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Political scientists had long found that candidates who used explicit racial demagoguery paid a price for it at the polls. Hence the need for coded dog-whistles.

But after Obama's election, they found that that penalty had disappeared.

And here we are.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/yes-donald-trump-is-making-white-people-more-hateful/

#trump #jdvance #fascism #propaganda
#Election2024 #immigration
#StochasticTerror

Schaffner’s research isn’t in conflict with those other studies that found a white backlash against Obama before Trump arrived on the scene; it’s complementary. Schaffner says that before Obama’s election, political scientists believed that “when candidates used language during a campaign, or during a debate, that was explicitly racist, voters would indicate that they liked that candidate less and were less likely to vote for them. So the idea was that if politicians wanted to make racial appeals, they had to do it in a subtle, implicit way.” But more recent studies... found that those penalties were no longer showing up. It appears that both are true: Obama’s election activated white voters’ racial grievances and anxieties about being displaced by other groups. But it was Trump’s nasty rhetoric that gave them permission to say what they might have kept quiet out loud—and in some cases, to act on those feelings.
Headlines about how hateful fascist propaganda about pet-eating Haitians is leading to bomb threats and harassment in Springfield, OH.

Yes, Donald Trump Is Making White People More Hateful | The Nation

A new study finds empirical evidence of the “Trump Effect.”
The Nation
#fascism #trump #propaganda #Election2024 #immigration #jdvance #stochasticterror
in reply to Joshua Holland

Joshua Holland
Joshua Holland
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People who emphasize the fact that the GOP ran on white racial grievance for decades before Trump came along aren't wrong, but this is the part they miss: He changed the whole permission structure for what they could say out loud and what kind of naked bigots they could associate with in public.
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