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Republicans are 'wannabe' whites, Democrats are 'wannabe' POC
Inspired by @ymeskhout 's thread below
The culture war in America is less religious, or even strictly ethnic, and more about whether a given group ‘identifies’ as white.
In America the GOP is the white party. That doesn’t mean it’s actually the ‘white party’ in some absolute anthropological sense, it’s entirely possible that largely native third-generation Central Americans might one day ‘identify as’ huwhite for the purposes of political alignment (cf Amerimutt memes). But certainly to be Republican has become to believe one is white, whether one is Scots-Irish, Italian, Cuban, Mayan, WASP, Jewish, Armenian or whatever else. Even black Republicans, even if they won’t overtly admit it, identify as white; Tim Scott was effectively raised by a neighborhood white businessman who owned the local Chick-fil-A franchise, Candace Owens is married to an English hedge fund manager and son of a peer, Clarence Thomas has a white wife etc. In several generations the modal black Republican with a white spouse will have white descendants.
Conversely, white progressives, even if they are literally as Nordic huwhite as it is possible to be under a Madison Grant-esque racial designation from 1890, do not ‘identify as’ white. Sure, they’ll tick white on a checkbox so they don’t get made fun of, Rachel Dolezal style, by their peers, but in the traditional, tribal sense they aren’t white. As the famous chart shows, white progressives are the only demographic in the entire western world (possibly the entire world) with out-group bias. Even if they would never admit it, they are transracial. Some part of Robin DiAngelo believes that, even if she knows she isn’t ‘black’ per se, she is on the PoC team in a tribal sense, just like Candace Owens, in marrying an Englishman, has declared her lineage to be ‘white’.
My grandfather, born in the 1920s, would never describe himself as a Jew, even though he, his parents, his wife, his children and (some of) his grandchildren were of course Jews. He would only describe himself as a “man of the Jewish religion”. He was a socialist in his youth, then became a Republican in the 50s and, in his final years on this earth, a devout Trump supporter. Before 9/11, when as is often stated, Muslims voted largely for the GOP (and pre-9/11 American Muslims were more Levantine/North African than they are today), they too identified as ‘white’, like my grandfather.
The political division in the US is and will remain between groups who ‘identify as’ white and those who do not, regardless of their actual ethnic origin. Religion won’t really come into it.
This has always struck me as heroically missing the point. white progressives are simply prioritizing the progressive identity over the white identity. White progressives are the only group whose co-ethnics are more-likely-than-not to have voted differently from them in the 2020 election. Every other ethnic group is most likely to find someone who shares their political beliefs by finding someone who shares their skin color, except white progressives.
We can argue chicken or the egg about it, I guess. But it seems like the skin color bias is downstream from the politics, that the ethnic nationalism game is a card trick to try to cover up the far more important economic/religious/political/cultural lines at play here. A white Biden-Voter walking down the street in a purple state who sees a white person and a black person, all else being equal, the black person is more likely to have voted the same way in the 2020 election. A white Trump-Voter, walking down the street will obviously be more likely to find someone who voted the same way by picking the white person.
Which brings up the obvious failing of the "famous chart;" THEY DIDN'T BREAK DOWN OTHER ETHNICITIES BY POLITICAL PERSUASION. So when we get the take over and over that "White Liberals are the only group, maybe in all of human history, to prefer their out-group..."; well yeah, we didn't fucking check the other groups.
How did Asian conservatives do? A lot of Asian liberals, both at home and abroad in places like Singapore, will accuse Asian conservatives of White-Worship. How do our Uncle Toms view their own race versus whites? If we break out Hispanic Republicans from the group, are we just getting white Hispanic immigrants who hated blacks in Cuba and Venezuela before moving to America and keeping right on hating them? Hispanics almost universally come from countries with racial politics that, besides a sometimes larger admixture of indigenous bloodlines, more or less exactly resemble the USA, only to be amalgamated from David Ortiz to Messi as "Hispanic."
I strongly predict that subsets of ethnic groups that vote against the majority of their ethnic group will all show the same "out-group bias" that is seen as such a shocking fact of American liberalism.
I'm very confused. You can't say "every other racial group" when talking about white progressives (who are not a racial group). Otherwise I can say this:
You're making hay over a semantic difference but my reading is that FiveHourMarathon is predicting your second paragraph is true. The point is that they didn't split up black liberals and black conservatives on the ingroup/outgroup preference test. We don't know if black conservatives might exhibit anti-black sentiment against those still trapped on the "Democrat plantations" and a pro-white outgroup bias because the authors didn't test for that.
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