George Hawley has done a great service, puncturing the myth of a Republican base that has suddenly, in the Trump era, adopted reactionary views on matters of race and sex. The Internet is not reality, and neither is elite punditry: There may be some crazy newfangled far-right subcultures on the web and lots of media interest in them, but they do not seem to have moved the needle when it comes to Republican attitudes overall. I especially like that Hawley makes his point with straightforward descriptive data.
Tasked with responding to these findings, I first suspected that the trends might look different among the young. Isn't Pepe the Frog all the rage with Millennials and Gen Z? But subsetting the American National Election Studies (ANES) data to Republicans under 40, I found patterns similar to Hawley’s.
Here are the four so-called “racial resentment” questions he compiled (which work as a measure of racial conservatism even if they don’t really measure bigotry), asking whether blacks could achieve equality by trying harder, whether blacks have gotten less than they deserve, whether blacks should work their way up without “special favors,” and whether the history of slavery and discrimination makes it difficult for blacks to succeed. Rather than tallying agreement with each question, I tally the allegedly “resentful” answers, such as disagreeing with the idea that conditions make it hard for blacks to succeed.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Fusion
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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