White Racial Solidarity and Opposition to American Democracy

Mass Support for Democracy and Racial Animus

Robert Dahl (1966, 40) wrote that it “is nearly impossible to find an American who says that he is opposed to democracy or favors some alternative.” But public opinion scholars have long noted that while most Americans seem to endorse democracy in the abstract (cf. Gibson 2021), there is far less consensus around more specific democratic principles (Drutman, Goldman, and Diamond 2020; McClosky 1964). Indeed, research has documented notable ambivalence toward, and even rejection of, democratic norms. A recent study found that, from 2017 to 2019, one-third of Americans favored having a “strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections,” and one-quarter reported that army rule would be a good way of governing the country. It also found that most Americans are receptive to an authoritarian leader who ignores checks on their authority (Drutman, Goldman, and Diamond 2020).

What accounts for individual variation in the willingness to endorse or reject various democratic practices? Prior work has examined how political context and voting for the winning or losing party is associated with satisfaction with democracy (Anderson and Guillory 2008; Blais and Gélineau 2007; Curini et al. 2012). Cross-national studies have demonstrated that commitments to Western democracies are wavering among citizens, many of whom have become increasingly supportive of authoritarian governance (Wuttke et al. 2020), in part because of a conservative cultural orientation that entails beliefs about traditional gender roles, religiosity, and opposition to immigration (Malka et al. 2020).

Recent research on the United States finds that opinions about democracy among whites are tied to their racial attitudes, primarily those directed at Blacks, Latinos, and immigrants. Some whites’ opposition to democratic principles is rooted, at least in part, in a rejection of racial pluralism; concerns regarding the political claims of racial and ethnic minorities; and the belief that the democratic system works better for people of color, whom they consider less deserving of its benefits. Enders and Thornton (2021) find that when a Democrat wins the presidency, whites whose preferred candidate lost and who have higher levels of racial resentment are more likely to report low levels of satisfaction with democracy. Miller and Davis (2020) show that whites with higher levels of racial prejudice are more supportive of having an authoritarian leader or having the army rule the government. And Bartels (2020) argues that white Americans with higher levels of ethnic antagonism—those with unfavorable feelings toward racial and religious outgroups coupled with concerns about these groups’ political and social claims—are more likely to endorse antidemocratic sentiments.

This work makes important contributions to understanding white Americans’ democratic preferences. But these studies focus on the feelings of outward hostility many whites have toward racial and ethnic minorities—feelings that need not be a product of or directly related to feelings of group threat and a desire to protect the in-group. Indeed, Jardina (2020) shows that racial ingroup attitudes such as white racial solidarity are not highly correlated with standard measures of racial prejudice. Moreover, these ingroup attitudes have significant predictive power on political attitudes relative to measures of racial prejudice. Thus, by only accounting for whites’ attitudes toward racial and ethnic out-groups, prior research does not reckon with the extent to which attitudes about democracy may be associated not only with outward racial hostility, but also with whites’ interest in benefiting their group and preserving its power and status.

Whites’ Support for Democracy in Historical Perspective

Democracies feature free and fair elections, universal adult suffrage, guaranteed civil rights and civil liberties, and the rule of law. On this definition, far from being the world’s oldest democracy, the United States is a young one; democratic politics have characterized the fifty states for only about a half century. The federal government intervened to defeat most suffrage restrictions only in the late 1960s. Barriers to fair, multiparty competition existed in many states and cities into the 1980s (Trounstine 2008). Civil rights and civil liberties, especially from repressive actions by state and local governments, were only recently guaranteed (Mickey, this volume).

The most stubborn obstacle in the country’s long path of democratization was the South. After the failure of Reconstruction and the turbulent decades that followed, conservative southern Democrats built eleven one-party authoritarian enclaves. In service mainly to large landowners invested in labor-repressive agriculture, these regimes defended state-mandated segregation, the disenfranchisement of Blacks and many whites, and restrictions on multiparty competition with state-sanctioned violence. These enclaves, aided and abetted by national political institutions, endured for seven decades. Only with the culmination of organized Black militancy in landmark federal legislation, as well as national Democratic Party reforms in the 1960s and early 1970s, did the country become a multiracial democracy (Mickey 2015).

Over the nearly three centuries of colonization and settlement preceding this democratization, inhabitants of European descent generally supported democracy of a diminished sort—democracy for whites only. Colonists often advocated for the construction and expansion of democratic institutions, but often full political membership was “limited to whites of property and social standing” (Bateman 2018, 73). The 1770s and 1780s featured successful efforts to broaden political participation to more white men and to construct institutions that secured them greater influence in state-level policymaking (Nash 2005). These hard-fought struggles culminated in the 1830s with the birth of the world’s first mass political parties and unrestricted white male suffrage.

As David Bateman has shown, this moment was highly paradoxical: state constitutional conventions and legislatures outside the South simultaneously removed property restrictions on white male voting and disenfranchised free Blacks. As working-class white men fought to democratize their country and clashed increasingly with free Blacks in nonsouthern cities (Stewart 1998), they fashioned a vision of the American “people” and political procedures that would allow this people to rule, amounting to a “White Man’s Republic.” Stephen Douglas articulated this vision in 1858, “This government was established on the white basis. It was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and never should be administered by any except white men” (Davis and Wilson 1858/2008, 163). Here, neither enslaved people of African descent nor free Black Americans could attain membership in the political community. Were they to do so, they would deflect “the focus of public policy away from [this vision’s] intended beneficiaries” (Bateman 2018, 140). Rather than rehearsing claims about Blacks’ racial inferiority, adherents to this vision instead argued that Black political equality betrayed America’s purpose at the expense of white group interests.

The “White Man’s Republic” was not a “bottom-up” vision. Leaders of the Democratic Party, trying to build and maintain a stable coalition across the North and South, had strong electoral motives to be responsive both to southern slaveholding elites and northern whites; fully incorporating working-class white men and disenfranchising free Blacks helped on both fronts. These politicians advanced an additional argument for the “White Man’s Republic” that presaged political scientists’ skepticism about the viability of multiracial democracies in highly divided societies. These scholars argue that a society riven by groups with fundamentally different beliefs will produce more conflict; and differences in race, language, and culture among politically mobilized groups will encourage citizens to view political competition in zero-sum terms, thereby fostering polarization, intercommunal conflict, and democratic breakdown (Horowitz 1985). Early-nineteenth-century elites also argued that because democracy requires the cultivation of sympathy among its fellow citizens, white racism made multiracial democracy impossible. Moreover, equality for free Blacks would actually harm white group interests by reducing whites’ own civic and social standing (Bateman 2018, 146).

Before the Civil War, a growing number of whites proposed a multiracial vision of American democracy, but they were a decided minority. Soon, Reconstruction presented the first chance to build such a democracy. However, in the 1860s, white voters in the North and West repeatedly rejected state-level expansions of Black voting rights; and the Fifteenth Amendment, while prohibiting the federal and state governments from restricting access to the polls due to race, still allowed states to continue to restrict voting on the basis of ethnicity, gender, income, and education (Keyssar 2000). Ultimately, the elite-led defeat of Reconstruction by violent insurgents ended the prospects for multiracial democracy for about a century. Later, many white advocates for women’s suffrage reassured white men that women’s voting rights would not reopen the door to southern Black voting (Kraditor 1981).

A sea change in white racial attitudes occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, as majorities of whites backed racial equality in marriage law, employment opportunities, public accommodations, and other facets of American life (Schuman et al. 1997). Since the civil rights era, national political institutions and parties have, at least rhetorically, endorsed (almost) universal adult suffrage, free and fair elections, equal civic standing for all citizens, and civil rights and liberties that reflect and reinforce this standing. In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government began to deracialize its immigration and naturalization policies, thereby establishing a state-sanctioned conception of the American people that was no longer rooted in white supremacy. Thus, to ask Americans today whether they support democracy is to ask whether they support multiracial democracy.

Multiracial democracy now faces its greatest threat since its birth a half century ago. Given their racial resentment and investments in white identity, many whites oppose even “colorblind” policies that prohibit racial discrimination and that undergird multiracial democracy (Tesler 2016). Over the past two decades, state-level Republicans have worked to disenfranchise their partisan opponents (Mickey, this volume). Neither they nor former president Donald Trump overtly called to scrap multiracial democracy. However, Trump’s alarming promotion of a more restricted vision of American peoplehood certainly inspired and emboldened white nationalists.

Moreover, Trump delivered on many of his promises “to protect traditionalist Americans, especially conservative Christians who are predominantly white, against many forms of victimization” (Smith and King 2021, 460, 471). Policies ranging from civil rights enforcement and immigration to voting, policing, and welfare reform offered a kind of protection for whites anxious about their group’s relative position. In doing so, they echoed past policies meant to preserve a country by and for whites, such as the 1920s immigration laws. These laws, drafted when the share of foreign-born Americans was at its greatest peak to date, successfully restricted immigration by allegedly racially inferior groups to preserve whites’ demographic dominance (Tichenor 2002). Perhaps most alarmingly, Trump’s delegitimizing of the 2020 election—joined by most Republican officeholders—threatens to build a base of whites skeptical of the possibility of fairly administered elections and who in turn support restricting access to the polls (Jacobs and Choate, this volume).

Racial In-Group Attitudes and Democratic Commitments

Not all white Americans are poised to reject multiracial democracy and accept these authoritarian, elite efforts to consolidate the power of white people. Drawing on work in political psychology, we suggest that individual commitments to democracy are conditioned on the extent to which some whites believe their racial group stands to benefit or lose from more democratic processes. As members of society’s dominant group, some whites may feel they stand to gain by restricting democratic practices to protect their group in the face of perceived threats from racial and ethnic minorities, especially in light of growing demographic diversity and the increased political, social, and economic standing of racial and ethnic minorities (Bartels 2020; Craig and Richeson 2017; Jardina 2019; Mutz 2018).

Here, we identify which whites are most likely to embrace antidemocratic opinions. Jardina (2019) demonstrates that a sizable share of white Americans possesses a racial consciousness—a sense of solidarity defined by a psychological attachment to their racial group, grievance about the relative status of this group, and a belief that their group should work collectively on behalf of its interest. Especially interested in defending and preserving their group’s dominant status, these whites are therefore extremely hostile to immigration, perceive significant competition from racial and ethnic minorities, and overwhelmingly support Donald Trump. We posit that these same whites ought to be especially inclined to support authoritarian leadership in the wake of Trump’s presidency and his various promises to limit multiracial democracy.

As Drutman, Goldman, and Diamond (2020, 5) point out, Trump once said (erroneously) that “when somebody’s president of the United States, the authority is total.” Despite his embrace of strongman tactics, Trump maintained consistent support from his white base, many of whom opposed legislative and judicial constraints on Trump’s executive authority (Carey et al. 2019). We posit that Trump support persisted because many white American with high levels of racial consciousness likely condone, in the abstract, undemocratic leadership. The analysis that follows does not allow us to make strong causal claims about the direction of this relationship. Indeed, we believe it is reasonable to hypothesize both that Trump’s appeals may have pushed many of his supporters to endorse strong antidemocratic leadership, and that a general preference among these whites for such leadership may have enabled many of Trump’s actions. Our purpose here is to illuminate the extent to which white racial solidarity is associated with particular antidemocratic preferences above and beyond other political and social factors.

White Racial Consciousness and Antidemocratic Leadership

To examine the relationship between white racial consciousness and support for authoritarian leadership, we turn to the 2020 American National Election Study (ANES), which assesses these attitudes with two questions: “Would it be helpful, harmful, or neither helpful nor harmful if U.S. presidents could work on the country’s problems without paying attention to what Congress and the courts say?” and “Having a strong leader in government is good for the United States even if the leader bends the rules to get things done. Do you agree . . . or disagree?” We examine the relationship among non-Hispanic whites between their opinion on these questions and white consciousness, controlling for national and personal economic evaluations, partisanship, political ideology, age, level of education, gender, authoritarianism (Feldman 2021), and racial out-group attitudes measured using the standard four-item measure of racial resentment (Kinder and Sanders 1996). We estimate white racial consciousness using the multi-item measure developed by Jardina (2019). The first item assesses white respondents’ strength of racial identity by asking, “How important is being white to your identity?” The second asks respondents how important it is for whites to “work together to change laws that are unfair to whites”; while the third item assesses whites’ sense of discontent by asking, “How likely is it that many whites are unable to find a job because employers are hiring minorities instead?” The last item asks respondents how much racial discrimination they believe their group experiences. For each respondent, we take the average of their responses to these questions, creating a single measure of consciousness that ranges from 0 to 1, with greater values corresponding to higher levels of racial consciousness.

Consistent with prior work, our regression model suggests that racial resentment, party identity, age, education, national economic evaluations, and authoritarianism are all associated with greater support for authoritarian governance. But beyond other political, partisan, or racial attitudes, the strongest relationship emerges with respect to white racial consciousness, which, all else equal, is powerfully associated with believing that it would be helpful for the president to work unfettered by Congress and the courts, and with support for having a strong leader, even one that bends the rules. We plot, in Figure 1, the predicted opinion on each item across levels of white consciousness. Moving from the lowest level to the highest level of consciousness results in a 17-point increase in support for the president working without institutional checks and a 22-point increase in support for a strong leader.

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Figure 1

The Relationship between White Racial Consciousness and Support for Antidemocratic Leadership

We also note that we do not find that white consciousness is uniformly associated with antidemocratic principles. Whites with higher levels of racial group consciousness are, for example, not more or less dissatisfied with democracy in general. One interpretation of these results is that white racial consciousness is not linked to all forms of undemocratic governance, but only to those that seem particularly relevant to securing their power and status. One implication, however, is that opportunistic political elites may garner support for other types of democratic backsliding by framing policies as maintaining whites’ dominant status.

Given partisan polarization in the United States and Trump’s cooptation of the Republican Party, one may wonder whether the relationship we uncover is primarily a phenomenon of Republican voters. The previous analysis showed the effect of white racial consciousness above and beyond partisanship. We also find that the effect of consciousness on support for antidemocratic leadership is largely similar among white Republicans and white Democrats. At the same time, approximately 75 percent of whites with high levels of consciousness identified with the Republican Party in 2020, suggesting that much of this ambivalence about democracy is concentrated among Republicans.

There are limits to the conclusions we may draw here. First, given our electorate’s polarization by party and race, it is difficult to distinguish between an individual’s support for democracy in general and their support for the party currently in power. As prior work notes, members of both parties seem very willing to condone the president violating democratic principles when they share the president’s party affiliation. (Bartels 2020). Indeed, given that whites high in racial solidarity are, among Republican voters, those most supportive of former President Trump (Jardina 2019), scholars should devise empirical tests that parse whether these individuals’ stated views about democracy are tied to Trump and his actions—and are thus at least partly ephemeral—or whether they are likely to endure.

We also cannot disentangle whether antidemocratic practices are driven by the mass public, or whether elites are primarily fostering support for their authoritarian efforts by cultivating and stoking racial grievances among whites. We suspect that both are at play. After all, we know that some whites are psychologically predisposed to express hostility toward democracy (Parker and Towler 2019). But there are reasons to be skeptical of a mass-public driven story. First, elites usually play an outsized role in shaping mass opinion and connecting predispositions to political preferences (Zaller 1992; Lenz 2012), including shaping support for democracy (Clayton et al. 2021). Second, a public-driven process would suggest that white group consciousness is driving changes in a broader set of attitudes about democracy, but that is not what we find.

The prospects for a democratic renewal in the United States are better if the elite-led story is true. The existence of a wellspring of antidemocratic whites would provide a deep reservoir for ambitious office seekers to exploit. Multiracial democracies are most imperiled when elites have strong electoral incentives to attack other social groups or democracy itself (Chandra 2007). But if Trump’s “stop the steal” rhetoric permanently transforms the beliefs of whites about democracy—particularly about the unfairness of elections—the advantages of an elite-led story may become moot.

Conclusion

Our finding that white racial solidarity is strongly associated with support for authoritarian governance is sobering, particularly because for many politicians, the exploitation of white identity politics is a winning strategy. Subverting it requires that politicians and the public be willing to “put democracy first” (Mettler and Lieberman 2020, 253), either by avoiding the temptation of antidemocratic electoral incentives or by publicizing and sanctioning these rhetorical appeals and election platforms. The evidence here is disappointing; experimental research suggests that voters, donors, and activists are unlikely to punish their copartisans for antidemocratic behavior (Graham and Svolik 2020; Carey et al. 2020).

That said, there may be some reasons for optimism. First, a salutary shift in Republican candidates’ rhetoric is certainly not out of the question, and—given the importance of elite rhetoric in shaping the political salience of white racial attitudes and identities—could have positive effects on white support for democracy (Clayton et al. 2021). For instance, greater Republican success among Hispanic Americans could help to rewire Republican candidates’ incentives and curb the party’s current antidemocratic behavior.

Second, the increase in democratic backsliding worldwide has been accompanied by a striking increase in prodemocracy mobilizations and activism (Hellmeier et al. 2021). Safeguarding democracy is not just a matter of reducing the prevalence of antidemocratic sentiments but also of encouraging prodemocracy forces. And recent surveys reveal an impressive racially egalitarian countermovement among white Democrats in the wake of Trump’s election. On average, whites who identify with the Democratic Party are more liberal in their racial attitudes and more supportive of policies that would promote racial equality than ever before. They could pressure their party to become an effective countervailing force against authoritarian policies intended to reinforce America’s racial hierarchy (Jardina and Ollerenshaw, forthcoming). Finally, new social movements are emerging to defend multiracial democracy. Their long-term impact may be even more important: to reenvision what democracy means and what it requires (Francis, this volume).