In this morning’s NYT. Key grafs:
In a 2005 paper, Cara Wong, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, and Grace E. Cho, a psychology professor at St. Olaf College, found that many whites identified with their race, but “white racial identity is not politically salient.”
Wong and Cho went on, however, to make what turned out to be a crucially important point: that since
white identity is indeed unstable but easily triggered, the danger is that a demagogue could influence the salience of these identities to promote negative outgroup attitudes, link racial identification more strongly to policy preferences, and exacerbate group conflict.
The rest of the article goes on to talk about how that’s exactly what happened during the Trump campaign, and continues now. It’s not about the extremists; it’s about ordinary folks who know Trump is an awful person, but who voted for him anyway because he’s the only one articulating their fears and resentments. This is what Bannon understands, and why he’s so gleeful when Liberals get sanctimonious about racial identity politics. He recognizes that it provokes these fears and resentments and pushes more and more of these people into the Trump white nationalist camp.
It’s hard for me to see how the Trump presidency survives into next year, but no matter how the establishment arranges for his removal, you can bet he’ll be seen as a martyred hero among these people. Getting rid of Trump does not solve the problem. A smarter Trump will come along who will take the monster he has let out of the cage and he might succeed in riding it where Trump appears so far to have failed. I don’t know who it will be, but there’s power there, and it’s too tempting for some bad actor not to find a way to channel it for his/her political ambitions.
The question is not whether White resentment is historically justified—that’s a rational question whose answer is irrelevant to people whose passions do not submit to rational critique.The question is what it will take to assuage the fears and resentments that fuel these political passions.
In other words. what will it take to get this beast back in the cage? I don’t know that getting all huffy and condemning it is going to do the job. I wonder if the reconciliation process in South Africa after the fall of apartheid provides a model that should be considered. Something like that should have been done in the South during Reconstruction, but it wasn’t, so the old resentments still fester, and now are spreading to the upper Midwest and and elsewhere. The solution would require imagination and moral authority that is woefully missing from within our political class.
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