February 16, 2021 ☼ cancel-culture
Source: The Washington Post - Link
One of the best encapsulations of the past few years of politics came from President Donald Trump about a month after he lost his reelection bid last year.
“We’re all victims,” he told an audience at a rally in Georgia on Dec. 5. “Everybody here, all these thousands of people here tonight, they’re all victims, every one of you.”
This sentiment was central to Trump’s appeal to many Republican voters. In the 2016 election, a sense that White Americans were losing out in modern society was a better predictor of support for Trump than economic disadvantages. Trump voters, more than anyone else, saw racism against Whites as a potent problem and were more likely to view Whites as victims of discrimination at rates similar to racial and ethnic minorities. Trump promised to make America great again — to wind back the clock to a time before things such as Black Lives Matter, to a time when the distributions of the rewards of American society weren’t questioned.
It goes on later to describe why this might resonate with white, christian, nationalists.
The reason is obvious. “Cancel culture” is a concept predicated on categorizing particular views as verboten, and those views are often ones which overlap with a sense that Whites and men are imperiled. This is by no means always true; some concern about “cancel culture” also derives from social-media bans which are frequently predicated on toxic behavior. But it’s often the case that the concern expressed as part of the backlash to the perceived phenomenon is the same concern which Trump expressed to applause during the first Republican primary debate in August 2015: his obnoxious comments about women were simply a mark that he wouldn’t be beholden to a “politically correct” worldview.
“Canceling” is not just something libs do. Talk to Colin Kapernick or any number of GOP representatives and party members that have been censured for not kissing up to Trump.