The age of grievance, p.15
The Age of Grievance, page 15
Note the trio of adjectives that kept company in Walter’s appraisal: racial, ethnic, and religious. Entwined with the ethnic nationalism to which Trump and Carlson appeal is Christian nationalism, which has drawn more attention and concern in the United States over the past few years, especially given the elevation of Mike Johnson, a Republican congressman who seems to embody Christian nationalism, to the position of House speaker in late 2023 and the involvement of conservative Christian activists in the rollback of abortion rights, in the censoring of books that make reference to homosexuality or transgenderism, and in the allowance, in some states, for parents to use publicly funded vouchers to enroll their children in schools run by religious groups. A Supreme Court decision in 2020 blessed that application of vouchers, and Oklahoma in June 2023 went a nervy step beyond it by approving the first religious charter school in the United States, an online academy, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, to be run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa. Although there can be confusion about the nature of charter schools among people who aren’t in the educational know, charters aren’t private. They’re established and run with taxpayer money, Oklahoma’s use of which for St. Isidore so blatantly disregards the separation of church and state that even some Republicans cried foul.
It’s difficult to say exactly where ethnic nationalism ends and Christian nationalism begins, or vice versa. That’s evident in much of the recent writing about Christian nationalism in the United States: it has sometimes been as much about ethnic nationalism among conservative (and especially evangelical) Christians as about some expressly theocratic plot. When Susan Stubson, a disenchanted longtime member of the Wyoming Republican Party, wrote an attention-getting essay, “What Christian Nationalism Has Done to My State and My Faith Is a Sin,” that appeared in the Times in May 2023, she bemoaned Wyoming Republicans’ racism and overwrought allegiance to Trump in a manner that didn’t make entirely clear whether their Christianity’s relationship to those phenomena was causative or correlative. I couldn’t tell how much culpability “Christian nationalism” per se bore or precisely what her definition of Christian nationalism was.
But as Allyson F. Shortle, Eric L. McDaniel, and Irfan Nooruddin wrote in an article in the Washington Post based on their 2022 book The Everyday Crusade: Christian Nationalism in American Politics, Christian nationalist ideologies, which they define as a vision of the “American identity as exclusively White and Christian” and the desire “for a government that favors that group’s beliefs,” have grown more apparent over the past few years. “Far-right leaders have ramped up their calls to take back Christian America through violence,” the authors noted. Even “Republican elites,” they added, increasingly use the rhetoric of religious war, possibly making it “easier for Christian nationalist extremists to mobilize followers, gain adherents, and build coalitions to gain political power.” One such member of the elite: Ron DeSantis, who has said that Republicans should “don the full armor of God” in their fight against Democrats, language that casts the contest between the parties—and the stakes of it—as fundamentally religious. “Full armor of God” has lately become a staple locution among Republican politicians along with godly verbiage in general. As part of DeSantis’s campaign for a second term as governor of Florida, he released an ad that portrayed him as divinely chosen to hold office at this moment in time. “God made a fighter,” stated the ad’s narrator over and over, a grandiose pronouncement accompanied by beautifully shot, carefully chosen images of DeSantis that gave him a heroic sheen.
Many of the January 6 rioters waved Christian flags, toted Christian banners, and cradled Bibles. The ReAwaken America Tour, a traveling road show that puts right-wing conspiracy theorists and provocateurs before crowds of Christian activists, is sponsored by Charisma News, a Pentecostal Christian publication, and it brims with violent language and imagery. In a September 2023 article for the New Republic, Katherine Stewart recounted a recent stop of the tour in Las Vegas, where she noticed that “the T-shirts are getting nastier.” One said “Size Matters” over big bullets. Another showed Trump with a long rifle, while yet another “featured dozens of white male soldiers and the words ‘Diversity is Destruction’ across the bottom,” Stewart wrote. “There was the old standby, ‘God, Guns and Trump.’ And then there was ‘BLITZKRIEG.’ ”
Regardless of Christianity’s role in the rightward lurch of many rural Republicans, their rage has intensified and, in the manner of modern grievance, become less and less tethered to the actual dynamics of their daily lives. It is linked instead to a broader sense that their status and the esteem for them in the United States are diminishing. That was the part of Stubson’s Times essay about Wyoming that most forcefully grabbed me. She wrote that right-wing candidates in her state in 2022 ran ads that warned about “government overreach, religious persecution, mask mandates, threats from immigrants and election fraud.”
“None of those concerns were real,” she added. “Our schools largely remained open during the pandemic. Businesses remained open. The border is an almost 1,000-mile drive from my home in Casper, and the foreign-born population in the state is only 3 percent. Wyoming’s violent crime rate is the lowest of any state in the West. Wyoming’s electoral process is incredibly safe. So what are we afraid of?”
Seven The Oppression Olympics
Unlike Wyoming, the United States has a substantial foreign-born population—it’s nearing 15 percent of all Americans, and that’s an all-time high. Decade after decade, the United States grows more ethnically and racially diverse; between 2010 and 2020, the population of white people in the country declined for the first time, and the nation maintained net growth only because nonwhite people made up the difference, according to an analysis of US Census figures by the Brookings Institution. The speed at which the number of nonwhite Americans is drawing even with white ones is sometimes exaggerated: many Americans were shocked, in the aftermath of Trump’s election, to learn that more than 60 percent of the United States was still non-Hispanic white, because for years some of the commentary about the country’s diversification gave the impression that we were on the cusp of a majority minority nation, with the non-Hispanic white share of it below 50 percent. We’ll get there. But some current projections put that date as far out as 2045.
That’s a profound change, especially for older Americans who grew up in a country so demographically different from today’s, and news organizations struggle to make proper sense of it and to report on it in the most constructive fashion. For a long time, the chief problem was their disregard for minority groups and failure to recognize—and explode—the homogeneous, monolithic perspective I mentioned earlier. But over the past ten years, there has been a veritable revolution in that regard, at least among media outlets and media figures more high-minded than Fox News and Carlson.
To cite just a tiny example: At some point over those ten years, or possibly a few years earlier, editors began to stress in a whole new way that we writers had to be more conscious of the lineup of experts we quoted in our articles and of the mix of them. And I realized, with a pang of shame, how overloaded with white men my figurative Rolodex was. That probably said as much about the overrepresentation of white men in the ranks of experts as it did about my prejudices, but it also suggested a vicious cycle: if I yielded lazily to that overrepresentation, I’d help perpetuate it, and it would change much more slowly than it should. I began casting a wider net. I noticed many of my colleagues doing the same. And I was grateful for being pointed in that direction. It was not only the right way to go but also the way toward better work.
Similarly, many major news organizations have done much, much more reporting than in the past on the challenges and general life experiences of groups that have been marginalized and have suffered (and continue to suffer) discrimination. That, too, has been necessary and overdue, and it has led to much essential and superb journalism.
But some race-oriented, gender-focused, minority-conscious coverage, in its current form, has a reflexive, intellectually facile feel that does little to draw in the audience that would benefit most from engagement with it. Some of it insists on a predetermined framing and on preordained findings. And that accentuates the idea that we Americans exist not as one big tribe with shared interests but as dozens of little tribes with separate—and, worse yet, competing—interests.
A major event occurs, and the crop of articles about it includes specific examinations of what it means for—or what the public reaction to it says about—women or gay people or trans people or Black people or Latinos (who are often called Latinx people, even though the overwhelming majority of them chafe at that term) or Muslims. A candidate catches fire, and the aspects of his or her record and proposals that come up for exploration include their possible impact on voters in those and other demographic categories, as if those categories shape voters’ outlooks and experiences more than anything else. For many people, that’s indeed the case. For many others, it isn’t. But the news media sometimes seems determined to spot the fault lines of race, gender, gender orientation, ethnicity, and more in everything it examines and to etch those lines as boldly as possible.
It wasn’t long after Vladimir Putin sent Russian missiles and troops into Ukraine in 2022 that at least a few prominent journalists and articles in major publications detected or wondered about racism in the rapt attention to, and tears for, the plight of Ukrainians: Where was that swell of feeling for the casualties of war in developing countries in Africa and elsewhere? Were Ukrainians more sympathetic because they were white? For some news consumers, probably, and that’s disgusting. But there were other dynamics at play. The invasion of Ukraine was getting intense coverage largely because the invading country was a nuclear superpower with an increasingly unhinged leader flexing what might be growing imperial ambitions; because the conflict was happening on NATO’s doorstep and, for that reason, might draw in NATO and thus the United States; and because Europe hadn’t been a theater for this kind of war in many decades. All of that made what was happening exceptionally dangerous and exceptional, period. And for better or worse, news organizations have long favored the extraordinary over the commonplace.
The moment Jacinda Ardern resigned as prime minister of New Zealand at the beginning of 2023, I braced for articles positing that she’d relinquished her post in part because of sexism. In short order, those articles came. They weren’t especially persuasive, and that’s not because sexism doesn’t exist or even because she miraculously escaped it. It absolutely exists, and I doubt any woman escapes it. But that doesn’t make it the dominant narrative at every juncture and in every corner of her life. In addition to being a woman, Ardern was unusually young for a national leader. She governed during the stresses and political crosscurrents of Covid. The price of housing in New Zealand skyrocketed under her watch, causing broad frustration and bitter recriminations. Sexism wasn’t necessarily the driver of her political fate, nor did it have to be a prominent theme in her biography.
Major news organizations nonetheless treat sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and especially racism exactly that way, and they raise the specter of white supremacy whether its imprint on a given circumstance is abundantly clear or entirely questionable. And there’s at least a threefold risk in that. One, readers and viewers grow inured to such analyses, and fail to recognize and reckon with white supremacy at its most evident and destructive. Two, it dwells on our divisions, sorting us, labeling us, and telling us that our labels are our destinies, a message that’s the enemy of both incentive and accountability. Three, it puts some of the people at whom it’s targeted on the defensive. They don’t hear a summons to be better than in the past. They hear a demand that they feel awful in the present. Many of them may deserve that indictment. But it can be a road to grievance as much as to redemption.
Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, told me that we may not have taken that into proper account, and we haven’t carved out “a middle ground where you can actually try to bring people along.” Gillespie, whose books on Black politics in the United States include, most recently, Race and the Obama Administration, said: “The idea that somebody might learn in school that their ancestors weren’t the best people in the world, and that they took things, and what that meant is that their descendants were going to be privileged and other folks’ descendants were going to have to work harder to even kind of make the same baseline of comfort—you know, that is a radical notion to people who have been on the privileged side of that lived experience, and perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that we have seen the backlash that we’ve had.”
Is the cause of ending discrimination against Asian Americans served or undermined by grafting a discussion of such discrimination onto events where it’s not conclusively present? Immediately after a white gunman rampaged through three massage parlors in Atlanta in March 2021, fatally shooting eight people, including six women of Asian descent, there were articles, tweets, and other public comments galore that mentioned or alluded to a Covid-exacerbated resentment of Asian Americans, a rise in hate crimes against them, white nationalism, and white supremacy. But a portrait of the gunman and his motives was only just emerging, and it harbored more evidence that he was a sexually tormented religious zealot lashing out at the objects of his desire—he’d apparently been a customer at two of the spas—than it did proof that he hated Asian Americans.
Commentary about the horrific killing of Tyre Nichols, a Black man, at the hands of five Black police officers in Memphis in early 2023 accommodated mentions of or allusions to white supremacy, crediting it with the violent and degrading system in which the Black officers were operating. Along those same lines, the Washington Post published an opinion essay in early 2021 in which a New York University professor explained that Trump had improved his standing with Black and Latino voters between 2016 and 2020 and that there were people of color among the January 6 rioters because of “multiracial whiteness.” In other words, Black and Latino voters’ aspirations to whiteness, or at least to its privileges, motivate them to behave as callously and savagely as white people, who are ultimately to blame.
That essay came to mind when, midway through 2023, the New Yorker published an article that pondered a recent mass shooting in which a thirty-three-year-old Mexican American man who had expressed white-supremacist views killed eight people at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas. The headline: “The Rise of Latino White Supremacy.” Apparently sensing how nonsensical that cluster of words sounds, the author wrote, in the first paragraph: “In fact, Latino white supremacy isn’t an oxymoron, and carrying out a premeditated mass shooting in the United States is one of the more American things a Latino could do.” I understood what the author was saying. I also understood how cynical and selective that willed logic was, and I understood the agenda behind it: to preserve the progressive, race-obsessed taxonomy of oppressors and oppressed—evildoers and those to whom evil is done—by finding a way to apply it even to events that resist or contradict it. The author went further than that, saying that the events she was looking at validated white supremacy if you just knew how to look at them in the proper way.
The subhead of the article was as revealing as the headline. “At a time of increased racial violence,” it said, “Latinos are potential perpetrators and potential victims.” That’s a pointless statement of the blazingly obvious—of course Latinos can fall into either role, because people can fall into either role—unless both author and reader inhabit a world in which Latinos are supposed to be only the objects of harm. The supposed “news” here was that they can be the agents of harm, too: four of the twenty-two mass shootings in Texas by that point in 2023 had been committed by Latinos, the article reported. Then it chastised anyone whose eyes widened at that statistic, because that eye-widening was, well, more white supremacy: “Expressing surprise or disbelief at the fact that Latino white-supremacist shooters exist marks them as outsiders, as many Latinos before them have been marked. But it should be the shootings that we see as un-American, not the shooters themselves.” Wait, wait: the author had said earlier that mass shootings were quintessentially American, to the point where the commission of one is an act of assimilation. Here, as in too much journalism today, grievance was supplanting coherence.
I’m not surprised that writers trying to capture racial dynamics and explore the overt and oblique wages of racism in the United States sometimes end up twisted into intellectual knots. This work is knotty stuff. But that’s why it’s all the more important that we acknowledge as much, that we not forcibly squeeze every set of circumstances into the same box, and that we show some respect for the subtleties of human nature and human relationships. It would be helpful as well to recognize that most individuals in the United States, for all the country’s flaws, maintain at least some agency, some choice, and that what they do with it is in part a matter of character. The conservative writer Andrew Sullivan communicated that eloquently in a 2023 edition of his Substack newsletter, the Weekly Dish: “We live in the freest, most multiracial democracy in the history of the planet. Of course traditional prejudices linger, ebb and flow, and the past has helped define the present. But they do not come near to definitively describing the infinitely fascinating interactions between all of us, in every possible combination, our shared humanity, the cross-racial friendships and marriages, our individual personalities, our different upbringings.” He added that “reducing our entire world to these allegedly irreconcilable abstractions of ‘hate’ is a pathological distraction from reality.”
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