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Oct. 28, 2024 - Straight White American Jesus
18:23
SUBSCRIBER PREMIUM: White Christian Supremacy vs. Multi-Racial Democracy
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Axis Mundi Axis Mundi The 2024 elections are upon us, y'all.
And no matter what happens, there's going to be a lot to process and a next chapter to prepare for.
That's why we're holding two live events in order to help you stay informed about what's happening and to get ready for what's coming.
On November 21st, we're holding an event with Americans United for Separation of Church and State at the University of Southern California.
We have an illustrious group of leaders and scholars, including Andrew Seidel, Rachel Lazar, Kyate Joshi, Diane Winston, and Dan Miller.
We're going to talk about what happened and prepare for what's next.
On November 22nd, we'll be talking about Christian extremism and the 2024 elections at the San Diego Convention Center.
Matt Taylor will be giving opening remarks, and we'll have a roundtable with familiar faces like Leah Payne and Lloyd Barba, not to mention me and Dan, and a few others.
Tickets are available now, and you can find everything in the show notes.
You can also watch online if you can't be in LA or San Diego.
November 21 and November 22.
Two chances to be with us at Straight White American Jesus and a number of other great scholars and leaders.
Join us in person or online.
I'm Brad Onishi.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
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Welcome to American Jesus.
My name is Ishii Arsh, who is hosted in partnership with the CAP Center at UCSB. And I'm joined today by Dr.
Liliana Mason, who is an associate research professor at the SNF Agora Institute and is a faculty in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Mason is the author of Uncivil Agreement, How Politics Became Our Identity.
That's with the University of Chicago Press and also has a new book coming next year.
Dr. Mason has been published seemingly all over the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly.
Also been featured in many places, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and NPR. Just say, Dr.
Mason, thanks for taking the time to join me.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks so much for the invitation.
I'm happy to be here.
We are here today to talk about a brand new article, Activating Animus, the Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support.
And that was published in the American Political Science Review with your co-host Julie Ronski from the University of Mississippi and John Kane from New York University.
As soon as I saw you post about the article on Twitter, I wanted to just see if there was any way to have you on, even though I know you have a very busy summer and a lot going on.
And one of the reasons is just this Twitter thread where you really elaborate All conclusions that y'all draw in this article.
So we will get there.
But for me, as somebody who spends his weeks and his hours and seemingly too many of his hours thinking about things like what animates Trump support, I would say it really just catches my eye is kind of novel and just at this point incisive in a way that I had never really considered.
Your work really did that.
And so I'm very thankful for just the kind of perspective that y'all bring in this article.
Can I just begin here?
What type of research did you and your co-authors do for activating enemas?
Like, how did you collect data, you know, for the layperson to understand how it is you sort of arrive at conclusions?
What is the kind of thing you do as a researcher?
Yeah.
Well, so we're very lucky because the Democracy Fund sponsors a publicly available survey called the Voter Study Group.
And anybody can actually access this data online.
And what they did was they interviewed many thousands of people in 2011.
And then started re-interviewing those people in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, this year, last year, this year.
So they're continuing this, let's call it panel, when you interview the same people over and over again.
And the nice thing about a panel is that if you see changes over time, you know that it's because these people's minds are changing, not because it's a different sample of people.
So we really thought that this would be a useful data source because it's almost like a CAD machine.
You can go back to 2011, before Trump was really a major political figure, And then sort of look at the types of characteristics of people before Trump was around that predicted or that were highly correlated with their feelings towards Trump in 2018, so after she'd been president for almost two years.
And so we were really just looking for patterns to see, you know, what are the patterns of, you know, what are the things that are the best at predicting Trump's support in the future?
Yeah, that's great.
I mean, I love this, the idea of a time machine effect where you have the same folks and you can really track how their attitudes have or have not changed.
One of the conclusions you draw in the article, and I'll quote here, Democratic link groups in 2011 predicts future support for Trump regardless of party identity.
You help us non-specialists, non-academics understand what that means?
Yeah, so these feelings toward, these were self-reported feelings towards African Americans, Hispanics, LGBTQ +, Americans, and Muslims.
And so these people who felt negative feelings towards these four groups in 2011 We're more likely to support Trump in 2018.
But that effect occurred among Republicans and Democrats, and especially among independents.
So, obviously, the overall level of Trump approval among Democrats is lower than anybody else.
But it's the people who had negative feelings towards these groups in 2011 still had significantly higher approval of Trump by 2018 than people who had warm feelings towards these groups, for instance, even in the Democratic Party.
What we found a pretty astonishing because usually not much moves partisans, right?
Republicans feel what they feel, Democrats feel what they feel, but this was actually something that was moving people across time.
I mean, what really caught my eye here was something that I think some of us have felt or perceived for a long time, but did not have the data to back this up, which is that Trump's turnout, the Trump coalition, is this group who seems unique.
It's not a Republican group.
It's not a party-identified group.
It's something...
And yet, did not have the data or the language, perhaps, to kind of zero in on what it was.
And so, I mean, this leads me to a bunch of things.
I want to turn to your truly noteworthy and, I think, alarming Twitter thread about the article.
You elaborate on your findings and draw some pretty arresting conclusions.
And first, it seems that what you're saying is there's a correspondence between folks who really liked Trump in 2018 and in 2017 really...
Have animus towards or dislike of Black folks, racial minorities like Muslims, folks who are part of the LGBTQ plus community, and Hispanics.
I'll just play devil's advocate really quick.
Not to be glib, but is that just a statement about the GOP in general?
How is this just different in the data than just the run-of-the-mill GOP Republican kind of voter?
Yeah, that was one of the most fascinating things that we found, actually, which is that this relationship only exists for Donald Trump.
So if you, and we're predicting the relationship between these two time periods, we're controlling, so basically controlling for partisan identity and age and gender and all of the other demographic things.
So we're holding constant all of these things that normally predict approval of Republican figures or the Republican Party.
And what we found was, holding all those things constant, This animosity in 2011 predicts approval of higher approval of Trump in 2018, but it does nothing to predict approval of the Republican Party in general or Mitt Romney or Paul Wright.
So these were just the people that we had in the survey to measure against.
But basically, it was this really standout effect where just regular Republicans Once you take into account the Republican identity, Zanamon City doesn't actually predict much, right?
But even taking into account Republican identity, Zanamon City in 2011 has this really strong relationship with Trump approval, and he's unique in all of the political figures and the political parties that we tested.
Trump was uniquely attracting This particular group of people, almost sort of like a lightning rod, right?
He wasn't creating them.
He was drawing, you know, previously people who already held these attitudes, he was attracting them, corralling them into one particular political group around him.
You know, when I think of the title of the article, Activating Animus, one thing we talk a lot about on our show, my co-author or my co-host, Dan Miller, just wrote a book, the metaphor of the national social body, that the nation has a body.
And when I think about activation, sometimes I think about those situations where you kind of go do some exercise that you usually don't do.
You know, so maybe if somebody's a runner and they end up going whitewater rafting or they paddleboarding, right?
Yeah.
Oh my Lord, you know, there's muscles in my shoulders or in my quads that I never knew I had because they just got active by this different movement.
And when I think of the work you're doing, and I think of the activation, right, of different parts of the American body that have now come rushing to the fore.
They are now the emphasis.
They are in the foreground of what has become the contemporary GOP. This leads to something you say that just lines up with everything we talk about on this show on a weekly basis.
And here you say, the new MAGA slash anti-MAGA conflict is not an entirely partisan one.
So as you've been saying today, it's not GOP versus Democrats, etc., What you say is, I quote, it's about Christian supremacy versus a fully multiracial democracy.
And so this is just, this is as clear as it gets.
And I guess what I'm wondering is, in your mind, what does Christian supremacy mean here?
What does multiracial democracy mean here?
And why are they adversaries?
I'm Philip Dislip.
And I'm Stacy Stukin.
Breath of Fire debuts October 23rd on HBO Max.
It's a docuseries about yoga, cults, abuse, and turning spirituality into big business.
The series focuses on Yogi Bhajan, who in the 1960s immigrated from India to the United States, and on Katie Griggs, a millennial American.
Decades apart, they both built wellness empires based on Kundalini Yoga.
Each had a huge personality, celebrity followers, and fervent disciples.
They also left behind a legacy of abuse and exploitation.
I'm a journalist, Phillips, an academic.
We served as historical consultants and on-camera experts for the series.
We created Temple of Steel, an unofficial companion podcast to the Breath of Fire docuseries, which premieres on HBO Max, Wednesday, October 23rd.
Join us the morning after each episode airs for context, analysis, and a deeper discussion.
Find Temple of Steel, the unofficial Breath of Fire podcast, anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Right.
So this is, I think, one of those crucial concepts that we just don't talk about very much, which is that, you know, at least in academia and journalism, right, we tend to assume that when we say democracy, we mean every citizen in the country has equal representation, regardless of their race or gender identity or whatever.
This is a faction of Americans who really don't want that type of democracy.
They're not interested in a fully represented American democracy.
They're much more interested in a country where white Christian men are at the very top of the social hierarchy.
They receive all of the benefits and privileges from being at the top of that social hierarchy.
And they don't ever get treated like people who are lower in the social hierarchy.
And the alternative to that is It's our assumption that democracy beats everybody, right?
And you can hear this in, you know, even just the Stop the Steal rhetoric, right?
It was, you know, if you don't count Milwaukee and Madison, then we would have won, right?
If we don't count these millions of human beings that live in this state but happen to not be largely white or Christian, right, then Trump did win the election.
And he did win white people.
He won white Christian America.
So in that sense, right, it's not the seal thing.
They do believe that they won because the voters that they want to be voting did vote for Trump.
And the people that they don't think deserve an equal voice in American democracy didn't vote for Trump.
And that's unfair in their view.
So it's pretty, like, the rhetoric that we're hearing come out of this, it makes it pretty clear, right, what they're actually advocating.
And it's not a multiracial democracy.
At all.
And in fact, you know, you should, I mean, obviously, America has wanted to be, or has tried to be, a multiracial democracy for a long time.
We have the 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th Amendments, right, that were providing voting rights and protections to people who are not white men.
But we haven't really fully achieved that goal.
And so we've been making a lot of progress recently.
And I think that progress has been really threatening to folks who think that it would be better if we went back to a time when things were less equal.
And white men, white Christian men knew exactly where they stood.
And no one could tell them what to wear on their face.
No one could tell them how to behave in public.
Or how they should interact with other people.
And all of a sudden, all of these other groups of people have had a say to some degree.
And you almost think about it as if America ever were to have a reckoning with its legacy of racial violence and prejudice, Unless there would be a backlash.
There would be a massive backlash from white supremacy.
And so it's almost, you know, at this point, I feel like this is just an inevitable process that we just have to go through.
It's just important that we talk about it for what it is and not pretend it's this polarization or, you know, partisanship.
Because that's not what it really is.
You're so right about...
I just want to come back to what you said at the top about Milwaukee.
I mean, the stop the steal rhetoric was, yeah, if you take out Milwaukee, if you take out Philadelphia, if you take out Detroit, i.e.
if you take out, right, these cities that are either majority black or majority person of color and so on and so forth, then yes, you know, Trump is president.
The other thing that for me is just so notable...
Everything you just said about your research from a social science perspective is as somebody who does a lot more historical work, this tracks completely, but it's always nice for me when the history, social science kind of line up and are kind of saying the same thing.
And so the idea that white men since the 1960s, since the 1860s and before have reacted this way every time the expansion of these or protection or voting rights, etc.
It just tracks and it tracks in 2020 just as it tracks All right.
So let's play devil's advocate.
You know, you'll hear from Tucker Carlson or Charlie Kirk or Lauren Boebert.
The left is anti-white, anti-Christian.
And so MAGA Nation has.
But you know what?
So the left, they're the intolerant left.
They hate us just as much as we hate them.
Is that true from your data?
What does it show?
It's not true in terms of race and religion.
So we tried to do this from the other side to see if there was any Trump-like figure in the Democratic Party.
And so the majority of racial and Christian groups in the Republican Party are whites and Christians.
And we did have recorded feelings towards those two groups.
So again, went back to 2011 and we tried to see if people's feelings towards whites and Christians had any predictive ability to say, you know, they're more likely to approve of the Democratic Party or Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer, etc.
And we found zero relationship.
So even, and in fact, there's slightly opposite relationships.
So the people who feel warmer towards whites and Christians actually feel warmer towards the Democratic Party, but it's not a significant difference.
It's a very mild effect.
So basically, it's that animus.
The way that it motivates people's attitudes towards Trump, there's nobody in the Democratic Party who is the same type of figurehead or lightning rod.
And the Democratic Party itself is not attracting people who hate whites and Christians.
It's actually possibly the opposite.
Don't forget y'all, two live events coming in November, some straight white American Jesus.
One at the University of Southern California in LA with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and then the next night at the San Diego Convention Center.
Tickets are available now and you can find everything in the show notes.
You can also watch online if you can't be in LA or San Diego.
November 21 and November 22.
Two chances to be with us at Straight White American Jesus and a number of other great scholars and leaders.
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