Abstract
Racial and ethnic division is a mainstay of the American social structure, and today these strains are exacerbated by political binaries. Moreover, the media has become increasingly polarized whereby certain media outlets intensify perceived differences between racial and ethnic groups, political alignments, and religious affiliations. Using data from a recent psychological study of the Alt-Right, we assess the associations between perceptions of social issues, feelings of status threat, trust in conservative media, and affiliation with the Alt-Right among White Americans. We find concern over more conservative social issues along with trust in conservative media explain a large portion of the variation in feelings of status threat among White Americans. Furthermore, more conservative social issues plus feeling of status threat significantly increase the odds of Alt-Right affiliation. Most surprisingly, however, trust in conservative media mitigated, instead of amplified, these associations. Implications and calls for future research are discussed.
Highlights
We were first interested in the associations between various social issues and feelings of status threat for White Americans and if such were conditioned by trust in conservative media outlets
Our analysis revealed the opposite—trust in conservative media mitigated the associations between social issues and status threat as well as Alt-Right affiliation
Our country was founded on racial inequality, and white supremacy is firmly rooted in that history [5]
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Racial and ethnic division has been a mainstay of the American social structure since the first contact between Indigenous peoples of the Americas and European colonizers. Political tensions, related to racial-ethnic hierarchies involving Whites and enslaved Africans, were the driving force behind the Civil War and have, in some ways, held constant since . Today these strains are marked and exacerbated by political binaries, most recently peaking during Donald Trump’s tenure as President of the United States and the 6 January
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