TO UNDERSTAND THE rise of Donald Trump, you don’t need to go to a diner in the Midwest or read “Hillbilly Elegy,” J.D. Vance’s memoir.
You just need to know these basic facts:
In 1980, white people accounted for about 80 percent of the U.S. population.
In 2024, white people account for about 58 percent of the U.S. population.
Trump appeals to white people gripped by demographic hysteria. Especially older white people who grew up when white people represented a much larger share of the population. They fear becoming a minority.
This is definitely true. It’s something I’ve heard Trump supporters argue about firsthand. But it’s not just only racism or the threat of being a minority, but the fear of losing freedom to do what they want according to their own skewed morals. So while a decent chunk of why they think the way they do is sheer racism and fear around that (especially since the start of the BLM movement), it’s not the core of the problem.
I believe that this started as the resurgence of toxic masculinity in that Trump showing people it was okay to be misogynistic, racist, and homophobic in opposition to race, gender, and identity politics rising in the 2010s. Women’s rights and LGBT people are in their sights as well and, despite their narrative fitting well with fundamentalist religious morals, this seems more like resentment that those movements didn’t address their needs or issues. COVID restrictions that they disagreed with fanned the growing fire into the fulblown fascist conservative movement we see today.
So I don’t think it’s the fact that cis het white people are in lower relative numbers but it’s the event of rising social progressivism and more rights for minorities and women that spurred the antagonism of them.
Tldr: Bigots are upset that they didn’t get anything out of women’s, LGBT, and minorities rights.
I’ll agree with you except for the timeline. It started after 9/11, bigotry was far less openly acceptable during the 90s. It just blew up after Obama was elected and social media took off. People were all exposed to the same type of media at the time, and big media companies weren’t spreading extremely racist content, other than a few fringe things like Rush Limbaugh. Fox news really took off after 9/11 too.
I want to disagree with this because bigotry was huge in the 90’s, but so was attacking it. Our cartoon’s were chock-full of anti-bigotry messaging, but then movies would be the opposite.
I think I, personally, would typify the 90’s with saying that one out-group is ok, but only if we all make fun of another one or you’re the butt of jokes. IE. You can have Will and Grace, but we’re using ‘gay’ as a word to literally just mean ‘bad.’
I think after 9/11 they were still the same old tactic they used in and after the cold war; security theater and fear mongering. But you’re right, news and political representatives definitely weren’t the completely open bigots that they are today though and I think you might be right about that time period being the start of today’s Fox news.
Social media definitely had a profound impact on politics, people’s rights, and open bigotry. This definitely gave them the means to have more of a voice with younger demographics but I’ll still argue that it wasn’t until Trump entered the picture that they were able to really push their narrative and decouple “truth” from official news sources in the minds of many. I don’t think I’ve seen so many people just repeat distorted views of reality at once until then.
Yup. It’s far more that racism alone.
It’s all sorts of bigotry that Trump has essentially given them permission to stop hiding.