Page 21 - Time Magazine, Sep. 17, 2018

erupt with every rapid change in our society
and world. He stands in a tradition of American
politics that can be traced to Strom Thurmond’s
1948 Dixiecrat run for the presidency, George
Wallace’s bids for the presidency in 1968 and
1972, and Patrick Buchanan’s runs in 1992 and
’96. Each of these men could move a crowd with
their homespun rhetoric and their willingness
to speak unvarnished truth with little regard
for the consequences—and each sought to give
voice to a deeply felt sense of white victimhood
as the nation grappled with significant social
transformation, be it the end of the Jim Crow
South or the tumult of the ’60s revolution.
America responded, at least in words, by oth-
ering them: These were marginal men and mar-
ginal thoughts. The grievances were real, the
country said. The messengers and their racial
animus were the problem. This separation—of
so-called grievance from racial animus—was a
grave error, and it is one we are in the process
of repeating.
In 2016, the degree to which a person deeply
identified as white “strongly related to Repub-
licans’ support for Donald Trump,” political
scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn
Vavreck write in their forthcoming book, Iden-
tity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and
the Battle for the Meaning of America. For in-
stance, among white millennials who voted for
Trump, a sense of white vulnerability—“the per-
ception that whites, through no fault of their
own, are losing ground to others”—and racial
resentment were more important factors than
economic anxiety, found researchers Matthew
Fowler, Vladimir Medenica and Cathy Cohen of
the GenForward Survey at the University of Chi-
cago. In fact, Tesler says—and this insight goes
beyond those millennials—“economic anxiety
isn’t driving racial resentment; rather, racial re-
sentment is driving economic anxiety.”
Despite this, we heard over and over again
from pundits and politicians—including
Democrats—that racism couldn’t explain the
counties that voted for Donald Trump and
Barack Obama, that more attention needed to
be given to the dire circumstances of working
white men and women, that Trump’s election
was a white, working-class, often rural back-
lash and what was needed was a focus on Middle
America. This criticism coalesced with an ongo-
ing obsession about what suburban white Amer-
ica was thinking. All the while, they decried the
President’s use of explicit racism, as opposed to
the implicit kind they had been endorsing, know-
ingly or not. The problem was him—not us.
It felt like folks weren’t fighting the true prob-
lem. They were, in fact, protecting it.
II
OUR NARROW FOCUS ON EXPLICIT RACISTS
misses a development that explains our cur-
rent moment: that much of our struggle with
race today is bound up in the false innocence
of white suburban bliss and the manic effort to
protect it, no matter the costs. In the late 1960s
and early ’70s, for example, millions of white
homeowners in the nation’s suburbs—for the
most part, racially segregated communities
subsidized by state policies—rejected efforts
to desegregate schools through busing and ve-
hemently defended the demographic makeup
of their neighborhoods. These were not people
shouting slurs at the top of their lungs (although
some did). They were courageous defenders of
mp isn’t some nefarious character
Trum
unli ke anything we have seen before.
He e
embodies the hatreds and fears that
e been part of America’s politics since
have
its f founding and that erupt with every
rap id change in our society and worldi
their quality of life—segregated life, that is.
These were the people of the so-called “silent
majority,” who insisted on free-market meri-
tocracy and embraced a color-blind ideology to
maintain their racially exclusive enclaves. Their
antibusing crusades, taxpayer revolts and insis-
tence on neighborhood schools cut across party
lines and helped shape national politics. Demo-
crats and Republicans appealed to the interests
of these voters, and many turned their backs on
the agenda of the civil rights movement. These
Americans, it was argued, were the true victims.
In his important 2006 book, The Silent Ma-
jority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South,
historian Matthew D. Lassiter stated clearly the
effect of this moment from the late 1960s and
early ’70s:
The suburban politics of middle-class warfare
charted a middle course between the open rac-
ism of the extreme right and the egalitarian
agenda of the civil rights movement, based in
an ethos of color-blind individualism that ac-
cepted the principle of equal opportunity under
the law but refused to countenance affirmative-
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