A study of participants in the January 6 insurgency on Capitol Hill suggests that, for some white Americans, fear of losing their dominance is a powerful factor driving right-wing extremism.
Politics in the United States has become an extreme sport. The violent insurgency on Capitol Hill was just one episode in a current of radicalization marked by the rise of vengeful and nihilist conservatism, excessive partisan polarization and the election of an authoritarian right-wing populist to the House. -White in 2016.
Why this extremism? Why this explosion of political violence on Capitol Hill?
a study that says a lot
In a study unveiled this week, political scientist Robert Pape of the University of Chicago analyzes the 377 people apprehended in the insurgency that left five dead on January 6. By examining their socioeconomic characteristics and those of their places of residence, the researcher believed to support the hypothesis according to which economic insecurity was at the origin of this radicalization. This is not what he found.
The majority of the apprehended insurgents are middle-class whites and neither these nor their places of origin are more economically tested than the average one. In fact, a majority come from counties that have supported Joe Biden and, more importantly, where the relative decline of the Anglo-Saxon white majority is faster than elsewhere.
More than economic anxiety, it is the racial anxiety of a majority losing its dominant position that would fuel violent extremism.
From anxiety to extremism
Violent events are inseparable from a political current carried by xenophobia, cultural insecurity and the demonization of the opponent, which does not immediately reject the legitimacy of violence.
The vast majority of Republican elected officials refused to recognize the responsibility of the then president, who had maintained the lie of a stolen election and called on his supporters to intervene to reverse the result. Since then, the right has trivialized the event and half of Republicans do not believe that there was violence on Capitol Hill on January 6.
The impact of the racial anxiety of the white majority on the Republican Party also explains its efforts to suppress the vote of ethnoracial minorities in Georgia and elsewhere.
The polarization of American politics is largely explained by this radicalization of an identity right which believes itself to be backed up to the wall by economic, cultural and demographic trends beyond its control.
Inevitable comparisons
In a few decades, non-Spanish speaking whites will be in the minority in the United States and their political domination will have waned. This domination is still very present in the Republican Party, where the fears of a majority which believes itself doomed to disappear is fully exploited.
Obviously, the parallels with a local reality are tempting. Despite what some right-thinking analysts say, however, the legitimate identity fears of French-speaking Quebecers are far from having led to the kind of unhealthy political radicalization that has gripped the American right. It is to avoid this kind of derailment that we must keep an eye on what is wrong with our neighbors.