I mean, what’s going on with these people?
Theda Skocpol, a sociologist and political scientists, explains the roots of right-wing resentment in America in this interview from The Atlantic:
Starting in 2008, a widely circulated conspiracy theory was that Barack Obama was not actually born in America…. Proof of this theory was never a requirement for subscribing to it; you could simply choose to believe that a Black liberal with a Muslim-sounding middle name was not one of us….
The country has not changed much….Ā Now, as then, you can take the rightās scramble for evidence of fraud with a grain of salt, she told me. The election deniers who say they are perturbed by late-night ballot dumps or dead people voting are actually concerned with something else.
āāStop the Stealā is a metaphor,ā Skocpol said, āfor the country being taken away from the people who think they should rightfully be setting the tone.ā More than a decade later, evidence remains secondary when what youāre really doing is questioning whose vote countsāand who counts as an American…..
Elaine Godfrey: Tell me what connection you see between the Tea Party movement that you studied and the T____-inspired Stop the Steal effort.
Theda Skocpol: Thereās a definite line. Opinion polls tell us that people who participated in or sympathized with the Tea Party … were disproportionately angry about immigration and the loss of America as they know it. They became core supporters of T____. Iām quite certain that some organizations that were Tea Partyālabeled helped organize Stop the Steal stuff.
T____ has expanded the appeal of an angry, resentful ethno-nationalist politics to younger whites. But itās the same outlook.
Godfrey:Ā So how do you interpret the broader Stop the Steal movement?
Skocpol:Ā I donāt think Stop the Steal is about ballots at all. I donāt believe a lot of people really think that the votes werenāt counted correctly in 2020. They believe that urban people, metropolitan peopleādisproportionately young and minorities, to be sure, but frankly liberal whitesāare an illegitimate brew thatās changing America in unrecognizable ways and taking it away from them. Stop the Steal is a way of saying that. Stop the Steal is a metaphor. And remember, they declared voting fraud before the election.
Godfrey:Ā A metaphor?
Skocpol: Itās a metaphor for the country being taken away from the people who think they should rightfully be setting the tone. [Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate] Doug Mastriano said it in so many words: Itās a Christian country. That doesnāt mean weāll throw out everybody else, but theyāve got to accept that weāre the ones setting the tone. Thatās what Hungary has in mind. Viktor OrbĆ”n has been going a little further. Theyāre a more muscular and violence-prone version of the same thing.
People [in Wisconsin] in 2016 who were otherwise quite normal would say, Thereās something wrong with those votes from Milwaukee and Madison. Iād push back ever so gently and say, Those are big places; it takes a while to count the votes. Iād get a glassy-eyed stare at that point: No, something fishy is going on.
They feel disconnected from and dominated by people who have done something horrible to the country. And T____ gave voice to that. Heās a perfect resonant instrument for thatābecause heās a bundle of narcissistic resentments. But heās no longer necessary.
Godfrey:Ā Elaborate on that for me.
Skocpol: Heās not necessary for an authoritarian movement to use the [Republicans] to lock in minority rule. The movement to manipulate election access and counting is so far along. I think itās too late, and weāre vulnerable to it because of how we administer local elections.
Whatās happened involves an interlocking set of things. It depends not just on candidates like T____ running for president and nationalizing popular fears and resentments, but also on state legislatures, which have been captured, and the Supreme Court. The Court is a keystone in all of this because itās going to validate … manipulations that really are about locking in minority rule. In that sense, the turning point in American history may have happened in November 2016.
Godfrey:Ā The turning point toward what?
Skocpol: Toward a locking-in of minority rule along ethno-nationalist lines. The objective is to disenfranchise metro people, period. I see a real chance of a long-term federal takeover by forces that are determined to maintain a fiction of a white, Christian, T____pist version of America.
That canāt work over the long run, because the fastest-growing parts of the country are demonized in that scheme of things. But a lot of things liberals do play into it: Democrats are the party of strong government, and theyāre almost as fixated on the presidency as T____ists are….Ā The hour is late. This election this fall is critical.
Godfrey:Ā Why so?
Skocpol: Weāve got about five pivotal states where election deniersāthe culmination of the Tea PartyāT____pist strand of the [Republican Party]āare close to gaining control of the levers of voting access and counting the results. If that happens, in even two of those places, it could well be enough. The way courts are operating now, they will not place limits on much of anything that happens in the states.
Godfrey:Ā So what would you say is on the ballotĀ in 2022?
Skocpol:Ā The locking-in of minority authoritarian rule.
People talk about it in racial terms, and of course the racial side is very powerful. We had racial change from the 1960s on, and conservative people are angry about Black political power. But I wouldnāt underestimate the gender anger thatās channeled here: Relations between men and women have changed in ways that are very unsettling to them…..
This is directed at liberal whites, too. Tea Partiers talked about white people in college towns who voted Democratic the way the rulers of Iran would speak of Muslims that are liberalāas the near-devil.
Godfrey:Ā What are the roots of that resentment?
Skocpol:Ā The suspicion of cities and metro areas is a deep strand in America. In this period, itās been deliberately stoked and exploited by people trying to limit the power of the federal government. They can build on the fears that conservatives haveāabout how their children leave for college and come back thinking differently. As soon as you get away from the places where upper-middle-class professionals are concentrated, what you see is decay. People see that. Theyāre resentful of it.
Anti-immigrant politics is very much at the core of this. Every time in the history of the U.S., when you reach the end of a period of immigration, you get a nativist reaction.Ā When the newcomers come, theyāre going to destroy the country. Thatās an old theme in this country.
Godfrey: The 2016 election was surrounded by a lot of discussion about whether T____ās supporters were motivated by racism or economic anxiety. Whatās your view on that?
Skocpol: That whole debate tends to be conducted with opinion polls. Iām in a minority, but I donāt find them very helpful for understanding American politics…. In American politics, everything is about the where.
If you drive into a place in Iowa or Nebraska where immigration is happening, itās changed the shops downtown, itās changed the language, itās changed the churches, itās changed the schools. And peopleās jobs have changedāso itās also about economics. In our 2011 interviews, Tea Party members were angry about immigrants. Iām not saying everybody in those communities is angry at newcomers, but it creates tensions that rabble-rousing politicians can take advantage of.
We know that T____ supporters, Stop the Steal supporters, are much more likely than other Republicans and conservatives to resent immigrants and fear them. In my 2017ā2019 period of research, I visited eight pro-T____ counties. Tea Party types were just furious about immigrants. T____ās emphasis on immigration interjected the idea that the debate is about what the nature of America is.
T____ism is nativism. Itās also profoundly resentful of independent women, and itās resentful of Black people whom it considers out of place politically. T____channeled that and fused it into one big, angry brew.
Godfrey:Ā How organic have these movements been? At a certain point,Ā we heard a lotĀ about how the Tea Party movement became a Koch-funded operation, not a true grassroots movement.
Skocpol: The Tea Party was not created by the Koch brothers; it was taken advantage of by the Kochs. But the Kochs were not anti-immigrant. The Tea Partiers really were. The Kochs didnāt control the results. The Kochs didnāt select D____ T____. They didnāt even like him. Marco Rubio was their guy. The Chamber of Commerce crowd wanted a Bush. Both were easily dispatched by T____.
Republican leaders could have done somethingāand they still could. The real story is about Republican Party elites and their willingness to go along with what theyāve always known was over the top. Thatās a mystery thatās a little hard to completely solve. A lot of the opportunists think they can ride that tiger without it devouring them, even though sometimes it does. But nobody seems to learn…..