Quote:
Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
If you spend a little time on google, you'll find plenty of surveys identifying increasing white supremacist views. But you've got plenty of other data points, from readership and/or viewership of things like the Daily Stormer, Breitbart, Tucker Carlson, to the votes for openly supremacist candidates to the increasing number of racially motivated or anti-semitic incidents.
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Sure. But how do you conclude those are Trump voters?
You're looking at two sets of data, (a) Trump voters; and, (b) Racists/Xenophobes expressing such views online or watching/reading things that champion such views.
You can't credibly argue that because there was an uptick in racist/xenophobic activity, all or even a majority of people involved in it were Trump voters. You can assume it, but it's a very weak assumption. The linking stats just aren't present, and they never will be. That assumption also rests on a conclusion that online trolls and people with deviant views predominantly vote, rather than stay in their basements.*
But putting all of that aside, the selection of racism/xenophobia as the sole alternative to economic anxiety makes no sense. The framing is utterly arbitrary.
A whole lot of Trump voters are tax voters. They're not economically insecure. So "greedy" is one huge category overlooked by the racism vs. anxiety framework. A lot of Trump voters work in fossil fuel industries. Concern about environmental regulation that could hit their bottom line is another huge alternative to racism as a reason people voted for Trump. Military people tend to vote R all the time. There's another alternative group. Along those same lines, you have small to mid sized business owners. You have the people who just vote R across the board every year because that's how they've always done it. You have the pro-lifers. The Evangelicals, the Mormons. The list of possible reasons to vote Trump other than economic anxiety could go on for paragraphs.
And yet the conversation about this is always a choice between economic concerns and racism.
Who does this framing serve? (That's rhetorical.)
Why is this framing a one-or-the-other proposition? If you're on the left, or a neoliberal seeking to avoid discussion of economic causes that screw the poor, minorities, and the middle, but make you money, you want to push the narrative that it's racism. If you're on the right, you want to push the narrative that it's all about the hollowing out of the middle class. Both make your side appear to be victimized and noble.
But it's really grey, and we don't know the mindset of the average Trump voter. We never will. Surely, racism and economic anxiety are both drivers for many of his voters. But what percentage? Unknown, unknowable, and never to be credibly stated.
But that won't stop us, the media, and the people who slant stats to tease out the conclusion they desire from attempting to prove the makeup of Trump voters, but instead proving HL Mencken correct: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
* ETA: Bots, also. How many of the armies of online racists are actually Russian, NK, and Chinese bots? And also, Carlson's audience is what? A few million? Cable news is shrinking at astonishing speed. If you take all of the viewers of the big cable news networks together, you still have a tiny fraction of the electorate. If you take Fox's share and stipulate they're all driven by racism and all voted for Trump, you still only have a small fraction of the 70 million he got in 2016.
