The Fear of the Rightwing White Supremacists...
Hundreds of people in a pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol on Jan. 6. The political scientist Robert Jason Andrew for The New York TimesPape set out to find what motivated them.Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population were the most likely to produce insurrectionists.
NYT - When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.
But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.
If Mr. Pape’s initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — hold true, they would suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend. In the shorter term, he added, the study would appear to connect Jan. 6 not only to the once-fringe right-wing theory called the Great Replacement, which holds that minorities and immigrants are seeking to take over the country, but also to events like the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 where crowds of white men marched with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us!”
Ayup, those far right folks must be a violently trembling bucket of irational fear. Actually, come to think about it, that's pretty much what they've always been.
“If
you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist
movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to
movements for civil rights by minority groups,” Mr. Pape said. “You see a
common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to
upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around
them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”
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