57% of white Americans believe “that discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities” (2) and 49% of Americans believe “discrimination against Christians has become as big a problem in America today as discrimination against other groups” (16, 77% of white evangelical Christians believe that, 17), It is a cliché in various circles that there is a “war on men,” and the organizers of “Straight Pride” events insisted that cis-het men (and, given that they often displayed Confederate flags—racists) are the real ones whose rights are under attack. Michelle Malkin and other have argued that there is a “war” on conservative speech, and Fox News positions itself as opposed to “mainstream media” (suggesting it is marginalized in some way).
The Congress elected in 2018 broke records in terms of diversity, yet the vast majority are still het, white, male Christians. 75% of Senators are men, as are 77% of members of the House. 78% of Congress is white, and only 10% are openly LGBTQ. 88% of Congress self-identifies as Christian. The 2019 list of Fortune 500 CEOs also broke records in terms of diversity, with 33 women (or 15%). 59 of the Fortune 500 and S&P 500 CEOs are non-white (around 12%). In 2017, the Republicans had all three branches of government; and both chambers in 32 states. 26 of US governors are Republican.
Fox News, relentlessly supportive of the Republican Party (and especially Donald Trump), had record numbers of viewers in 2019, “making it the top-rated basic cable network.” It is “the most trusted name in television news” (Berry and Sobieraj 111). Talkers Magazine in 2019 listed the top three “most influential talk show personalities” as the openly pro-GOP Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Dave Ramsey. Christians are doing well, too. As Rachel Laser says, “Trump is conferring unparalleled privilege on one narrow slice of religion”–conservative white patriarchal self-described “evangelicals” (I think the term “fundagelical”—not a term I invented—is more accurate). Their mission is to remake the US government into a democracy of the faithful, in which their policy agenda is the only religious agenda to benefit from the notion of “religious freedom”—an agenda of homophobia, patriarchy, and racism. In short, the reins for government, economic, and cultural power are firmly in the hands of cis-het white Christian male Republicans.
Not just firmly, but disproportionately so: 65% of Americans self-identify as Christian, 49% are men, and 60% are white. In other words, Christian white men are over-represented in positions of power. 35% of Americans self-identify as conservative (26% self-identify as liberal), while the number that self-identify as Republican (29%) is about the same percentage that self-identify as Democrat (27%).
So why are they whining so much? Why do members of the disproportionately powerful groups see themselves as victims?
Ashley Jardina, in her extraordinary White Identity Politics, quotes a man at a rally for Trump: “If you just put everything aside and talk about it rationally, it’s not racism when you’re trying to maintain a way of life and culture” (21). It’s notable that he isn’t talking about economic power, but a way of life and culture—that is, his privilege. Jardina quotes Bill O’Reilly, who said,
“For a long time, skin color wasn’t really much of an issue, in the 80s and 90s we didn’t her a lot. Yeah, you always had your Farrakhans and your Sharptons. We always had those people but—Jackson—they were race hustlers [….] But now, whiteness has become the issue. [….] So if you’re a white American you are a part of a cabal that either consciously or unconsciously keeps minorities down. Therefore, that has to end and whiteness has to be put aside. That’s what the border is all about.[….] Let everybody in. [….] That would diminish whiteness because minorities then would take over [….] That’s what this is all about. Getting whiteness out of power.” (220)
Note that, again, this isn’t about jobs, disease, crime—it’s about whiteness. It’s about whether “whiteness” (by which O’Reilly means loyal Republican white Christian men) will continue to be able to dominate politically, economically, and culturally. My whole talk is summarized in that quote.
This argument, oddly enough, gives away the game—that we have “a way of life” in which whiteness is dominant, and people feel themselves in existential threat because conservative Christian white masculinity is not quite as hegemonic as it once was.
Noel Ignatiev’s formulation of whiteness emphasized the rhetorical and political deflective power of “whiteness” (an aspect lost in many current discussions of “privilege” such as “privilege walks”). Whiteness, he argued, is presented to some people as a “privilege” that invites people to hurt themselves in material ways—good wages, job security, reasonable healthcare, good public schools, good roads—in order to get the “privilege” of being on the good side of American racism. Once someone has been invited to climb into whiteness, they are likely to be very protective of the privileges of whiteness; they are not only drawn to kicking the ladder out from behind them (that is, support abandoning the very policies and processes that enabled them to get to where they are), but to be among the most vocal and active opponents of the people who materially look very much like them (the Irish hating on other Irish, people on public assistance hating on other people on public assistance, second-generation immigrants hating on the latest group of immigrants). Ignatiev’s argument is that the invitation to the privilege of whiteness depoliticizes politics by deflecting discussion away from working conditions, infrastructure, social safety nets to whether your privilege is threatened.
Research in in- v. out-group relations makes it clear that people are willing to hurt themselves in order to keep an out-group from gaining. In various studies, if people are asked to choose between an outcome that gives the in-group and out-groups the same amount, they will choose to take a hit just in order to hurt the out-group more. Sometimes called “Vladimir’s Choice,” it is “the tendency for people to choose to disadvantage others, even when doing so comes at the cost of disadvantaging themselves” (Sidanius et al. 257, see also Koomen and van der Pligt 122).
As long ago as 1941, the deeply-problematic (aka racist, although sometimes categorized as moderate white) W.J. Cash noted that race-baiting was effectively used to keep poor whites from engaging in the political action that would have meant sense materially. Giving poor whites “white privilege” (also known as herrenvolk democracy) meant they didn’t demand good jobs, good schools, good roads, good healthcare because the system guaranteed them that they could feel a kind of identification with the richest white person (even if it was the one who screwing them over in material ways). LBJ famously said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
One irony of the political power of that rhetorical invitation to whiteness is that it involves the simultaneous claim that whiteness is ontologically grounded and a new group can see themselves as white. That new group can see itself as only now and yet always already white. This material and political persuasion is fundamentally rhetorical. People are persuaded to depoliticize policy questions—instead of arguing about our rich and varied policy options in terms of questions like feasibility, solvency, unintended consequences, we frame policy questions in terms of in-group benefit and loyalty (and, sometimes openly, hurting the out-group).
Jardina argues that “white identity […] is a product of the belief that resources are zero-sum, and that the success of non-whites will come at the expense of whites” (268). I would modify that to say that it isn’t a question of resources, but of privilege—that people who strongly identify as white, and who feel threatened, don’t feel threatened in material ways, but in terms of privilege. They see, probably correctly, that white privilege is a zero-sum, and the more that whiteness is not privileged, the more whites lose…privilege. As Jardina says, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression” (21).
Jardina argues that this anxiety about white privilege is the consequence of increased immigration of non-whites allowed by Reagan’s immigration policies, an explanation that assumes a material cause. But whiteness has always been threatened by the immigration of “non-whites” (or non-WASPs), as early as the immigration of Irish and German Catholics in the first part of the 19th century. Whiteness has long maintained its privilege by giving white cards to another group—a group always defined against African and Native Americans (and, until recently, against Jewish and Asian Americans—this seems to be changing, in complicated ways).
My point is that Ignatiev’s argument—that the rhetorical and political invitation to whiteness is a way of neutralizing a potentially radical opponent—is something we’re seeing now. The inclusion in whiteness is how people forget class, it’s how people redefine our own ancestors. More important, it’s how people are persuaded to oppose, passionately, policies that would help them.
Jonathan Metzl’s heartbreaking chapter about sick white men in Tennessee who opposed the expansion of Medicaid or any aspect of “Obamacare”—policies that would have helped them—shows that they did so because they believed that those policies would have enabled “a lot of people that’s not sick…to use the shit out of it, and then when somebody really needs it, they ain’t there for you to get” (Dying of Whiteness 149). They were willing to sacrifice themselves just to make sure an out-group didn’t get benefits.
People can be persuaded set themselves on fire just to make the out-group uncomfortably warm. When an out-group is stereotyped as lazy, and that out-group is getting the same benefits as the in-group, the in-group will reject the benefits. A famous instance of this is the refusal of working-class whites in many areas to join unions, if the unions would have non-white members who would also benefit from union negotiations. But, it’s also, as Metzl observes, a reason that the poor white men he studied in Tennessee will refuse Medicaid—because of the perception that doing so would benefit an out-group whom they saw as lazy and parasitical. These men were making Vladimir’s choice.
How are people persuaded to hate some group so much that they will set themselves on fire in order to make the out-group uncomfortably warm? The short answer is that they are persuaded that they are in a zero-sum apocalyptic battle with the out-group, that the out-group benefitting in any way is yet one more step toward the extermination of the in-group. Their greatest fear is that the previously marginalized out-group will treat them as badly as they treated that out-group.
This is an old argument, the “wolf by the ears” argument that Thomas Jefferson made about African Americans: treatment of slaves had been so bad that it was like having a wolf by the ears. If the US freed slaves, they would turn on whites in a race war. This was the argument made in such different places as a Supreme Court decision about Japanese internment, arguments against releasing innocent people from GITMO, defenses of displacing Native Americans.
The short answer is that they get radicalized by their media of choice.
The first step of radicalizing an audience is to say that we are facing an existential threat. Sometimes the threat is that everyone is threatened; sometimes it’s just the in-group. And here I have to point out that radicalizing an audience, at least to some extent, is not always bad. Sometimes we are facing an existential threat. We can have democratic deliberation and existential threat. In this case, however, the in-group’s existential threat is the loss of privilege, as though people cannot be white and equal.
The second step is to say that this existential threat has an obvious cause, and an equally obvious solution. This is the point at which media say we need to stop arguing about our policy options and go for this one because it is the only right option. This step toward radicalization is an explicit rejection of democracy and democratic deliberation.
The third step follows from the previous two. If the solution is obvious, why are some people unpersuaded? This step says that our complicated world is really just a zero-sum battle between two groups. The third step appeals to our tendency to frame issues in terms of in- and out-groups. We are all prone to categorize people we meet—she’s a Missouri Synod Lutheran, so she must be a Calvinist; he’s got a neck beard, so he must be a douche; they’re from Alabama, so they must racist; he’s black, so he must like rap; she’s a Sanders supporter, so she must be a jerk; he’s a Biden supporter, so he must be a tool of corporate America. Those initial impulses toward categorizing are inevitable, and not necessarily harmful, if they’re open to revision.
The third step toward radicalization is to keep those categories—stereotypes, really—safe from disproof, and that is best done by framing the characteristics of our mental stereotype as essential. What I’ve noticed about stereotypes—the racist Southerner, good-at-math Asian, caring female teacher, hardass white male teacher, lazy POC, corrupt politician—is that, for many people, they exist in a weird space of simultaneously ontologically-grounded and non-falsifiable Platonic forms. Although those beliefs can be shown to “true” by giving evidence, they aren’t shown to be “false” if the evidence turns out to be false or irrelevant, or if there is counter-evidence. All counter-examples are instances of “no true Scotsman.”
Crucial to this step is the assumption (and talking point) that there is no good-willed disagreement of any kind—disagreement, dissent, or even skepticism about the in-group ideology/policy—is not a legitimate point of view to be considered, but proof that the person disagreeing is Them. That they disagree is proof that they are Them, or a stooge of Them. This step is not just a complete rejection of democratic deliberation, but an active move toward fascism (or some other kind of authoritarianism).
These three steps—there is an existential threat; the solution is obvious; only They disagree with us—lead neatly to the fourth step: purifying the in-group. At this point in radicalization, we’re in a world grounded in a lot of claims that a few minutes of sensible googling would show to be wrong: there is never only one possible policy option, the entire world of political positions is not usefully reduced to us v. them.
We are so deeply immersed in a culture of demagoguery, that, when I make this argument, people often say, but there are evil groups. And there are. But, even if we agree that there is an existential threat doesn’t mean there is only one possible response. We really shouldn’t disagree as to whether we should fight Nazis and fascists, but it’s fair to disagree about the best way to do that. We have a lot of options, and it might be most effective for us to adopt a lot of different strategies at the same time. Radicalization, however, says that there is only way to fight Them, and it is to for all in-group members to be more purely loyal to the in-group, committed to purifying the in-group.
The tendency to believe that the only response to existential threat, failure, or uncertainty is a purification of the in-group is well-documented (Koomen and Van der Pligt, and Hogg et al.). This call for purity is always a call for remaining pure in your sources of information, and that’s the fifth step in radicalization: inoculation against dissent, disagreement, disconfirming evidence. If in-group members who have been radicalized this far look at information from other sources—even non-radicalized in-group sources—then they might realize that they’ve been lied to. The more extreme that in-group propaganda becomes, the more vulnerable it is to disproof, and the solution is to persuade its audience that they shouldn’t even look at other media, except in radical in-group media’s abridged, edited, and sometimes actively falsified form.
Inoculation is the rhetorical move of giving your audience a weak version of an argument they will later confront, and it’s something people in rhetoric should study much more. It’s how far too much of our media works (and pretty much all political youtube videos). Propaganda doesn’t work if it looks like what people think propaganda is—what They listen to. Propaganda is most effective when it looks “fair.”
Oddly enough, then, radicalization only works if it looks as though it’s being “fair” to “the other side,” if it looks “objective” and “unbiased.” And, so, here we are at the paradoxical situation that radicalizing an audience has to look as though it isn’t radicalizing, but being “objective.” This step in radicalization is greased by how bad our cultural discourse is about “objectivity” (a slide greased by how far too many fyc courses talk about “objectivity”). Even in academia, the whole discussion of “objectivity” is muckled by binaries. I want to set aside that hobby horse, however, and go back to the question of radicalization. Here I’ll just say that we shouldn’t be looking for proof, but disproof.
Willem Koomen and Joop van der Pligt, in their book The Psychology of Radicalization and Terrorism, argue that radical groups operate most effectively within certain social contexts (such as relative deprivation) and to the extent that they can foster the ideological processes that rationalize (even seem to make necessary) intergroup violence (or the support of violence).
The first of those processes, isolation, Koom and ven der Pligt describe in terms of groups like the Weathermen that physically isolated recruits, but I want to suggest that we should think of the rhetorical process of inoculation as functionally the same kind of isolation. According to Berry and Sobieraj (The Outrage Industry), as well as Benkler et al. (Network Propaganda), much of our current media spends as much time trash-talking “the other” as it does promoting its own side. The point of all that trash-talking is that the “other” media is dangerous, corrupting, and should be avoided.
Research is clear that “cross-cutting” in terms of political discourse—talking to people who disagree, reading or viewing opposition points of view (and not hate-watching)—is beneficial. Inoculation prevents precisely that approach; that’s what it’s intended to do.
That isolation enables group think, a phenomenon that leads to ingroup amplification: “the convictions of moral superiority, in combination with extreme forms of us-versus-them thinking helps to legitimize violence against all adversaries, including innocent children” (Koomen and van der Pligt 179). And here I’m thinking of all those arguments about why putting children in cages is moral.
I mention that political position, but this is a process, facilitated by media, that can happen anywhere on the political spectrum (think anti-vaxxers, flat earthers).
Jardina, as mentioned before, argues that the rise of white identity politics is the consequence of increased immigration under Reagan, largely because of the timeline, but I’m dubious. That timeline also fits the rise of hate-talk radio and radicalizing cable “news,” and social media—including youtube—fuels a cycle of self-selection, self-censorship, and self-radicalization.
Hanna Pitkin once said that what she called “free citizenship”—what I think might more usefully called “responsible political action”—requires “the ability to fight—openly, seriously, with commitment, and about things that really matter—without fanaticism, without seeking to exterminate one’s opponent” (266). My argument is that, through a process of rhetorical radicalization, far too many sites of political discourse not only depoliticize politics, but seriously limit and sometimes completely stifle political discourse itself. Instead of fighting, we exterminate.
So what do we do? Make better media choices. As Benkler et al. show, not all media are the same. While almost all media is driven by the profit motive to engage in damaging frames for politics: us v. them (in other words, zero-sum), elections as horse races, the kind of sloppy psychologizing that displaces policy argumentation with motivism, some media are better than others at fact-checking, issuing corrections, avoiding disinformation campaigns (see especially 381-387). But, as they say, “The pessimistic lesson of our work is that there is no easy fit for epistemic crises in countries were a political significant portion of the population does occupy a hyperpartisan, propaganda rich environment” (386).