Stephan: If you have been reading SR for a while you know that for over a decade I have been talking about a major transformative trend that I see going on in the United States, a trend almost unique to America, because unlike Europe or Asia we are and always have been a nation primarily of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants. I am speaking about the fact that within the next 20 to 25 years the United States is going to become a majority-minority nation. No one racial group will be a dominant majority.
For many Americans, even most Americans, I hope, that isn't a big issue. Your physician may wel be Asian, your mayor a Black person. Look at the number of mixed-race couples you see on television series and in television advertising. But for a small but substantial group of White people, particularly White men, this is a huge issue that they see as growing larger with more threatening with each passing day. These are the Whites who find the change in the culture threatening, and who are resentful and fearful about what they see as a loss of status and privilege. White nationalism dominates what was once Christianity in this country. It is the power source of the Republican Party, and it was fully on display on the 6th of January.
Here is a very good report on this trend, which is going to be a growing source of violence unless we acknowledge it, and starting in schools defuse it.
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 […]