The U. S. A. was established on a system of white supremacy, meaning specifically the subjugation and subordination of people of African descent and Native peoples. Many people have fought and died trying to change this system, occasionally even having a little success, but never overturning white supremacy’s basic structure. Consequently, many if not most societal issues revolve around race and racism.
More than anything else, what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was white supremacists rebelling against the inclusion of nonwhites in citizenship activities. These white supremacist groups express in a more militant way the concerns that elected Donald Trump in 2016 and voted in such large numbers for him in 2020. They feel a threat to their presumed status in American society.
Yes, this status threat is the most critical issue that drives Trump’s voters. The media and most of the pundits keep repeating the mantra that Trump’s voters are people with economic insecurities. They say these voters were “left behind” economically. They say these are people who lost jobs or experienced stagnant wages due to the loss of manufacturing jobs, and therefore they punished the incumbent party. Taint so! While economic issues are a concern, they are not the most dominant concern of these people. Several studies have shown that.
The data say the most important issue for Trump voters was “status threat.” Many Trump voters were significantly concerned about the rise of minorities in numbers and power and white America’s loosening grip on the country. In other words, for these voters, white supremacy was at stake in the election.
Trump ran a white supremacist campaign in 2016 and established a white supremacist White House around Steve Bannon, a leader of the so-called Alt-Right (white nationalists), and fellow travelers Stephen Miller, the architect of the anti-Muslim and anti-Hispanic immigrant policies, and Sebastian Gorka, a fellow white nationalist.
Neo-Nazi David Duke, the former Klan leader who endorsed Trump during his campaign, had this to say about the deadly violence by the white supremacist mob in Charlottesville in 2017:
“This represents a turning point for the people of this country. We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.”
And consider this motto widely used across various neo-Nazi groups: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
The usual narrative is that white, working-class voters from rural and Rust Belt communities felt abandoned by the political establishment. Decades of free trade, automation, and cuts to the social safety net turned these voters against the mainstreams of both political parties.
But this narrative fails to answer two critical questions: Why did upper-middle-class and wealthy white voters – who aren’t economic victims – vociferously support Trump in 2016? And why did some of these people, along with many middle-class folks who did not benefit economically from the Trump presidency, storm the capitol?
They wanted to save the country from these nonwhite voters.
Status threat is related to the idea of “wages of whiteness.” Historian David Roediger demonstrated how in the 19th and early 20th centuries, adopting whiteness gave working-class European Americans certain psychological and social advantages as well as economic ones.
W.E.B. DuBois called these advantages the “wages of whiteness. “These “wages of whiteness” gave white Americans the social advantages afforded by higher-paying jobs as well as residential and school segregation. The psychological payout came in knowing that even if elites were economically exploiting them, at least they held social standing above their black counterparts.
Whites fear they are losing their superior social standing. Although the U.S. is far from achieving racial equality, white supremacists see the loss of illegal white preferences as problematic. And they are reacting strongly to the incursion of blacks and other nonwhites into America’s social and political life.
Whether Trump is around to lead it or not, this politicized victimhood (e.g., “nonwhites are taking our place”) that existed long before him – victimhood he powerfully tapped into and mobilized – will be fertile soil for white supremacy and political violence far into our future.
