White Supremacy as a Winning Political Strategy
“Make America White Again: The Racial Reasoning of American Nationalism” by Matthew W. Hughey and Michael L. Rosino explores why white people are so enamored with Trump and his racial reasoning. In 2016 he received 58 percent of the white vote. Despite this, there are many who deny the relationship between Trump’s election and racially based backlash against the Obama presidency.
When examining voter data, the authors found that white working-class voters, ideas on race correlated much more closely with Trump’s support than economic dissatisfaction. Further, holding racist attitudes led to a 30-point increase in support for Trump. Whites see themselves as an embattled racial group, and historically it has been an extremely effective strategy to play to this anxiety during political campaigns.
It is beneficial for politicians to invoke reasoning that non-white people are dysfunctional and pathologic and are somehow detrimental to the country and even to democracy itself. While the specific language used in these arguments has evolved from outright slurs and segregation to coded words like states’ rights and tough on crime, the basic strategy of uniting white voters against people of color, particularly black people, remains popular.
Politicians, and the people who buy into their arguments, conflate the idea of ideal citizenship with whiteness. They create a narrative of a fictionalized past with images like the pilgrims landing in Massachusetts, George Washington, manifest destiny, white people in wagons heading west, and peaceful, prosperous white suburbs. They link the essence of what they believe it means to be American with white Christian conservatism. Therefore any deviation from this model feels personally threatening as well as an attack on national identity.
In this mindset, it is easy to create the myth of white victimhood. Trump, and other politicians like him, tapped into the white panic fantasy and legitimized the feeling that whiteness itself was under attack. Compared to the romanticized white supremacy of the mythologized past, current moves towards equality, no matter how small a step, make white people feel like more and more are being snatched away from them. They believe that there is some moral or character deficiency in non-white people that makes them underserving of the aid and attention they get. Many people feel like they have lost the dominant social position, which should be theirs by right of inheritance.
This rhetoric is extremely pervasive in right-wing circles, both in mainstream media and on the internet. They want to recapture a nationalist idealized past where national identity was whiteness. This reasoning leads to a belief in the necessity of white domination in the social and political ring for the benefit of “true” (white) Americans. White people grow up in an education system and society that instills racist beliefs, and if the idea of a mythologized white utopian past is added to their worldview, they are primed to be extremely angry and motivated. Politicians rely on this to build voting bases, as made very evident in Trump’s campaign and presidency. This is why the simultaneous continuation of such rhetoric while also maintaining America’s position as post-racial has compounded to create our current political and social climate.
About the Author
Stella Hudson is a Graduate Assistant with the Baha’i Chair for World Peace. She graduated from the College of William and Mary in 2021 with a B.A. in English. She is attending the University of Maryland and pursuing a Master’s of Library and Information Science.