Christ finally a piece on Trump voters that addresses racism as a motivational ideology theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
"The paper quoted G. D. Miller, a “59-year-old oil-and-gas lease buyer,” who explained that “the way I understood the Klan, it's not anti-this or anti-that.”
"Trump embodied his supporters’ most profound beliefs—combining an insistence that discriminatory policies were necessary with vehement denials that policies discriminate and absolute outrage that the question would even be asked."
BOOM "The relevant factor in support for Trump among white voters was not education, or even income, but the ideological frame with which they understood their challenges and misfortunes."
We need to talk about racism as an ideological framework
Not a bad habit or a character flaw or an understandable mistake. An ideological framework.
There's something else very interesting being spotlit in this essay - the idea of a persistent cognitive dissonance in society in general. I've noticed this in literature. Bear with me a moment:
In Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare can count on his audience to take the part of the female characters who have been treated unfairly by men - even though he's writing in a society that generally treated women like chattel.
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald takes a shortcut to make us dislike a character by having him say some racist bullshit - even though he's writing in a society in which Black people were second-class citizens by law.
I've always kind of wondered about how these different strata of ideology can coexist in culture; it's not that different people have different opinions, it's that MOST people have BOTH opinions.
If you don't understand that white people can deplore racism AND hold racist beliefs at the same time, it's going to be very hard to understand America.
A really successful piece of art often satisfies both the revolutionary and conservative urges at once. Anna Karenina kills herself, as is fitting punishment for a loose woman, but you're meant to feel sad about it - you're not a monster.
As @AdamSerwer states in the piece above, Obama offered white voters exactly that kind of reconciliatory narrative - you could make history by voting for a Black man but don't worry, he's not like all those other Black men
Or to put it more generously, he offered white people a way to feel safe enough to let the more open and progressive parts of themselves take the lead.
It did not surprise me in the least when Trump came along and they willingly let him cast them in a different play.
The reason I'm so interested in this stuff is because, no, we will never fully conquer the xenophobic parts of our mammalian brains. And yet there are ways to dial it up and down.
The SAME PEOPLE who handed our nation over to the worst impulses of human nature, made a different choice when offered a way to do so, and could again
when I was coming up it was considered smart to ask questions like "what part of X culture makes X people do Y?" And the more I read anthropology the more bogus I think that is, because X culture is always going to be soup.
even monocultures contain multitudes. Cultures and the ideologies within them are like genes - they can be turned on or off. The same culture can produce many wildly different political phenotypes.
The question is how to activate the cultural genes - narratives, ideologies, patterns of behavior - that are good for us. The fact that Trump ran a full-on campaign on xenophobia - against HILLARY CLINTON - and ALMOST lost - is really encouraging to me
