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.
While the Census Bureau says there are still 195 million white people in America and that they are still the majority, the white population actually declined slightly in 2023, and experts believe that they will become a minority sometime between 2040 and 2050.
Every component of the Trump-Republican agenda flows from these demographic fears.
The Trump phenomenon and the surge of right-wing extremism in America was never about economic anxiety, as too many political reporters claimed during the 2016 presidential campaign.
It was, and still is, about race and racism.
This is a huge over simplification of a complex problem. Sure some people are bigoted and support trump but it doesn’t follow that all folks that support trump are bigoted. Wingers on the left and right use the same strategies of othering folks they disagree with. It’s ignorant to assert that people only support trump because they’re racists or people only support Harris because they’re communist/woke.
If you read it, it’s not saying simply that all Republican voters are racist, it’s saying that Trumpism and the surging Christian-Nationalist movement is, in a way that other Republican and conservative candidates in the past has not been, and that is the x-factor that makes them so appealing to many of their base right now.
If you live in those spaces and can “pass”, you’ll hear it come out. People start spewing racist shit when they think they’re in safe company. It’s not all Republicans, to be sure, but I’m my experience it’s definitely the majority of (remaining) Republicans. A lot of the ones who weren’t on board with that abandoned the party when Trump took over.
I have a side of the family that still supports Trump. That same side of the family has interracial marriages and there are black babies that are very loved upon (and no, it wasn’t some scandalous thing, the relationship and the marriage was uncontroversial).
Clearly, those members of my family are not voting for Trump because they’re racist and afraid of skin colors.
They’re (in my understanding) voting for Trump because the older members when they were younger had more economic opportunities and felt more attached to their community and their faith. I don’t agree with them on priorities, but it’s not racism, it’s in more ways a sort of nostalgia for a time period when life didn’t involve so many complex and nuanced topics.
First off, it’s certainly possible that everyone in their family absolutely does love their interracial kids, but it’s also very possible they don’t; that is a dynamic I’d need to see to know. Behind closed doors, people change.
But either way, that would still be anecdotal, and not prove or disprove the tracked and statistically-validated rise in racist rhetoric in conservative spaces online, in conservative candidate platforms, in conservative legislators’ bills, etc etc etc.
but it’s not racism, it’s in more ways a sort of nostalgia for a time period when life didn’t involve so many complex and nuanced topics
I hate to burst your bubble, but “life was simpler when white people were 80% of the population, and we didn’t have to deal with Black people, we just let the cops do their thing, pre-phone-cameras” IS racism, whether they realize that or not. We know what was actually happening to Black people (lynchings, murder, sundown towns, Jim Crow laws used to imprison and enslave, etc). If your argument is, “well they just don’t care to think about that all, they want what was a better society for themselves, even if it was much worse for people of other ethnicities”, then you are acknowledging that they are (whether they realize it or not) making an argument for their (racial) comfort at the expense of others’.
Ignorance to the harm you’re advocating is not an actual defense, and it’s highly suspect when it’s very readily-known information. Willful ignorance at that level borders on malice (and once again, it’s not like the Republican platform isn’t absolutely rife with racist rhetoric, so it’s not like they’re just in a bubble where race isn’t discussed).
Sure some people are bigoted and support trump but it doesn’t follow that all folks that support trump are bigoted.
Most of his supporters are bigoted and every single one of them who isn’t mentally deficient certainly knows that they are supporting a bigot, so they still don’t get a free pass.
