Of the many bad consequences of Donald Trump’s election as an American President, possibly the most poisonous and long-lasting will be the validation of open and express racial hatred, and the emergence of a loud, unabashedly racist subculture made up of pampered, spoiled and willfully ignorant white men whose access to the Internet allowed new bonds to form between them and others of their ilk. The glue holding these (mostly young) men to together is a shared sense of grievance and "white" entitlement (the quality and character of parenting they experienced also plays a large, if unacknowledged role). They are the new, digital-savvy Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists, who refer to themselves as the “alt-right.”
The Internet was, at least in theory, supposed to broaden the human experience and provide avenues for the integration of disparate views and viewpoints. It was, at least in theory, supposed to enhance our ability to understand and empathize with each other. It was hoped that such a broader understanding would provide societal benefits and help to stratify cultural differences and prejudices.
But those assumptions ignored the biological norms of human nature, which still compel us to congregate into tribes based on exclusivity and with the overriding goal of exclusion, motivated by instincts of insecurity, no matter how irrational those instincts may be. As a result of the Internet, predominantly as a result of a polarizing, political “bubble”-inducing Facebook, we have Donald Trump as our President. He would not have been elected without stoking race-based resentments accepted and internalized as fact by millions of largely white, largely male, Americans.
The Internet has simply amplified—on an exponential scale-- a propensity towards hatred that has always existed in this country. Andrew Romano and Lisa Belkin, writing for Yahoo News, piece together the history of outbreaks of American hate similar to what we are seeing now. But they take it a step further and actually get into the heads of the haters—the psychology of what motivates them, what illusions and myths they cling to, what needs and instincts operate to cause their hatred:
Hatred of outsiders has been a cyclical thing in America, and we seem to be in such a cycle now. Economic and social insecurity fuels bigotry, and new forms of communication — the internet, especially — helps it spread. But psychologists and sociologists over the last few decades have begun to understand the qualities that make a person susceptible to what was once called “xenophobia,” meaning fear of outsiders — a useful term that perhaps deserves to be resurrected in Trump-era America. And understanding how people are recruited into hate is a first step in combating it.
The surge in hate crimes against people of color and different faiths since Trump's election has been documented to death and is now an established fact. Lending his direct Twitter support as often as "dog whistling," Trump has very deliberately legitimized and sanctioned the spread of race-centered hatred and violence in this country, and it is only getting worse:
In 2016 there were 6,100 reported instances of people targeted based on their race, religion, sexuality, disability or national origin, an increase of 300 over 2015, and like last year the overwhelming majority of those victims were targeted because of their race or religion. Of the 4,496 targeted because of their race, 50.2 percent were black or African-American. Of the 1,583 targeted because of their religion, 55 percent were Jewish and 25 percent were Muslim. This is the second year in a row that hate crime numbers have increased, reversing the trend of the preceding 20 years.
Similar outbreaks of hatred and xenophobia have occurred here, usually after some galvanizing event involving an influx of immigrants or an assertion of power by people of color, historically African-Americans. The authors cite the rise of the KKK in response to Reconstruction, the imposition of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924 in reaction to a surge in immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, the Japanese internment of World War II, and the repatriation of Mexicans during the Great Depression as just some examples of public backlash against the “other.”
But the most recent and relevant precursor to what we are seeing today was the backlash in the South against the Civil Rights movement, which resulted in an entire political party whose unifying principle was racism, fear and loathing of anyone who was non-white. It’s no accident that the resurgence of an “alt-right” and NeoNazis came in tandem with a Republican President who has offered his full-throated voice and support to the racism that underpins the Republican party.
Examining the origins of such historical “outbreaks” of race hate and xenophobia provides the opportunity to compare the conditions that gave rise to them. As the authors put it, “the pathways to hate...are hardwired in our brains.” But it wasn’t until the advent of Nazi Germany and the ability of sociologists and psychologists to study and understand a fairly modern population consumed by hatred that the science and psychology of mass hatred received widespread attention.
The horrors of the Nazi regime were so extreme that many assumed the aberrant personality itself was the sole determinant of such hate. The “Authoritarian Personality” and other books suggested that this kind of hatred was a type of deviance. Later studies in the 1950’s, however, came to the conclusion that prejudice and xenophobia are simply normal consequences of our psychological need to categorize and form judgments based on those categorizations. Earlier (1930’s) research into the origins of “stereotyping” tended to confirm this. But the real key to behavior of xenophobic groups is the pervasive tendency towards an “in-group” bias, which showed itself over and over again in experiments:
Within minutes of being divided into minimally cohesive teams — even on such trivial pretexts as a taste in art — strangers tend to see their own group as superior and seek to maximize their advantage over other groups.
The important point here is that people who see themselves as part of groups begin almost immediately to develop a “double standard” between members of their own group and members of outside group, with their own group seen as superior. This “double standard” manifests itself in attributing overall qualities and behaviors to the outside group, seeing them as an undifferentiated “mass,” with positive aspects of that group deemed “exceptions.” Meanwhile, members of the observer’s own group are perceived as a “diverse assortment of individuals.” This creates an illusion which has been corroborated and defined as as “implicit bias.”
So, the authors ask, assuming the existence of these types of group bias, how does bias change to bigotry? And why is white supremacy (“white nationalism”) on the rise right now? The history suggests we are at another inflection point.
Albert Camarillo, an emeritus professor of history at Stanford University,who specializes in the study of American minorities, believes all hateful chapters start with the same stewing “intolerance, a hatred, a feeling of ‘our problems are caused by someone else and something needs to be done about that.’ That’s fundamental whether you’re talking about the 1860s or the 1960s or the times between and since.”
Economic uncertainty is also, historically, a precursor to spikes in bigotry and hate. This was most vividly the case during Reconstruction when the KKK, representing the interests of southern landowners, fought to keep newly freed African Americans from voting and thus infringing on their economic power. During the Depression white workers --like today—blamed their problems on Mexicans, even though Mexicans were demonstrably more worse off than whites. In most cases there has been a group “in charge” that perceives another group preparing to “overtake them.”
But another near-constant factor common to all of these eras is the existence of political leadership
ready and willing to condone hatred. From Woodrow Wilson to Father Coughlin, and Lester Maddox and George Wallace, to Donald Trump, these eras have all spawned race-baiting demagogues egging on the population about their supposed “grievances” in order to secure their own political power. In this respect, Trump following after the first African-American President is significant. The fact that Obama’s Presidency was widely viewed as quite successful added to the sense of a world literally spinning “out of control” of the white race, a factor stoked by Trump himself in the campaign and in his racist “birtherism” prior to it.
What makes today different is that the “economic” argument in and of itself doesn’t fly. These well-groomed Nazis marching in white polo shirts and khakis with their Target-purchased “tiki torches” are not hurting economically—not at all. Many of them arrived in Charlottesville and elsewhere brandishing expensive weaponry and traveled significant distances to attend these rallies and demonstrate their “solidarity” with other like-minded bigots.
So if not for legitimate economic grievances, then what is it that leads these white young people to espouse this kind of hate, willingly letting it define them as human beings?
For that answer, the science suggests we look to ISIS, for example, and the psychology of terrorism, coupled with the everyday, banal group-think and reinforcement qualities of the Internet.
The best way — perhaps, at the moment, the only way — to look for answers is by looking at terrorism. While the alt-right is a new (and largely unresearched) phenomenon, the psychological processes that produce a Unite the Right rallygoer may have a lot in common with the psychological processes that, taken further in a different cultural context, produce an ISIS soldier. A subset of researchers has been studying the psychology of terrorist recruitment for years.
The insulated ideological bubble in which an ISIS adherent operates is not that far removed from the unquestioning absolutism and intolerance espoused by the new digital Nazis, so the comparison is not as strange as it may sound at first. But ideology isn’t the only only variable in the puzzle. It’s ideology coupled with “frustration, insecurity, paranoia, anxiety, jealousy, desperation, all tangled up in a lack of direction and purpose,” and bolstered by a group of like minded individuals constantly reassuring each other of their rightness over the Internet. There are also some recent studies which suggest that members of the “alt-right” have some distinctly characteristic personality traits such as dehumanization, and “scored higher on social dominance orientation (the preference that society maintains social order), right-wing authoritarianism (a preference for strong rulers), and somewhat higher levels of the “dark triad” of personality traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism).” In other words, they are predisposed to hate.
Which is all interesting, but the more fundamental reasons people are susceptible to radicalization, and why the internet is such a overpowering influence on this susceptibility, is found in something called group dynamics. This is a process than can be divided into four steps:
1) susceptibility
2) misrecognition
3) identification and disidentification and
4) polarization.
All of these steps go hand in hand with youth, which is why your Islamic terrorists and your alt-right members tend, with a few exceptions, to be on the younger side and male. Young men in particular are socialized to seek their own identity through confrontation and dominance. It’s a characteristic tailor-made for the anonymity and risk-free chest-beating available on the Internet because it feeds a sense of masculinity. That’s “susceptibility,” writ large.
“Misrecognition” has been defined as the “experience of having others misperceive or deny a valued identity.” It’s a sense of indignation or insult at having failed to have been recognized for something that we feel others should recognize. It’s the heart of “white grievance:”
Listen to any alt-right sympathizer rant for two minutes and you’ll hear similar complaints — only in this case about an increasingly diverse and politically correct America that (in their view) bends over backward for feminists, immigrants, blacks and other “social justice warriors” at the expense of the very people who founded this country: white men like them.
One of the bizarre things you immediately witness about these people when they’re interviewed is how convinced they are that they are being “wronged” by people of color or women. This is a culture of victimhood being cultivated and reinforced by the Internet. And this in turn leads one to separate himself from the outside world for the warm, comforting arms of the group—in this case, a group of like-minded haters and blamers. Again, the Internet facilitates and encourages this separation, and the fact that they are not to blame for their own problems or emotional stuntedness is constantly reinforced. It’s the same way terrorists recruit. One of the common memes on jihadi recruiting and alt-right sites is the “red pill/blue pill” dichotomy of the simplistic but influential movie, The Matrix. By swallowing the red pill, the adherent sees the world as it is, but loses all contact with the (phony, “sellout”) outside world. Everyone is out of step except those in their group.
The final step is polarization and, ultimately, dehumanization—making up words, for example, like like “cucks,” “social justice warriors,” etc, all terms used to dehumanize anyone outside the group, and make them less worthy of existing, since by virtue of their views their lives must be worthless. Conspiracy theories provide a sense of “agency,” that implies or suggests power to “do something” about a world tilted against them. Again, this is a common trait in both jihadi circles and the “alt-right, as is “co-radicalization,” the deliberate provocation of opposing groups to treat the provocative group as “dangerous,” thus helping to solidify its policies and leaders who are seen as “under siege.”
The Internet provides the medium for these kinds of “movements” made of disaffected, often socially dysfunctional young men to flourish to an extent previously not possible in human society. It exaggerates, amplifies and reinforces hateful sentiments, and provides an echo chamber that many susceptible people cannot escape even if they wanted to. And the unnatural pervasiveness of the Internet perpetuates an obstacle to the collective solving of problems and conflicts that should really be the priority of of all of us living here:
The suppression of hate depends on pushback by the mainstream, clarity that the hateful views are not the norm. With the wildcard of new technology, however, and the resulting bubbles and echo chambers, it is ever more possible to live in a world where one’s views are only reinforced, never challenged.
It’s all so very depressingly scientific and “predictable.” But that doesn’t make it any more bearable or livable to the people targeted by these Internet-inspired bullies and thugs. It’s the responsibility of all decent and good people in the society to push back against this onslaught of hate, to call it out whenever they see it, and never to let it be normalized.