getting Trump out of the White House, it is toward these voters that they must make concerted efforts at pragmatic diplomacy and persuasion — and show a new level of empathy.

The GOP Defines Patriotism As Complacency About Racism

If there has been any benefit to be derived from Donald Trump's racist tweet storm, it is that far right "intellectuals" - something that is increasingly an oxymoron - and the base of the GOP equate white skin and indifference to racial inequality, if not out right racism, with being a "true American" and a patriot.  Given Trump's words and his long history of racism, including racial discrimination in housing in apartment properties his family owned in Norfolk, Virginia, it is near impossible to say the man is not a racist if one indulges in any shred of honesty, yet the right refuses to condemn him. Why?  Because it supports the underlying premise that only whites are true Americans. Everyone else is supposed to be happy to be in America and keep their mouths shut when it comes to enunciating America's many flaws. A piece in New York Magazine looks at the redefining of patriotism and the right to be an American with skin color.  Here are excerpts:

Over the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has tweeted several things that respectable conservatives do not wish to defend. No National Review columnist has seconded Trump’s assertion that U.S.-born congresswomen Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.” And only a few GOP officeholders have implored Ilhan Omar to heed the president’s guidance, and return to the “crime infested” place from which she came.

But beneath these distastefully forward flirtations with white nationalism, many conservative intellectuals see an argument worth redeeming. Trump’s chief complaint with “the squad” of progressive nonwhite congresswomen was that they had been “loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States … how our government is to be run” (apparently, the voters who elected AOC & Co. are not among “the people of the United States,” and opining on government operations is an aberrant behavior for members of Congress).

GOP operatives have been trying to pretend that this was his only point: Far-left Democrats hate our great country. Congressional Republicans got the memo. . . . Trump, meanwhile, shifted his emphasis from whether AOC & Co. are American to whether they deserve to be.

Once sanitized by GOP message-makers, Trump’s stance ceases to be overtly racist. Ilhan Omar’s claim to national belonging is now negated by her anti-American attitude, not her Somali origins. And yet the moment one examines what “anti-American” means, in this context, the true color of Trump’s nationalism becomes plain.

[N]one of the congresswomen in question have said that they “hate America.” They’ve merely expressed dissatisfaction with its present state and challenged popular conceptions about its past — prerogatives of citizenship in a free society that Donald Trump has never denied himself. . . . And Trump has no compunction about goring the sacred cows of conservative nationalism. He has expressed contempt for American prisoners of war, said that George W. Bush did not keep us safe, questioned whether the U.S. government was more “innocent” than Vladimir Putin’s, and declared that America had done “a tremendous disservice to humanity” in the Middle East.

Clearly then, neither Trump nor his defenders believe that dissent is inherently unpatriotic. It is something about the content of the congresswomen’s dissent — and perhaps the congresswomen themselves — that causes conservatives to see their protests as expressions of unforgivable ingratitude.

Of course, that something isn’t difficult to discern. The American right refuses to recognize any distinction between the claim “racial inequality was fundamental to our nation’s founding, and remains a pervasive force in American society today,” and an expression of “hatred” for the United States. This refusal is not peculiar to Trump or his loyalists. Even the president’s most highbrow (and lukewarm) apologists regularly denounce the anti-Americanism of progressives who express dissatisfaction with the state of racial progress in the U.S.

Take Charles C.W. Cooke. On Monday, the National Review’s senior editor penned a column arguing that Ilhan Omar had a moral obligation to “temper her critiques of American politics and culture” because she came to the U.S. as a refugee, and therefore owes this country a debt of gratitude.

But directly engaging with Omar’s dissent would create a problem for the pundit, because not once in the Washington Post column he cites does the congresswoman say “America is a disaster” or “needs complete rethinking.”

Omar clearly expresses disappointment with the United States. But the cause of her disappointment is the discrepancy between her country’s egalitarian ideals and its inequitable realities. Her defining mission, as a politician, is to close that gap and realize the “promise that’s not kept.”

The difference, as Cooke subsequently makes clear, is that Omar’s critique challenges America’s racial innocence, while Trump’s does not.

Beto O’Rourke has no allergy to praising America. But when asked about what he would do to combat racism at a campaign event, he did acknowledge the fact that white supremacy was a de jure reality in the American republic for its first 188 years of existence, and that the legacy of centuries of race-based subjugation has not been fully eradicated in the 55 years since 1964. If Cooke regards the public airing of this sentiment as an invitation to “cultural suicide,” one must ask whose culture he wishes to preserve.

African-Americans have deeper roots in our country than virtually any other U.S. community. The hard labor of black slaves served as a (if not the) primary engine of American prosperity throughout our civilization’s first centuries of existence. Chattel slavery didn’t just fill the coffers of southern planters; “as a source of the cotton that fed Rhode Island’s mills, as a source of the wealth that filled New York’s banks, as a source of the markets that inspired Massachusetts manufacturers,” historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman write, slavery “proved indispensable to national economic development.”

And yet for the unspeakable sacrifices that their ancestors made in service of our nation’s development, black Americans have never been compensated. Rather, most were systematically excluded from the wealth creation that followed the Second World War. And studies suggest that African-Americans still face de facto discrimination in housing, employment, and the criminal-justice system.

Why would it be more “grateful” of Omar to evince indifference to the maltreatment of a deeply rooted American community whose past subjugation is inextricable from the comforts and opportunities that she presently enjoys? Or, to put the question more pointedly: Why does Cooke — a British-American immigrant who earns his livelihood at a publication that defended southern segregation and apartheid — believe that his relative complacency about racial progress is a mark of gratitude rather than entitlement?

The ostensible answer is that Cooke believes white, conservative Americans are entitled to his (and Omar’s) gratitude, while black liberal ones are not, no matter how long the latter’s “people” have been here. This belief does not appear to be conscious. But absent that premise, his argument becomes unintelligible. . . . 

On the same day that Cooke’s reflection on Omar’s ingratitude went live, the National Review’s editor Rich Lowry published an editorial with nearly identical flaws. . . . Like Cooke, Lowry does not quote the object of his critique because that would make it harder for him to misrepresent her argument.

As a response to Rapinoe’s actual argument, Lowry’s history lesson is a non sequitur. Her complaint is with America’s racial order, not its flag. But like Cooke, Lowry refuses to acknowledge a distinction between the two. On a surface level, both columnists assail the left for equating love of America with indifference to white supremacy; in actual fact, it is Cooke and Lowry who insist on that equation.

Trump has made the color of conservative nationalism more plain to the naked eye. But a tacit faith in white Christian Americans’ superlative claim to national belonging has always been native to the creed.

Brexit and Trump: Self inflicted Harm With Help From Russia

Separated by the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps the two greatest democracies in the world - the United Kingdom and the United States - are each suffering from self-inflicted harm.  There are parallels between the two scenarios of democratic suicide: (i) Russia employed cyber-space attacks fanning racial fears and bigotry and pushed for votes that would render harm both internally and externally, and (ii) in each case far less than a majority of voters (mostly rural), many fighting against modernity and others clinging to delusions of restoring a lost past, voted against the best interests of themselves and their nations.  The only true winners: Vladimir Putin and Russia. Now, Britain is at a true crisis point and it's economic future uncertain.  To anyone sane, the solution is a new referendum that could reverse the race towards the cliff.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the crisis.  America is not far behind the UK in terms of self-destruction. Here are article excerpts:

With Prime Minister Theresa May’s bill expected to lose, the question dominating British politics is: What comes next?

If the agreement is not approved, she would have until Monday to present a backup plan to Parliament. The range of possibilities is wide, unappealing and a bit bewildering.

If the deal loses by a narrow margin, she might be able to win a few concessions from Brussels and bring those revisions to Parliament for a second vote. But if the defeat is a crushing one, that option is likely to be unavailable.

As things now stand, Britain will leave the European Union on March 29. Neither Mrs. May’s government nor the European bloc wants that to happen without an agreement in place — most experts predict that a no-deal Brexit would be chaotic and do severe economic damage.

With little time left to negotiate anew with the European Union, the prime minister may be forced to ask Parliament to postpone Brexit.

She could also call a second referendum, an option favored by lawmakers who hope that British voters have changed their minds. But Mrs. May and the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, have both rejected that idea.

Mr. Corbyn wants to force early elections, and seems likely to call for a vote of no confidence in the government, putting the prime minister on the brink.

The vote will provide little of the detail that businesses need to plan their operations, but it could at least narrow the options.

“The longer this Brexit political drama continues, the less and less attractive the U.K. is going to be” to investors, Iain Anderson, the executive chairman of the consulting firm Cicero Group, said last week.

Manufacturers remain concerned that a no-deal situation would wreak havoc on just-in-time manufacturing, which relies on goods crossing the British border, sometimes multiple times, and arriving within minutes of assembly. — Amie Tsang

Last week, a member of Parliament proposed an amendment requiring Prime Minister Theresa May to return within three days to announce what the government intended to do next if the original deal was rejected. She previously had 21 days to decide.

By Parliament’s arcane rules (it mostly hinged on the meaning of “forthwith”), Mr. Bercow should have rejected that amendment. But he didn’t. And Parliament passed it by a slim margin.

That decision single-handedly tipped the balance of power to Parliament from Mrs. May’s government. The episode made a no-deal exit less likely and will let lawmakers weigh in — quickly — with alternatives.

And Mr. Bercow may not be done yet. Commentators said it could end up being the most radical shift in relations between the government and Parliament since the speaker defied King Charles I in 1642. — Benjamin Mueller

The Pervasiveness of White Racial Resentment and GOP Race Baiting

A lengthy column in the New York Times looks at studies and surveys on one of America's most persistent social and political problem: white racism and white resentment, two undercurrents that Donald Trump inflamed to edge out Hilary Clinton in 2016 by roughly 70,000 votes spread across three states to gain an Electoral College win despite losing the popular vote by three million votes.  The column also looks at the insidious way the GOP continues to play the race card by pandering to racial fears that are unfounded when looks at real facts and figures as opposed to GOP sound bites and dog whistle messaging.  Personally, I do not comprehend the anxiety far too many whites hold toward those who are deemed "other."  Perhaps this is a result of living in a city where whites are a minority yet suffer no loss of privilege or standing or perhaps it's due to my being part of a minority group hated by many of the same people who hate blacks: white conservative Christians who in surveys admitted their racial animosity and exposed the lie to the claim they support Christian values.  Here are column highlights (note the white fear that others may some day threat whites as they have long treated minorities):

For 50 years Republicans have battered the Democratic coalition, wielding the so-called southern strategy — built on racism and overlaid with opposition to immigration — to win control of the White House and one or both chambers of Congress.

At the same time, Democrats have struggled to piece together a coalition strong enough to deliver an Election Day majority. In the 1950s, the Democratic coalition was 87 percent white and 13 percent minority, according to the American National Election Studies; it is now 59 percent white and 41 percent minority, according to Pew Research.

As the Democratic Party has evolved from an overwhelmingly white party to a party with a huge minority base, the dominant strategic problem has become the tenuous balance between the priorities of its now equally indispensable white and minority wings. The frontal attack Trump has engineered — in part by stigmatizing “political correctness” — has had a dual effect, throwing Democrats back on their heels while simultaneously whetting their appetite for a fight. . . . . For Democrats to counter Trump effectively, a number of scholars believe it is essential to understand the motivations — the needs, beliefs and agendas — of those whites who have moved into the Trump camp. In her forthcoming book, “White Identity Politics,” Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at Duke, describes three groups of whites who generally fall on the right side of the political spectrum.

The first is made up of those for whom their white “identity is extremely or very important” to them.  , , , , the percentage of whites who say their white identity is very or extremely important ranges from 28 to 42 percent. . . . . According to Jardina, “higher levels of white identity are somewhat linked to higher levels of racial animosity.” . . . . but many more white identifiers possess average and even low levels of racial prejudice.

The second group comprises those who rank high on a test of “white consciousness.” . . . The difference between white identity and white consciousness, Jardina argues, is that those in the latter category believe that “many whites are unable to find jobs because employers are hiring minorities.” Jardina reports that they also stress “the importance of whites working together to change laws that are unfair to whites.”

The third constituency is made up of whites high in “racial resentment.” . . . . On average, the level of racial resentment among whites is high, Jardina found: “Among all whites in the 2012 ANES face-to-face study, the mean level of racial resentment is 0.68 on a zero to one scale.”

Jardina argues in her book that the racial resentment scale reveals a new type of racial prejudice — one that is a subtle combination of anti-black affect and the belief that blacks do not adhere to traditional American values associated with the Protestant work ethic.

Jardina, whose work I have written about before, agrees that “some of this backlash” — including the election of Donald Trump and the opposition to immigration — “is rooted in prejudice, racism, and ethnocentrism.”

But, she adds, many whites’ reactions to our country’s changing racial landscape do not simply manifest in outward hostility. Amidst these changes, many whites have described themselves as outnumbered, disadvantaged, and even oppressed. They have voiced their anxiety over America’s waning numerical majority, and have questioned what this means for the future of the nation. They have worried that soon they may face discrimination based on their own race, if they do not already.

Such fears, in Jardina’s view, drive the emergence of white identity as a political issue: . . . They have led a sizable proportion of whites to believe that their racial group, and the benefits that group enjoys, are endangered.

The result?  This racial solidarity now plays a central role in the way many whites orient themselves to the political and social world. . . . . these whites feel, to some extent, that the rug is being pulled out from under them — that the benefits they have enjoyed because of their race, their groups’ advantages, and their status atop the racial hierarchy are all in jeopardy.

[These] whites, to a certain extent, are deliberately claiming victimhood:  White identifiers have co-opted the language of racial discrimination and oppression. Put bluntly, the politics of white identity is marked by an insidious illusion, one in which whites claim their group experiences discrimination in an effort to reinforce and maintain a system of racial inequality where whites are the dominant group with the lion’s share of power and privileges.

Eric Kaufmann, in his forthcoming book “Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities,” addresses similar racial and ethnic tensions. . . . Kaufmann argues that there is a structural dilemma posed by the multiracial nature of the left coalition: he views what he calls “the institutionalization of multiculturalism/diversity/equity” and of “high immigration” as fueling the rightward direction of recent political movements in the United States and Europe. He believes that it would benefit progressive groups, “in the interests of harmony,” for liberals to “argue their case for diversity” but that they should “tolerate difference of opinion and accept compromise.”

Lynn Vavreck — a political scientist at U.C.L.A. and one of the authors of one of the most influential books on the 2016 election, “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America” — is also looking at the recent rightward drift in the United States. She believes that developments in contemporary politics are not in any sense racially neutral but instead amount to “hostility or fear of outgroups.”

One of the key attitudes revealed in survey data linked to support for Trump has been the “fear of losing your job to a minority,” Vavreck wrote me by email. In addition, 64 percent of Trump voters believed that “average Americans” have gotten “less than they deserve” but “only 12 percent said black Americans have gotten less than they deserve.” 

They surveyed 22,500 people in France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Britain and the United States and found that respondents greatly overestimate the total number of immigrants, think immigrants are culturally and religiously more distant from them, and are economically weaker — less educated, more unemployed, poorer, and more reliant on government transfers — than is the case.

In other words, pro-immigration, pro-diversity Democrats face clear obstacles breaking the Republican hold on white voters — and a challenge in repelling Trump’s race-and-immigration-focused offensive. Still, the accumulating insights on how and where Republicans have successfully worked these levers may help demonstrate — as President Barack Obama, President Bill Clinton and the results of this year’s midterm elections prove — that these obstacles are not insuperable and that they can be overcome.

The article suggest that white Trump voters need to do some real soul searching and admit that they may are motivated by prejudice or worse.

Study: Trump Voters Driven by Fear of Losing Status

Photo credit: Damon Winter/The New York Times.        

Personally, I never bought into the supposed explanation for working class whites moving to support Trump due to their "economic anxiety."  First, the economy had improved remarkably since the Great Recession, real estate prices had finally begun to rebound, and America enjoyed respect across most of the globe (travel abroad now, and you find yourself striving to explain that you were NOT a Trump voter).  Instead, I always believed that the real motivation was reaction to a perceived loss of white privilege or, stated another way, racism against minorities, particularly blacks and Hispanics.  Add to this the manufactured myth of Christian persecution disseminated by Christian "family values" organizations with roots tracing back to proponents of segregation and the fig leaf of economic anxiety as a primary motivating factor falls completely apart. Now, a new study further debunks the economic anxiety meme pushed by lazy and irresponsible journalist reluctant to call out the bigotry of Trump's base.   The New York Times looks at the study findings which are more or less an indictment of white, Christian, male voters in particular.  Here are highlights:

Ever since Donald J. Trump began his improbable political rise, many pundits have credited his appeal among white, Christian and male voters to “economic anxiety.” Hobbled by unemployment and locked out of the recovery, those voters turned out in force to send Mr. Trump, and a message, to Washington.

Or so that narrative goes.

A study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences questions that explanation, the latest to suggest that Trump voters weren’t driven by anger over the past, but rather fear of what may come. White, Christian and male voters, the study suggests, turned to Mr. Trump because they felt their status was at risk.

“It’s much more of a symbolic threat that people feel,’’ said Diana C. Mutz, the author of the study and a political science and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics. “It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.”

The study is not the first to cast doubt on the prevailing economic anxiety theory. Last year, a Public Religion Research Institute survey of more than 3,000 people also found that Mr. Trump’s appeal could better be explained by a fear of cultural displacement.

In her study, Dr. Mutz sought to answer two questions: Is there evidence to support the economic anxiety argument, and did the fear of losing social dominance drive some voters to Mr. Trump? . . . . Dr. Mutz’s statistical analysis focused on those who bucked the trend, switching their support to the Republican candidate, Mr. Trump, in 2016.

Even before conducting her analysis, Dr. Mutz noted two reasons for skepticism of the economic anxiety, or “left behind,” theory. First, the economy was improving before the 2016 presidential campaign. Second, while research has suggested that voters are swayed by the economy, there is little evidence that their own financial situation similarly influences their choices at the ballot box.

The analysis offered even more reason for doubt.

Losing a job or income between 2012 and 2016 did not make a person any more likely to support Mr. Trump, Dr. Mutz found. Neither did the mere perception that one’s financial situation had worsened. A person’s opinion on how trade affected personal finances had little bearing on political preferences. Neither did unemployment or the density of manufacturing jobs in one’s area.

“It wasn’t people in those areas that were switching, those folks were already voting Republican,” Dr. Mutz said. . . . It showed that anxieties about retirement, education and medical bills also had little impact on whether a person supported Mr. Trump.

While economic anxiety did not explain Mr. Trump’s appeal, Dr. Mutz found reason instead to credit those whose thinking changed in ways that reflected a growing sense of racial or global threat. . . . the voters, in a defensive crouch, found themselves closer to Mr. Trump. . . . the findings revealed a fear that American global dominance was in danger, a belief that benefited Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.

“The shift toward an antitrade stance was a particularly effective strategy for capitalizing on a public experiencing status threat due to race as well as globalization,” Dr. Mutz wrote in the study.

Her survey also assessed “social dominance orientation,” a common psychological measure of a person’s belief in hierarchy as necessary and inherent to a society. People who exhibited a growing belief in such group dominance were also more likely to move toward Mr. Trump, Dr. Mutz found, reflecting their hope that the status quo be protected.

“It used to be a pretty good deal to be a white, Christian male in America, but things have changed and I think they do feel threatened,” Dr. Mutz said.

The other surveys supported the cultural anxiety explanation, too.

For example, Trump support was linked to a belief that high-status groups, such as whites, Christians or men, faced more discrimination than low-status groups, like minorities, Muslims or women . . .

If wrong, the prevailing economic theory lends unfounded virtue to his victory, crediting it to the disaffected masses, Dr. Mutz argues. More important, she said, it would teach the wrong lesson to elected officials, who often look to voting patterns in enacting new policy.

Once again, I ask my "friends" who voted for T rump to look at themselves in the mirror and admit what really motivated their vote.  Given the GOP/Trump tax bill, we know that references to supporting "fiscal conservatism" are complete bullshit.  Sorry, to be blunt, but it's time to be honest about people's motivations.

Yet Another Study: Racial Resentment Fueled Trump Vote

Republicans and lazy journalist continue to use the meme of economic uncertainty to explain the votes of whites who voted for Donald Trump.  However, at this point, study after study has documented that the really determining factor was racial resentment and by extension concerns about loss of white privilege and guaranteed social standing.   The current budget busting GOP tax bill shows the lie of those who claim that  it was their desire for "fiscal conservatism" that moved them to vote for Trump.  In short, these voters, if they will not admit their racial motivations, are deluding themselves and need to take a long, hard look at themselves in the mirror. Demographic change is a fact and despite the Trump/Pence regime's effort to allow racial discrimination and to allow Christofascists (a majority of whom, in my view are racists) to wage war on the LGBT community will not stop the changing nature of American society.  All this rear guard efforts will do long term is set the stage for an anti-white backlash at some future date.  A piece in Vox looks at the latest study on Trump voters' real motivations.  Here are excerpts:

More than a year after President Donald Trump won the election, there are still some questions about what drove him to victory: Was it genuine anxiety about the state of the economy? Or was it racism and racial resentment?

Over at the Washington Post, researchers Matthew Fowler, Vladimir Medenica, and Cathy Cohen have published the results of a new survey on these questions, with a focus on the 41 percent of white millennials who voted for Trump and the sense of “white vulnerability” that motivated them. The conclusion is very clear:

Contrary to what some have suggested, white millennial Trump voters were not in more economically precarious situations than non-Trump voters. Fully 86 percent of them reported being employed, a rate similar to non-Trump voters; and they were 14 percent less likely to be low income than white voters who did not support Trump. Employment and income were not significantly related to that sense of white vulnerability.

So what was? Racial resentment.

Even when controlling for partisanship, ideology, region and a host of other factors, white millennials fit Michael Tesler’s analysis, explored here. As he put it, economic anxiety isn’t driving racial resentment; rather, racial resentment is driving economic anxiety. We found, as he has in a larger population, that racial resentment is the biggest predictor of white vulnerability among white millennials. Economic variables like education, income and employment made a negligible difference.

To anyone who’s been following the research on this, the findings should come as little surprise. There have now been numerous studies that found support for Trump is closely linked to racial resentment, defined by Fowler, Medenica, and Cohen as “a moral feeling that blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism and self-reliance.”

This is crucial to understanding both Trump’s rise and how to overcome Trump. As a presidential candidate, Trump made all sorts of racist comments . . . . and deploying dog whistles about “law and order.”

The studies suggest that these kinds of comments and actions are not just incidental to Trump; they are at the core of his political success. If Democrats want to defeat him, they will need to overcome that racial resentment.

This is not a one-off finding. At this point, the evidence that Trump’s rise was driven by racism and racial resentment is fairly stacked.

One paper, published in January by political scientists Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta, found that voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology.

Another study, conducted by researchers Brenda Major, Alison Blodorn, and Gregory Major Blascovich shortly before the election, found that if people who strongly identified as white were told that nonwhite groups will outnumber white people in 2042, they became more likely to support Trump.

And a study, published in November by researchers Matthew Luttig, Christopher Federico, and Howard Lavine, found that Trump supporters were much more likely to change their views on housing policy based on race. In this study, respondents were randomly assigned “a subtle image of either a black or a white man.” Then, they were asked about views on housing policy.  The researchers found that Trump supporters were much more likely to be impacted by the image of a black man.

The point, at least for me, is not to demonize Trump voters. The point is to understand them in order to better grasp what motivated them to vote for someone who ran a clearly bigoted campaign and who most voters agreed is unqualified for the nation’s highest office.

As Schaffner, MacWilliams, and Nteta wrote in their paper, there’s growing evidence that 2016 was unique — in that racism and sexism played a more powerful role than in recent presidential elections. “Specifically, we find no statistically significant relationship between either the racism or sexism scales and favorability ratings of either [previous Republican candidates] John McCain or Mitt Romney,” they wrote. “However, the pattern is quite strong for favorability ratings of Donald Trump.”

Donald Trump and the Last Gasp of White Privilege

I apologize in advance for yet another post about Der  Trumpenführer, but the man makes it hard to focus on other things, especially since he embodies the worst aspects of American society and the latent racism that continues to plague so much of white, Christian, heterosexual America.  In the case of Trump, he was born to wealth and raised in what would seem to have been a racist household given his father's involvement with the KKK many decades ago.  Yet, despite his wealth, like so many of his supporters, he is brain dead when it comes to the grasping the privilege he inherited simply by virtue of the color of his skin.  Worse yet, like his supporters, he sees race relations as a zero sum gain.  If blacks and Hispanics secure equal rights under the law, under this warped view, it is taken to mean that somehow whites have lost something.  The concept of all doing better and the country doing better is a concept beyond their grasp.  In the wake of the controversy Trump has generated in his effort to stiffle the freedom of expression rights of minority players in the NFL,  San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich provided what might be be the best take on the legitimacy of the NFL/police brutality protests.  Here are highlights via Joe Jervis' blog:

Race is the elephant in the room and we all understand that. Unless it is talked about constantly, it’s not going to get better. ‘Oh, they’re talking about that again. They pulled the race card again. Why do we have to talk about that?’

Well, because it’s uncomfortable. There has to be an uncomfortable element in the discourse for anything to change, whether it’s the LGBT movement, or women’s suffrage, race, it doesn’t matter.

People have to be made to feel uncomfortable, and especially white people, because we’re comfortable. We still have no clue what being born white means. And if you read some of the recent literature, you realize there really is no such thing as whiteness. We kind of made it up. That’s not my original thought, but it’s true.

It’s hard to sit down and decide that, yes, it’s like you’re at the 50-meter mark in a 100-meter dash. You’ve got that kind of a lead, yes, because you were born white. You have advantage that are systemically, culturally, psychologically rare. And they’ve been built up and cemented for hundreds of years.

But many people can’t look at it that way, because it’s too difficult. It can’t be something that’s on their plate on a daily basis. People want to hold their position, people want their status quo, people don’t want to give that up. Until it’s given up, it’s not going to be fixed.

I may be white, but being gay in a state that historically has been virulently anti-gay, has provided with a first hand knowledge that America's supposed promise of "liberty and justice for all" is a myth. Gays are lees than equal and often do not receive justice from bigoted legislators and judges.  If one is black, things are far, far worse. Yet if one complains, one is labeled as a whiner, a single issue voter, or according to Der  Trumpenführer, unpatriotic.  A piece in Sports Illustrated looks at why these NFL protests are not only appropriate but also an affirmation of the values that white Americans claim to support: free speech and the right to engage in peaceful protests.  Here are excerpts:

On Sept. 16, 1960, before a home game against the Athletics, Cleveland pitcher James (Mudcat) Grant was standing in the bullpen singing along with the national anthem. Grant decided to do a little barbering of the lyrics. He adjusted the last line to "This land is not so free/I can't go to Mississippi." This was some topical humor of a very high order: opposition to the civil rights movement was growing more violent, and, as had been the case since the Civil War, Mississippi was the cone of the volcano. 

The Indians' bullpen coach, a Texan named Ted Wilks, took exception to Grant's improvised lyrics and, according to Grant's account, called the pitcher a "black so and so." In reply, Grant told Wilks that Texas was worse than Russia. Grant then got dressed and left the park. The next day, Cleveland manager Jimmie Dykes suspended him for the season without pay. Wilks apologized but Grant refused to accept it. He would no longer accept that this racist invective was part of the cost of doing business as an African-American athlete in the U.S. I mention all this in support of one of several things to which you must stipulate if you're going to talk sensibly about the controversy that blew up over the weekend, and the ongoing controversy regarding displaced quarterback Colin Kaepernick, whose protest against police brutality is at the heart of what went on in stadiums all over the world:

1) The inclusion of a national anthem—any national anthem—in a sporting event necessarily politicizes that event. Historically, this is best demonstrated by protests at the Olympic Games. Everyone remembers Tommie Smith and John Carlos in Mexico City in 1968. But few remember Czechoslovakian gymnast Vera Caslavska, who bowed her head and looked away from the Soviet flag while sharing the top spot on the medal podium with the U.S.S.R.'s Larisa Petrik at the same Games, only two months after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring revolt of 1968. When Caslavska got home, she was investigated by the new government and forbidden to travel or compete for several years.

2) The protests of today are not about the anthem or the flag or the troops, or even about Donald Trump. The protestors are high-profile African-American athletes raising awareness of how lower-profile African-Americans are often mistreated by police officers. 3) All effective protest is inconvenient and, in its own way, uncivil. The Boston Tea Party was an act of vandalism. Critics' appeal to "find a better way to protest" is really a call for self-sabotage, and it's a dodge that dates back to the Olive Branch Petition of 1775.

4) The wealthy athletes protesting worked much harder for their money than the president in question ever has for his.

In short, if you're going to perform national anthems, you're going to have politics. And if you have politics, you're going to have political statements and, this being the United States of America, those statements are not always going to make everyone comfortable. And once military-related promotions reached a level that made even John McCain uncomfortable, those statements had to get louder, if only to be heard over the fighter jets, and more garish, if only to be seen beyond the giant midfield flags.

The way to avoid this, of course, is to de-emphasize the anthem ritual, and return to the days before 2009 when it was common practice for teams to remain in the locker room while the anthem was played. . . . Unfortunately, today, it would take courage beyond that possessed by most owners and league commissioners to take this simple step.

This is why, over the weekend, we had so many owners framing the issue as a matter of standing behind their employees' free-speech rights. . . . Those same owners, along with commissioner Roger Goodell, don't want any part of the issue of why African-Americans end up dead on the pavement after traffic stops and other encounters with police officers. But ultimately the owners and commissioners may not have a choice: The real issue behind the protests has been out there all along.

Trump Can't Save White Christian America

As noted in a recent post, the number one cause of the decline of Christianity in America is the evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who through their lies, hypocrisy and general hatred of others have made the entire Christian brand, if you will, toxic.  Yet despite this reality, 81% of evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump who shamelessly prostituted himself to the Christofascists and held himself out as the would be savior of the self-anointed "godly folk."  A constant campaign meme from Trump was the broadcasting of the myth that American Christians are being subjected to persecution.  As other post have explored, this myth is a lie and if the Christofascists are experiencing anything, it is a growing opposition to the Christofascists' persecution of others.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at why Trump will not be able to halt the decline of white Christian America.  Here are article highlights:

Down the home stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, one of Donald Trump’s most consistent talking points was a claim that America’s changing demographics and culture had brought the country to a precipice. He repeatedly cast himself as the last chance for Republicans and conservative white Christians to step back from the cliff, to preserve their power and way of life. In an interview on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in early September, Trump put the choice starkly for the channel’s conservative Christian viewers: “If we don’t win this election, you’ll never see another Republican and you’ll have a whole different church structure."

Michele Bachmann, a member of Trump’s evangelical executive advisory board, echoed these same sentiments in a speech at the Values Voters Summit, an annual meeting attended largely by conservative white Christians. That same week, she declared in an interview with CBN: “If you look at the numbers of people who vote and who lives [sic] in the country and who Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton want to bring in to the country, this is the last election when we even have a chance to vote for somebody who will stand up for godly moral principles. This is it.” Post-election polling from the Public Religion Research Institute, which I lead, and The Atlantic showed that this appeal found its mark among conservative voters. Nearly two-thirds (66 percent) of Trump voters, compared to only 22 percent of Clinton voters, agreed that “the 2016 election represented the last chance to stop America’s decline.”

Does Trump’s victory, then, represent the resurrection of White Christian America? The consequences of the 2016 elections are indeed sweeping. . . . . The evidence, however, suggests that Trump’s unlikely victory is better understood as the death rattle of White Christian America—the cultural and political edifice built primarily by white Protestant Christians—rather than as its resuscitation. Despite the election’s immediate and dramatic consequences, it’s important not to over-interpret Trump’s win, which was extraordinarily close. Out of more than 136 million votes cast, Trump’s victory in the Electoral College came down to a razor-thin edge of only 77,744 votes across three states . . .

Trump’s intense appeal to 2016 as the “last chance” election seems to have spurred conservative white Christian voters to turn out to vote at particularly high rates . . . . white evangelicals went from being overrepresented by five percentage points at the ballot box in 2008 to being overrepresented by nine percentage points in 2016. This is an impressive feat to be sure, but one less and less likely to be replicated as their decline in the general population continues.

[T]wo trends with 2015-2016 data also confirms that the overall patterns of demographic and cultural change are continuing. . . . . The percentage of white Christians in the country fell from 54 percent in 2008 to 47 percent in 2014. That percentage has fallen again in each subsequent year, to 45 percent in 2015 and to 43 percent in 2016. Similarly, the percentage of Americans who supported same-sex marriage rose from 40 percent in 2008 to 54 percent in 2014 . .  . but jumped to 58 percent in 2016.

[T]he key long-term trends indicate White Christian America’s decline is continuing unabated. Over the last eight years, the percentage of Americans who identify as white and Christian fell 11 percentage points, and support for same-sex marriage jumped 18 percentage points. . . . . “The waning numbers of white Christians in the country today may not have time on their side, but as the sun is slowly setting on the cultural world of White Christian America, they’ve managed, at least in this election, to rage against the dying of the light.”

Twenty years from now, there is little chance that 2016 will be celebrated as the revival of White Christian America, no matter how many Christian right leaders are installed in positions of power over the next four years. Rather, this election will mostly likely be remembered as the one in which white evangelicals traded away their integrity and influence in a gambit to resurrect their past.

Meanwhile, the major trends transforming the country continue. If anything, evangelicals’ deal with Trump may accelerate the very changes it was designed to arrest, as a growing number of non-white and non-Christian Americans are repulsed by the increasingly nativist, tribal tenor of both conservative white Christianity and conservative white politics. At the end of the day, white evangelicals’ grand bargain with Trump will be unable to hold back the sheer weight of cultural change, and their descendants will be left with the only real move possible: acceptance.

I hope the author is correct.  Indeed, I hope the decline of the Christofascists accelerates.  

Trump Voters Brought Us This Fiasco

In my view, Trump voters - and Republican voters - were motivated in 2016 by many things, and few of them good.  Talk of smaller government and/or fiscal conservatism were merely smoke screen used by those who sought to cloak their real motivations: racism, religious extremism, ignorance due to laziness and reliance on right wing "news" sites, rebellion against modernity, the decline of white privilege.  The list goes on and on, but at root all of the motivations circle back to being an embrace of misogyny.  Worse yet, those who disclaim their real motives the loudest are likely those actually motivated by the ugliest motives.  The result is that the nation now has a madman in the White House and Republicans are too concerned with pushing their anti-working and middle class and pro-polluter agenda.  Where the nightmare ends - hopefully short of a dictatorship - is hard to tell.  A piece in Salon lays the blame for this national crisis at the feet of Trump supporters who I hope history will judge most harshly.  Here are excerpts:

Columnist Michael Gerson has described President Donald Trump as living in “the eternal now.” In other words, Trump doesn’t really consider the past or the future in his decision-making, especially when it comes to his kneejerk blurtings, be they on Twitter or during a rally or whenever he’s within spitting distance of a microphone. Everything for Trump is about getting through the moment. Everything is a reaction to something he just watched on television.

Not surprisingly, “the eternal now” also rings true of the modern conservative movement which has, for many years now, abandoned integrity in favor of saying the exact opposite of whatever the opposition is saying, even if that means flagrantly contradicting previous conservative positions. For example, Obamacare was mostly a Republican plan, a proto-version of which was implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney. But since it was passed by Obama, it must be killed. Or, naturally, the sudden affection for Russia and Vladimir Putin by Trump conservatives, even though so many of them are on record having previously criticized Putin’s strongman leadership. Call it “opposite day politics.”

Trump’s “eternal now” is also illustrated by the fact that he routinely and accidentally engages in perhaps the dumbest politics we’ve ever seen from a chief executive. Specifically, Trump has repeatedly verified the authenticity of leaks by screeching about the leaks being a violation of national security and classified information.

Likewise, during his usual weekend excursion to Mar-a-Lago, Trump accused former President Obama of personally ordering wiretaps at Trump Tower. We’ll get into why he did this presently. But once again, Trump undermined his own case . . . . Trump has successfully if inadvertently coaxed his most loyal fanboys to support a complete and thorough investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election cycle, believing the findings will confirm Trump’s ludicrous claims about Obama administration wiretaps. Instead, investigations may well lead to evidence that Trump colluded with Russia to hack the Democrats and skew the election using the “damn emails.”

What we’ll all soon learn, if we haven’t already, is that the presidency isn’t something to be monkeyed with. Trump is proving with every blurt and every drip-drip of the Russia revelations that 62 million American voters frivolously experimented with the presidency, and this is what we get when the electorate gets suckered into a historically colossal mistake.

The consequences of this mistake have yet to be fully revealed, but they will be. And soon. Trump’s shocking tweets about wiretaps and Obama’s (unproved and likely nonexistent) involvement could very easily slip into a constitutional crisis in which one side of the debate is calling for the arrest of Trump while the other side is calling for the arrest of Obama. The only problem here is that the latter’s argument is silly and the former’s argument is entirely plausible,, according to former NSA analyst John Schindler. Unless Trump makes a move to shield himself from prosecution, it’s an increasingly likely scenario. Oh, and there’s a really solid chance he’ll abuse his power to keep himself out of jail. Obviously.

[W]ith no evidence or substantiation, the White House is pursuing this Obama angle. We have a president who is willing to accept without question things he sees on Fox News or reads on Breitbart. One of Trump’s other often-cited sources is “Fox & Friends,” which rivals “Vanderpump Rules” as the least intellectual show on television.

So — who will stop him? Who will stand up to Trump when he takes all this too far? (And he will.) It certainly won’t be the ignorant voters who think he’s righteousy disrupting the system. It doesn’t appear it’ll be Republican leadership either, since John McCain and Lindsey Graham are the only Republicans showing the balls to watchdog Trump from the GOP side of the aisle.

Now that Trump thinks his mandate is to disrupt the system, a million unforeseen things could come crashing down on our heads. Not to mention on the heads of those 62 million voters who thought the presidency and the free world needed a tyrannical Batman villain in the White House. 

Why We Need A Third Reconstruction in America

I am not sure what the symbolism might be, but I woke up during the night after having a dream where I and other family members were resistance fighters in Vichy France. The dream was disturbing and frustrating too since many in the dream were unconvinced of the evil being opposed. With waking and the coming of morning, a lesser but no less dangerous evil exists that must be opposed: the racism and right wing religious fanaticism that throughout America's history has typically walked hand in hand with racism and white supremacy.  If post election exit polls and other surveys are to be believed, a last gasp of angry white voters upset about the loss of white privilege Christian reactionaries who continue to seek to force their beliefs on all citizens propelled Donald Trump to electoral victory (along perhaps with electronic vote hacking in three swing states).  The take away from this circumstance is that the vast majority of registered voters - nearly 75% - who did not vote for Trump must oppose his agenda and push for what one writer at BillMoyers.com has called a third Reconstruction in America.  Here are article highlights:

The reactionary wave that swept across America with the election of Donald Trump is not an anomaly in our history. It is an all-too-familiar pattern in the long struggle for American reconstruction.

The story of our struggle for freedom is not linear: Every advance toward a more perfect union has been met with a backlash of resistance.

When African-Americans became full citizens of the United States during Reconstruction, a violent backlash arose in the Redemption movement that included both the violence of the Klan and the voter suppression of Southern Democrats. The same kind of backlash followed the legislative victories of the civil rights movement — what many historians call a “Second Reconstruction.” Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign of 1968 was an intentional effort to appeal to racial hate and fear without using overtly racist language. His adviser, Kevin Phillips, called it the “Southern Strategy.”

Donald Trump’s unanticipated victory could not have been possible without the election of Barack Obama as America’s first African-American president. Trump entered national politics by waging a crusade against the possibility of Obama’s citizenship. It proved to be the perfect way to touch the psychic wound of so many Americans who have not faced our legacy of racism. Anyone familiar with the Mississippi Plan of 1876 or the Southern Strategy of 1968 can be surprised only by the ease with which Trump adapted them for the 21^st century.

Trump’s attacks on immigrants, Muslims and the LGBTQ community were political ploys based on the fundamental racial fear at the heart of the American experience. When he told white Americans that he was their last chance to make America great again, he was touching a wound passed down since the lost cause religion of the 19^th century.

If we are willing to see ourselves as we are and have been, we will also see our potential for prophetic resistance, even in times like these. For we are also the heirs of great dissenters who’ve stood for right even when they were a minority of one. When the Jim Crow laws of the solid South were upheld by the US Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, only one justice — John Harlan of Kentucky — dissented. But his dissenting opinion laid the legal groundwork upon which Thurgood Marshall built his case over half a century later in Brown v. Board of Education.

When Woodrow Wilson showed Birth of a Nation at the White House a century ago, W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells and the interracial NAACP challenged the most powerful man in America to face his racism. 

Less than a majority of Americans elected a mortal, not a god, when they cast their ballots for Donald Trump. . . . Across lines of division, we can continue to build the moral coalition that is already a majority in this country. We can and must face the race and class question together and not as separate issues.

Yes, we have some difficult days ahead. . . . Our work continues: we must work together for a Third Reconstruction in America.

Many Republican "friends" vehemently deny the racism that motivated their votes.  Not coincidentally, many of them still cling to a near fundamentalist form of Christianity that, if one looks at America's history, has always been in lock step with white supremacy.  Lest we forget, the Southern Baptists came into being over the issue of slavery and religious arguments that blacks were inferior and not equal to whites.  Why do we pretend that much of this toxicity no longer exists throughout that denomination and so many of the other Christian fundamentalist sects?   #NotMyPresident