Interesting psychological twists and turns

DROzone, a member of the Daily Kos community, discusses a recent article in *The Atlantic*. The anxiety that prompted voters in 2016 wasn’t economic. That article features University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana Mutz.

“For the first time since Europeans arrived in this country,” Mutz notes, “white Americans are being told that they will soon be a minority race.” When members of a historically dominant group feel threatened, she explains, they go through some interesting psychological twists and turns to make themselves feel okay again. First, they get nostalgic and try to protect the status quo however they can. They defend their own group (“all lives matter”), they start behaving in more traditional ways, and they start to feel more negatively toward other groups.

When whites who were high in “ethnic identification” were reminded they will soon be outnumbered by non-whites, their support for the nasty guy and his anti-immigrant policies increased.

And how did the nasty guy campaign? By doing as much reminding as he could.

As for economic issues, none prompted people to switch their vote from Obama in 2012 to the nasty guy in 2016.

DROzone agrees that economic messages didn’t work with his friends, the ones who don’t seem as progressive as they did back in 2012. The economic message seemed to backfire. People readily refuse a proposal that would help them such as Medicare for All because it would also help those people who would only take advantage of the system.

They refuse economic justice, even for themselves, because it is more important for them to maintain their social injustice.

It was racism.