Literally all Trump voters are racist.
The latest bit of clickbait trash circulating through social media to get under my skin is a piece from Thomas Wood at Washington Post. The title alone should make clear exactly why it was shared so feverishly: "Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism." Firstly, I'm sure that your editor wouldn't have minded if you squeezed in the word "some" just for clarity. Though that's giving Mr. Wood the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he did actually intend to insinuate that **all** Trump voters were motivated by racism. Certainly, omitting it from the title makes it more attention-grabbing.
Personally, I tend to think that the intent here was to create an explosive title just to increase shares on social media. Shares increase site visits, which, in turn, produces ad revenue. It's fairly clear now that a lot of major news outlets are struggling more and more in the digital age, so it's perhaps no surprise.
The problem is that if you actually read the article, you could see that perhaps the title was in fact a bit strong. The evidence is fairly weak. The first part of the article, which draws upon data from the "2016 American National Election Study," examining white people's inclination to vote Republican was really only truly anomalous in the highest income bracket. This isn't particularly surprising and probably communicates more about Hillary Clinton's commitment to protecting the status quo than it does about the motivations of Trump's supporters.
The second part found that Trump voters were "less authoritarian" than other white, Republican voters. This is surprising, but trends away from the omnipresent narrative that his supporters are unilaterally "nazis" and "fascists".
And finally, the part which the whole thesis is based on, the "symbolic racism scale", appears to be purely a measure of personal political values, not actual perceptions of race. The questioning is inherently biased. So, as the author notes, because they can't ask, "Do you think blacks are lazy?" instead, they ask "whether racial inequalities today are a result of social bias or personal lack of effort and irresponsibility." This is one of the central pillars of conservatism--personal responsibility and work ethic. It isn't testing their opinions about minorities, it's testing their adherence to a political ideology. Do you think that any significant number of conservative respondents are going to answer that they think social inequality is a result of social bias when so much of their own political identity is tied to work ethic and personal responsibility? Imagine asking the same question but substituting "millennials'economic disparity" for "social inequality". The same trends would almost certainly persist.
As an aside, why is it that, if you're trying to survey for racism, you can't ask directly, "Do you think (minorities) are lazy?" I mean, if you're truly trying to test for racism, then simply ask it directly. By the methodology employed in this survey, you could produce almost whatever results you wanted to show. In reality, if you wanted to produce the most accurate analysis, you would find the most succinct way to ask that question.
In spite of all that, however, they actually showed that there was an observable decline on the "symbolic racism scale" for both Republicans and Democrats between 2012 and 2016 with very little statistical variation overall. The title of the article seems to draw simply from the fact that authoritarianism was represented relatively lower than racism in this voter response survey. To declare confidently that this data shows that "Trump voters" (again suggesting they're some sort of monolith) are racist is disingenuous at best. The trends simply aren't strong enough to make such bold assertions.
To me, the real insidiousness of this type of "news" is that it exploits political ideologies to sell ads and sacrifices truth in the process. As I suggested, the data used in the article didn't show a particularly strong correlation between Trump voters and racism. The fact is that most people likely shared the article without reading it or bothering to see if that's what the data actually seemed to suggest. Instead, it seems like WaPo used an inflammatory headline to generate clicks. People share headlines, not content. And here, it was mostly being shared as a means to validate a pre-held position. There isn't any deep analysis. It doesn't invite the reader to think about the social or political ramifications. It isn't an invitation for a dialog. It simply allows one "side" to feel morally righteous and vindicated. Ultimately, it further entrenches political positions on opposite sides of an ever-growing ideological schism.
This article, like a myriad of others that seek to attribute some causality to Clinton's "unexpected" loss, also fails to mention any other reasons why voters may have chosen Trump. Being from the south myself, it's perhaps no surprise that I know people who voted for Trump. I know they're not racists. I know my mother and sister aren't misogynists. The reality is that, over the last 20 or 30 years, we've witnessed a historically unprecedented upward redistribution of wealth. Decades of atrocious trade deals destroyed manufacturing jobs, eviscerated the middle class, and left the poor in increasingly dire conditions. And after the 2008 collapse, we used taxpayer money to bolster and strengthen the institutions whose unremitting greed created the conditions which lead us there. It should come as no surprise that working class and poor white people would rather vote for a "human molotov cocktail," as Michael Moore put it, than to vote for someone whose husband was the catalyst for the economic forces that destroyed their livelihood while she herself campaigned on more of the same.
The article in question
Michael Moore sums up why Americans would vote for Trump
Personally, I tend to think that the intent here was to create an explosive title just to increase shares on social media. Shares increase site visits, which, in turn, produces ad revenue. It's fairly clear now that a lot of major news outlets are struggling more and more in the digital age, so it's perhaps no surprise.
The problem is that if you actually read the article, you could see that perhaps the title was in fact a bit strong. The evidence is fairly weak. The first part of the article, which draws upon data from the "2016 American National Election Study," examining white people's inclination to vote Republican was really only truly anomalous in the highest income bracket. This isn't particularly surprising and probably communicates more about Hillary Clinton's commitment to protecting the status quo than it does about the motivations of Trump's supporters.
The second part found that Trump voters were "less authoritarian" than other white, Republican voters. This is surprising, but trends away from the omnipresent narrative that his supporters are unilaterally "nazis" and "fascists".
And finally, the part which the whole thesis is based on, the "symbolic racism scale", appears to be purely a measure of personal political values, not actual perceptions of race. The questioning is inherently biased. So, as the author notes, because they can't ask, "Do you think blacks are lazy?" instead, they ask "whether racial inequalities today are a result of social bias or personal lack of effort and irresponsibility." This is one of the central pillars of conservatism--personal responsibility and work ethic. It isn't testing their opinions about minorities, it's testing their adherence to a political ideology. Do you think that any significant number of conservative respondents are going to answer that they think social inequality is a result of social bias when so much of their own political identity is tied to work ethic and personal responsibility? Imagine asking the same question but substituting "millennials'economic disparity" for "social inequality". The same trends would almost certainly persist.
As an aside, why is it that, if you're trying to survey for racism, you can't ask directly, "Do you think (minorities) are lazy?" I mean, if you're truly trying to test for racism, then simply ask it directly. By the methodology employed in this survey, you could produce almost whatever results you wanted to show. In reality, if you wanted to produce the most accurate analysis, you would find the most succinct way to ask that question.
In spite of all that, however, they actually showed that there was an observable decline on the "symbolic racism scale" for both Republicans and Democrats between 2012 and 2016 with very little statistical variation overall. The title of the article seems to draw simply from the fact that authoritarianism was represented relatively lower than racism in this voter response survey. To declare confidently that this data shows that "Trump voters" (again suggesting they're some sort of monolith) are racist is disingenuous at best. The trends simply aren't strong enough to make such bold assertions.
To me, the real insidiousness of this type of "news" is that it exploits political ideologies to sell ads and sacrifices truth in the process. As I suggested, the data used in the article didn't show a particularly strong correlation between Trump voters and racism. The fact is that most people likely shared the article without reading it or bothering to see if that's what the data actually seemed to suggest. Instead, it seems like WaPo used an inflammatory headline to generate clicks. People share headlines, not content. And here, it was mostly being shared as a means to validate a pre-held position. There isn't any deep analysis. It doesn't invite the reader to think about the social or political ramifications. It isn't an invitation for a dialog. It simply allows one "side" to feel morally righteous and vindicated. Ultimately, it further entrenches political positions on opposite sides of an ever-growing ideological schism.
This article, like a myriad of others that seek to attribute some causality to Clinton's "unexpected" loss, also fails to mention any other reasons why voters may have chosen Trump. Being from the south myself, it's perhaps no surprise that I know people who voted for Trump. I know they're not racists. I know my mother and sister aren't misogynists. The reality is that, over the last 20 or 30 years, we've witnessed a historically unprecedented upward redistribution of wealth. Decades of atrocious trade deals destroyed manufacturing jobs, eviscerated the middle class, and left the poor in increasingly dire conditions. And after the 2008 collapse, we used taxpayer money to bolster and strengthen the institutions whose unremitting greed created the conditions which lead us there. It should come as no surprise that working class and poor white people would rather vote for a "human molotov cocktail," as Michael Moore put it, than to vote for someone whose husband was the catalyst for the economic forces that destroyed their livelihood while she herself campaigned on more of the same.
The article in question
Michael Moore sums up why Americans would vote for Trump
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