A New Study Draws a Line From January 6 to Charlottesville

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

07 April 21

If you ever wonder why the Republican Party can’t cut loose of the crazy, refer to the results of this study.

obert Pape is a political scientist at the University of Chicago who specializes in the study of various security threats. In Tuesday’s Washington Post, he published a column based on research that he and his team had done into the lives of 377 people who were arrested in connection with the insurrection of January 6. You very likely will not be flattened by the news that Economic Insecurity does not hold a prominent place in the data. Neither will you be stunned by what form of insecurity actually does.

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), working with court records, has analyzed the demographics and home county characteristics of the 377 Americans, from 250 counties in 44 states, arrested or charged in the Capitol attack. Those involved are, by and large, older and more professional than right-wing protesters we have surveyed in the past. They typically have no ties to existing right-wing groups. But like earlier protesters, they are 95 percent White and 85 percent male, and many live near and among Biden supporters in blue and purple counties…

…Nor were these insurrectionists typically from deep-red counties. Some 52 percent are from blue counties that Biden comfortably won. But by far the most interesting characteristic common to the insurrectionists’ backgrounds has to do with changes in their local demographics: Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges.

Jackpot.

If you ever wonder why the Republican party can’t cut loose of the crazy, refer to the results of this study. First, the crazy cuts across all economic and social demographics. And second, if we take these results as a measure of The Base, then The Base is a helluva lot bigger than to 34 million people who voted for the former president* last November. Like Joyce’s snow in Ireland, crazy is general all over the party. It is a legitimate movement. And its fundamental engine is old-fashioned racial terror.

CPOST also conducted two independent surveys in February and March, including a National Opinion Research Council survey, to help understand the roots of this rage. One driver overwhelmingly stood out: fear of the “Great Replacement.” Great Replacement theory has achieved iconic status with white nationalists and holds that minorities are progressively replacing White populations due to mass immigration policies and low birthrates. Extensive social media exposure is the second-biggest driver of this view, our surveys found. Replacement theory might help explain why such a high percentage of the rioters hail from counties with fast-rising, non-White populations.

It is telling that the white-supremacists who rioted in Charlottesville chanted, “You will not replace us” as they marched through the streets. That should have been enough to tell us that the threat to rational self-government in this country is deep and entrenched, and it will not go away when and if the economy turns around. It has nothing to do with money. It has to do with the disappearance of phantom entitlements on which this society depended for too long. Either we get a handle on this or we can lose it all. This study should be the seedbed for a serious intellectual investigation of the wild kingdom.