Many Republican voters value “keeping America great” more than they value democracy — and, by “keeping America great,” such voters typically mean “keeping America’s power structure white.”
—Eric Levitz commenting on Larry Bartels’s study: “Ethnic antagonism erodes Republicans’ commitment to democracy”
Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University documents what has been obvious from before Donald Trump descended the golden escalator. From the abstract:
Most Republicans in a January 2020 survey agreed that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” More than 40% agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” (In both cases, most of the rest said they were unsure; only one in four or five disagreed.)
Almost half agreed that “Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done.” Nearly three-quarters agreed that “It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.”
Bartels finds these attitudes “are grounded in real political values—specifically, and overwhelmingly, in Republicans’ ethnocentric concerns about the political and social role of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos in a context of significant demographic and cultural change.”
Translation: Political, religious and social power in the country is shifting, becoming less concentrated in White hands, i.e., away from them. Whites will have to share. The election of Barack Obama brought home the fact that they are on their way to becoming just another minority in this country. And they know how this country treats minorities. They and their forebears have done most of the treating for four hundred years.
Like Trump, they assume others think just as they do. These White Republicans assume others will behave towards them as they behave towards minorities. They are scared shitless.
Trump fuels that fear among his supporters, now as he did in 2016.
David Frum warned of this in January 2018 when he wrote, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
Levitz writes:
When democracy came to America, it was wrapped in white skin and carrying a burning cross. In the early 19th century, the same state constitutional conventions that gave the vote to propertyless white men disenfranchised free Blacks. For the bulk of our republic’s history, racial hierarchy took precedence over democracy. Across the past half century, the U.S. has shed its official caste system, and almost all white Americans have made peace with sharing this polity with people of other phenotypes. But forfeiting de jure supremacy is one thing; handing over de facto ownership of America’s mainstream politics, culture, and history is quite another. And as legal immigration diversifies America’s electorate while the nation’s unpaid debts to its Black population accrue interest and spur unrest, democracy has begun to seek more radical concessions from those who retain an attachment to white identity. A majority of light-skinned Americans may value their republic more than their (tacit) racial dominance. But sometimes, minorities rule.
Many already have abandoned democracy. Decades of increasing and increasingly subtle and complex Republican voter suppression efforts aimed at securing for themselves minority rule demonstrate that clearly. Desperation is in the air. All that’s missing is the flop sweat.
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