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What Ails the Right Isn't (Just) Racism
An authoritarian fear of difference best explains the intolerance sweeping the Republican Party.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/what-if-left-was-right-race/595777/?fbclid=IwAR1DSdjpZGdngUkWx5IZEU7kJN6D_wMZsCL2tyJwCdsBOBFq4f0_BzXes7w
I concur that Trump, as surely as Lee Atwater, marshals racist tropes. But I doubt the last claim: “Instrumental racists” believe that voters will perhaps respond only to racism. And I doubt that voters, in fact, respond only to racism. Something distinct and deeper is at work. This deeper force explains nearly all of Trump’s most odious and irresponsible comments, not just the racist ones. It helps explain why so many conservatives and Republicans were caught off guard by Trump’s rise and the resonance of his bigotry. And it helps clarify what the left sees and doesn’t see about racism. Once leftists understand it, they will find it easier to defeat the identitarian right.
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And she cautioned that “a good deal of what we call racial intolerance is not even primarily about race, let alone blacks, let alone African Americans and their purported shortcomings,” though antiblack, ideological racists do of course exist, and African Americans are harmed regardless of what drives intolerance. “Ultimately,” Stenner contended, “much of what we think of as racism, likewise political and moral intolerance, is more helpfully understood as ‘difference-ism,’” defined as “a fundamental and overwhelming desire to establish and defend some collective order of oneness and sameness.”
...
Stenner’s book reaches a conclusion that cuts against one of the main progressive strategies for fighting racism in American society: the belief that if we have the will, everyone can be socialized to respect and value difference.
“All the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference … are the surest way to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors,” she wrote. The appearance of sameness matters, and “apparent variance in beliefs, values, and culture seem to be more provocative of intolerant dispositions than racial and ethnic diversity,” so “parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness” seems wise when possible.
...
And she cautioned that “a good deal of what we call racial intolerance is not even primarily about race, let alone blacks, let alone African Americans and their purported shortcomings,” though antiblack, ideological racists do of course exist, and African Americans are harmed regardless of what drives intolerance. “Ultimately,” Stenner contended, “much of what we think of as racism, likewise political and moral intolerance, is more helpfully understood as ‘difference-ism,’” defined as “a fundamental and overwhelming desire to establish and defend some collective order of oneness and sameness.”
...
Stenner’s book reaches a conclusion that cuts against one of the main progressive strategies for fighting racism in American society: the belief that if we have the will, everyone can be socialized to respect and value difference.
“All the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference … are the surest way to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors,” she wrote. The appearance of sameness matters, and “apparent variance in beliefs, values, and culture seem to be more provocative of intolerant dispositions than racial and ethnic diversity,” so “parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness” seems wise when possible.
Very interesting article from the Atlantic back in August.
