Resentment: the emotion that has set fire to U.S. democracy

As the US becomes more diverse, some white voters feel a rising resentment that they could lose power and privileges long taken for granted. That anger finds form in the growing white nationalist movement, says Lawrence Rosenthal, founder of the Center for Right Wing Studies at UC Berkeley. (Photo by Rodney Dunning via Flickr Through three years and eight months of his presidency, Donald Trump has seemed to defy the laws of political gravity: Despite myriad scandals, open racial incitement, admiration of dictators, the indictment or imprisonment of his high-level staff, his own impeachment and a widely criticized response to the COVID-19 pandemic, his support among voters has held steady, just north of 40% . The question is: Why? In a new book, UC Berkeley scholar Lawrence Rosenthal bores beneath the headlines and tweetstorms to the realm of human emotion and concludes that, to understand this moment in American politics, it is essential to understand one of the most primal emotions of all: Resentment. In "Empire of Resentment" (released Sept. 8, 2020, by The New Press), Rosenthal tracks how the razor-edged emotion that animated the conservative Tea Party movement during the presidency of Barack Obama coalesced under Trump into an identity movement that feels dispossessed of its birthright and, at its extreme, descends into aggrieved white nationalism. "The fierceness of the new identity movement is more about status lost than property lost," he writes.