I’ve come to believe, and argue in this book, that playing to white anxieties has implications beyond “whipping up the base” against immigrants, liberals, and minorities. When politics demands that people resist available health care, amass arsenals, cut funding for schools that their own kids attend, or make other decisions that might feel emotionally correct but are biologically perilous, these politics are literally asking people to die for their whiteness. Living in a state or a county or a nation dominated by a politics of racial resentment then becomes a diagnosable, quantifiable, and
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