On the Ballot in 2020: Will the United States (finally) embrace civil rights?

Abstract

This article situates the 2020 presidential election within the context of U.S. history, specifically the longstanding relationship between white supremacist views and what types of U.S. citizens were considered capable of exercising democratic citizenship. I argue that President Trump's use of racialized, nativist tropes must be understood within that context and the ongoing backlash to the advancement of civil rights in the United States. White resistance to racial progress is not new, nor is the violence associated with it. Only by looking at the intersection of white racial resentment and modern sexism can we fully understand the durability of the Trump coalition. The article closes by considering what political scientists should be learning from this moment in order to better explain American political dynamics moving forward.

Anti-Muslim policy preferences and boundaries of American identity across partisanship

“…The primacy of national identity is now arguably the dividing line in national politics, particularly as it pertains to deciding whose rights should be protected or curtailed (Uslaner, 2017). For example, national identity was on display during Trump's 2016 election campaign and presidency (Bedolla, 2021;Sides et al, 2017), in shaping support for Brexit (Henderson et al, 2017), and in the rise of the Sweden Democrats (Elgenius and Rydgren, 2019) and the AfD in Germany (Rosellini, 2020).…”

Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and the Racialization of Attitudes Toward Descriptive Representation

“…In contemporary research, the connection between racist and sexist attitudes has typically been decoupled, or remains underexplored (Winter, 2008). However, there is still much to be learned about how gender and race intersect; as Cassese and colleagues (2015) note, “there is a critical need to better understand the process by which gender issues become racialized” (see also García Bedolla, 2020). Our paper heeds this call by exploring the extent to which views about one marginalized group are connected to attitudes about representation by another, returning to a tradition in which racial and gendered attitudes are understood as distinct but similar concepts (Dovidio et al, 1989; Sears & Kinder, 1971).…”