As the outlines of President Trump’s reelection campaign become clearer, it seems likely that stoking racial division will again be a central feature. According to The Politics of Losing: Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment by Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep, this should come as no surprise. Drawing parallels to periods of heightened Ku Klux Klan activity throughout American history, the authors show how Trump succeeded in 2016 by appealing to white nationalist sentiment.
McVeigh and Estep contribute to an expanding literature on contemporary backlash politics. From Kathy Cramer’s (2016) The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness and the Rise of Scott Walker to Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal’s (2015) White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics and Ashley Jardina’s (2019) White Identity Politics, a raft of recent scholarship documents the ways in which white Americans’ fears and resentments have been nurtured, consolidated, and channeled to the political benefit of right-wing politicians and the Republican Party. Along with a broader scholarship on the persistence and political activation of racism, work in this area often makes arguments using experimental or fieldwork research and behavioral and opinion data. McVeigh and Estep’s innovation is to use a historical case study approach, comparing episodes of heightened KKK activity in the 1860s, 1920s, and 1950–60s to Trump’s 2016 strategies and bases of electoral support. The authors argue that Trump, like earlier KKK leaders, has taken opportunistic advantage of white Americans’ sense of loss, focusing their resentment on others perceived as unfairly benefiting at their expense. The result is episodic white nationalist resurgence during periods of marked change: Reconstruction, the Progressive and civil rights eras, and today.
In addition to its topical appeal, The Politics of Losing is eminently readable. The authors explain social science tools and concepts (e.g., regression analysis, social movement theory) and significant history (e.g., the Black Codes, Republican Party issue shifts) in a way that is especially useful in the undergraduate classroom. Their central argument is premised on what they call the “occurrence of power devaluation” (p. 19), which they explain as what happens when a powerful group feels threatened by a loss of power across multiple dimensions. Separate chapters on economics, politics, and social status detail how leaders exploited changes in each of these spheres to direct white Americans’ anger toward support for white nationalism. The authors describe both general historical and current trends in demographic change, economic fluctuation, and political and party alignments (also useful in the classroom), showing exactly how opportunistic leaders framed these developments for susceptible audiences. A chapter on the media shows the similar ways that Klan leaders and the Trump administration managed their images and controlled narratives to their advantage. Although much of the argument is made through qualitative comparisons, the authors rely on quantitative data and simple statistical analyses, especially to demonstrate who was most responsive to Trump’s candidacy.
With The Politics of Losing, McVeigh and Estep have waded into the class versus race debate over why Trump won in 2016. By showing which white Americans were made receptive to Trump’s racist, demagogic appeals—and how—the authors reveal that race and class are made to serve one another by ambitious elites. One of their central claims is that education, more than income level, drove Trump’s support, arguing that whites in communities bypassed by globalization—typically with lower education levels—were especially vulnerable to his white nationalist messages. Focusing on primary voters who elevated Trump above more conventional Republican candidates, the authors argue that Trump appealed to lesser-educated whites because his populist rhetoric spoke not only to their economic loss but also to their perceived loss of social status and political power in a country with changing racial, ethnic, and religious demographics. This type of argument is not new; Richard Hofstadter and others writing in the mid-twentieth century used the concept of status anxiety to explain popular support for right-wing politics. Although more recent scholars of modern conservatism have dismissed this claim as too simplistic (e.g., Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, 2002), McVeigh and Estep have reinvigorated the argument, updating it with the concept of a trifold loss and highlighting how Trump, by yoking economic nationalism to religious and racial conservatism, offered a message very different from that of traditional Republican elites.
Historicizing the pattern helps answer the question of how virulent racism is kept alive in a country that has nonetheless made progress toward liberal goals: what leaders do matters. But Trump was put into office by Republican voters in general. Contemporary party polarization, as well as efforts by generations of Republican leaders to rhetorically discredit the federal government and expertise in general, undoubtedly aided Trump in his populist, scapegoating efforts. Although the authors recognize some of this in their discussion of the modern Republican Party, more could probably be said about how these larger party trends accommodate the sustenance of white nationalism and its effects.
The authors’ decision to compare a case of, in essence, intraparty factionalism (Trump Republicanism) to an external social movement (the KKK) also minimizes the role of institutions. Although Donald Trump had no public service history, his electoral success capitalized on long-standing Republican currents of social conservatism and coded racial and anti-immigrant mobilization. And, notably, despite the hiccup of the “Never Trump” movement, the Republican Party establishment has largely tolerated and occasionally endorsed Trump’s base-rallying appeals. Bringing white nationalism into contemporary party politics is presumably what the authors mean by “mainstreaming” resentment. But why not compare Trump’s success to McCarthyism, the Dixiecrats, or even the Know-Nothings/American Party? This sort of comparison, by showing how established parties have negotiated—absorbing and repudiating—popular antiliberal movements over time, might give additional leverage on addressing the question of how white nationalism was mainstreamed in 2016. The authors have done us a big service in pointing to the conditions under which white nationalism flourishes, but perhaps the biggest story here is how a national political party, theoretically and often empirically a moderating institution of democracy, has become a facilitating vehicle for ideological extremism.
A related question about the authors’ comparative endeavor is what role in the analysis should be accorded to changing norms and laws. The earlier episodes of KKK activity took place after the Civil War and during Jim Crow—when illiberal racial norms were pervasive and had state legitimation. That white nationalism has resurged is not surprising to any student of US history, but that it has been mainstreamed, as the authors suggest, in the context of a legal regime with additional liberal protections and greater norms of equality, requires more discussion. It may make the parallels the authors draw between now and then all the more ominous.
The authors’ concluding observation is that white nationalism thrives on segregation and that integration—geographic and social—is key to defeating it. And as they note, the United States today remains remarkably segregated. But what should be underscored is that today’s Republican Party, with its record of resisting equality-promoting legislation and its active minority governance strategy of gerrymandering, immigration restriction, and racialized voter disenfranchisement, has helped drive inequality. Complicit in its rise and sustained by its cultivation, the Republican Party of 2020 may see little benefit in resisting white nationalism. And this institutional capitulation—in the context of twenty-first-century liberalism—might be one of the biggest differences from the past.
