'The psycho-social phenomenon' that can have severe consequences for democracy: researchers

05 June 2024

When a predominantly white mob of far-right Donald Trump supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, some of them were carrying Confederate flags.

Many Trump critics, from liberals and progressives to right-wing Never Trump conservatives, have pointed to those flags as evidence that the assault on the Capitol was more than a riot — it was an outright insurrection.

According to a newly published study conducted by David C. Wilson of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and Darren Davis — a political science professor at Notre Dame University in Indiana — there was another component in the January 6 attack: "racial resentment."

The Guardian's Alice Herman reports, "Angered over the claim, promoted by Trump and his closest allies, that heavily Black cities had rigged the 2020 election in favor of Democrats, white voters — some affiliated with white-nationalist groups and militias, and others acting alone — stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 election."

The study is titled "Stop the Steal: Racial Resentment, Affective Partisanship, and Investigating the January 6th Insurrection."

According to Herman, researchers "relied on a national survey of adults in the U.S. conducted in 2021."

Herman notes that the researchers draw a distinction between "racial hatred" and "racial resentment."

According to Herman, "Wilson and Davis also point to the fact that while a slew of polls show the general public split somewhat evenly over the legitimacy of the (January 6) House Select Committee, Black Americans overwhelmingly supported the Committee's work, while white poll respondents generally opposed it…. Distinct from racial hatred or prejudice, racial resentment, Wilson argues, is a particularly powerful motive to action because it stems from a sense of injustice. The psycho-social phenomenon can have consequences for democracy, Wilson said."

In the report, Wilson and Davis explain, "Many of President Trump's supporters believed they were being victimized by election fraud in the 2020 election, but they also believed that whites were being victimized more generally — the American way of life for them was changing and they were being disadvantaged by African-Americans and other minorities."

Read The Guardian's full article at this link.

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