There is nothing new about white supremacist groups in the U.S., or anti-Semitism, or people who defend the symbols of the Confederacy. (The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.) From Richard Nixon’s “law and […] Read more »
The Political Payoff of Making Whites Feel Like a Minority
Nationality, race and ethnicity are a large part of identity for most people. Factors like this matter more for some people than others — and for some groups more than others — but a sense of group awareness or membership exists in varying degrees across all segments of American society. […] Read more »
The Policies of White Resentment
White resentment put Donald Trump in the White House. And there is every indication that it will keep him there, especially as he continues to transform that seething, irrational fear about an increasingly diverse America into policies that feed his supporters’ worst racial anxieties. … The guiding principle in Mr. […] Read more »
Aversion to difference
Last week, I examined two of the three strands of conservative thinking — aversion to government and aversion to change — which Donald Trump melded together in his successful effort to capture the White House. Here I’ll focus on the third — aversion to difference — which mostly lay dormant […] Read more »
Trump’s core voters could suffer most under GOP health bill, but they may not punish him for it
The Senate health-care bill has sharpened the central political question surrounding the 2017 Republican agenda: Will the voters who made Donald Trump president rebel? Like the House health-care bill, the Senate version would roll back Obamacare’s expansion of insurance coverage under Medicaid. While cutting Obamacare’s taxes on the rich, it […] Read more »
The End of the Left and the Right as We Knew Them
By now it has become quite clear that conservative parties in Europe and the United States have been gaining strength from white voters who have been mobilized around issues related to nationalism — resistance to open borders and to third-world immigration. In the United States, this development has been exacerbated […] Read more »