Richard Hanania published an excellent article a while ago called "Anti-woke as autism" (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/anti-woke-as-autism), and treating white liberals' poll-measured stated preferences as even remotely relevant indicators of their actual preferences is exactly the kind of misguidedly autistic anti-wokeness he talks about.
To illustrate the point with a simple example from his article, consider the "fat acceptance" movement during the peak woke era. The only commentary we heard from liberals about weight was that it supposedly has nothing to do with physical attractiveness because "big is beautiful." We saw plus-sized models, etc all over the place with the implied (and sometimes explicitly stated) message being that their plus-size could not possibly have any implications on their attractiveness. A running poll of self-identified progressives, and maybe even liberals, on whether they find fat people physically attractive would unquestionably have documented a significant spike in "yes" responses during 2016-2020. Does this mean that wokes actually started to care meaningfully less about weight as a factor in physical attractiveness and started to find fat people physically attractive?
Well, someone's perceptions of physical attractiveness is inevitably going to influence their dating preferences and choices and how they treat other people. So if wokes really started to find fat people a lot more physically attractive like they claimed, then you would expect to see fat people start to get many more likes on dating apps and much more attention from the opposite sex, at least in progressive areas such as college campuses, than they used to. You would expect woke male college professors who fully paid lip service to "big is beautiful" to show no subtle biases whatsoever in favor of thinner female students relative to fatter ones during personal interactions.
Obviously, no such thing ever happened, because no one really started believing that "big is beautiful", which was always just a polite/politically correct stated preference that never reflected their revealed preferences. The vast majority of liberals who paid any kind of lip service to "big is "beautiful" viscerally found plus-sized models to be as out-of-place in an ad as conservatives did. This is the kind of contradiction that conservatives would correctly call "virtue signalling". White liberals' poll responses on race are the same kind of virtue-signalling as their fake stated preferences about fatness being attractive. If White liberals really shifted their truly-held racial preferences in favor of non-whites, then there would be evidence of that in their revealed preferences, but there isn't. At least not nearly as much as taking poll responses at face value would imply.
Someone's dating preferences are usually among their most visceral and deeply-held emotions and thus a good indicator of revealed/truly-held preferences. It's especially valuable as a proxy for revealed preferences about race because it's the one area of life in which it's not taboo to express racial preferences for White people- you can't really say "I only want White friends/neighbors/colleagues/doctors/immigrants", but it's largely still acceptable to say "I only want to date White people." So if White liberals actually started to like non-whites a lot more than they liked other whites after Floyd, you would expect to see non-white people start to do much better and white people start to do much worse among white people on dating apps in liberal areas. You'd expect to see a surge of white people buying homes in majority-non-white areas relative to majority-white areas and enrolling their kids in majority-non-white schools. No such things ever happened, and as Hanania noted in his article, being White has always been valued on dating apps to the point that apps don't want to publish the data. There is no evidence whatsoever of any change in those dynamics or a huge post-Floyd increase in inter-racial marriages between Whites and non-Whites.
The "self-hating White liberal phenomenon" is really just the "virtue-signalling and lying White liberal phenomenon".
White liberals stated preferences often drive political discourse, hiring decisions, immigration, public policy, law enforcement and social media censorship. If their stated preferences are just virtue-signalling or not it doesn't matter, the impact is real.
BTW Hanania is a rage-baiting troll. I don't trust his stated preferences.
Interesting that so much hinges on 2012. What happened in 2012? Obama was already president, it wasn’t his first election. Trump, brexit, merkel’s millions were nowhere on the scene yet. I remember noticing the extent of woke madness seeping into the public sphere outside of academia and college campuses around 2012, but I am surprised it extended so far that it is seen this much in attitudes across white liberals. Was there some media source or social media platform that was becoming very active around that time? There was HuffPost, slate, daily kos…were such things enough to have such an impact on white attitudes about other whites?
Trayvon Martin -> 'If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon', proto-BLM/BLM founded 2013, etc. Perhaps the awful racial discourse was also amplified by cell phones.
I don't think anyone has a comprehensive theory, but we definitely 'get' the timing, that it was harmful, etc.
I know this might sound a bit far fetched, but as I recall, 2012 was not long after the concept of a commentariat appeared on news articles. At the time, comment sections were generally unmoderated. Blogs were becoming popular and among this, HBD started to gain legs and those ideas made their way out of strictly pioneer fund pariahs. Somewhat before 2012, you saw comments responding to any news articles and editorials that contradicted legacy media claims that racial outcomes were due to some kind of oppression or poverty. When Eric holder called America a nation of cowards for not talking about race, the commentariat came forward in droves with data about race and iq stuff. At the time, HbD types were optimistic, as if HBD was about the go mainstream. This seemed plausible at the time because people making such claims were everywhere on the internet. Anyway, I got the impression that this drove educated leftists into the mode of both severe censorship and also to retreat into a mentally fortressed worldview of systemic injustice. It was like a person whose core beliefs were threatened who then retreated into a kind of fanaticism. I have no proof for this or data. It’s just how the online world appeared to be behaving to me at the time.
Agnes Callard’s unicontext theory provides an interesting explanation for this: it roughly claims that the communications revolution put us in a global normative space and certain distinctive norms were developed in this environment. In particular, racial transgressions came to have significantly more weight because it could be judged without requiring local context to understand - whereas traditional values e.g. loyalty require too long an explanation to fit into 280 characters
Isn't it equally plausible that 2016 was the pivot point? Whites elected Trump and it made us white libs lose our fucking minds. Did you use the pre- or post-election survey?
The panel series documentation on the ANES website mentions both in the panel:
"Number of waves: nine (2016 Time Series pre-eIection survey, 2016 Time Series post-election survey, [...]"
More people should focus on this question. According to Steve Sailer, Obama managed to impose a certain discipline on the activist muscle around the democratic party in his first term because he needed moderate voters for reelection. After he was reelected, the path of least resistance was to cater to activist insiders instead.
Obama no longer needed to worry about re-election in his second term. His administration fundamentally shifted gears on approach to race/gender. This had a profound impact on the administrative state and non-profit complex. Worth digging into the details, but here is a starting point: https://time.com/10557/obama-my-brothers-keeper-minorities-race/
"After spending much of his first term avoiding issues of race, he has spent his second taking a piecemeal approach to assisting minority youth. He addressed the issue of racial profiling after a Florida jury reached a not-guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman, who had been charged in the killing of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. And his departments of Justice and Education have looked to stem disparities in drug sentencing and school discipline."
There should be a reason why perceptions of White vs Black by other races have flipped. Here in China where I live, people accuse each other of being a “white-leftist “ as a way of insult.
Would be interesting to relate this data to studies of jury bias, though I'm not sure the latter have as much data longitudinally. If I recall, the general finding is that blacks have large in-group bias on juries, consistent with what you show here, while white jurors have essentially no in-group bias, but no anti-in-group bias, either ... though I'm not sure if anyone has broken out the specifically liberal white segment in the jury context.
This is great. One thing I'd note is that, pace claims that this has never happened before, I think these time series do show a precedent: late 80's - early 90s. The line for white-ingroup sentiment doesn't cross zero, but it meets the line, in a manner unlike any other group, and a significant drop from previous baselines, that is partially reverted over the course of the 90s through the 2010s. Ditto with white liberal sentiment towards other groups. In the chart there is a big raise in how white liberals see outgroup members from the late 80s-90s, followed by a levelling off from the 2000s through 2010s, and then another period of major uptick after the current Great Awokening. So eyeballing the charts, they seem consistent with the idea that something like this has happened before, just the baseline of ingroup sentiment among white liberals was higher in the late 80s than it was in 2012, so the drop during that period didn't lead to white liberals viewing their own group negatively but, instead, seeing their own group with equanimity while seeing other groups increasingly positively.
Another thing that jumps out looking at the chart of all groups attitudes towards themselves v. others: from the mid 1960s through the early 2000s, all groups were growing less identitarian. The relative warmth towards their own group relative to others was in consistent decline. Then, after 2004, this shifted: all groups, including whites, began to feel more warmly about their own groups, i.e. grew more tribal/ identitarian in their thinking. But after 2012, this reversed among whites, driven by changes in white liberals, while the trend continued for virtually all other groups.
This is interesting because it suggests that there really was a cultural trend away from identitarianism through the back half of the 20th century that seems to have been reversed in the 21st. But the reversal after 2004 predates the "Great Awokening." The Great Awokening seems to have been a moment that shifted things a lot for whites (especially liberals) but may not have changed the trajectories for everyone else much (relative to their post-2004 trend lines).
That’s right around when social media crossed the 50% mark. The activists all came online in 2010-2012, by 2012 the majority of Americans were on some kind of social media, and by 2016 social media was dominant in politics. The Arab Spring was mostly in 2011.
Social media increases the returns to signaling virtue and also increases intra-elite status competition. The medium is the message etc.
As to why this only happens amongst whites - it’s because they’re at the top of the heap. If elves were the richest and most powerful, you’d see more white unity and elves fracturing as they each fought to be at the top.
Of course there are more causes and most things have multiple factors. But these are fun to prognosticate about.
The MAGA base is predominantly white. As they have become more open and more extreme in their beliefs and actions, many of which disproportionately affect people of non-white races, the shame that white liberals have felt has grown. At the same time, it’s grown the empathy and respect for the most affected people.
This is people's announced feelings, which may not correspond to their actual feelings. How much intermarriage is there between the various groups? How much living nearby other groups?
I was wondering what each groups Implicit Association Test (IAT) results looked like for all of these polls compared to the stated feelings! It would be interesting to see how much people's gut reactions have/haven't changed compared to their (possibly aspirational?) answers to a poll.
Interesting! Do you think IAT scores are interesting at all, or is it junk?
If the IAT is junk (or just inappropriate for this context) then is there a feasible way to determine the "real" feelings (the gut level responses) of these groups or do you think that taking people at their word on these surveys is the most meaningful data?
I'm not an expert in any of this but intuitively it feels like what people answer on these polls and what they "actually think of people" in their day-to-day interactions could look very different.
Calvinism was only successful in Scotland. Not in Iceland, Greenland, Danemark, Norway, Sweden or Finland. So no, not Nordic. Nordics are Lutherans, see Minnesota.
Nope. Lutherans are easily swayed one way or the other. For example, the absolute majority of German Lutherans voted for Hitler in March 1933. They have a knack for following crazy authorities.
The issue comes down that white liberals live in fear of being called racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic. Thus, they have to adopt luxury beliefs while living their own life in defiance of their own luxury beliefs.
As an example: white liberals will send their own children to expensive, very white college prep private schools was claiming that middle class and blue collar whites are racist for opposing busing. When asked why they, as white liberals, made the education choices for their own family, race and public school demographics will never come up.
Self-hating Whites is historically an extension of the self-hating Jews phenomenon. Both are brought about by external negative propaganda - mainstream media, advertising, clerisy etc. If there were tons of anti-Asian or anti-Latino or anti-Black propaganda, we'd be seeing self-hating Asians, Latinos and Blacks. But we don't...
Richard Hanania published an excellent article a while ago called "Anti-woke as autism" (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/anti-woke-as-autism), and treating white liberals' poll-measured stated preferences as even remotely relevant indicators of their actual preferences is exactly the kind of misguidedly autistic anti-wokeness he talks about.
To illustrate the point with a simple example from his article, consider the "fat acceptance" movement during the peak woke era. The only commentary we heard from liberals about weight was that it supposedly has nothing to do with physical attractiveness because "big is beautiful." We saw plus-sized models, etc all over the place with the implied (and sometimes explicitly stated) message being that their plus-size could not possibly have any implications on their attractiveness. A running poll of self-identified progressives, and maybe even liberals, on whether they find fat people physically attractive would unquestionably have documented a significant spike in "yes" responses during 2016-2020. Does this mean that wokes actually started to care meaningfully less about weight as a factor in physical attractiveness and started to find fat people physically attractive?
Well, someone's perceptions of physical attractiveness is inevitably going to influence their dating preferences and choices and how they treat other people. So if wokes really started to find fat people a lot more physically attractive like they claimed, then you would expect to see fat people start to get many more likes on dating apps and much more attention from the opposite sex, at least in progressive areas such as college campuses, than they used to. You would expect woke male college professors who fully paid lip service to "big is beautiful" to show no subtle biases whatsoever in favor of thinner female students relative to fatter ones during personal interactions.
Obviously, no such thing ever happened, because no one really started believing that "big is beautiful", which was always just a polite/politically correct stated preference that never reflected their revealed preferences. The vast majority of liberals who paid any kind of lip service to "big is "beautiful" viscerally found plus-sized models to be as out-of-place in an ad as conservatives did. This is the kind of contradiction that conservatives would correctly call "virtue signalling". White liberals' poll responses on race are the same kind of virtue-signalling as their fake stated preferences about fatness being attractive. If White liberals really shifted their truly-held racial preferences in favor of non-whites, then there would be evidence of that in their revealed preferences, but there isn't. At least not nearly as much as taking poll responses at face value would imply.
Someone's dating preferences are usually among their most visceral and deeply-held emotions and thus a good indicator of revealed/truly-held preferences. It's especially valuable as a proxy for revealed preferences about race because it's the one area of life in which it's not taboo to express racial preferences for White people- you can't really say "I only want White friends/neighbors/colleagues/doctors/immigrants", but it's largely still acceptable to say "I only want to date White people." So if White liberals actually started to like non-whites a lot more than they liked other whites after Floyd, you would expect to see non-white people start to do much better and white people start to do much worse among white people on dating apps in liberal areas. You'd expect to see a surge of white people buying homes in majority-non-white areas relative to majority-white areas and enrolling their kids in majority-non-white schools. No such things ever happened, and as Hanania noted in his article, being White has always been valued on dating apps to the point that apps don't want to publish the data. There is no evidence whatsoever of any change in those dynamics or a huge post-Floyd increase in inter-racial marriages between Whites and non-Whites.
The "self-hating White liberal phenomenon" is really just the "virtue-signalling and lying White liberal phenomenon".
White liberals stated preferences often drive political discourse, hiring decisions, immigration, public policy, law enforcement and social media censorship. If their stated preferences are just virtue-signalling or not it doesn't matter, the impact is real.
BTW Hanania is a rage-baiting troll. I don't trust his stated preferences.
Everyone got fatter and standards shifted accordingly.
Interesting that so much hinges on 2012. What happened in 2012? Obama was already president, it wasn’t his first election. Trump, brexit, merkel’s millions were nowhere on the scene yet. I remember noticing the extent of woke madness seeping into the public sphere outside of academia and college campuses around 2012, but I am surprised it extended so far that it is seen this much in attitudes across white liberals. Was there some media source or social media platform that was becoming very active around that time? There was HuffPost, slate, daily kos…were such things enough to have such an impact on white attitudes about other whites?
Trayvon Martin -> 'If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon', proto-BLM/BLM founded 2013, etc. Perhaps the awful racial discourse was also amplified by cell phones.
I don't think anyone has a comprehensive theory, but we definitely 'get' the timing, that it was harmful, etc.
I know this might sound a bit far fetched, but as I recall, 2012 was not long after the concept of a commentariat appeared on news articles. At the time, comment sections were generally unmoderated. Blogs were becoming popular and among this, HBD started to gain legs and those ideas made their way out of strictly pioneer fund pariahs. Somewhat before 2012, you saw comments responding to any news articles and editorials that contradicted legacy media claims that racial outcomes were due to some kind of oppression or poverty. When Eric holder called America a nation of cowards for not talking about race, the commentariat came forward in droves with data about race and iq stuff. At the time, HbD types were optimistic, as if HBD was about the go mainstream. This seemed plausible at the time because people making such claims were everywhere on the internet. Anyway, I got the impression that this drove educated leftists into the mode of both severe censorship and also to retreat into a mentally fortressed worldview of systemic injustice. It was like a person whose core beliefs were threatened who then retreated into a kind of fanaticism. I have no proof for this or data. It’s just how the online world appeared to be behaving to me at the time.
Agnes Callard’s unicontext theory provides an interesting explanation for this: it roughly claims that the communications revolution put us in a global normative space and certain distinctive norms were developed in this environment. In particular, racial transgressions came to have significantly more weight because it could be judged without requiring local context to understand - whereas traditional values e.g. loyalty require too long an explanation to fit into 280 characters
Isn't it equally plausible that 2016 was the pivot point? Whites elected Trump and it made us white libs lose our fucking minds. Did you use the pre- or post-election survey?
The panel series documentation on the ANES website mentions both in the panel:
"Number of waves: nine (2016 Time Series pre-eIection survey, 2016 Time Series post-election survey, [...]"
Both pre- and post-election already support the trend from 2012, and other datasets do too.
Oh ok. Wow. Thanks.
More people should focus on this question. According to Steve Sailer, Obama managed to impose a certain discipline on the activist muscle around the democratic party in his first term because he needed moderate voters for reelection. After he was reelected, the path of least resistance was to cater to activist insiders instead.
2012 Obama got reelected, and that was it - he was no longer competing. So all the ugliness that was kept out of sight before could be now be let out.
Obama no longer needed to worry about re-election in his second term. His administration fundamentally shifted gears on approach to race/gender. This had a profound impact on the administrative state and non-profit complex. Worth digging into the details, but here is a starting point: https://time.com/10557/obama-my-brothers-keeper-minorities-race/
"After spending much of his first term avoiding issues of race, he has spent his second taking a piecemeal approach to assisting minority youth. He addressed the issue of racial profiling after a Florida jury reached a not-guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman, who had been charged in the killing of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. And his departments of Justice and Education have looked to stem disparities in drug sentencing and school discipline."
There should be a reason why perceptions of White vs Black by other races have flipped. Here in China where I live, people accuse each other of being a “white-leftist “ as a way of insult.
Would be interesting to relate this data to studies of jury bias, though I'm not sure the latter have as much data longitudinally. If I recall, the general finding is that blacks have large in-group bias on juries, consistent with what you show here, while white jurors have essentially no in-group bias, but no anti-in-group bias, either ... though I'm not sure if anyone has broken out the specifically liberal white segment in the jury context.
This is great. One thing I'd note is that, pace claims that this has never happened before, I think these time series do show a precedent: late 80's - early 90s. The line for white-ingroup sentiment doesn't cross zero, but it meets the line, in a manner unlike any other group, and a significant drop from previous baselines, that is partially reverted over the course of the 90s through the 2010s. Ditto with white liberal sentiment towards other groups. In the chart there is a big raise in how white liberals see outgroup members from the late 80s-90s, followed by a levelling off from the 2000s through 2010s, and then another period of major uptick after the current Great Awokening. So eyeballing the charts, they seem consistent with the idea that something like this has happened before, just the baseline of ingroup sentiment among white liberals was higher in the late 80s than it was in 2012, so the drop during that period didn't lead to white liberals viewing their own group negatively but, instead, seeing their own group with equanimity while seeing other groups increasingly positively.
Another thing that jumps out looking at the chart of all groups attitudes towards themselves v. others: from the mid 1960s through the early 2000s, all groups were growing less identitarian. The relative warmth towards their own group relative to others was in consistent decline. Then, after 2004, this shifted: all groups, including whites, began to feel more warmly about their own groups, i.e. grew more tribal/ identitarian in their thinking. But after 2012, this reversed among whites, driven by changes in white liberals, while the trend continued for virtually all other groups.
This is interesting because it suggests that there really was a cultural trend away from identitarianism through the back half of the 20th century that seems to have been reversed in the 21st. But the reversal after 2004 predates the "Great Awokening." The Great Awokening seems to have been a moment that shifted things a lot for whites (especially liberals) but may not have changed the trajectories for everyone else much (relative to their post-2004 trend lines).
That’s right around when social media crossed the 50% mark. The activists all came online in 2010-2012, by 2012 the majority of Americans were on some kind of social media, and by 2016 social media was dominant in politics. The Arab Spring was mostly in 2011.
Social media increases the returns to signaling virtue and also increases intra-elite status competition. The medium is the message etc.
As to why this only happens amongst whites - it’s because they’re at the top of the heap. If elves were the richest and most powerful, you’d see more white unity and elves fracturing as they each fought to be at the top.
Of course there are more causes and most things have multiple factors. But these are fun to prognosticate about.
I suspect that "self-hating" isn't quite right. They hate other, non-leftist whites.
The MAGA base is predominantly white. As they have become more open and more extreme in their beliefs and actions, many of which disproportionately affect people of non-white races, the shame that white liberals have felt has grown. At the same time, it’s grown the empathy and respect for the most affected people.
What about when you split white liberal men and women?
This is people's announced feelings, which may not correspond to their actual feelings. How much intermarriage is there between the various groups? How much living nearby other groups?
I was wondering what each groups Implicit Association Test (IAT) results looked like for all of these polls compared to the stated feelings! It would be interesting to see how much people's gut reactions have/haven't changed compared to their (possibly aspirational?) answers to a poll.
The IAT does not measure implicit associations, despite what the name says.
Interesting! Do you think IAT scores are interesting at all, or is it junk?
If the IAT is junk (or just inappropriate for this context) then is there a feasible way to determine the "real" feelings (the gut level responses) of these groups or do you think that taking people at their word on these surveys is the most meaningful data?
I'm not an expert in any of this but intuitively it feels like what people answer on these polls and what they "actually think of people" in their day-to-day interactions could look very different.
Puritanism is penitential. That’s not just white, it’s positively Nordic.
Calvinism was only successful in Scotland. Not in Iceland, Greenland, Danemark, Norway, Sweden or Finland. So no, not Nordic. Nordics are Lutherans, see Minnesota.
Self-deprecating. Never listened to Prairie Home Companion?
Nope. Lutherans are easily swayed one way or the other. For example, the absolute majority of German Lutherans voted for Hitler in March 1933. They have a knack for following crazy authorities.
The issue comes down that white liberals live in fear of being called racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic. Thus, they have to adopt luxury beliefs while living their own life in defiance of their own luxury beliefs.
As an example: white liberals will send their own children to expensive, very white college prep private schools was claiming that middle class and blue collar whites are racist for opposing busing. When asked why they, as white liberals, made the education choices for their own family, race and public school demographics will never come up.
Do we think Floyd was murdered here?
Who's 'we', white man?
Cremieux and most of his audience
Oh, then you should have said 'realists'/'everywhere' instead of 'we'/'here'...people could get the wrong impression...
So does he?
I think we need to bring back teenage dirt bag, it will fix whites again
Self-hating Whites is historically an extension of the self-hating Jews phenomenon. Both are brought about by external negative propaganda - mainstream media, advertising, clerisy etc. If there were tons of anti-Asian or anti-Latino or anti-Black propaganda, we'd be seeing self-hating Asians, Latinos and Blacks. But we don't...
What happened in America after 1980 and 88? seems like circa 82 and 90, there were steep dives in how whites viewed themselves.
The Reagan Era? Quite a lot happened.