White Supremacy discussion thread

[North Washington Republic]

I’m going to go with what the CDC recommends over what you recommend.

If the vaccine doesn;t prevent hospitalization its completely pointless.

The CDC still recommends masking in certain situations.

[Neu California]

I've been fully vaccinated, and I still wear a mask out simply because I'd rather not explain my vaccination status and there are still places that require masks, like my grocery store

[Neu California]

Really mods? I was trying to debate honestly without trolling.

Are you, mayhaps, a DOS?

[San Lumen]

If the vaccine doesn;t prevent hospitalization its completely pointless.

The CDC still recommends masking in certain situations.

This is not relevant to the thread .

[Odreria]

the vaccine gives 100% protection against hospitalization, so please stop spreading dangerous misinformation. You are killing thousands of people.

I’m going to go with what the CDC recommends over what you recommend.

yea even they say that its fine to not wear a mask in most circumstances if you're vaxxed but this was never about "CDC" or "science" it's about the quarantine being a bizarro new religion for you people.

[North Washington Republic]

The CDC still recommends masking in certain situations.

This is not relevant to the thread .

You’re right. We should stop and move all COVID and vaccine debate to the right thread.

[Miku the Based]

Really mods? I was trying to debate honestly without trolling.

They are like that.
Anti-glasses gang supports your struggle against urbanites.

[San Lumen]

Really mods? I was trying to debate honestly without trolling.

They are like that.
Anti-glasses gang supports your struggle against urbanites.

what's his issues with urbanites?

[-SARS-]

They are like that.
Anti-glasses gang supports your struggle against urbanites.

what's his issues with urbanites?

Anyone who uses the word "urbanites," it's not worth asking.

[New haven america]

I don't think I've ever really heard a good argument against cities.

Usually all it boils down to it "Liberals!", "Drugs!", and "I want grass!"

Meanwhile, left-wing politics exists in rural areas (I should know, I live in one of those areas. 80% of the voters in the county went with Biden), drugs and addiction are actually a bigger issue in rural areas because they're less capable of getting help for their issues, and oh yeah, yards exist in cities, especially out West.

[Washington Resistance Army]

I don't think I've ever really heard a good argument against cities.

Usually all it boils down to it "Liberals!", "Drugs!", and "I want grass!"

Meanwhile, left-wing politics exists in rural areas (I should know, I live in one of those areas. 80% of the voters in the county went with Biden), drugs and addiction are actually a bigger issue in rural areas because they're less capable of getting help for their issues, and oh yeah, yards exist in cities, especially out West.

Cities are pretty strongly linked to higher rates of mental health problems (particularly depression), cost of living is drastically higher, there's usually more violent crime, they're dirtier both environmentally and physically etc etc. There are very real and very valid complaints about city living, even if a lot of it does get simplified down.

[Croat-Slavonia]

uhhh...why am I here again?

https://www.nationstates.net/nation=croat-slavonia
Im just here don't mind me

[Kowani]

So, my work so far has mostly been in contemporary expressions of racial animus, its prevalence, and effects, mostly with an eye towards the electoral realm.
I don't really want to re-hash all of that again, this is available info at this point. But I am going to draw on it, because this is important.
The first question here is actually two-fold.
1: How widespread is radicalization among the American Right.
and 2: When did this radicalization begin? To save those of you who don't want to read all the science, allow me to lay out part of my thesis here-the current crop of reactionary attitudes has always been present, it was just not salient. A minor detour here to explain what exactly issue salience is-using a demographic I have regrettably neglected in my analysis so far, because they are about to become critical. Latinos.
It is not unknown to anyone with an internet connection that Trump did better with Latinos in 2020 than he did in 2016. It's just numbers. But what's important is the why. See, Trump didn't just do better with the "traditional" Republican Latinos, Venezuelans and Cubans, or Latinos at the border in Texas. It was a baseline, national shift. He still lost them-but considering that Trump is the white identity politics candidate, we ask ourselves why.
Firstly, a note on who shifted strongly into the Trump column: mostly, Latinos with less formed Partisan identities-particularly Latinos who hadn't voted before. And that's important, because partisanship is rapidly becoming one of our new Social Identities (and I think for good reason).

In other words: the shifts appear to be among those with the lowest partisan formation. We know enough to say these look like true swing voters. Neither party should assume that a Hispanic voter who cast a ballot for Trump in 2020 is locked in as a Republican going forward. Nor can we assume this shift was exclusive to Trump and will revert back on its own. And if there’s a lesson for the future, it’s to watch the margins and those voters who often remain invisible: the ones who stayed home and the many others aging into the electorate.

So how does this play into issue salience? Simple. Immigration was hypersalient as an issue-at least partly because of Trump's campaign. But in 2020, that was not the case-things like covid, the basket-case economy, and Black Lives Matter protests dominated the agenda.

And with Latinos, immigration was a losing issue for Trump-even among the most conservative ones.

In late 2019, children in detention + family separation were top of mind even with conservative Latinos who agreed with Trump on other aspects of immigration

It's why it predicted vote choice in 2016, but not in 2020

So what changed? Immigration (and its link to Latino identity) had ceased to become salient as an issue.

This is fascinating in its own right-but it's not an explainer of right-wing radicalization (very much, anyway). It is, however, an illustrative, real-time of a phenomenon that everyone reading this lived through and can easily understand.

So let's get into the right-wing.
So I've gone at length about the prevalence of racial resentment. But if we situate it in a temporal context, we learn that racial resentment has been remarkably stable over the past decades.

There have been massive changes in the United States since the racial resentment scale was incorporated into the American National Election Studies (ANES) in 1988, but as we show, national aggregate levels of racial resentment seem impervious to the past three decades of change. To be sure, the few scholars who have examined national trends over time provide evidence that racial resentment has become more virulent in effect and has “spilled over” to affect nonracialized policy preferences such as health care, but overall, levels of racial resentment among (White) Americans has largely remained stable in level since the mid-1980s.

(national relative racial resentment over time)

So why, then, is radicalization so prevalent now?
Simple: Issue salience. Specifically, the issue of who has power in America. This is not a novel insight. That modern right-wing politics are largely white identity politics is not new. But what made this different was the culmination and combination of several trends at the same time about power and who is the prototypical American that made this modern explosion so powerful-and so dangerous.
Firstly is something I talked about already, the racialization of government.

On average, the two largest increases in the correlation between racial resentment and any one of the other variables occur between 2008 and 2012 with respect to health care policy and government services attitudes. This is congruent with work demonstrating the Obama-induced "spillover” of racial prejudice to attitudes about seemingly nonracial issues such as health care, though such an effect has not been directly observed with respect to attitudes about government spending and services in general.[...]The correlation between racial resentment and context-dependent political attitudes and behaviors also increase markedly over time. In 1988, differential feelings toward the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates was fairly weakly correlated with racial resentment at .16. By 2016, however, this correlation had nearly quadrupled to .61. A similar, albeit weaker, pattern emerges with respect to (Democratic) vote choice. Here, the value of the correlation with racial resentment doubled from .20 in 1988 to .54 in 2016.

The observed trends when it comes to both affective evaluations of the candidates and vote choice are particularly interesting because they began well before a racial minority of any sort was running for office. Again, our observation runs counter to the narrative of Barack Obama as a lightning rod when it comes to the racialization of politics—these trends harken back to at least the late 1980s, if not earlier. Although we observe relatively large increases in the correlations between 2004 and 2008 for both candidate evaluations and vote choice, the increases were larger moving from 2000 to 2004 with respect to vote choice, or from 2012 to 2016 with respect to candidate evaluations.

To facilitate interpretation of the coefficients associated with the racial resentment–time multiplicative terms, we, once again, graphically present marginal effects in Figure 5. With each dependent variable, the marginal effect of racial resentment increases over time. The absolute value of the marginal effect of racial resentment on the differential evaluation of the major party candidates is 0 in 1988 and increases to approximately 0.18 by 2016. When it comes to voting for the Democratic candidate rather than the Republican candidate, the absolute value of the marginal effect of racial resentment increases from 0.08 in 1988 to 0.12 in 2016. The increase in the marginal effects of racial resentment are even more striking with respect to issue attitudes. The marginal effect of racial resentment of attitudes about health insurance increases from –0.08 in 1988 to 0.17 in 2016, a marked increase from no effect to one rivaling that on affective evaluations or vote choice. The same marginal effect when it comes to attitudes about governmental spending and services increases from –0.06 in 1988 to 0.13 in 2016.

But it's worth going into the why this happened. Part of it has been the widespread adoption of Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy by the Republican Party.

The symbolic, abstract language and imagery of Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign continued during subsequent presidential campaigns that focused on crime and expanding welfare, denigrated the “liberal” label, and argued for the repeal of supposedly antiquated Civil Rights and affirmative action policies. More than use during presidential campaigns, however, the symbolic racial appeals became highlights of the common political rhetoric espoused by elected representatives at all levels of government. The destruction of the policies this rhetoric was used to refer to—governmental services aimed at strengthening social safety nets and reducing the effects of racial discrimination—quickly became the centerpiece of the Republican Party platform. Thus, the new Southern strategy has, over the past 30 years, permeated all forms of political discourse, strategy, and behavior.

But it goes further. It also extends to the presence of black people in government.

Under the guise of a cognitive test, we exposed 600 survey participants who self-identified as white to six pictures: three of the faces of blacks and three of whites. Respondents were asked to assess each person in terms of attractiveness and likeability. We used the pictures employed in the Implicit Association Test (IAT) which have been designed to activate racial attitudes exclusively. It is important to note that unlike implicit racial primes used in much of the literature, this did not involve threatening images, or coded racial messaging. The pictures are calibrated to be emotionally neutral in tone. As such, ours is a relatively weak prime because it lacks negative emotional content. The control group (n=600) did not receive any prime; they were just asked to complete the survey. Following the prime, respondents were asked a series of questions about policy preferences, the three government responsiveness items and two items related to political trust.

As a check to ensure that the prime can activate politically relevant attitudes associated with race, near the end of the survey we included a question that asked people to specify what proportion of the members of Congress were black, white, or other racial minority. Our expectation was that exposure to the prime would lead white respondents to offer a higher proportion of black legislators and lower proportion of white legislators relative to the control. Since the question asked to specify group proportions, the two dependent variables range from 0 to 100. An independent samples means test shows that respondents assigned to the treatment estimated the proportion of blacks in Congress to be 2.2ppts higher, on average, than the control group. The estimate offered for whites in Congress was 4.1ppts lower, on average, than the control group. Both are statistically significant differences (p<0.001). This reassures us that indeed, exposure to an implicit racial prime does influence considerations about racial political representation, leading whites to overestimate the political representation of blacks and underestimate that for their own group. We should note that there was no statistically significant difference in the way racial egalitarians and racial conservatives responded to this question; however, we contend that the two groups associate different meanings and attitudes with perceptions of greater black representation in Congress. For racial conservatives, the activation of racial predispositions should produce a decline in beliefs about government responsiveness, while among racial egalitarians it should either have no effect or increase positivity toward government. Following the prime, respondents were asked a series of questions about policy preferences, the three government responsiveness items and two items related to political trust.[...]Figures 1 and 2 present the result of these interaction models with the public trust variable and the government responsiveness measure, respectively. In both cases, we observe both floor and ceiling effects: the government attitudes of those who are very strongly egalitarian and those who are strong racial conservatives appear unaffected by exposure to the prime. However, we find that the treatment and the three interaction terms are jointly statistically significant (p<0.05). This is evidence that exposure to the prime relative to the control, does suppress public trust and belief in government responsiveness among those who have middling levels of racial resentment, but it does not affect those at the highest or the lowest tiers of racial resentments. It seems that those groups have already very strong attitudes about the relationship between race and government that their views are not malleable.

this has, unsurprisingly, bad outcomes

We find that racial resentment, a measure of anti-black racial prejudice, is a significant predictor of all three types of attitudes about government and the relationship suggests that whites who score high on racial resentment are also likely to believe the government to be unresponsive, harbor less public trust, and even perceive the government as an outright threat to rights. Our survey experiment also shows that priming race activates politically relevant cognitions and it dampens beliefs in government responsiveness among some racial conservatives. First, our analyses suggest that among white Americans’ negative attitudes about government may not be tied only to government policy performance or the personality of office holders, but to perceptions of value incongruence between government and its citizens. The increase in black representation, which racial conservatives may overestimate given the relative visibility of black issues and black officials, has likely linked attitudes about government to negative beliefs about blacks’ moral citizenship. If government is representing a group that in the eyes of racial conservatives rejects traditional American values, then the motivations of government are suspect. Second, our analyses combined with Hetherington’s work on racial policy in the 1970s-1980s, and Aberbach and Walker’s study of the immediate post-civil rights era, suggest that the racialization of government may have occurred in the 1960s and continues unabated to today.

How low is this cutoff? Well, at the time of the 60's, when this trend began, there were...0 black Senators, 8 black representatives, and 1 black cabinet secretary. (With the caveat that at least one Representative, Augustus Hawkins, did not look black at all)

This is important, because the number of Black members of Congress has only increased.

While this doesn't track in a simple pattern for the cabinet, the basic idea holds.

In fact, this pattern held for all racial groups, not just black people-about 23% of Congress is a minority-most of them Dems.

Among today’s senators and representatives, the overwhelming majority of racial and ethnic minority members are Democrats (83%), while 17% are Republicans.

Why is this important? Not only do minority politicians correlate with racial resentment-they are also perceived as more liberal than otherwise identical white politicians-regardless of what they actually did in office.

To summarize, these results show that voters perceive non-White MCs as more liberal than their White counterparts who take the same policy positions. Even in a relatively “high information” environment, where voters were given explicit information about legislators’ positions, voters categorized on the basis of race and attributed a more liberal ideology to non-White politicians. The ideological skew of the MC’s positions does not appear to significantly moderate the extent to which voters saw non-White MCs as more liberal than White MCs. Note that this does not mean that voters perceived conservative non-White MCs as liberals: No matter their race, MCs who took more conservative positions were perceived as more conservative. Rather, the results show that non-White MCs were seen as more liberal than White MCs who took the same positions. Conservative non-White MCs were seen as more conservative than liberal non-White MCs, in other words, but were still seen as more liberal than a White MC with an equally conservative record

To the surprise of nobody, this affected their appeal.

I simulate the coefficients from Model 3(a) to estimate differences in the probability that respondents with different ideological outlooks approve of MCs of different races. These first differences show the impact of race on approval ratings for different sets of voters. Liberal voters (those who took a liberal position on every policy) respond more favorably to a Black or Hispanic MC than they do a to White MC (an increase in the probability of approving of .07 [.02, .13] and .04 [−.01, .09], respectively). Conservative voters, in turn, are less likely to approve of Black, −.11 [−.20, −.03], or Hispanic, −.07 [−.16, .02], MCs than White MCs, although these estimates for Hispanic MCs have confidence intervals that include zero. The stereotype of Black and Hispanic politicians as liberals leads conservatives to approve less, and liberals to approve more, than they would of otherwise equivalent White MCs.

But there's one more major thing we need to address before we can move on. Barack Obama. Now, I demonstrated before, racial animus cost Obama about net 4 percentage points he would have had otherwise.

But it did something more sinister. It increased whites’ perception that blacks threaten their dominant position in the United States as a result of Obama's presidency-but said presidency did nothing to reduce prejudice.

Beginning with the question about work ethic, we see a marked and stable tendency for whites to rate blacks as lazier than they rate their own group. In 2008, 50% of white respondents rated blacks as lazier than whites, compared with 51% in 2012 (p < .67). At first glance, the intelligence question analyses seem more consistent with the argument that contact may reduce anti-black attitudes: in 2008, 45% of whites rated blacks as less intelligent than whites, compared with 39% in 2012 (p < .01). While these results may appear to bolster the argument in favor of positive effects of contact with the nation’s first black president, this decrease in describing blacks as less intelligent than whites actually results from a decrease in the average intelligence ratings of whites. When the analysis is restricted to the intelligence ratings of blacks alone, rather than looking at the difference measure, the magnitude of the increase is small at 0.12 of the 1–7 range, or about 2% of the scale. Thus, we do not see evidence that contact with Obama had a positive influence on white attitudes towards blacks as a group. As a complement to the stereotype questions, we also examine three alternative measures of prejudice against blacks (all recoded from 0 to 1).10 The mean level of white sympathy for blacks11 (Hutchings 2009) actually decreases from 0.44 in 2008 to 0.30 in 2012 (p < .001), the mean racial resentment score on the standard four-item battery (Kinder and Sanders 1996) changes little from 0.65 in 2008 to 0.64 in 2012 (where high values indicate more resentment), and the mean warmth toward blacks on a standard feeling thermometer decreases slightly from 0.66 in 2008 to 0.63 in 2012 (p < .001). Taken together, these analyses yield little evidence that white attitudes toward blacks improved during Obama’s first term as President, and there is even some evidence to suggest that prejudice may have increased. This pattern is consistent for
both Democratic and Republican respondents.

But the portion about status threat is more important, I think.

Next, we assess whether the impact of prejudice on policy opinion increases over time in the panel data. To do so, we examine associations between prejudice, again as measured by coldness toward blacks relative to whites, and opinion about whether the federal government should enforce legislation outlawing racial discrimination in the labor market. This question was asked in both September 2008 and May 2009 – spanning Obama’s inauguration as president. To determine whether the influence of prejudice on policy opinion increased over this time period – as we hypothesized and the cross-sectional data supported – we model opinion in May 2009 as a function of opinion in September 2008 and racial prejudice as measured in September 2008, as well as control variables (see Table 3). This standard practice of including a lagged dependent variable in the regression model (Keele and Kelly 2006) allows us to assess whether prejudice predicts opinion about the issue in May 2009 even taking into account how the respondent felt about the issue eight months prior. Here we see an association between racial attitudes and white policy opinion in May 2009 even after controlling for policy opinion in September 2008. Thus, we see an increase in the effect of racial attitudes on policy opinion over time. Considering this finding in combination with our cross-sectional data, we find scant evidence that racial prejudice declined during Obama’s first term in office even with whites’ regular exposure to the president. Indeed, on the topic of discrimination in the labor market and support for affirmative action, the association between prejudice and whites’ policy opinion actually became stronger over time. These results are consistent with the interpretation that Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency was perceived as a threat to whites’ superior group position: in the age of the first black president, the impact of prejudice on public opinion about racialized policies increased, even when Obama did not explicitly associate himself with such policies.

So that's the first bit.

---

So let's get into the next section: class.
A lot of people have noted that, when there is an economic downturn, minorities seem to work as convenient scapegoats. "They're stealing our jobs", or other such rhetoric. But that's not solely as a result of politicians blaming immigrants. Economic downturns help fuel animus against black people too.
Note that the following data is in the context of the Great Recession. "Racist searches" here refers to google searches using the n-word (a measure whose validity I'll go into in a bit)

Our baseline estimates using racist internet searches as the outcome are reported in Table 2. The results show that pre-recession manufacturing and real estate shares are associated with substantial increases in racist internet searches after the start of the recession. A one standard deviation increase in the pre-recession manufacturing share is associated with a 5.5 percent higher rate of racist internet searches. Similarly, a one standard deviation increase in the real estate share is associated with a 6.1 percent increase in racist searches, and a one standard deviation increase in the recession vulnerability index is associated with a 5.8 percent increase in racist searches.

But it also extends to physical violence.

Table 3 shows results for Poisson regressions using the number of hate crimes against blacks as the dependent variable. The results are qualitatively similar to those in Table 2. A one standard deviation increase in the pre-recession manufacturing share is associated with a 55 percent (e0.44 − 1 = 0.553) increase in hate crimes against blacks. One standard deviation increases in the pre-recession real estate share and the aggregate recession vulnerability index are associated with 51 percent and 52 percent increases in hate crimes, respectively. These results suggest that the animus created by the economic downturn is not restricted to racist online speech, but translates into tangible behavior with potentially severe consequences for the affected individuals. There is no evidence that states that were especially dependent on manufacturing and real estate experienced increases in hate crimes prior to the Great Recession in 2007.

In fact, we're pretty positive it's just the economic downturn.

Fig. 2 shows that, before 2008, unemployment rates, GDP and racist searches were on parallel trends in states with high and low recession vulnerability. Starting in 2008, GDP begins to decrease, while racist searches and hate crimes begin to increase in vulnerable versus less vulnerable states. The unemployment rate does not begin to decrease until 2009, consistent with its status as a lagging indicator of economic performance. The unemployment effect of the recession vulnerability index begins to decrease starting in 2010, but the GDP effect persists over the entire period of observation. The estimated effect of the index on racist internet searches peaks in 2010 and decreases afterwards. By contrast, its estimated effect on hate crimes persists over the entire period of observation. Overall, the graphs in Fig. 8 provide evidence that the time-series relationship between sectoral employment shares and racial animus is similar to the relationship between employment shares and economic indicators (i.e., the unemployment rate and GDP), which suggests that our estimates are not driven by spurious correlations caused by pre-treatment trends in unobservables. Finally, we explore whether our results can be explained by latent racial tensions coming to the fore after the election of President Obama in 2008. If latent tensions were correlated with the manufacturing and real estate shares, and their effect on racist searches was amplified after 2008, the parallel trends assumption of our estimator would be violated. We begin by exploring whether pre-recession sectoral employment shares were related to survey measures of pre-recession racial attitudes or the vote share for President Obama in the 2008 election. Table 4 shows that the pre-recession manufacturing share was negatively related to attitudes towards blacks as measured by our five proxies of pre-recession racial tensions from the ANES. By contrast, the pre-recession real estate share was positively correlated with these same attitudes. Likewise, consistent with the hypothesis that racial animus reduced support for Obama in 2008, the vote share for Barack Obama was negatively correlated with the manufacturing share of employment but positively correlated with the real estate share. Importantly, this pattern of results suggests that latent racial animus coming to the fore is not a good explanation for our baseline results: although the pre-recession real estate share is positively related to racist searches after 2008 (Table 2), it is negatively related to pre-recession measures of attitudes towards blacks. In Tables 5 and 6, we report the results of additional robustness tests that control for our proxies for pre-recession racial tensions interacted with an indicator for the post-recession period. In the first column of either table, we show that controlling for the vote share for Barack Obama interacted with an indicator for the post-recession period has little effect on our estimates, which remain similar to those reported in Tables 2 and 3. Likewise, controlling for survey measures of racial attitudes has little additional effect on the estimated effect of either sectoral share. Finally, including these additional controls has a negligible effect on our estimates using the aggregate recession vulnerability index. Overall, the estimates reported in Tables 5 and 6 increase our confidence that our estimates are not driven by a flare-up of latent racial tensions after the 2008 elections.

Now, we come to the question of why this happens. Well, the first bit is easy. In practically every society, minorities have taken the blame for economic hardship. We've all heard the famous Obama quote; “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama said. “And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
And this is, at least in part, true (if horribly expressed). But the basic idea-that dislike of outside groups pops up in communities experiencing economic hardship. This is a critique you hear on pretty much every area of the political spectrum.
But what if it was something else, too?
What if...US economic decline-particularly manufacturing- is racialized? (Spoiler alert: it is)
A quick explanation, first.

We examine how deindustrialization and the resulting localized economic downturns may influence voting by distinct groups in different ways. We argue that the decline of manufacturing can incite a particularly acute
political response among some white voters due to the threat that economic restructuring poses to notions of dominant group status that are central to white identity (“whiteness”). As Harris (1993) explains, whiteness embodies a “settled expectation” of perpetually privileged economic, political, and social circumstances. For many whites in former manufacturing hubs, the ravages of deindustrialization challenge those expectations and lead them to support candidates who they expect to defend their status. Our argument builds on social identity theory, which holds that society consists of various groups with differing levels of power and status relative to one another. Social identity encompasses an individual’s association with, or attachment to, a particular group and the value placed on being a part of the group. Individuals who are strongly affiliated with their group assess political, economic, and cultural outcomes through the lens of their identity: it shapes their stances on issues and political candidates. While voters may consider the interests of others, they tend to care most about the well-being of those with whom they most closely identify. In turn, they tend to favor candidates and policies that are consistent with their group’s interests, economic hardship can solidify their political preferences The decline of manufacturing in a locality can create a unique social status threat for some whites in that area. This is because the negative economic and social consequences of deindustrialization upend the settled expectations of whiteness: they challenge whites’ privileged status as the dominant group. For whites who perceive manufacturing jobs as historically important sources of employment and economic security mainly for members of their own group, lay-offs, stagnant incomes, and localized social decay all contribute to the sense of diminished status. Put differently, deindustrialization is a source of “nostalgic deprivation,” which Gest, Reny, and Mayer (2018) describe as the discrepancy between individuals’ understanding of their current economic, social, and political status and perceptions about their past. Furthermore, white Americans with a strong in-group identity often view themselves as prototypically American and conflate their personal economic standing with that of the US, For individuals living in localities hit hard by deindustrialization, manufacturing layoffs embody the country’s declining standing as a global industrial force, and with it, their own group’s declining social and economic status.

White voter status anxiety about deindustrialization can activate white identity and a preference for conservative candidates. The political expression of heightened white identity tends toward support for policies and candidates that whites expect will uphold their privileges and preserve racial hierarchy. Prior research shows that status threats elicit “defensive” political reactions; whites tend to become more conservative and more supportive of the Republican Party. As whites in distressed localities seek to maintain or reinstate the privileges and benefits diminished by deindustrialization, we expect increased support for conservative candidates and policies—particularly nationalist iterations that play to dominant group status anxieties. As a dominant group status threat, deindustrialization activates white identity and increases white voter support for reactionary candidates.[...] In sum, insights from the economic voting literature suggest that manufacturing job losses may weaken support for incumbents irrespective of voter or candidate differences. But a consideration of the ways in which economic distress is refracted through voters’ identities leads to more
nuanced expectations about political behavior in the context of deindustrialization.

So first, how does manufacturing job less affect voting... race.

Table 2 reports the results of the county-level election models, starting with our baseline model. The coefficient for manufacturing layoffs is negative and significant in Models 1–3. The effect holds when we include White Population Share and Service Layoffs. These findings indicate that Democratic vote shares decline in counties with more manufacturing job losses. Two additional findings are worth mentioning. First, the inclusion of the variable White Population Share reduces the magnitude of the coefficient on White Manufacturing Layoffs by roughly 25%, likely due to the fact that these variables are highly correlated. Second, the coefficient of Service Layoffs is never significant in any of the model specifications. The magnitude of the estimated effect of job losses on voting is nontrivial. First, we run our models with different outcome variables, which we report in Table B4. We show that our results are similar if we use (a) levels rather than changes in Democratic candidates’ percentages and (b) overall Democratic vote shares (rather than two-party) to operationalize our outcome variable. Moreover, we show that our results hold if we include potential confounders: layoffs broken down by education level, age, and gender, as well as the localized effects of Chinese import surges.

And now, finally, the hard hitting stuff-bust a small detour on mechanism.

We have shown that manufacturing layoffs influenced the voting patterns of whites and non-whites differently in the 2016 election. In this section, we explore four possible mechanisms that may be driving this result. First, we focus on a question related to the status of the
US: Is the US economy improving?40. Second, we explore a question on the status of the country more generally: Is the country on the “right track”? Third, we include a question concerning individual upward mobility: How much opportunity is there to get ahead? Fourth, we explore the pocketbook economic channel: Are you better off financially than you were a year ago?

And the results? (quelle surprise)

Table 5 reports the results of the 2SLS regressions. Model 1 demonstrates that white respondents who live in districts hit by greater job losses are significantly more likely to believe the economy is worsening. In model 2, the coefficient of the interaction between White and Layoffs is negative and significant, indicating that white respondents in districts affected by layoffs are more likely than non-white respondents to believe the country is on the wrong track. In model 3, white respondents in harder-hit districts report fewer opportunities to get ahead than non-white respondents living in the same districts. In model 4, we find no evidence that high layoffs operate strictly as a pocketbook economic issue for white respondents. Rather, the results suggest that white respondents in hard-hit districts have grimmer assessments of the US economic trajectory and individual opportunity than non-whites in the same districts regardless of personal economic circumstances. In sum, these results indicate that whites experience deindustrialization differently than do voters of color, as our theory anticipates. Localized manufacturing job losses appear to invoke concerns among white voters about American economic decline and the current course of the country. Job losses also appear to lead whites to question the prospects of upward mobility at the individual level, for the “average” American. These results suggest that localized manufacturing decline heightens economic anxiety among whites in particular. In conjunction with the voting results indicating a strong preference for Trump among white voters in localities with higher manufacturing job losses, one possible interpretation of the survey analysis is that some whites perceive deindustrialization as a status threat.
[...]
With the important caveat that we are examining a small number of elections, some notable inferences emerge when we compare the county-level results. First, while the pooled county-level analysis indicates that manufacturing layoffs induce anti-incumbent voting regardless of which party is in power, the 2008 results in isolation do not reveal a statistically significant decline in Republican support. Second, the anti-incumbent effects on manufacturing layoffs are stronger and more robust when Democrats are the incumbents. A similar story emerges in the individual-level models reported in Table 7. In model 1, we show the results of the pooled analysis.50 The estimated interaction between White and Manufacturing Layoffs is negative and significant, indicating lower support for Democratic incumbents among whites where manufacturing layoffs are high. Note that we include county-election year fixed effects in this model, which account for time-varying characteristics at the county level. For this reason, we are unable to estimate Manufacturing Layoffs, whose coefficient gets absorbed by county-election year fixed effects. Models 2 and 3 are similar to the results at the county level. There is no evidence that manufacturing layoffs affect the probability of voting for the Democratic candidate in 2008 (when the incumbent is a Republican) among white respondents, whereas the interaction between Manufacturing Layoffs and White is negative and significant in 2012 (when the incumbent is a Democrat). That is to say that anti-incumbent effects are not generic, but rather appear to depend on the party in power. In particular, we do not find robust evidence that manufacturing job losses contribute to increases in anti-incumbent voting among whites when the incumbent is a Republican. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, manufacturing job losses appear to harm Democratic incumbents more than Republican ones. Finally, we note that the estimated effect of the interaction term is substantively smaller in 2012 than it is in 2016. We find that Trump’s reactionary campaign particularly appealed to white voters in deindustrializing localities.

I'm going to grab this sentence from the conclusion, because it's the most poignant part: "We argue that deindustrialization threatens dominant group status, leading white voters in affected areas to favor candidates who they believe will address economic distress and defend racial hierarchy."

For obvious reasons, this is bad for minority groups. But it's bad for whites as well-perceieved racial status threats lead whites to oppose redistributive programs. (This has the added "benefit" of creating a loop of economic deprivation>status threat>greater deprivation)
But why this is requires some explaining.
So we're gonna tie the results of this in with the media for a second.
Firstly, we learned that mentioning the possibility of demographic change-that white people will no longer be the majority group-creates major status threat. But it also increases a desire to cut welfare programs (which, remember, have been racialized and tarred as unfairly going to minority groups).

Participants answered a series of demographic questions, and then were asked to answer questions about one of two charts describing trends in the population share of different racial/ethnic groups in the United States, ostensibly as part of a study of quantitative reasoning and social opinions. Both graphs presented information adapted from Census Bureau population projections. Introductory text noted that the last presidential election had sparked discussion of changes in the demographic make-up of the country, and so “it is important to know the results of cutting-edge research.” Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions meant to highlight different aspects of these trends. Participants in the “Majority Salient” condition were shown population data from 2000 to 2020, when white Americans’ population share is expected to remain about 60 percent of the population (figure 3a). In contrast, participants in the “Decline Salient” condition were shown projections from 1960 to 2060, when whites’ population share is expected to fall to about 40 percent. This longer time scale was intended to communicate a sharp, stable decline in white population share. We also included a line for the share of “total non-white” Americans intended to underscore the growth in the minority population (figure 3b). The graphs were accompanied by captions describing the trends in words (e.g., “The majority of Americans will be nonwhite in about 25 years”), reinforcing the experimental manipulation. Participants were then quizzed regarding the information; one of these questions assessed whether the experimental manipulation was effective. Next, participants’ welfare attitudes were measured in two ways. First, participants were told to imagine they were on a Congressional committee charged with cutting $500 million from the federal budget. They were given a list of nine spending areas including “Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (Welfare)” and asked to indicate how much they would cut from each area. Second, participants indicated their agreement with two statements adapted from the General Social Survey: “We are spending too much money on welfare” (reverse-coded) and “Public assistance is necessary to ensure fairness in our society.” These items were averaged to create a composite scale of welfare attitudes (Cronbach’s α =
0.77), centered at zero, ranging from −3 to 3. Next, racial resentment was measured using a standard scale including the above items from the ANES and four additional items (Henry and Sears 2002). These items were averaged to form a composite (Cronbach’s α = 0.87), centered
at zero, ranging from −3 to 3.

Yeah, this should not have been a surprise.

We first tested the effect of the population trend information on participants’ welfare support and racial resentment (table 3). White participants assigned to the Decline Salient condition reported significantly greater opposition to welfare than those assigned to the Majority Salient condition. While white participants who were told that whites continue to be the largest single ethnic group in the United States proposed cutting $28 million from federal welfare spending, those told that whites’ population share is substantially declining proposed cutting $51 million. In addition, whites in the Decline Salient condition reported significantly greater opposition to welfare and higher levels of racial resentment on survey measures. By contrast, minority participants proposed cutting roughly the same amount of money from welfare across conditions and showed opposite trends from whites on survey measures. These trends were not statistically significant, though due to the small number of minority participants, we have low statistical power to detect significance. For our purposes it is most important to note that the trends we observed among minorities were qualitatively different from those we found among whites.

And we checked to see whether it was a pro-white bias or an "anti-minority" one (it was anti-minority), by testing the response when the racial income gap fell.

We first model whites’ program support (model 1 in table 4). These participants reported significantly less support for TANF than for unemployment insurance net of condition. We found no significant main effects of exposure to the Gap Closing condition or the racial composition of program beneficiaries. There was, however, a significant, negative interaction between assignment to the Gap Closing condition and the race of beneficiaries (p = 0.04), such that whites showed uniquely low support for programs that benefited minorities if
they had been told that the white income advantage is closing. When evaluating programs they believed primarily benefited whites, white
participants who were told the racial income gap was shrinking did not differ much in their program support from white participants who were told the income gap was widening. However, when the program primarily benefited African Americans and Latinos, whites in the Gap Closing condition reported less support than in the Gap Expanding condition (figure 6a). This pattern suggests that the significant interaction found in model 1 is driven by decreased support for a welfare program benefiting minorities, not increased support for a program benefiting whites. In addition, we found no significant effect of the Gap Closing condition on white participants’ racial identification (p > 0.58), and racial identification did not moderate the interaction between the Gap Closing condition and race of program beneficiaries (p > 0.95).

In this study, we provide evidence supporting the final link in our logic: that racial threats lead to anti-welfare sentiment among whites because they perceive such programs to mostly benefit minorities. Where a welfare program was portrayed as primarily benefiting whites, threatened white participants reported almost identical support for welfare as unthreatened white participants. These findings provide discerning support for our claim that whites’ opposition to welfare following racial threat is due to increased racial resentment

So why am I going on about welfare and redistributive policies? Because they serve as concrete actions through which we can measure the largest ideological sorting of the modern American right: perceived threats to white power. And I do make this about race, because...well, it outstrips and influences everything else.
Opinions on race are the issue which is most likely to sunder a friendship-both one's own race and their opinion on race relations.

Thirty-one percent of young Americans, but 37% of young Biden voters and 32% of young Trump voters say that politics has gotten in the way of a friendship before. Gender is not a strong predictor of whether or not politics has invaded personal space, but race and ethnicity are. Young whites (33%) are more likely than young Blacks (22%) to say that politics has gotten in the way--and nearly half of white Biden voters (45%) say politics has negatively impacted a friendship; 30% of white Trump voters say the same.

When young Americans were asked whether a difference of opinion on several political issues might impact a friendship, 44% of all young Americans said that they could not be friends with someone who disagreed with them on race relations. Sixty percent of Biden voters agreed with this sentiment, as did a majority of women (52%) and Blacks (57%). Americans between 18 and 24 (47%) were more likely than those slightly older (41% of those 25-29) to feel that race relations would cause a problem with friendships. Differences of opinion on whether or not to support Trump was an issue for slightly more than a third (34%), followed by immigration (30%), police reform (27%), abortion (26%), climate change (26%), and guns (19%).

And in terms of voting behaviour, much the same-in fact, if we zero out the two economic programs that are heavily associated with whiteness, the right suddenly looks a lot more economically conservative

For one thing, I hope my version clarifies that most of the questions that went into the “social/identity” dimension were actually about Black Americans, Muslims, and immigration. Only three of the twelve questions in the “Social Dimension” are really about “social issues” as I would usually use the phrase (issues like gay marriage, abortion, and transgender acceptance). Indeed the article itself defines a “populist” as “liberal on economic issues, conservative on race issues”. I had also wondered how much all of these results were driven by the questions about whether Medicare and Social Security were “important to you”. These were by far the most heavily-”progressive” questions out of the 24, so they will naturally push respondents into the “economically progressive” quadrants.
What happens if you zero out those questions? Suddenly Trump voters become a bit less “split by economic issues”:

Statements like "the left is too extreme" "wokeness is why I left the left", or something similar, may be the case for a few individuals-but they are not representative of the vast majority of right-wing radicalization.
So why do they keep popping up, then? Firstly, as rationalization. "I oppose the left because they hate white people" is better PR and more mentally comforting to the person saying it than "I perceive that the status of white people at the top is declining and I don't like that." So those sort of statements are very good for covering that cognitive dissonance-remember that racial resentment requires the belief that black people (and usually Hispanics as well) are being given an unfair leg up-which you can't reconcile with waning unfair advantages for your own group. But the other part is, unsurprisingly, the right-wing media.

I've gone over how it creates disinformation in-depth, but here I want to look at how it creates in-and-out-groups.
Specifically, through the use of the term "hate."

We collected verbatim transcripts from the leading primetime shows on Fox News and MSNBC (in the 6:00–10:59 pm timeslots), between January to May 8, 2020. The sample included a total of 1088 transcripts from the two channels (n Fox = 558; n MSNBC = 530). These were provided via the LexisNexis database, and were initially gathered via an empty keyword search for these two channels over the timeframe specified above. The transcripts were then loaded into a text analysis software, where they were systematically ordered.

We them employed a quantitative content analytic approach, by which we constructed a dictionary of terms and phrases indicative of strong antipathy, such as “dislike,” “despise,” “can’t stand” or “hate.” As both channels are often perceived and depicted as highly partisan, we expected some degree of similarity along these basic measures of antipathy and negative sentiment. Our results painted a different picture: usage of these terms was 5 times higher on Fox News than on MSNBC. One term in particular stood out: “hate,” of which we found a total of 647 mentions on Fox, compared to MSNBC’s 118.

And they use it differently-

Further analysis revealed that “hate” was most frequently used in conjunction with “(Donald)
Trump” (n = 99) and in combination with the pronouns “I” (n = 128) and “they” (n = 101). This latter combination was also were the starkest difference between the two channels emerged: only 5 instances of this phrase were found in the MSNBC data, compared to Fox News’ 101 (=1:20).

There is, in fact, a clear shift in strategy over time, as a result of the much more aggressive tone the Murdoch Machine pumped out

And that strategy was simple: consolidating identities-both of the group and of their enemies.

Fox links most of these subjects (“they”) together. Terms such as media, the left, Democrats and political elites are often used interchangeably, portraying these actors as unified in hatred of Fox audiences, their views and their representatives

The final thesis, then, is this: Race is the central organizing axis of modern American politics. This fact dates back to the Civil Rights Movement, when blacks became a major political bloc (not to say that they did not affect politics before, but not nearly at the same scale). Race, thus, has only been strengthened as an rail of American politics by three major (though not sole) shocks: the increasing number and visibility of Latino immigrants, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, and the Great Recession. The final part, then, is that the ideological sorting of whites into the reactionary party has not been a reaction to progressive excesses (perceived, imagined, or real), but rather, as a response to and rejection of the attempt of minority groups to stand on equal footing.

[Repubblica Fascista Sociale Italiana]

I don't think I've ever really heard a good argument against cities.

Usually all it boils down to it "Liberals!", "Drugs!", and "I want grass!"

Meanwhile, left-wing politics exists in rural areas (I should know, I live in one of those areas. 80% of the voters in the county went with Biden), drugs and addiction are actually a bigger issue in rural areas because they're less capable of getting help for their issues, and oh yeah, yards exist in cities, especially out West.

An urbanized population is easier to control and adequately govern as a state should, we see many examples of this, famously Singapore

[San Lumen]

I don't think I've ever really heard a good argument against cities.

Usually all it boils down to it "Liberals!", "Drugs!", and "I want grass!"

Meanwhile, left-wing politics exists in rural areas (I should know, I live in one of those areas. 80% of the voters in the county went with Biden), drugs and addiction are actually a bigger issue in rural areas because they're less capable of getting help for their issues, and oh yeah, yards exist in cities, especially out West.

Cities are pretty strongly linked to higher rates of mental health problems (particularly depression), cost of living is drastically higher, there's usually more violent crime, they're dirtier both environmentally and physically etc etc. There are very real and very valid complaints about city living, even if a lot of it does get simplified down.

Total rubbish. I lived in a city for several years and will be going back soon.

[Lady Victory]

What, pray tell, does urban living have to do with white supremacy?

[The Alma Mater]

I don't think I've ever really heard a good argument against cities.

Usually all it boils down to it "Liberals!", "Drugs!", and "I want grass!"

Meanwhile, left-wing politics exists in rural areas (I should know, I live in one of those areas. 80% of the voters in the county went with Biden), drugs and addiction are actually a bigger issue in rural areas because they're less capable of getting help for their issues, and oh yeah, yards exist in cities, especially out West.

Cities are pretty strongly linked to higher rates of mental health problems (particularly depression), cost of living is drastically higher, there's usually more violent crime, they're dirtier both environmentally and physically etc etc. There are very real and very valid complaints about city living, even if a lot of it does get simplified down.

Well, yes and no.
Take pollution. For an individual, a city is obviously more polluted than a cabin in the midde of the woods. But having a million people clumped together in a city is vastly better for the environment than having them spread out would be. Cheaper to create infrastructure for as well.

And that goes for most things on your list. If there were no cities, everything would be more polluted, more expensive etc. for everyone.

[San Lumen]

What, pray tell, does urban living have to do with white supremacy?

Cities tend to be more diverse and multicultural.

[Lady Victory]

What, pray tell, does urban living have to do with white supremacy?

Cities tend to be more diverse and multicultural.

You're missing the point.

Town v. City is not the topic.

[The Alma Mater]

Cities tend to be more diverse and multicultural.

You're missing the point.

Town v. City is not the topic.

White supremacy is more common in rural areas though. So it can be related.

[Lady Victory]

You're missing the point.

Town v. City is not the topic.

White supremacy is more common in rural areas though. So it can be related.

Yes, but not when discussing the benefits/drawbacks of urban life and rural life.

Again: the point is being missed, here.

[San Lumen]

White supremacy is more common in rural areas though. So it can be related.

Yes, but not when discussing the benefits/drawbacks of urban life and rural life.

Again: the point is being missed, here.

On that topic yes but it is true white supremacy is far more common in rural areas.

[Borderlands of Rojava]

SNIP

So really, the dichotomy of economic anxiety vs racial resentment is a false one when describing motivations for Trump votes, because the economic anxiety is racialized and the racial resentment is heavily driven by economics?

[Lady Victory]

SNIP

So really, the dichotomy of economic anxiety vs racial resentment is a false one when describing motivations for Trump votes, because the economic anxiety is racialized and the racial resentment is heavily driven by economics?

"I support the emancipation of slaves."

"Don't you know? That will just let the black man take your job!"

"What!? Then fuck those n*ggers!"

Some things never change.

[Borderlands of Rojava]

What, pray tell, does urban living have to do with white supremacy?

Cities tend to be more diverse and multicultural.

That's not always a good thing either you know. There's drawbacks to multiculturalism. Back in 1991 at the outset of the Yugoslav war, the Detroit metropolitan region became a hotbed of interethnic violence between Serbs and Albanians, leading to numerous homicides, assaults, acts of vandalism and even a few bombings. My uncle neighborhood was a hotbed of the conflict and became one giant outdoor shooting range for the decade. He lived in an urban area and starting in 1991 and lasting till 99-2000, the cultural enrichment he was getting was having to hear gunshots or see blood up on the sheets when he read the paper on Saturday morning. So while I understand your fear of rural areas as being seats of racism, let's not pretend that multiculturalism is the opposite of bigotry. A multicultural society can often be a very sectarian one.