There is significant resentment in the United States among non-college white males. Economic inequality is widening at an increasing rate. Many jobs are either disappearing or are being accomplished by robots. Women are in greater possession of their reproductive rights and are legally protected against spousal abuse. The sway of churches in urban settings is diminishing. But probably most significantl, is the inexorable march of racial diversity in the United States. By 2045 the United States will be predominantly populated by people of color. This prospect upsets many whites who fear losing their "white privilege" status. This is precisely what Donald Trump has been tapping into, vowing to maintain the 243 year old social divisions of the United States. So too do Trump Republicans work to recreate the America of George Wallace and Jim Crow voting laws.
What is *interesting* to me in your 'sociological approach' is in the realization that you really have no sympathy nor genuine concern for those who have, through deliberate machinations, been dispossessed of what was in truth 'theirs'. It is highly interesting to me that the function therefore of these high-toned sociological expositions is really just to trace and explain the process of loss and, at the same time, to indicate who and what you yourself serve. You serve the dispossession of the dominant demographic of the US. You are thus part of the process of loss and harm that has been perpetrated in the American Postwar.
And you wonder why you are understood to be a traitor?! See, I suggest that that is what you are. And to the degree that you align yourself with a political and élite class that sponsors this dispossession process, to that exact degree you are really and truly an enemy. Your righteous tones ring false when closely examined.
The author (Thomas Edsall) of that opinion article asks the questions:
How toxic is the combination of pessimism and anger that stems from a deterioration in standing and authority? What might engender existential despair, this sense of irretrievable loss? How hard is it for any group, whether it is racial, political or ethnic, to come to terms with losing power and status? What encourages desperate behavior and a willingness to believe a pack of lies?
But the better question is: Is it morally and ethically defensible that a people in the process of being so dispossessed is seen and understood as having a right to act against it? This 'sociological distance', as if he is studying a foreign people, is deeply suspect to me. The process of dispossession is in itself an evil and a destructive enterprise. And it requires a profoundly compromised ethics to see that such is going on and not to oppose it.
He gets one answer by Bart Bonikowski:
Ethnonationalist Trump supporters want to return to a past when white men saw themselves as the core of America and minorities and women “knew their place.” Because doing so requires the upending of the social order, many are prepared to pursue extreme measures, including racial violence and insurrection. What makes their actions all the more dangerous is a self-righteous belief — reinforced by the president, the Republican Party, and right-wing conspiracy peddlers — that they are on the correct side of history as the true defenders of democracy, even as their actions undermine its core institutions and threaten its stability.
OK so what this means, I take it, is that it is morally wrong for those 'white men' (itself a deprecating term) to question or resent what had been done to them. The part about women who knew their place frames the former statement as a backward and retrograde sentiment that, what, must be overcome by proper ethical introspection?
Can you see how these *narratives* are designed to function? Their function is to undermine the legitimate possibility of opposing what has been slated for this entire class of 'white men'. It is really transparent.
[cont. next]
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