Thread by @doctorow

In "The Effect of White Social Prejudice on Support for American Democracy," a pair of political scientists used data from the World Values Survey to analyze the rise of authoritarian, anti-democratic rhetoric among American white people.

github.com/svmiller/woi/b…

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The authors released a prepub of their work last year; as I wrote then, "White Americans abandoned democracy and embraced authoritarianism when they realized brown people would soon outvote them."

boingboing.net/2018/05/30/pis…

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The paper has now been accepted for publication in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, and this has spurred fresh attention for the study and its conclusions.

svmiller.com/research/white…

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Writing on @NBCNews, @nberlat invokes the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who said "We need an ethno-state so that our people can ‘come home again’… We must give up the false dreams of equality and democracy."

nbcnews.com/think/opinion/…

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But he could just as readily have cited Peter Theil's avowed belief that "freedom" is incompatible with "democracy" (because in a democratic system, plutocrats would be outvoted and thus not free to exploit the rest of us).

cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/pet…

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This is why the GOP is so committed to voter suppression - and why the real strategic battleground of the civil rights era was voter-registration, not lunch-counters.

pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/rea…

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But after a brief flirtation with luring conservative, Catholic latinx people to the GOP by making abortion into a wedge issue, the party abandoned that strategy and pivoted to Trumpism, which, at its core, denies the legitimacy racialized people's claims of Americanness.

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That's why armed white militias are demanding to know if American indigenous people are "legal." "Legal" doesn't mean "legally in the USA" - it means "white."

azcentral.com/story/opinion/…

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But after years of turkeys voting for Christmas, the GOP is struggling to get poor whites to vote for plutocracy - workers are skeptical of claims that they need to submit gracefully to being thrown into a volcano to appease the economy gods.

pluralistic.net/2020/05/08/vol…

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Which makes the authoritarian turn in US politics all the more frightening - the farmer may have convinced the turkeys to vote for Christmas with honeyed words and big promises, but when the day comes, he's not above wringing their necks.

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And while I'm as furious as I can be with the Democratic party, its corporate sellouts, and its garbage policies, the authoritarian turn is mostly owned by the GOP.

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"The GOP has dug itself into such a hole on this that the most practical effort to stave off these impending losses is to disenfranchise the votes of the same ethnic/racial outgroups against whom GOP messaging has been stoking animosity."

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"Social intolerance isn't just leading to GOP support as we know it and see it now. It's leading to preferences in favor of the kind of candidate the GOP ultimately nominated and supported for president." -@stevenvmiller

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Image:
Epoch Times (modified)
flickr.com/photos/1425885…

CC BY
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.…

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