In an attempt to understand the coalition that gave Trump his narrow 2016 election victory, for the past year and a half the press has spun a whole new subgenre of stilted, tautological feature reporting on how Trump supporters support Trump.
They have routinely given platforms to those who claim, with little to no firm evidence, that Trump’s election and his steady (though historically low) popularity (as well as his predicted eventual reelection) are all partly if not wholly the fault of liberal smugness and left-wing political correctness run amok.
The proof presented in these arguments is routinely shot through with logical holes that go unaddressed. Rather than acknowledging that sexism and racism remain very real and pernicious phenomena in our society, these op-eds typically treat the words as mere insults that the left manipulatively and indiscriminately lobs at conservatives for almost every little thing they do.
Might “liberal condescension” just be a convenient fig leaf for hardened, motivated reasoning from an older, white demographic that is already heavily predisposed to like Trump, regardless of what liberals say? You won’t find any answers to legitimate questions like that here or elsewhere in these feckless claims.
Time and again, any underlying racism or discriminatory policies cited by liberals are treated as mere pretense to stigmatize those on the right. This manifests itself in almost absurdly reductive ways.
A University of Maryland working paper that studied reactions to the 2016 election cast doubt on the premise of liberal shaming driving conservatives further toward the right. As it noted, there was no statistically significant evidence of a backlash by conservative voters when confronted with liberal critiques of Trump being racist.
In fact, the paper found that conservative racial animus in response to liberal election messaging was rooted in pre-existing biases, which is why those same conservatives also rejected claims of Trump’s racism that came from Republicans.
The full article is available here
