by James A. Bacon
I love it when The New York Times tries to explain to its liberal and progressive readers what makes Republicans tick. Viewing the world through their woke lens of intersectional oppression, an article published yesterday concludes that the depravity of White Republican political views reflects their ignorance and racism. The Times never used the “R” word outright, but that’s the unavoidable implication of its argument.
The article purports to explain the votes of Republican congressmen who voted last year to reject President Trump’s electoral defeat. An article published yesterday sums up the thesis thusly:
A shrinking white share of the population is a hallmark of the congressional districts held by the House Republicans who voted to challenge Mr. Trump’s defeat, a New York Times analysis found — a pattern political scientists say shows how white fear of losing status shaped the movement to keep him in power.
The Times allows Ashley Jardina, a George Mason University political scientist, to elaborate: “Because they are more vulnerable, disadvantaged or less educated white voters can feel especially endangered by the trend toward a minority majority. A lot of white Americans who are really threatened are willing to reject democratic norms because they see it as a way to protect their status.”
Let me make the syllogism crystal clear: White Republicans fear the demographic rise of minorities, and they fear their resulting loss of status. Rejecting democratic norms in a bid to preserve that status, they refused to concede Trump’s election loss, and their representatives voted to keep Trump in power.
This is what you get when you try to impose a progressive world view upon an recalcitrant reality.
I will concede that the persistent and unproven belief that the “election was stolen” does warrant an explanation. But I would suggest that the reason has nothing to do with lost status and everything to do with lost trust. Republicans believe nothing reported by the mainstream media after years of the never-retracted Russian-collusion narrative, the squelching of the Hunter Biden laptop, biased narratives on cultural issues, and mendacities too countless to recite. Republicans were primed from the beginning to disbelieve the mainstream interpretation of the 2020 election — one of the few instances, ironically, in which the MSM got a big story right.
Yesterday’s Times story — not the on-the-ground reporting but the narrative foisted upon it — will only feed that mistrust.
Much as it might dispatch a correspondent to the strife-torn Congo to explain a strange and foreboding land to its readers, the Times sent a team to Southwest Virginia. There, the Times reporters found, many residents have lost faith in the political process and public institutions, and see Trump as their savior.
The absurdity of the fear-of-lost-status argument is that Southwest Virginia is more than 90% White. Whites there are not being overwhelmed by other races. The Appalachian region is so poor that other races have no desire to move there. As a consequence, race is not the all-consuming obsession that it is in New York and other major metropolitan areas. Southwest Virginians have other problems to worry about.
No Southwest Virginian interviewed by the Times mentioned race as a factor in their preference for Trump. No one mentioned the loss of status. People do talk about the collapse of coal, tobacco, and manufacturing, the traditional mainstays of the region. They do talk about the opioid epidemic. They do talk about the war on coal, the paucity of healthcare, and the remoteness of ruling elites.
The loss-of-status argument is a theory that only an IYI (intellectual yet idiot) could dream up. People in the hinterlands don’t measure their personal status against distant New York billionaires, about whom they know next to nothing, or even Hollywood celebrities, whom they might read about in checkout-counter magazines. They measure their status against that of others in their community. As it happens, Southwest Virginia in its poverty is far more egalitarian than New York. People there don’t share the status obsessions of Manhattan journalists and the academics they choose to quote.
Southwest Virginians do resent the political elites who look down upon them as ill-educated and ignorant, and communicate their contempt daily. They do resent cultural elites who denigrate their religion and their traditional values, and seek to impose their elite preoccupations with race, gender and sexual orientation. They also correctly understand that those same distant, educated elites have pursued policies that privilege the knowledge economy and benefit themselves economically while kicking out the props from coal, tobacco and manufacturing and substituting welfare payments for the dignity of work.
While spinning fabulist tales of lost White “status,” this article ignores the historic realignment of the political parties that is bringing more minorities — mostly Hispanics (but also an increasing number of Blacks) — into the GOP fold. Public opinion polls show that half of Hispanics could vote Republican this fall. And the percentage of Blacks, while never quite matching GOP aspirations, could reach new highs.
Narratives like the one peddled by the Times yesterday are what White liberal elites tell themselves when they’re about to have their asses kicked in what is shaping up to be a Red wave election. Readers of the Times might buy it because it confirms their biases, but no one else will.
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