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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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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.
The Intercept - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for The Intercept:
MBFC: Left - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: Mostly Factual - United States of America
Wikipedia about this sourceSearch topics on Ground.News
https://theintercept.com/2024/08/10/republicans-trump-vance-racism-white-nationalism/
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.
John Brown didn’t get to kill enough slavers, that’s why we’re all here. We gave the racists a little rope, and now they’re trying to hang us with it. Been that way ever since Reconstruction ended.
Opposition to racism must be enduring. It must be absolute. It can brook no compromise, because compromise is tacit agreement to the validity (however small or marginal) of the opposition’s point, and racism is based on an absurdity. And when a society starts validating absurdities… well, look at Trump.
and the fact the confederacy was allowed to “live
inon” in memory as heritage, and allowed statues honouring traitors to the United StatesIf you allow confederate statues to honour enemies of the country, why are there no statues honouring the british red coats from the war of independence? Where are the statues honouring soviet spies executed for espionage?
I mean there should at least be a statue commemorating when we future Canadians had most of DC burning, including the White House and Capitol.
:p
Constructed largely after the cowards were all dead, in the civil rights era. And yet some people still insist that it’s ‘history’ to leave them standing instead of a blatant attempt to cement the United States as a ‘White Man’s’ polity.
Fuck them.
If you allow confederate statues to honour enemies of the country, why are there no statues honouring the british red coats from the war of independence? Where are the statues honouring soviet spies executed for espionage?
Let’s make some 9/11 memorials to commemorate those brave hijackers too.
It’s fucking absurd, and while I know HOW it got started, I don’t know how it got started. You know what I mean? Like, I understand the conditions that led to the rise of Lost Causer nonsense, but I just can’t wrap my fucking head around the idea that everyone just fucking normalized it. Like, even if you are a racist (as most 19th century Americans were to at least some degree), what the fuck kind of lunatic country commemorates the ‘heroism’ of literal traitors and secessionists who killed hundreds of thousands of our countrymen?
Sherman didn’t burn enough.
Sherman should’ve done a victory lap juuuuust to make sure
40 acres and a mule would’ve gone a long way. Shame Andrew Johnson was a piece of shit.
Fun fact: There is a statue in honor of famous traitor Benedict Arnold… kinda.
That true, actually where I grew up there were few orange people, but lately I noticed some people elected one !
Btw I am an antiracist so I will not descriminate but please dear U.S.A. citizens do not vote for this orange guy.
we got ourselves a sherlock over here
The elderly need to SIT DOWN. It’s not their planet anymore, and they need to get over it.
You’re conflating “elderly” with “racist.” Ageism is also a thing, check yourself.
This has nothing to do with “ageism”, which is a statistical idea applied individually. I’m discussing statistics applied to the appropriate population. I’m discussing the idea that a population, which holds no interest in the outcome of a decision, should stay the hell out of that decision. Check yourself.
I have no problem with elderly voting. My question is why do they vote?
This is why the right keeps attacking social security; to keep folks who don’t actually have a stake in the future at the voting booths. Then, en masse, they vote against equality and the very future of our planet’s surface all because of outdated ideologies. Because of their self-centeredness, they hold back progress.
WHY do they vote when they won’t be here to see the result? Do they think the generations that will are too stupid to govern themselves?
Dwell on it a bit.
Do you also buy the Vance line that people who don’t have kids should not vote because they don’t have skin in the game? At what age are you too old (or need to have kids by) to be concerned about the future? And regardless of “the future” at least some policy’s are about right now. Like the abortion bans or getting rid of Medicare or social security, or raising taxes or regulation of sources of heat or stoves etc… These matter to people till they die ffs.
Nope. But I think people who don’t have kids should deeply consider why they are sitting on a school board, voting to ban books, etc.
To clarify here - do you think that people should be forced to leave school boards as soon as their kids graduate? Do they end up eligible again if their kids have grandkids? Is this limited to people with kids going to that specific school? Also, does paying school taxes not make you have some skin in the game?
And what about just input on the society you live in? It seems to me the solution in your example would be to have younger people run for / contest the school board.
Did I say people should be forced to leave?
Here try this: Do you think people from Russia should vote in our elections? If you put any thought at all into your argument, you’ll see in advance that you lose this little debate.
If you made an argument, I could perhaps put some thought into it. My argument is simply that Russia isn’t paying our taxes, and is a different country, so there’s no comparison I can think of.
People living in an area paying taxes for that school have every right to be on the school board - it’s a direct application of “no taxation without representation” in which kind of implied in the US is the right to run for the office and be elected to the office. We fought a revolution over taxes and representation. So, not - I put some thought into this and think I just won the debate right there.
I want to go on the record on the side of “Yes, people without kids are absolutely capable of caring about education.”
But I also wanted to offer a correction:
Is this limited to people with kids going to that specific school?
School boards are for the school district, which is obviously composed of many elementary schools, junior highs, high schools. Without speaking for every school district in the country, I would expect that school board members would need to be residents of the district.
Heh. I grew up rural, the school was the district. Thanks for the info.
This has nothing to do with “ageism”, which is an statistical idea applied individually.
While I disagree with that statement, especially in this context, I’m glad to see that you understand the difference between discussing statistics about a demographic population (identified by observation of past events) and inappropriately applying those statistics to an individual.
When you said
The elderly need to SIT DOWN. It’s not their planet anymore, and they need to get over it.
You were insisting on specific future actions (“SIT DOWN” and “get over it”). Actions are taken by individuals. Age is a characteristic that individuals do not have control of. It is not a decision, and we don’t cast aspersions on people for things they do not have control of.
I think there are better ways to say the thing you intended to say, without being ageist.
Lol. This is a stretch.
Again… it’s not agesist when you literally call out the entire population for doing the thing that population does. You were wrong, get over it too.
Again… it’s not agesist when you literally call out the entire population for doing the thing that population does.
There it is again.
The entire population - every individual who is a member of the specified population - does not do the thing which is observed to be in the statistical majority for that population (if that’s even the case here).
Ok, school time. You are conflating the “entire” population with “every member” of the population. Perhaps you should actually learn about the thing you are trying to correct others about.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entire
having no element or part left out : whole
complete in degree : total
Edit: lol he downvoted the dictionary
Fine, we can compromise. Nobody over 75 or under 30 is allowed to vote. Deal?
Lol, I’m over 30. People under thirty have more at stake than I do.
And let me know where I said people can’t vote. I can’t help it if you make up things, now can I?
“No, not like that!”
What is the age cutoff before you start being elderly?
Ask the article.
Can you point out where the article defines the cutoff age? Because I read it and I didn’t see that part.
Honestly, it’s when you get your first “Join AARP” letter.
Believe it or not, and I thought it was hilarious at the time, I got one when I was 19 or 20 because I had moved into my late grandparents’ house and AARP thought my grandfather changed his first name or something.
I have some bad news for you.
I do feel like an old man sometimes, but considering I’m 47, I don’t think I count as elderly.
I was at a restaurant a couple weeks back and realized I’m frighteningly close to the “55+ senior menu.”
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?
No, they’re still racist because their actions (e.g. voting for Trump) increase racial inequality.
I was assuming the people that are the potential P zombie here are the ones turned off from Trump because of open racism, and therefore NOT voting for him. I implied that these people are taking actions they (at least think) are not racist, like not voting for Trump.
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?
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.
Systems don’t vote in the US however (at least in the context of this article) - we’re talking about individuals voting.
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.
I think you have a good point but it gets pretty far into the semantics of language. Most people seem to use the term racist in casual language to refer specifically to what are widely considered the worst outcomes associated with grouping people together by race. The “black people are violent” kind of racism that I referred to earlier. However, I don’t think there is anything about the academic definition of the word racist that would limit it to this kind of usage. I also get why you would want to avoid the conclusion that everyone is racist but I really believe that is the most accurate assessment of reality.
Granted, it is easy to see how your KKK kind of racist would want to latch on to this conclusion to minimize the horrible nature of their beliefs. Still, I don’t think you can get a holistic view of the problem without recognizing the fact that this tendency to make generalizations about groups of people exists within us all. Without seeing the scope of the problem I don’t think you can address it in any meaningful sense.
1000% true.
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/
Another way to look at this is that you’ve linked to an article that necessarily lacks the entire last eight years of context necessary to discuss an article written in 2024. Please, join the rest of us in our current reality if you want to discuss what’s happening now.
This is definitely true. It’s something I’ve heard Trump supporters argue about firsthand. But it’s not just only racism or the threat of being a minority, but the fear of losing freedom to do what they want according to their own skewed morals. So while a decent chunk of why they think the way they do is sheer racism and fear around that (especially since the start of the BLM movement), it’s not the core of the problem.
I believe that this started as the resurgence of toxic masculinity in that Trump showing people it was okay to be misogynistic, racist, and homophobic in opposition to race, gender, and identity politics rising in the 2010s. Women’s rights and LGBT people are in their sights as well and, despite their narrative fitting well with fundamentalist religious morals, this seems more like resentment that those movements didn’t address their needs or issues. COVID restrictions that they disagreed with fanned the growing fire into the fulblown fascist conservative movement we see today.
So I don’t think it’s the fact that cis het white people are in lower relative numbers but it’s the event of rising social progressivism and more rights for minorities and women that spurred the antagonism of them.
Tldr: Bigots are upset that they didn’t get anything out of women’s, LGBT, and minorities rights.
I’ll agree with you except for the timeline. It started after 9/11, bigotry was far less openly acceptable during the 90s. It just blew up after Obama was elected and social media took off. People were all exposed to the same type of media at the time, and big media companies weren’t spreading extremely racist content, other than a few fringe things like Rush Limbaugh. Fox news really took off after 9/11 too.
I think after 9/11 they were still the same old tactic they used in and after the cold war; security theater and fear mongering. But you’re right, news and political representatives definitely weren’t the completely open bigots that they are today though and I think you might be right about that time period being the start of today’s Fox news.
Social media definitely had a profound impact on politics, people’s rights, and open bigotry. This definitely gave them the means to have more of a voice with younger demographics but I’ll still argue that it wasn’t until Trump entered the picture that they were able to really push their narrative and decouple “truth” from official news sources in the minds of many. I don’t think I’ve seen so many people just repeat distorted views of reality at once until then.
I’ll agree with you except for the timeline. It started after 9/11, bigotry was far less openly acceptable during the 90s.
I want to disagree with this because bigotry was huge in the 90’s, but so was attacking it. Our cartoon’s were chock-full of anti-bigotry messaging, but then movies would be the opposite.
I think I, personally, would typify the 90’s with saying that one out-group is ok, but only if we all make fun of another one or you’re the butt of jokes. IE. You can have Will and Grace, but we’re using ‘gay’ as a word to literally just mean ‘bad.’
Trump showing people it was okay to be misogynistic, racist, and homophobic
Yup. It’s far more that racism alone.
It’s all sorts of bigotry that Trump has essentially given them permission to stop hiding.
Whenever a group of white people get scared everyone suffers.
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’.
They fear becoming a minority.
clutches pearls Goodness gracious, someone might treat them like they treat minorities!
That is literally what the white “christians” have been stressing about here. As a minority mutt that “passes”, maybe try being less of an asshole?
removed by mod
I guess this is one of the few times American Exceptionalism actually proves right. We’ve always been a melting pot of cultures. That includes many different “white” cultures for a good few centuries, but go ahead and ask the Irish and Italian immigrants if they didn’t feel like minorities as they were coming off the boats to Ellis Island. Even next to the oppression and brutality both Native and Black Americans faced, their contributions to our society are innumerable and invaluable. The new immigrants coming from Latin America are just being played for political gain while we appreciate and depend on their willingness to work our farms and construction sites. Their kids are just as adapted to American culture as mine are, just as every second generation of immigrants turns out to be. We stress a huge amount about racism (and yes we still have a long way to go, as Trump shows) but when you really compare us to other countries, we seem to be doing alright. The melting pot will keep going, even once us white people are under 50% of the population.
I think that you overextimate the american exceptionalism. In the xx century the europe was destroyed in the ww leaving the usa as the only state not touched by the wars. The rest of the world was lagging techlogicaly. Now the situation is different. Usa is a young country and it is not different from any other.
11 aircraft carriers, the dollar being the fiat currency of the world, and our cultural dominance pretty much seals the hegemony win for the US since the '90s, but ok, sure dude. We’re no different than other countries…
To be an empire doesn’t mean be different
white people aren’t even close to becoming a minority, we’re just approaching a point that no race is the majority. there will still be more white people than any other race here for a long long time, and when that changes it’s only going to be because of racial mixing and a loss of racial identity or the birth of a new one. white people will not be a minority just because they become less than 50% of the population. they will lose some of the privilege they have and that may feel like oppression to them, but they will not become a minority.
We will see.
Babe, wake up, new flavor of brain rot just dropped…
