Chicago Protesters Reinforce the Implicit Whiteness of Donald Trump's Candidacy: Trump voters fear becoming a minority

Source: Occidental Observer

March 12, 2016 — 103 Comments

Kevin MacDonald

Donald Trump is the implicitly White candidate. One indication of this is that he is doing better in primaries where there is cross-over voting, implying that independents and Democrats, especially working-class Whites who have not already bailed on the party of Al Sharpton, La Raza, and the rest of the Rainbow Coalition, are attracted to his populist themes. In the most recent debate (March 10) Trump emphasized that he is drawing support from Democrats and independents in an effort to defuse Republican fears that he is appealing only to a very narrow base.

In effect Trump is expanding the White base of the GOP — to the point that pretty soon the only Whites voting Democrat will be college professors and the young SJWs who take them seriously.

The cross-over appeal of Trump will only be increased by the violent clashes between Trump supporters and protesters in Chicago (March 11). Most Whites will associate the opposition to Trump with last year's BLM and radical left riots and protests, like those in Ferguson, Baltimore, and numerous college campuses where speech that offends the left is routinely shouted down in a torrent of (often anti-White) hatred phrased as lofty moralism. The Chicago protesters looked like a combination of BLM protesters and Bernie Sanders-supporting, White SJWs — a combination that is likely to anger a very large swath of White America. I would be amazed if Trump did not benefit from this.

The implicit Whiteness of Trump's campaign is apparent in the results of a recent poll by two UMass researchers, Tatishe M. Nteta and Brian Schaffner showing that Whites are fearful of a majority-minority America — as well they should be given the bloody history of ethnic conflict throughout the ages ("New poll shows Trump supporters more likely to fear majority-minority America"). The poll

directly measured Americans' fear of the demographic change that is projected to make the United States a majority-minority nation by the year 2043. Recent work has found that white Americans, once told about this impending demographic shift, are more likely to identify with the Republican Party, to express conservative policy positions, and view themselves as conservatives.

This, of course, is further evidence of the racialization of American politics and the implicit Whiteness of identifying as a Republican and holding mainstream conservative views (see also my VDARE comment on the previous research cited by Nteta and Schaffner on what happens when you ask White people about being a minority: "Diversity Is Strength! It's Also…Racially Polarizing Politics, Despite MSM Efforts To Lull Whites"). The results fit well with the finding that an increasing percentage of Whites are voting Republican, around 1.5% in each presidential election cycle.

The percentage increase may be much higher with Donald Trump because he is stressing the most important implicit White issue, immigration, not to mention his many violations of political correctness, likely also an implicitly White issue.

Specifically, the poll asked the following:

According to the U.S. Census Department, by 2043 African Americans, Latinos, and people of Asian descent will make up a majority of the population. In general, do you think that this is a good thing or bad thing for the nation?

Of the respondents who expressed an interest in voting in the Republican primary, just 6 percent saw the ascent of the minority population as a good thing, while 45 percent said it was a bad thing, and 49 percent said neither. Trump won the support of more than 60 percent of those who responded "bad thing" to this question.

The relationship between responses this question and Trump support persists even after accounting for a respondent's ideological affiliation, educational experiences, age and gender. Individuals who think the increase in the minority population is a bad thing are 20 percentage points more likely to support Trump than those who responded "good thing" or "neither."

Of the respondents who expressed an interest in voting in the Republican primary, just 6 percent saw the ascent of the minority population as a good thing, while 45 percent said it was a bad thing, and 49 percent said neither. Trump won the support of more than 60 percent of those who responded "bad thing" to this question.

My only question is why the numbers of "neither" are so high and why only 60% of people who think becoming a minority is a bad thing plan to vote for Trump given that he is the only candidate to implicitly address this issue with his talk about building the wall, deporting illegal aliens and having a moratorium on Muslims. Of course, the respondents were from the very blue state of Massachusetts, and there may well be reluctance to admit such things to a pollster, but still ….

The authors cite other research on the characteristics of Trump voters:

A number of political scientists have found that those statements might actually be a key reason for his success. Support for Trump is highest among whites who express ethnocentric viewpoints, score high on measures of authoritarianism, identify strongly as white, and who express negative views of racial minorities.

All of these, except authoritarianism, are obviously very consistent with the implicitly White nature of Trump's candidacy. The claim that Trumpsters are authoritarian, of course, plugs into the world view of the left deriving from the Frankfurt School's The Authoritarian Personality — perhaps the most egregious (or at least the most influential) example of anti-White ideology and Jewish ethnic strategizing masquerading as psychology.

Interestingly, the results on authoritarianism are called into question by another poll described in an article by two other political scientists, Wendy Rahn (University of Minnesota) and Eric Oliver (University of Chicago) ("Trump's voters aren't authoritarians, new research says. So what are they?"). They found that Trump voters were no more authoritarian than supporters of Rubio and a bit less authoritarian than Cruz supporters. Also, the correlations with authoritarianism they did find were likely due to religious voters who practice strict child rearing, not overtly political attitudes.[1]

They found that Trump voters are high on three critical issues that make a lot of sense in terms of the issues he has raised: anti-elitism, mistrust of experts, and American identity — in a word, populism. As defined in their study,

Populism … is a type of political rhetoric that casts a virtuous "people" against nefarious elites and strident outsiders. Scholars measure populism in a variety of ways, but we focus on three central elements:

Belief that a few elites have absconded with the rightful sovereignty of the people;

Deep mistrust of any group that claims expertise;

Strong nationalist identity.

Given that other research shows that America has in fact become an oligarchy in which elites are able to shape public policy in ways that conflict with the attitudes of American majorities, the beliefs of populists that elites have "absconded with the rightful sovereignty of the people" is firmly based on reality (see Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page in Perspectives on Politics, Sept. 2014, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens"). Furthermore, the people who claim expertise are often academics at prestigious universities whose views are far to the left of the rest of America. Their views are disseminated by the elite media like the New York Times whose views are also out of touch with what Trump calls "the silent majority."[2] And anyone watching the protests in Chicago would hardly come away with the feeling that the protesters have a strong American identity (e.g., the Mexican flags) or were in any sense American nationalists.

What we are seeing now is that huge numbers of Americans, especially White Americans, do not trust these experts, nor do they trust the elite media. Recently there have been numerous articles and video comparing Trump to Hitler or the KKK (see here for a recent list compiled by Howard Kurtz of FoxNews). Another example: Sarah Silverman appeared on the Conan O'Brien show dressed as Hitler and saying "I agree with a lot of what he says. A lot. Like 90 per cent of what he says, I'm like "this guy just gets it". And here's a skit from Saturday Night Live that couldn't be less subtle.

What the poll is saying is that all of the propaganda coming from the elite media and academic world will be completely useless in converting Trump voters. They're not listening any more.

On the other hand, anti-Trump media messages doubtless encourage the violent protesters who are becoming such an important part of the Trump campaign. Quite a few of the anti-Trump protesters in Chicago had tee-shirts with images of Hitler and Trump, and I noticed professionally printed signs with images of Hitler's book Mein Kampf and references to Trump. These protesters are definitely paying attention to the media.

So if the media want to point a finger at what is causing all the violence and disruption, it should be looking in the mirror.

In my chapter on the Frankfurt School a major theme is the assault by Jewish intellectuals on populism.

Novick (1988, 341) [finds] … that Jewish identification was an important ingredient in this analysis, attributing the negative view of American populism held by some American Jewish historians (Hofstadter, Bell, and Lipset) to the fact that "they were one generation removed from the Eastern European shtetl [small Jewish town], where insurgent gentile peasants meant pogrom."

Jewish history in the diaspora has always been fundamentally about making alliances with elites, often against other segments of the population. In traditional societies Jews were typically in a subordinate position to non-Jewish elites, but at least since the nineteenth century, Jews have often been a central force among elites in the USSR and throughout the West — a major theme of TOO. (We now have 55 articles under the category "Jews as a hostile elite" and 50 under "Jews as an elite".) It's fair to say that the thrust of Jewish power has been to create a top-down, oligarchic culture where decisions on important policy issues are made by elites rather than by popular majorities — and that is exactly what has happened.

The intellectual groundwork for rationalizing lessening the power of majorities and promoting top-down, elite domination has a long history.

This is a comment on the anti-populist thrust of the New York Intellectuals, a Jewish intellectual movement discussed in Chapter 6 of The Culture of Critique:

Clearly the New York Intellectuals were attacking populism in favor of themselves as an intellectual elite. The New York Intellectuals associated rural America with

nativism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, and fascism as well as with anti-intellectualism and provincialism; the urban was associated antithetically with ethnic and cultural tolerance, with internationalism, and with advanced ideas. . . . The New York Intellectuals simply began with the assumption that the rural—with which they associated much of American tradition and most of the territory beyond New York—had little to contribute to a cosmopolitan culture. . . . By interpreting cultural and political issues through the urban-rural lens, writers could even mask assertions of superiority and expressions of anti-democratic sentiments as the judgments of an objective expertise. (Cooney 1986, 267–268; italics in text)

The last line bears repeating. The New York Intellectuals were engaged in a profoundly anti-democratic enterprise given that they rejected and felt superior to the culture of the majority of Americans. The battle between this urbanized intellectual and political establishment and rural America was joined on a wide range of issues. Particularly important was the issue of immigration. In this case and in the entire range of what became mainstream liberal politics, the New York Intellectuals had the enthusiastic support of all of the mainstream Jewish organizations. [see here]

Another example of this anti-populist attitude can be seen in the discussion in The Culture of Critique of The Politics of Unreason (1970) by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, a volume in the Patterns of American Prejudice Series funded by the ADL:

Right-wing extremism is also condemned for its tendency to advocate simple solutions to complex problems, which, as noted by Lasch (1991), is a plea that solutions to social problems should be formulated by an intellectual elite. And finally, right-wing extremism is condemned because of its tendency to distrust institutions that intervene between the people and their direct exercise of power, another plea for the power of elites: "Populism identifies the will of the people with justice and morality" (p. 13). The conclusion of this analysis is that democracy is identified not with the power of the people to pursue their perceived interests. Rather, democracy is conceptualized as guaranteeing that majorities will not resist the expansion of power of minorities even if that means a decline in their own power.

Viewed at its most abstract level, a fundamental agenda is thus to influence the European-derived peoples of the United States to view concern about their own demographic and cultural eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology. (pp. 194-195; emphasis in text)

I fully expect more violence as we get closer to the election. The effect of the 1965 immigration law — itself the result of a top-down process made possible by Jewish power as an elite rather than reflecting the attitudes of the majority — has been to create facts on the ground that make increased ethnic/racial conflict inevitable. Quite a few of the signs and the Mexican flags that were so obvious among the anti-Trump protesters reflect their interests in expanding their share of the US population. White Americans are quite reasonable in not wanting to become a minority, and it looks like we are going to have to fight for it, and we should be prepared for assassination attempts on Trump. But better a civil war now than 20 years from now. 

[1] This is because the authoritarianism scale really measures child rearing attitudes. Any good measure of child rearing attitudes is sure to tap into big differences between conservative, religious Americans versus Americans who have been influenced by the sea change in attitudes on parenting brought about by psychoanalysis, the triumph of the 1960's counter-cultural revolution, and the dissemination of these ideas in the elite media and educational system ever since. So it's no surprise that Bernie Sanders supporters are far and away the lowest on authoritarianism.

[2] The authors point to the differences between Trump and Sanders: "Despite the fact that Sanders often gets called a populist, his voters do not conform to the populist stereotype. They generally trust experts and do not identify strongly as Americans. A better way to describe them would be cosmopolitan socialists. They see the system as corrupted by economic elites. But they don't trust ordinary Americans and show only light attachment to Americanism as an identity."