TO UNDERSTAND THE rise of Donald Trump, you don’t need to go to a diner in the Midwest or read “Hillbilly Elegy,” J.D. Vance’s memoir.
You just need to know these basic facts:
In 1980, white people accounted for about 80 percent of the U.S. population.
In 2024, white people account for about 58 percent of the U.S. population.
Trump appeals to white people gripped by demographic hysteria. Especially older white people who grew up when white people represented a much larger share of the population. They fear becoming a minority.
John Brown didn’t get to kill enough slavers, that’s why we’re all here. We gave the racists a little rope, and now they’re trying to hang us with it. Been that way ever since Reconstruction ended.
Opposition to racism must be enduring. It must be absolute. It can brook no compromise, because compromise is tacit agreement to the validity (however small or marginal) of the opposition’s point, and racism is based on an absurdity. And when a society starts validating absurdities… well, look at Trump.
and the fact the confederacy was allowed to “live
inon” in memory as heritage, and allowed statues honouring traitors to the United StatesIf you allow confederate statues to honour enemies of the country, why are there no statues honouring the british red coats from the war of independence? Where are the statues honouring soviet spies executed for espionage?
Constructed largely after the cowards were all dead, in the civil rights era. And yet some people still insist that it’s ‘history’ to leave them standing instead of a blatant attempt to cement the United States as a ‘White Man’s’ polity.
Fuck them.
If you allow confederate statues to honour enemies of the country, why are there no statues honouring the british red coats from the war of independence? Where are the statues honouring soviet spies executed for espionage?
Let’s make some 9/11 memorials to commemorate those brave hijackers too.
It’s fucking absurd, and while I know HOW it got started, I don’t know how it got started. You know what I mean? Like, I understand the conditions that led to the rise of Lost Causer nonsense, but I just can’t wrap my fucking head around the idea that everyone just fucking normalized it. Like, even if you are a racist (as most 19th century Americans were to at least some degree), what the fuck kind of lunatic country commemorates the ‘heroism’ of literal traitors and secessionists who killed hundreds of thousands of our countrymen?
Sherman didn’t burn enough.
Sherman should’ve done a victory lap juuuuust to make sure
40 acres and a mule would’ve gone a long way. Shame Andrew Johnson was a piece of shit.
Fun fact: There is a statue in honor of famous traitor Benedict Arnold… kinda.
I mean there should at least be a statue commemorating when we future Canadians had most of DC burning, including the White House and Capitol.
:p
They fear becoming a minority.
They/we were often the minority but still held all the power.
We’re simply terrified that in becoming the minority now, Black and Brown people would start treating us like we’ve treated them for hundreds of years.
We’re simply terrified that in becoming the minority now, Black and Brown people would start treating us like we’ve treated them for hundreds of years.
That is definitely a huge part of it. And it’s total projection like so much else they believe. “They’ll get revenge because we would get revenge.”
And at what point does that become a self-fulfilling prophecy? The longer minorities in this country are treated as second-class citizens, the more likely it becomes for them to treat whites the exact same way when they’re the minority.
If there wasn’t a purge when most of the black population of the country was released from slavery, I don’t think a purge is coming.
They fear becoming a minority.
clutches pearls Goodness gracious, someone might treat them like they treat minorities!
That is literally what the white “christians” have been stressing about here. As a minority mutt that “passes”, maybe try being less of an asshole?
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I guess this is one of the few times American Exceptionalism actually proves right. We’ve always been a melting pot of cultures. That includes many different “white” cultures for a good few centuries, but go ahead and ask the Irish and Italian immigrants if they didn’t feel like minorities as they were coming off the boats to Ellis Island. Even next to the oppression and brutality both Native and Black Americans faced, their contributions to our society are innumerable and invaluable. The new immigrants coming from Latin America are just being played for political gain while we appreciate and depend on their willingness to work our farms and construction sites. Their kids are just as adapted to American culture as mine are, just as every second generation of immigrants turns out to be. We stress a huge amount about racism (and yes we still have a long way to go, as Trump shows) but when you really compare us to other countries, we seem to be doing alright. The melting pot will keep going, even once us white people are under 50% of the population.
I think that you overextimate the american exceptionalism. In the xx century the europe was destroyed in the ww leaving the usa as the only state not touched by the wars. The rest of the world was lagging techlogicaly. Now the situation is different. Usa is a young country and it is not different from any other.
11 aircraft carriers, the dollar being the fiat currency of the world, and our cultural dominance pretty much seals the hegemony win for the US since the '90s, but ok, sure dude. We’re no different than other countries…
To be an empire doesn’t mean be different
white people aren’t even close to becoming a minority, we’re just approaching a point that no race is the majority. there will still be more white people than any other race here for a long long time, and when that changes it’s only going to be because of racial mixing and a loss of racial identity or the birth of a new one. white people will not be a minority just because they become less than 50% of the population. they will lose some of the privilege they have and that may feel like oppression to them, but they will not become a minority.
We will see.
Babe, wake up, new flavor of brain rot just dropped…
Also, I wanted to say that the more open Trump is about racism, the more he will turn people off. There are a lot of people who are pretty much racists, but they would never admit it, even to themselves. These are people who cross the street when they see a black man coming toward them, but would never dream of saying the N-word and think Martin Luther King had a dream about something involving ending racism and that was good.
Those people will not want to be associated with Trump and Vance the more overt they get.
This is an interesting question - if you’re lying to yourself about being racist, and won’t condone racist policies and you know, act in a way to not look racist… Like a philosophical P zombie, are you for all external functional (maybe limited to politically) purposes not racist?
No, they’re still racist because their actions (e.g. voting for Trump) increase racial inequality.
I was assuming the people that are the potential P zombie here are the ones turned off from Trump because of open racism, and therefore NOT voting for him. I implied that these people are taking actions they (at least think) are not racist, like not voting for Trump.
All people are racist to some degree. The ability of our brains to perform categorization and pattern recognition are two major reasons why humans have been successful as a species. We can’t help but apply those concepts to the people we interact with.
Some people are more fear motivated and gravitate towards the “black people are violent” kind of racism while others tend towards the “Asians are good at math” kind of racism but both are forms of racism. Obviously the first type is going to have more negative outcomes in society than the second but that doesn’t mean the second type is not racist. They’re both fundamentally generalizations based primarily on the race of another human.
Simplifying complex information for quick analysis is how our brains work and that’s essentially what racism is. There is no getting away from it completely.
This is the correct answer. Racism is systematic and it is to simple to blame the individuel.
Systems don’t vote in the US however (at least in the context of this article) - we’re talking about individuals voting.
In this case, I think using the term racist here is diluting the term and causing confusion. I think it’s better to us the anthropological term here of tribal, at least in your first and last paragraphs. If everyone is racist then I have trouble not considering that a normal part of being human. It seems like railing against people who breath or something. If we’re biologically programmed to be this way, then we need to stop trying to claim people are bad for their biology, and at best we’re now going to say there’s an acceptable and normal level of racism on the spectrum that everyone is on.
I don’t think that’s a great framing, and avoiding that framing in my mind means not claiming that everyone is racist.
I think you have a good point but it gets pretty far into the semantics of language. Most people seem to use the term racist in casual language to refer specifically to what are widely considered the worst outcomes associated with grouping people together by race. The “black people are violent” kind of racism that I referred to earlier. However, I don’t think there is anything about the academic definition of the word racist that would limit it to this kind of usage. I also get why you would want to avoid the conclusion that everyone is racist but I really believe that is the most accurate assessment of reality.
Granted, it is easy to see how your KKK kind of racist would want to latch on to this conclusion to minimize the horrible nature of their beliefs. Still, I don’t think you can get a holistic view of the problem without recognizing the fact that this tendency to make generalizations about groups of people exists within us all. Without seeing the scope of the problem I don’t think you can address it in any meaningful sense.
One doesn’t have to acknowledge their cancer to be full of tumors.
Racism can lay quietly below the surface while festering and slowly rotting away their insides.
This doesn’t really address my thought experiment though - if they don’t act racist then now we’re just arguing about how they should feel inside, where no one can see their private thoughts. I.e. are we doing a purity test here, or do we care about actual things the people do?
I actually think a core part of being republican has to do with hating someone and feeling superior to them. It can revolve around sex, education, accent, culture, religion, sexual orientation, government structure, or skin color, but they have to hate on someone. You can plot the generations of conservatives by who they (primarily) hate at any given time.
They have to wrap themselves in their hate-blanket and fantasize about how they’ll have their AR-15 locked and loaded when the baddies come around. First they need to be scared, so they make up stories and lies about how “the other” corrupted their children, stole their jobs, took the government assistance, or performed DDOS on their interview, and then talk with friends or family on how evil the other is. Then they get great pleasure in having a big hate-orgy and trying hard to “trigger a liberal” spewing their made up hysterical bullshit.
A short list who’s-who hate list for conservatives: communists, socialists, civil rights activists, labor unions, abortion rights people and doctors, environmentalists, academics, immigrants, “the gays” (all LGBTQ+ individuals), muslims, transgender people, “mainstream media”. They’ve got to hate someone.
Authoritarian Personality
That reminds me of the primitive human trait of tribalism.
If you have a group labeled “others”, your group will get closer. If you have no “others” to fear, you’ll find a way to invent such a group.
It’s why I don’t think humanity will ever get along unless an external, immediate threat unites us. Aliens or something.
But yeah, it feels like conservative people are just more… “Primitive” in that way. Their fear organ is just more developed.
It’s why I don’t think humanity will ever get along unless an external, immediate threat unites us. Aliens or something.
What like a foreign dictatorship meddling in your democratic process? Or maybe that’s not existential enough - what about an urgent planetary climate crisis caused by a greedy minority trying to steal or planet’s limited resources to turn into useless stock?
The tragic thing about that is that it’s kind of not concrete enough for our little brains to comprehend on an emotional level.
Or rather, it’s so large and long-term and complex that we can’t deal with it.
I honestly think you’d still have collaborators with an obviously malevolent external force. Like say portals to hell opened up
Hmm, probably, but I feel like humanity would largely come together, or split into two camps.
I would envision either “everyone against the demons”, and the few who are with them are a small, covert minority, kind of like criminals, or humanity splitting into two camps, which would still be division, but arguably less divided than how we currently are.
To this point, how could we increase the number of people who take the side of humanity?
My thinking is that reducing anomie and inequality, increasing the bonds between people, all help move that number in a positive direction, as more of us realise that we need eachother.
This is my sneaky way of saying that we could be doing this now. That sure, maybe there will always be those who are just in it for themselves or a tiny in-group, but that’s no excuse for fatalism/doomerism.
IE we don’t have to wait for baleful aliens or demons spewing forth from hellgates. If we’re not waiting for the perfect unifying scenario, we can start moving the needle in a positive direction now. :)
Oh yeah I certainly hope we can. It’s just hard when there are big systemic and evolutionary obstacles in the way.
This is definitely true. It’s something I’ve heard Trump supporters argue about firsthand. But it’s not just only racism or the threat of being a minority, but the fear of losing freedom to do what they want according to their own skewed morals. So while a decent chunk of why they think the way they do is sheer racism and fear around that (especially since the start of the BLM movement), it’s not the core of the problem.
I believe that this started as the resurgence of toxic masculinity in that Trump showing people it was okay to be misogynistic, racist, and homophobic in opposition to race, gender, and identity politics rising in the 2010s. Women’s rights and LGBT people are in their sights as well and, despite their narrative fitting well with fundamentalist religious morals, this seems more like resentment that those movements didn’t address their needs or issues. COVID restrictions that they disagreed with fanned the growing fire into the fulblown fascist conservative movement we see today.
So I don’t think it’s the fact that cis het white people are in lower relative numbers but it’s the event of rising social progressivism and more rights for minorities and women that spurred the antagonism of them.
Tldr: Bigots are upset that they didn’t get anything out of women’s, LGBT, and minorities rights.
I’ll agree with you except for the timeline. It started after 9/11, bigotry was far less openly acceptable during the 90s. It just blew up after Obama was elected and social media took off. People were all exposed to the same type of media at the time, and big media companies weren’t spreading extremely racist content, other than a few fringe things like Rush Limbaugh. Fox news really took off after 9/11 too.
I’ll agree with you except for the timeline. It started after 9/11, bigotry was far less openly acceptable during the 90s.
I want to disagree with this because bigotry was huge in the 90’s, but so was attacking it. Our cartoon’s were chock-full of anti-bigotry messaging, but then movies would be the opposite.
I think I, personally, would typify the 90’s with saying that one out-group is ok, but only if we all make fun of another one or you’re the butt of jokes. IE. You can have Will and Grace, but we’re using ‘gay’ as a word to literally just mean ‘bad.’
I think after 9/11 they were still the same old tactic they used in and after the cold war; security theater and fear mongering. But you’re right, news and political representatives definitely weren’t the completely open bigots that they are today though and I think you might be right about that time period being the start of today’s Fox news.
Social media definitely had a profound impact on politics, people’s rights, and open bigotry. This definitely gave them the means to have more of a voice with younger demographics but I’ll still argue that it wasn’t until Trump entered the picture that they were able to really push their narrative and decouple “truth” from official news sources in the minds of many. I don’t think I’ve seen so many people just repeat distorted views of reality at once until then.
Trump showing people it was okay to be misogynistic, racist, and homophobic
Yup. It’s far more that racism alone.
It’s all sorts of bigotry that Trump has essentially given them permission to stop hiding.
I don’t think racism itself is enough for Trump and far-right to succeed, which is precisely why they’ve combined it with populism and working class rhetoric. Of course, there’s still racism like how muslims are being portrayed as violent beasts as opposed to culture white christians, but a lot of it is also things like “immigrants are taking away money from welfare thats why you live bad” or “immigrants are taking our jobs” or “jews control everything and steal from workers” and so on, you know what they say.
Like any good right-wing propaganda, there is a grain of truth in those statements, and it’s that economic reality of working class is shit - wages are stagnant, exploitation is rampant and just pure stress when it comes to finances. I do believe that if people’s needs are met then the racist rhetoric would lose a lot of its power and people will just stop caring as much as they do right now, but that’s very unlikely without any radical action.
His supporters certainly don’t mind an awful lot of racism though.
Of course it’s not just racism. You got to throw in sexism and other kinds of discrimination. This is not just targeting elderly white people, all this certainly it is targeting many of them. It’s also targeting younger white people, and men, for example.
The other thing we should never forget is that Washington is full of sleazy politicians. In 2016, Trump was campaigning as a reformer, and people were hoping that maybe he would magically address some of that corruption. Of course he didn’t, but he played on that hope, as reform candidates always do. And once people buy into him, it’s easier for them to stay bought in than it is to admit that they got played.
Yes, Trump’s shit talking was extremely entertaining during the Republican primary. He brought that up against one of the most despised establishment figures in Hilary Clinton and it was a recipe for victory.
Why? Are minorities treated badly or something?
Dey turk mah jerb
DEY TUK IS JERB!!!
That true, actually where I grew up there were few orange people, but lately I noticed some people elected one !
Btw I am an antiracist so I will not descriminate but please dear U.S.A. citizens do not vote for this orange guy.
Whenever a group of white people get scared everyone suffers.
Is anyone surprised by this? Trump is the same guy that spent 4 years demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate because he didn’t think he was a US-born citizen. That was his first foray into “politics” and it established both his loyal base and the tone of his public discourse.
WHAT? Not Trump! /s
Why are they worried about white pepper becoming the minority? I mean, do we treat minorities badly around here or something?
Pretty sure this applies to all right-wing politicians, especially ones of the far-right.
Yepp. Even if they don’t speak to it, they are Trojan horses.
