If there has been one consistent theme running through this blog for the past nine years, it is this one: the domestic political obstacles President Obama faced while in office and the rise of the still-destructive Tea Party and the subsequent emergence of a corrupt cartoonish racist named Tr-mp are all importantly connected to what I have frequently called “white angst.”
As I use the term, white angst is in some cases merely a worry that something bad is happening to white dominance of the culture. In other cases it is a deep-rooted fear that something bad is happening to that dominance. But in all cases white angst is a foreboding, a concern that something bad is, if it hasn’t already, going to happen if white people don’t put a stop to it while there is still time. I have consistently posited this race-based phenomenon as a significant factor (along with pure partisanship) in the dreadful reaction against Obama, first as a viable presidential candidate, and then as our first African-American chief executive trying to combat a soul-crushing recession, a dangerous economic moment in our country that surely helped him overcome the electoral challenges in our race-troubled history.
Economic anxieties created by the Great Recession in 2008 temporarily put to sleep some of the racial anxieties of white folks. The voter turnout rate for whites that election year fell from 67.2% to 66.1%, while all minority groups increased their turnout rates. And Obama received 43% of the white vote that year. But the Tea Party movement, pregnant with white angst after the election of a black man, r
aised its ugly reactionary head early in 2009, just after Obama took office. Here in Joplin I attended three tax-day Tea Party events in three successive Aprils. I could hear the worry and fear in the speeches and in the conversations I had with some of the folks who were there. The pretense was that the worry and fear were rooted in economics, mostly about government debt and deficits and the future of “our kids and grandkids.”
But you may have noticed that there were no Tea Party events on any of the eight April tax days during the George W. Bush administration, despite the profligate war spending and tax cuts—and the doubling of the national debt that resulted. And you may have noticed that there were no Tea Party events on tax day this April, despite the news that annual deficits and long-term debt are skyrocketing, much of it due to the lingering effects of past tax cuts and new effects from cuts that Republicans handed out to their wealthy donors and corporations at the end of last year. No, there were no Tea Party events here in Joplin or elsewhere. Just silence from previously worried white teapartiers, a silence that provides some evidence for my past claims of racial angst and its effects on the white electorate. (Some other evidence: Obama received only 39% of the white vote in 2012, after that 43% showing in 2008. And the racist-birther Tr-mp beat Hillary with the white vote 58%-37%.)
Well, well. Now there is much more science behind my ongoing claim, a claim that was challenged by conservatives early on in the life of this blog. From The New York Times:
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.
You can read the entire article if you want (“Trump Voters Driven by Fear of Losing Status, Not Economic Anxiety, Study Finds”), or you can follow-up on the study it was based on (“Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote”), or you can see a study referenced in the article (“Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump”). There are other studies that offer similar evidence. With this post, I just wanted to defend myself from attacks long ago.
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NOTE for NERDS:
Perhaps I should make something clear about the study that formed the basis for the latest Times article. The problem isn’t just with what the National Academy of Sciences study called “group status” threats related to white people’s perceptions. There is also the group status threat of globalism, “the increasing interdependence of the United States on other countries” and the idea that “Americans increasingly feel that they are not getting their fair share.” Regarding the former, the threat is to white dominance within our country. Regarding the latter, the threat is to American dominance in the larger world. But the study makes some points we shouldn’t miss, so I will quote it at length for those of you who like to get into the weeds a little bit:
Racial status threat and global status threat are technically separable, but they are difficult to distinguish in practice. Because white male Christians are seen as most prototypically “American” (31), they have the most to lose psychologically if they perceive America and/or whites to be no longer dominant. Given that the 2016 election featured discussions of perceived threats from religious minorities, racial minorities, and foreigners, this generalized sense of threat is likely to have spilled over into multiple arenas. For white Americans, the political consequences of racial and global status threat seem to point in similar directions with respect to issue positions: opposition to immigration, rejection of international trade relationships, and perceptions of China as a threat to American wellbeing.
For two of these three issues—trade and China—trends in public opinion clearly support the thesis of increased threat between 2012 and 2016 (32, 33). For immigration, however, multiple sources instead suggest increasingly supportive attitudes among Republicans and Democrats alike (34). Likewise, to the extent that immigration is perceived as threatening by Americans, scholars find that it is due to the increased economic burden Americans believe immigrants place on the social welfare system rather than a threat to white status (35). Nonetheless, it remains possible that the heightened salience of immigration contributed to Trump’s victory without increasing actual opposition to immigration, consistent with previous findings attributing preference changes to the increased salience of immigration (3).
How plausible is status threat—whether from a sense of declining racial or global status—as an explanation for changes in voting behavior in 2016? With respect to global status threat, the received wisdom from decades of research has long been that “voting ends at water’s edge.” In other words, outside of foreign wars, international affairs are assumed to have little if any electoral importance (36). However, economic globalization has gained prominence in recent years (37). Racial status threat makes perfect sense occurring immediately after 8 y of leadership by America’s first African American president. It is not racism of the kind suggesting that whites view minorities as morally or intellectually inferior, but rather, one that regards minorities as sufficiently powerful to be a threat to the status quo. When members of a dominant group experience a sense of threat to their group’s position, whether it is the status of Americans in the world at large or the status of whites in a multiethnic America, change in people’s sense of their group’s relative position produces insecurity.
Despite multiculturalism’s ostensible goal of inclusion, experimental studies suggest that it is experienced by whites as a form of status threat that produces more negative attitudes toward outgroups of all kinds (38). Simply reminding whites about their impending loss of majority status produces feelings of threat in experimental studies (39), particularly among those who think of the “American way of life” as being white (40). Consequences of exposure to information about impending majority–minority status have included increased conservatism and greater identification with the Republican Party (41) and the Tea Party (42), increased opposition to diversity (41), greater explicit and implicit racial bias, and a stronger preference for interacting with one’s own race (43). In one study, reminding participants about the upcoming racial shift also produced increased support for Trump among both Democrats and Republicans in a white convenience sample (44).
Perhaps my favorite detail is the fact that the chairwoman of the well-known Tea Party Patriots, Jenny Beth Martin, whose mug ought to be familiar to anyone who watches cable news or C-SPAN, “sets her own $15,000 monthly fee for strategic consulting — payments that have totaled $120,000 since July.” Not bad, no? Except that’s not all:
The fight over the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s made Schlafly famous. In 1972 she founded Eagle Forum, an anti-feminist, evangelical Christian, “pro-family” (!) lobbying group that does all it can to make the country safe for white people who vote Republican. A fact that leads me to why Democrats should thank her for her latest efforts.
If the Republican party is to remain a party that is conservative and nationally competitive, it must defeat amnesty and any proposed increases in legal immigration. Further, we must work to significantly reduce the number of legal immigrants allowed into the country from the current level of 1.1 million a year. There is nothing inevitable about immigration. The level and selection criteria can be changed by Congress.
Normally I find Brooks to be a thoughtful man of the right, even if I frequently find myself scratching my head and wondering, given all that the right has become in the age of Rush Limbaugh and Fox “News,” why such a bright man remains a man of the right. Then, every now and then, Brooks gives us a hint as to why he continues to fight on the same side that people like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul fight.
rs, even if those donors choose to spend time reading Nietzsche or, more likely, Nozick. While the rest of us, if we ever had the fleeting luxury of not worrying about our jobs or our health care or our children’s education, might be thinking about philosophy or about culture or about having fun, all the political money that wealthy people invest in politics and political advocacy would just keep right on working to make sure it accomplishes the mission it was sent out to do.
