Good news - the decline of ethnic tensions

Hmm. This could be interesting. I'll see if I can find access. From The Rise of Trump, the Fall of Prejudice? Tracking White Americans' Racial Attitudes 2008-2018 via a Panel Survey by Daniel J. Hopkins and Samantha Washington. From the Abstract:

In his campaign and first few years in office, Donald Trump consistently defied contemporary norms by using explicit, negative rhetoric targeting ethnic/racial minorities. Did this rhetoric lead white Americans to express more prejudiced views of African Americans or Hispanics, whether through the normalization of prejudice or other mechanisms? We assess that question using a 13-wave panel conducted with a population-based sample of Americans between 2008 and 2018. We find that via most measures, white Americans' expressed anti-Black and anti-Hispanic prejudice declined after the 2016 campaign and election, and we can rule out even small increases in the expression of prejudice. These results suggest the limits of racially charged rhetoric's capacity to heighten prejudice among white Americans overall. They also indicate that prejudice can behave like an issue attitude: rather than being a fixed predisposition, prejudice can respond thermostatically to changing presidential rhetoric and policy positions.

At the time of the election, it was much ballyhooed by the mainstream media that Trump was a racist and that we were already seeing a rise in hate crimes and that we would be seeing a dramatic rise over coming years. Trump was a white nationalist racist, resulting hate crimes were a given.

Of course this was, at the time, all projection. Hate crime data is patchy and is at best a loose proxy. There was no possible way in January 2017 to know empirically that there was a rise. The data did not exist. Clearly journalists and pundits were cherry-picking cases to try and turn anecdote into data, an always precarious task. Made more risky by the fact that there was such a shortage of hate crimes that people were having to fill the supply funnel with hoaxes. Journalists and pundits slowly lost credibility in the following months as time after time they proved that racism was on the rise based on cases that turned out to be hoaxes.

In the couple of years since then, the data, patchy as it is, has not supported a surge in hate crimes. This was all ideological projection by mainstream media Mandarin Class talking heads.

And of course it was improbable in the first place. Trump's history is as a pragmatic Democrat with strong social liberal instincts and behaviors. That he should morph suddenly from a run-of-the-mill urban Democrat centrist into a raging white nationalist seemed an improbable arc. In addition, a rising economy always takes the edge off race, religious, income inequality tensions.

So all the rising white nationalism and rising hate crimes was unlikely in the extreme. Now we are beginning to get some initial data to back that logical position.