A related conundrum, of course, is why a New York City slicker who has spent his entire career making real-estate deals in big cities and putting up buildings in big cities and making TV shows in big cities seems to have so much appeal to countryside and small-town folk.
Seems to me it was more about Roe and prayer in schools. The timing is right, but the 60s and 70s were a time of big changes that covered a lot more than race.
I think you’re overestimating the decrease in racism from Boomers to Millennials. I’d buy that it is not as blatant, but improvements seem marginal at best and there is plenty of unquestioned or even supported racism.
That doesn’t measure racism though, that just measures innate prejudice. We’re born that way. We can’t easily change our unconscious prejudices, we can just recognize when we’re making wrong assumptions about people based on them.
Millenials are much less racist than their parents if we define racism as the prejudice and hate that comes by conscious choice, rather than just the normal tribalistic instincts that all humans have.
I know for certain I grew up being told about how horrible that was. Heck, we had songs about it. (The actual line is 1:18. but I recommend at least checking out how it starts, too.)
I also note that, among active Evangelicals, Trump is actually less popular than other groups. He’s only really popular with “cultural Evangelicals.” I know pastors who are preaching against him.
Exactly, if you look at the history, starting with 1962 and the prayer in school case with Roe vs Wade as the most famous example, evangelicals started to feel that the government had turned against religion. At the same time a three decade massive crime wave started, teen pregnancy and abortions massively increased, and drug abuse became rampant. Religious people started seeing the governments anti-religion stance and the social decay of the country as being related. Francis Schaeffer who was an American living in Switzerland, wrote several books explaining how secular humanism had taken over America and was causing the breakdown in society. Many christians read these books, agreed and the religious right was born.
That song brings back awful memories of Carmen songs being played, everyone around me getting verklempt, and me wondering why he chose to make music if he can’t sing.
Sure, millions of people like David Duke.
yes, as I said, the Christian Right philosophy is, today, mainly evidence on their part of disgust with other people’s behavior in the bedroom, and they consistently vote a party that has a far higher rate of sex crimes among their leaders than the Democrats do. Oddly, these days, they are mutating into feeling that so long as the sex is between willing partners of the opposite sexes, anything goes. Domination in the family by the male is a very important tenet for many Christian Rightists. Race is not as important in social matters. Race is now coded into economic terms, as they rail against entitlement programs while cashing their monthly SS check and using Medicare to the hilt. Ask them to defend and they express great concern for all the fraud being perped in those programs by immigrants and minorities, a fraudulent or badly mistaken position. Look at the results of drug testing for welfare. Costs far more than it saves. But, the Christian Right just KNOWS someone, somewhere is taking money out of their bank account or stealing their watermelons, one or the other.
FWIW, just my two cents; I’m a minority American and I have almost always been treated extremely well, in terms of race, by the conservative/religious conservative folks I’ve been around in the US.
In downtown Buffalo, New York, a considerably more liberal place than rural America (where I spent some time,) I saw people harassing a black man, one of the few racist incidents I’ve personally witnessed or encountered.
Someone may have beaten me to it, but I disagree that the American Religious Right is wed to racism. Certainly, there have been times in American history in which religion has been used to justify racist acts, such as when American Protestantism was used to justify slavery of Africans and their descendants. The Klan invoked religion as well.
But the evidence in this election tells a somewhat different story. There have been large swaths of the Farm Belt which have not voted for Trump and who apparently have instead voted for one or both of his two Cuban American opponents. Racism has been a much bigger marketing tool in the South, which Trump has shockingly won. But I would say that race is apart from religion in the South. Trump has done well with religious conservatives who want a racist to win. Trump has not done well in the Farm Belt and the North West, where people want a true Christian to win, whether he is a racist or not (and I’m guessing they’d prefer he’s not).
There remains to this day a kind of regionalism in the South which stubbornly refuses to be told by the outside world how to think and how to behave with regard to matters of race. The South lives with the consequences of its racist past every day, with terrible public education systems, with gun violence, with mass incarceration, and many there attempt to use the inevitably terrible outcomes from blacks that their racist attitudes are justified. And so when Donald comes in riding like a shining White Knight, it gets their attention. They respond to it. And none of this has been accidental by Trump’s campaign: there’s a reason why he visited Philadelphia – Mississippi.