- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
TO UNDERSTAND THE rise of Donald Trump, you don’t need to go to a diner in the Midwest or read “Hillbilly Elegy,” J.D. Vance’s memoir.
You just need to know these basic facts:
In 1980, white people accounted for about 80 percent of the U.S. population.
In 2024, white people account for about 58 percent of the U.S. population.
Trump appeals to white people gripped by demographic hysteria. Especially older white people who grew up when white people represented a much larger share of the population. They fear becoming a minority.
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While I do think racism plays a big role, articles like these that paint a large American section with broad brush like this play a dangerous game.
At this point if you’re still supporting Trump, there is little that can be done for you with regards to changing your mind and youll be hard pressed to find sympathy.
But there is something to be said about the rural / urban divide. Small town America has been left behind - both economically and culturally and somehow we have to reach them. I don’t know if it’s a failure of messaging on the Dems or what exactly. I also think it’s a much broader issue than just ‘racism’.
he’s not popular. he’s super unpopular. he was the biggest energizer for democratic voter turnout despite a super unpopular and boring democratic candidate. even when he won the election he lost the popular vote. just because US elections are very antidemocratic doesn’t mean he’s popular. stop making shit up.
They fear becoming a minority.
They/we were often the minority but still held all the power.
We’re simply terrified that in becoming the minority now, Black and Brown people would start treating us like we’ve treated them for hundreds of years.
We’re simply terrified that in becoming the minority now, Black and Brown people would start treating us like we’ve treated them for hundreds of years.
That is definitely a huge part of it. And it’s total projection like so much else they believe. “They’ll get revenge because we would get revenge.”
And at what point does that become a self-fulfilling prophecy? The longer minorities in this country are treated as second-class citizens, the more likely it becomes for them to treat whites the exact same way when they’re the minority.
If there wasn’t a purge when most of the black population of the country was released from slavery, I don’t think a purge is coming.
In 2024, white people account for about 58 percent of the U.S. population.
Especially now that you can “become black.”
That said, I wonder if someone like Obama is counted in the “white people” part of that statistic. He should. He’s as white as he is black, just like Kamala Harris is as Indian as she is black.
Not one drop rule still applies to this day
The average Black American is ~1/3 white (because of all the rape of enslaved women, basically) so he’s not that much off the average there.
I don’t doubt it, but based on Trump’s reasoning, Kamala Harris has an Indian mother, so she’s Indian. Therefore Barack Obama has a white mother, so he’s white.
Which is why I’m going to keep telling that to Republicans.
I’d imagine he be classified as mixed race or something since he’s both not either?
It’s only in the past few years that “two or more” races became an option on most demographic forms. Even into the early 2000s most demographic forms only let you pick one category so you had to make a choice. The 2024 number may more accurately account for mixed race people but there is no way that 80s number does at all.
Source: was a confused mixed child asking adults which I should pick on official forms and just got shoulder shrugs and hand waving from them.
Three other day, I was reading through the parts of Mississippi constitution which regard marriages and got to the section about race-mixing. It was really disturbing to see some of those incredibly offensive terms merely crossed out from such a legally influential document.
Also, I learned that you have to accept the existence of “a supreme being” to hold any office in Mississippi. Less fucked up, but still fucked up.
I grew up in the south. Mississippi was too much even for a lot of us more country folk. My apologies to any decent people in Ms for getting lumped in with the rest of the terrible folks in that state….
Oof. I’m from Texas and had a friend in highschool who grew up in Mississippi. One day while discussing dominant and recessive traits in biology, she noted that she was born left-handed, but the teachers at her public school beat it out of her and got her to use her right hand. Anytime she’d use her left hand they’d
smack her hand with a ruler
because
“that’s THE DEVIL’S hand!”
Fucking beating kids in public school over superstitions! How we haven’t nuked Mississippi yet is beyond me. Fuck it, nuke everything from Texas to Florida up to South Carolina. I haven’t lived a perfect life, I’m sure I deserve a face-full of nuke, too.
If you haven’t seen bittersoutherner.com I highly recommend it. A great publication that’s doing good work trying to counteract all the shit happening down there. A lot of stuff I love about the south but unfortunately even more that I’m ashamed of about it.
Thank you! Genuinely, I appreciate this interaction. You are getting tallied under “bright points” for my day.
Aww, thanks! Same to you!
Especially now that you can “become black.”
Well, if they’re all so scared that white males are the most discriminated against, they should all become black women. Problem solved!
/S, of course.
Not a bad plan! Let’s get them to work on it!
Anyway- I am definitely going to enjoy spending the next few months letting Republicans know that Obama is white based on Trump’s own ideas of race.
we got ourselves a sherlock over here
I feel like this article gets written every 3 weeks.
WHAT? Not Trump! /s
Why? Are minorities treated badly or something?
Dey turk mah jerb
DEY TUK IS JERB!!!
Also, I wanted to say that the more open Trump is about racism, the more he will turn people off. There are a lot of people who are pretty much racists, but they would never admit it, even to themselves. These are people who cross the street when they see a black man coming toward them, but would never dream of saying the N-word and think Martin Luther King had a dream about something involving ending racism and that was good.
Those people will not want to be associated with Trump and Vance the more overt they get.
This is an interesting question - if you’re lying to yourself about being racist, and won’t condone racist policies and you know, act in a way to not look racist… Like a philosophical P zombie, are you for all external functional (maybe limited to politically) purposes not racist?
All people are racist to some degree. The ability of our brains to perform categorization and pattern recognition are two major reasons why humans have been successful as a species. We can’t help but apply those concepts to the people we interact with.
Some people are more fear motivated and gravitate towards the “black people are violent” kind of racism while others tend towards the “Asians are good at math” kind of racism but both are forms of racism. Obviously the first type is going to have more negative outcomes in society than the second but that doesn’t mean the second type is not racist. They’re both fundamentally generalizations based primarily on the race of another human.
Simplifying complex information for quick analysis is how our brains work and that’s essentially what racism is. There is no getting away from it completely.
This is the correct answer. Racism is systematic and it is to simple to blame the individuel.
In this case, I think using the term racist here is diluting the term and causing confusion. I think it’s better to us the anthropological term here of tribal, at least in your first and last paragraphs. If everyone is racist then I have trouble not considering that a normal part of being human. It seems like railing against people who breath or something. If we’re biologically programmed to be this way, then we need to stop trying to claim people are bad for their biology, and at best we’re now going to say there’s an acceptable and normal level of racism on the spectrum that everyone is on.
I don’t think that’s a great framing, and avoiding that framing in my mind means not claiming that everyone is racist.
No, they’re still racist because their actions (e.g. voting for Trump) increase racial inequality.
One doesn’t have to acknowledge their cancer to be full of tumors.
Racism can lay quietly below the surface while festering and slowly rotting away their insides.
This doesn’t really address my thought experiment though - if they don’t act racist then now we’re just arguing about how they should feel inside, where no one can see their private thoughts. I.e. are we doing a purity test here, or do we care about actual things the people do?
Is anyone surprised by this? Trump is the same guy that spent 4 years demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate because he didn’t think he was a US-born citizen. That was his first foray into “politics” and it established both his loyal base and the tone of his public discourse.
Pretty sure this applies to all right-wing politicians, especially ones of the far-right.
Yepp. Even if they don’t speak to it, they are Trojan horses.
I don’t think racism itself is enough for Trump and far-right to succeed, which is precisely why they’ve combined it with populism and working class rhetoric. Of course, there’s still racism like how muslims are being portrayed as violent beasts as opposed to culture white christians, but a lot of it is also things like “immigrants are taking away money from welfare thats why you live bad” or “immigrants are taking our jobs” or “jews control everything and steal from workers” and so on, you know what they say.
Like any good right-wing propaganda, there is a grain of truth in those statements, and it’s that economic reality of working class is shit - wages are stagnant, exploitation is rampant and just pure stress when it comes to finances. I do believe that if people’s needs are met then the racist rhetoric would lose a lot of its power and people will just stop caring as much as they do right now, but that’s very unlikely without any radical action.
His supporters certainly don’t mind an awful lot of racism though.
They fear becoming a minority.
They operate under the false beliefs that they already are and that “the libs” bring in foreigners to tilt the vote (which is litteraly not possible) and then “those people get free everything” to feed further into racism. The imafinery bussed in people can’t vote or get benefits but thier social circle says so and thats all they need to believe and repeat it.
The triangle of rhetoric is appeal to authority, appeal to emotion, appeal to logic. They don’t accept any of it thay didn’t come from within thier social group so there is no convinving them and that is why Tronald Dump can say he could shoot somebody on 5th avenue and have them call it fake news despite beinh recorded.
Aren’t they also the ones loading up all of their undesirables onto buses and shipping them off to more lefterly cities?
The triangle of rhetoric is appeal to authority, appeal to emotion, appeal to logic. They don’t accept any of it thay didn’t come from within thier social group so there is no convinving them and that is why Tronald Dump can say he could shoot somebody on 5th avenue and have them call it fake news despite being recorded.
This is spot on. Delve into the inevitable “Politics and Religion” section of any old school web forum for white guy hobbies and nine times out of ten it’s going to be knee deep in a loud circle jerk consisting of these exact guys whipped into a frenzy over nothing. Look, but don’t touch, it’s like a buzz saw in there.
This is exactly what my neighbor stopped me to tell me recently. About bringing in immigrants to vote and what not. I tried to tell him none of that information is true and show him where and why, but it’s really hard to do without making them dig further into their position.
Anne they are now conditioned believe that any media that doesn’t align with them is fake.
From skimming this, there seems to be nothing in there not debunked in 2016 by https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
I actually think a core part of being republican has to do with hating someone and feeling superior to them. It can revolve around sex, education, accent, culture, religion, sexual orientation, government structure, or skin color, but they have to hate on someone. You can plot the generations of conservatives by who they (primarily) hate at any given time.
They have to wrap themselves in their hate-blanket and fantasize about how they’ll have their AR-15 locked and loaded when the baddies come around. First they need to be scared, so they make up stories and lies about how “the other” corrupted their children, stole their jobs, took the government assistance, or performed DDOS on their interview, and then talk with friends or family on how evil the other is. Then they get great pleasure in having a big hate-orgy and trying hard to “trigger a liberal” spewing their made up hysterical bullshit.
A short list who’s-who hate list for conservatives: communists, socialists, civil rights activists, labor unions, abortion rights people and doctors, environmentalists, academics, immigrants, “the gays” (all LGBTQ+ individuals), muslims, transgender people, “mainstream media”. They’ve got to hate someone.
Authoritarian Personality
That reminds me of the primitive human trait of tribalism.
If you have a group labeled “others”, your group will get closer. If you have no “others” to fear, you’ll find a way to invent such a group.
It’s why I don’t think humanity will ever get along unless an external, immediate threat unites us. Aliens or something.
But yeah, it feels like conservative people are just more… “Primitive” in that way. Their fear organ is just more developed.
It’s why I don’t think humanity will ever get along unless an external, immediate threat unites us. Aliens or something.
What like a foreign dictatorship meddling in your democratic process? Or maybe that’s not existential enough - what about an urgent planetary climate crisis caused by a greedy minority trying to steal or planet’s limited resources to turn into useless stock?
The tragic thing about that is that it’s kind of not concrete enough for our little brains to comprehend on an emotional level.
Or rather, it’s so large and long-term and complex that we can’t deal with it.
I honestly think you’d still have collaborators with an obviously malevolent external force. Like say portals to hell opened up
Hmm, probably, but I feel like humanity would largely come together, or split into two camps.
I would envision either “everyone against the demons”, and the few who are with them are a small, covert minority, kind of like criminals, or humanity splitting into two camps, which would still be division, but arguably less divided than how we currently are.
To this point, how could we increase the number of people who take the side of humanity?
My thinking is that reducing anomie and inequality, increasing the bonds between people, all help move that number in a positive direction, as more of us realise that we need eachother.
This is my sneaky way of saying that we could be doing this now. That sure, maybe there will always be those who are just in it for themselves or a tiny in-group, but that’s no excuse for fatalism/doomerism.
IE we don’t have to wait for baleful aliens or demons spewing forth from hellgates. If we’re not waiting for the perfect unifying scenario, we can start moving the needle in a positive direction now. :)
Oh yeah I certainly hope we can. It’s just hard when there are big systemic and evolutionary obstacles in the way.
