Tag: Symbolic racism

He had a history of making racist comments as a New York real-estate developer in the 1970s and ‘80s. Steven Miller and Nicholas Davis, political scientists at Clemson University and Texas A&M, report on poll data collected by the World Values Survey between 1995 and 2011 in their recent paper, “White Outgroup Intolerance and Declining Support for American Democracy”: Social intolerance of immigrants, those who speak a different language, and those from a different race leads to increased support for strongman rule in the U.S., potential rule of U.S. government by the army, and decreases support for even having a democracy in the U.S. Intolerance, they continue, increases white individuals’ openness to undemocratic alternatives — white Americans who exhibit social intolerance are more likely to dismiss the value of separation of powers. One of Miller and Davis’s most striking findings is that among socially intolerant whites, education heightens hostility to immigrants and fails to moderate the anti-democratic orientation of these white Americans. In a separate study of voters surveyed before and after the 2016 election, Christian S. Crandall, Jason M. Miller and Mark H. White of the psychology department at the University of Kansas, found that the 2016 contest “ushered in a normative climate that favored expression of several prejudices.” The election, they wrote in “Changing Norms Following the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election: The Trump Effect on Prejudice,” served to give “voice and license to express the previously suppressed.” I asked Nour Kteily at Northwestern University about the objective of Trump’s rhetoric. He added that the research he and others have conducted shows a positive association between dehumanization of minorities and support for several of the Republican candidates, but the link to support for Trump was statistically stronger than for any of the other Republican candidates. Studies of voters in both parties show that his hostile invective has begun to infect the electorate at large. In “Party Animals? Party Identity and Dehumanization,” James L. Martherus of Vanderbilt University, Andres G. Martinez of Sonoma State University, Paul K. Piff of the University of California, Irvine, and Alexander G. Theodoridis, of the University of California, Merced, contend that their studies Demonstrate new and extreme boundaries of partisan behavior. Trump’s rhetoric — leaning heavily as it does on simplification — is an explicit attack on political correctness — on “restrictive communication norms” designed to avoid offense to “groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against” — standards that in the past constrained hostile, cruel and heedless remarks about minorities and immigrants. Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, writes in “Follow the Racist?