Structural racism beliefs by party affiliation, 2022 PRRI American Values Survey
Philip Bump comments on an ad just released by Steven Miller’s America First political group. Miller was an official in the Trump administration who played a key role in some of its most savage anti-immigrant policies. America First's ad claims that racism against white Americans is a bigger concern than discrimination against racial minorities.
As Bump notes, until Trump came along, the Republican party used "coded" dog-whistle language to appeal to its white supremacist base. Those days are now over, and the racism is right out in the open: Bump writes,
The appeals used to be coded, quiet. Present and identifiable, but shying away from specific “they’re coming for you” language. The coding is gone. The elevation of racial fear is explicit. The Southern strategy is gone; the Jim Crow appeals to Blacks usurping power are back.
Bump notes that PRRI’s 2022 American Values Survey finds 65% of Republicans seeing discrimination against whites as a problem just as big as discrimination against Blacks. As I noted recently, 61% of white evangelicals, who form a big portion of the Republican base, also told PRRI that they think whites face as much if not more discrimination today than Blacks.
And speaking of PRRI's 2022 American Values Survey, as Grant Schwab reports, another finding of the survey is that, except among white Catholics, religious affiliation correlates with higher levels of belief in QAnon conspiracy theories. Schwab writes,
All religious groups identified in the survey, except for white Catholics, had higher levels of belief in QAnon than religiously unaffiliated Americans. For some groups, that could be attributed to high levels of Republican partisanship.
Of those surveyed by PRRI (the entire group of Americans surveyed, not just those with religious affiliations, 17 percent of respondents agreed that the U.S. is controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation. As Robert P. Jones of PRRI says, these and other findings of the survey are disheartening.
I think that with the results of the upcoming elections, we're going to see just how disheartened those of us who believe in democracy as a governing system are going to be now.
