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.

Open Carry Racism Predates Trump

Over the weekend the husband and I attended the 15th annual Commonwealth Dinner in Richmond, Virginia.  The event is Equality Virginia largest fundraiser of the year and includes numerous elected officials - Republicans uniformly boycott the event - and LGBT activists and supporters from across Virginia.   At the event, one sees LGBT individuals and couples of various generations from Virginia's urban areas as well as those from rural areas that are less than LGBT accepting.  In addition to a uniform desire to make Virginia a more open and accepting state, the attendees have one other thing in common: we are all uniformly hated by white Christian nationals and their gun loving neo-Confederates.  Indeed, if one follows both self-styled: Christian" family values organizations and the the NRA and its strident supporters one thing is almost immediate observable: almost everyone in these groups is white.  Another common characteristic is that these people insanely believe that they are being subjected to persecution and oppression by those they deem "other."  The Trump/Pence regime has courted the underlying hatred of these far right whites, but, in truth, the racism long predates the rise of Trump as noted by a piece in Religion Dispatches.  Here are article highlights:

The idiosyncratic pantheon of Trump administration staffers continues its exodus, a stream of comic book villains exiting stage right. The combination of venality, incompetence, and pathological narcissism, however, remains. And the world lives in the Trump era’s bubble of strangely dilated time: everything agonizingly slow—and bewilderingly fast.

But for all the post-mortems on the 2016 election, for every Hillbilly Elegy that says to white rage “I feel your pain,” or every column wondering how evangelicals can tolerate Stormy Daniels, there’s a larger diagnosis that Americans need to undertake. A frank assessment of the conditions enabling Trump’s election—and I’m not talking here about Russia and the UAE—means that we look squarely at the tendency of Americans to invest more in “authenticity” than capability, and to combine this with a paranoia that long predates Trump. At the center of this venerable right-wing fantasy (and it does provide the right with subversive pleasure) is the idea that without a “straight talker” to cut through the BS, the state will come for our guns and our freedom of religion.

It’s a capacity for offense, outrage, and embattlement which provides most Americans with their surest sense of authenticity these days. . . . . Nothing outrages Americans more, of course, than religion. What characterizes our moment is the literal and metaphorical weaponization of such outrage. And both depend on the unhinged imagination that too many citizens imagine is superior to dull facts.

And in Trump’s America, solid facts—the lifeless bodies of school students, the realities of institutional racism, the norms and laws hourly flouted—are commuted into things that can be ignored, as if their hold on us was mere fantasy. The “again” that is central to the MAGA phenomenon is a yearning for the not-realness of black bodies, women’s bodies, Muslim bodies, or the dead who bear the marks of our complicity.

But what needs to be acknowledged is that while Trump is truly exceptional in his disregard for laws, norms, and institutions, he’s also a recognizable product of a half-century’s con game.

Significantly, it was with Ronald Reagan’s endorsement of conservative evangelicals that the link between personal religion and politics was cemented firmly in ways we currently recognize. Rather than simply a lens through which people decide to support particular laws or policies, with Reagan religion became central to what we might call Politics as Personal Radiance. In a time of shrinking public resources and uncertain futures, we began to bathe willingly in the light of charisma, hoping that its warmth would sustain us where the state no longer would. . . . . This focus on the personal, on the sincerely held belief, on personality and inner piety all combined into a vertiginous atmosphere in which everyone could become offended by everyone else.

Voters didn’t want someone who was experienced and efficient as much as they wanted somebody who looked at the world the way they do. . . . . Trump is in no small part the product of this combination of vanity and imagination. He will fight for us, we hear. He tells us we matter, they say. At least he says what he means, the mantra goes. But however hollow these rationales ring, behind the phenomenon is a toxic mix of white-guy swagger and religious exclusivism.

Armed white citizens appearing in public came partly to define the Obama era and the resurfacing of aggressive white supremacy. . . . . Groups held “open carry” church services and warned about Obama’s anti-gun conspiracy. In the age of false-flag tweets, bots, and Breitbart, America’s politics became increasingly about displaying our vehement opposition to a thing that has not happened. What counts as truth is confirmed in our fearful anticipation—we can’t trust an expert, but we can trust what we feel.

A failure to question such fantastical narratives of embattlement and persecution allowed the chief Birther to ascend to the Oval Office. Who could possibly profess shock at the massive increase in American hate groups since 2016, or at the rise in public violence, after years of open carry racism, of hoarding bullets before Obama can tax them, or of attempts to intimidate crowds at Black Lives Matter marches. At the end of the phrase “Make America Great Again,” there may as well be an “Or Else.”

The fearful times we live in didn’t just drop out of the sky. Trump just turned up the volume on what’s been cultivated for at least a half-century: a steady, shrill white noise that drowns out other voices in America. It’s much easier to double down on the idea that we’re embattled, especially when we’re not, than to admit to ourselves we need to rethink certain fundamental realities: like who “the people” are.

While white racists, defined through imaginings of their own heroic resistance, indirectly acknowledge the erosion of their historic privilege, now there are skyrocketing rates of African-American gun owners, gun clubs, and more. For all that Richard Spencer or Stephen Miller might wish otherwise, for all the fearsomeness of alt-righters in the streets, for all the pieties about “our way of life” and the whiteness of its religion, ours is a time of things refusing to conceal themselves, to be swept under nostalgia’s rug.

It’s still possible that Americans might make it through this bleak time with an increased readiness to listen and practice a politics of humility, rather than indulge in carnival, braggadocio and self-serving fantasies of persecution. But if privileged Americans keep drowning out the voices of those who actually, materially suffer, new noise will get louder too

White the white Christian nationals - the Christofascists, if you will - want all of the rest of us to conveniently disappear, after the Commonwealth Dinner gala, it is clear that the LGBT community is not going away and we will not quietly allow the haters to go unchallenged.   Women, Hispanics, blacks and others need to do the same.  Being denied the ability to persecute others does not amount to persecution of the would be persecutors. Would that the legitimate media - which excludes Fox News, a/k/a Faux News - would underscore this reality.

The Far Right's Refusal to Admit Its Racism

A very lengthy article in The Atlantic looks at the issue of the rising racism of the Republican Party and far too many whites who, if asked, would argue that they are not racists even as they support politicians who promote a racist agenda.  The piece - which I view as 100% on point - debunks the excuse/myth that white economic angst and financial struggles caused white working class voters to support Donald Trump.  Stated another way, the data simply does not support the myth that provides a convenient smoke screen for the white nationalism racial prejudice that was actually the principal motivator for many white voters.  By his openly racist, anti-immigrant campaign and its slogan "Make America Great Again" which translated to this audience as "make America white again" Trump tapped into this toxic and dangerous undercurrent.  Trump voters may deny that race was important to them or motivated their vote, but the statistics argue otherwise.  I can name "friends" who voted for Trump who I believe fall into this category.  They may not like to face the truth, but things will never improve in this country until this unpleasant truth is faced.  Here are article highlights:

THIRTY YEARS AGO, nearly half of Louisiana voted for a Klansman, and the media struggled to explain why. 

It was 1990 and David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, astonished political observers when he came within striking distance of defeating incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator J. Bennett Johnston, earning 43 percent of the vote. If Johnston’s Republican rival hadn’t dropped out of the race and endorsed him at the last minute, the outcome might have been different.

Was it economic anxiety? The Washington Post reported that the state had “a large working class that has suffered through a long recession.” Was it a blow against the state’s hated political establishment? An editorial from United Press International explained, “Louisianans showed the nation by voting for Duke that they were mad as hell and not going to take it any more.” Was it anti-Washington rage? A Loyola University pollster argued, “There were the voters who liked Duke, those who hated J. Bennett Johnston, and those who just wanted to send a message to Washington.”

Duke’s strong showing, however, wasn’t powered merely by poor or working-class whites—and the poorest demographic in the state, black voters, backed Johnston. Duke “clobbered Johnston in white working-class districts, ran even with him in predominantly white middle-class suburbs, and lost only because black Louisianans, representing one-quarter of the electorate, voted against him in overwhelming numbers,” The Washington Post reported in 1990. Duke picked up nearly 60 percent of the white vote. Faced with Duke’s popularity among whites of all income levels, the press framed his strong showing largely as the result of the economic suffering of the white working classes.

By accepting the economic theory of Duke’s success, the media were buying into the candidate’s own vision of himself as a savior of the working class. He had appealed to voters in economic terms: He tore into welfare and foreign aid, affirmative action and outsourcing, and attacked political-action committees for subverting the interests of the common man.

Duke’s candidacy had initially seemed like a joke. He was a former Klan leader who had showed up to public events in a Nazi uniform and lied about having served in the Vietnam War, a cartoonishly vain supervillain whose belief in his own status as a genetic Übermensch was belied by his plastic surgeries. . . . . Many of Duke’s voters steadfastly denied that the former Klan leader was a racist. . . . Duke’s rejoinder to the ads framing him as a racist resonated with his supporters. “Remember,” he told them at rallies, “when they smear me, they are really smearing you.”

While the rest of the country gawked at Louisiana and the Duke fiasco, Walker Percy, a Louisiana author, gave a prophetic warning to The New York Times.  “Don’t make the mistake of thinking David Duke is a unique phenomenon confined to Louisiana rednecks and yahoos. He’s not,” Percy said. “He’s not just appealing to the old Klan constituency, he’s appealing to the white middle class. And don’t think that he or somebody like him won’t appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens.”

A few days after Duke’s strong showing, the Queens-born businessman Donald Trump appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live. . . . Trump later predicted that Duke, if he ran for president, would siphon most of his votes away from the incumbent, George H. W. Bush—in the process revealing his own understanding of the effectiveness of white-nationalist appeals to the GOP base.

Even before he won, the United States was consumed by a debate over the nature of his appeal. Was racism the driving force behind Trump’s candidacy? If so, how could Americans, the vast majority of whom say they oppose racism, back a racist candidate?

During the final few weeks of the campaign, I asked dozens of Trump supporters about their candidate’s remarks regarding Muslims and people of color. I wanted to understand how these average Republicans . . . had nevertheless embraced someone who demonized religious and ethnic minorities. What I found was that Trump embodied his supporters’ most profound beliefs—combining an insistence that discriminatory policies were necessary with vehement denials that his policies would discriminate and absolute outrage that the question would even be asked.

It was not just Trump’s supporters who were in denial about what they were voting for, . . .  These supporters will not change their minds, because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of.

The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal. . . . . had racism been toxic to the American electorate, Trump’s candidacy would not have been viable.

In his own stumbling manner, Trump has pursued the race-based agenda promoted during his campaign. As the president continues to pursue a program that places the social and political hegemony of white Christians at its core, his supporters have shown few signs of abandoning him.

One hundred thirty-nine years since Reconstruction, and half a century since the tail end of the civil-rights movement, a majority of white voters backed a candidate who explicitly pledged to use the power of the state against people of color and religious minorities, and stood by him as that pledge has been among the few to survive the first year of his presidency. Their support was enough to win the White House, and has solidified a return to a politics of white identity that has been one of the most destructive forces in American history. This all occurred before the eyes of a disbelieving press and political class, who plunged into fierce denial about how and why this had happened. That is the story of the 2016 election.

A bleak vision, but one that any regular Fox News viewer would recognize.  The white-supremacist journal American Renaissance applauded Trump’s message. “Each political party proposes an implicit racial vision,” wrote one contributor. “A Trump Administration is a return to the America that won the West, landed on the moon, and built an economy and military that stunned the world. Non-whites can participate in this, but only if they accept the traditional (which is to say, white) norms of American culture.”

Most Trump supporters I spoke with denied that they endorsed this racial vision—even as they defended Trump’s rhetoric.

The plain meaning of Trumpism exists in tandem with denials of its implications; supporters and opponents alike understand that the president’s policies and rhetoric target religious and ethnic minorities, and behave accordingly. But both supporters and opponents usually stop short of calling these policies racist. It is as if there were a pothole in the middle of the street that every driver studiously avoided, but that most insisted did not exist even as they swerved around it.

Trump’s great political insight was that Obama’s time in office inflicted a profound psychological wound upon many white Americans, one that he could remedy by adopting the false narrative that placed the first black president outside the bounds of American citizenship. He intuited that Obama’s presence in the White House decreased the value of what W. E. B. Du Bois described as the “psychological wage” of whiteness across all classes of white Americans, and that the path to their hearts lay in invoking a bygone past when this affront had not taken place, and could not take place.

Americans act with the understanding that Trump’s nationalism promises to restore traditional boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality. The nature of that same nationalism is to deny its essence, the better to salve the conscience and spare the soul.

Among the most popular explanations for Trump’s victory and the Trump phenomenon writ large is the Calamity Thesis: the belief that Trump’s election was the direct result of some great, unacknowledged social catastrophe . . . . White people without college degrees are living in deprivation, and in their despair, they turned to a racist demagogue who promised to solve their problems.

This explanation appeals to whites across the political spectrum. On the right, it serves as an indictment of elitist liberals who used their power to assist religious and ethnic minorities rather than all Americans; on the left, it offers a glimmer of hope that such voters can be won over by a more left-wing or redistributionist economic policy. It also has the distinct advantage of conferring innocence upon what is often referred to as the “white working class.”

But the research does not support the conclusions many have drawn from it—that economic or social desperation by itself drove white Americans to Donald Trump. . . . a closer look at the demographics of the 2016 electorate shows something more complex than a working-class revolt sparked by prolonged suffering.

The most economically vulnerable Americans voted for Clinton overwhelmingly; the usual presumption is exactly the opposite.  If you look at white voters alone, a different picture emerges. . . . . Trump won white voters at every level of class and income. He won workers, he won managers, he won owners, he won robber barons. This is not a working-class coalition; it is a nationalist one. . . . . the controlling factor seems to be not economic distress but an inclination to see nonwhites as the cause of economic problems.

When you look at Trump’s strength among white Americans of all income categories, but his weakness among Americans struggling with poverty, the story of Trump looks less like a story of working-class revolt than a story of white backlash. And the stories of struggling white Trump supporters look less like the whole truth than a convenient narrative—one that obscures the racist nature of that backlash. . . .

Even before Trump, the Republican Party was moving toward an exclusivist nationalism that defined American identity in racial and religious terms, despite some efforts from its leadership to steer it in another direction. . . . White Backlash, a study of political trends, and found that “whites who hold more negative views of immigrants have a greater tendency to support Republican candidates at the presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial levels, even after controlling for party identification and other major factors purported to drive the vote.” . . . Trump is a manifestation of this trend rather than its impetus, a manifestation that began to rise not long after Obama’s candidacy.  

Donald Trump Bloviates in Virginia Beach

GOP windbag and liar in chief Donald Trump appeared before a small crowd in Virginia Beach and gave another one of his substance free speeches that played on white fears of minorities and implied that he's favor creating an even more oppressive police state.   The supposed purpose of the appearance was to address issues facing the military in this region of Navy, Army and Air Force bases.  For the most part, it turned out to be Trump's usual race based and anti-trade message.  Here are details from the Virginian Pilot: 

Calling himself “the law and order candidate,” Republican presidential contender Donald Trump said Monday that police need more authority to protect the public but acknowledged a growing problem of racial unrest.

Trump told a crowd of about 175 supporters in a Westin Town Center hotel ballroom that he had intended to focus his afternoon speech on his proposals to assist military veterans but changed his speech after Thursday’s ambush and killing of five Dallas police officers and wounding of 10 others. Trump and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who introduced him, both argued for a stronger national focus on law enforcement.

“It’s time for our hostility against our police and against all members of law enforcement to end, and end immediately – right now,” Trump said. “We must maintain law and order at the highest level, or we will cease to have a country.”

The presumptive GOP nominee said the violence and resulting protests highlight a growing threat of racial unrest.

“I think it’s a bigger problem than people understand. I think it’s far bigger than President Obama wants to admit,” Trump said. “He doesn’t want to admit it because it’s taking place during his administration. I mean, when you have 11 cities absolutely ready to blow up over the last three or four days – and it could very well get worse. I mean we’re just going into the summer.”

The New York businessman said he could help solve those problems by blocking U.S. companies from moving operations overseas and keeping more jobs here.

Lamenting the persistent problems of veterans snagged in the Veterans Affairs bureaucracy, Trump promised a deep investigation as soon as he takes office. Among his proposed VA changes: Eligible veterans would be able to get VA-paid medical care from any doctor or medical facility rather than just the VA hospital system.

Acknowledging Hampton Roads’ dependence on defense spending, Trump said in the interview that he’ll release a detailed plan before the Nov. 8 election, outlining how he’ll grow the size of the military. It will include more personnel, more ships, more aircraft and other equipment, he said

Three hours before his speech, three former military officers who support Clinton spoke out against Trump outside the hotel.

“Donald Trump has said so many things over the years that are just so utterly insulting to the men and women who serve our country,” said Dave Belote, a retired Air Force colonel and unsuccessful 2015 state Senate candidate. “He calls our military ‘a disaster.’ ”
During the candidate’s stop, dozens of people stood outside the front entrance of The Westin.  The number of signs for and against him was about equal.