XPost: soc.culture.russia, soc.culture.usa
"The principal danger to the United States is not any out-of-control
technology or fringe militia group. It is not economic grievances run
amok. It is not even Trump, who is as much a symptom of what ails the
United States as he is a cause. Instead, the greatest source of danger
comes from a cultural clash over the nature of the United States’ identity—one with profound implications for who gets to be a citizen.
Its key actors are not isolated radicals but large numbers of ordinary Americans. According to new research carried out by my team at the
University of Chicago, tens of millions of Democrats, Republicans, and independents believe that political violence is acceptable. Many of them
hail from the middle and upper class, with nice homes and college
educations.
The country’s fight over its national identity has multiple dimensions.
But the most serious is demographic change. In 1990, 76 percent of the
U.S. population identified as white. In 2023, the U.S. Census Bureau put
that figure at a little over 58 percent. By 2035, the share is set to
fall to 54 percent; a decade later, it will dip below 50 percent. These
changes have led to rising anger among conservatives, many of whom see increased ethnic diversity as an existential threat to their way of
life. These voters have embraced Trump and his nationalist movement,
which promise to stop such change in its tracks. Trump’s exclusionary policies and rhetoric have, in turn, prompted a ferocious backlash from liberals, who embrace demographic change—or who at least fear that conservative success will cost Americans hard-won freedoms.
The anger on both sides is in keeping with historical precedents.
Scholars have long understood that social change and demographic shifts
are a potent catalyst for violence. And as elsewhere, the turn toward
force in the United States is fundamentally populist in nature. The
millions of Americans who support political violence have concluded that
their country’s elites are so thoroughly corrupt and that their
democracy is so completely broken that riots, political assassinations,
and coercive attacks are acceptable and even necessary to bring about
the supposedly genuine democracy that people deserve."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/our-own-worst-enemies
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