Towards a race-class model of white identity politics in the Trump era

• In Event: 30469 - Right-Wing Populism in the US and Beyond

Abstract

We focus on white identity politics from a race-class perspective as one way to understand why American working classes are turning away from the more economic egalitarian party. Research on white identity politics has progressed considerably over the last decade. Much recent work incorporates racial threat, modeling increasing/high white consciousness as caused by threats to whites’ status dominance. Findings are mixed and positive findings are of modest strength. We discuss several other models for explaining white consciousness. Most prominently, Jardina (2019) steered analysts away from exclusively focusing on racial threat and white nationalist ideal types, arguing that many high white consciousness whites (HWCWs) are experiencing considerable racial threat, but most have little animus towards racial outgroups and are primarily motivated by ingroup favoritism – e.g. protecting their interests in Social Security, Medicare, and restricting immigration. We test this model in Study 1 for 2012, 2016, and 2020. Full models find zero association between white consciousness and ingroup favoritism, and robust associations between white consciousness and explicitly drawing racial boundaries (‘old-fashioned racism’) and economic egalitarianism. Mediation models report similar findings (Study 2). We posit that white consciousness today is demonstrably a legacy of white supremacy, and frame it as a color visible white strategy, distinct and overlapping with hegemonic colorblind strategies. From this we hypothesize divergent types of HWCWs 1) ‘color visible neoliberals’ who merge the colorblind neoliberalism of establishment Republicans with open racial animus/boundaries; (2) marginalized whites cross-pressured by economic egalitarianism and drawing invidious racial boundaries, yet contradictory in their views on racial inequality. We find strong evidence for the cross-pressured type across all three years. Correlates indicate they may be receptive to multiracial social democratic projects. Findings suggest Trump strengthened the color visible neoliberal type and correlates fit a profile of mainstreaming white nationalism in the Republican Party.

Author

• Carl W. Stempel, California State University-East Bay