White racial anxiety strikes again in Virginia election

Glenn Youngkin’s defeat of Terry Mcauliffe in the Virginia governor’s race shocked some. But it resulted from multiple factors. Democrats still haven’t delivered on their promises or moved major legislation — their infrastructure, social spending and voting rights bills — through Congress. And Mcauliffe ran a last-cycle campaign, an anti-donald Trump campaign.

Of course, there are structural, historical patterns that still hold true in states like Virginia, where voters tend to punish whichever party controls the White House. But what can’t be denied is the degree to which Youngkin successfully activated and unleashed white racial anxiety, positioning it in its most potent form: as the protection of the vulnerable, innocent and helpless. In this case, the white victims in supposed distress were children.

Youngkin homed in on critical race theory, even though critical race theory, as Youngkin imagines it, isn’t being taught in his state’s schools. But that didn’t matter.

There are people who want to believe the fabrication because it justifies their fears about displacement, powerlessness and vulnerability.

In fact, the frenzy around critical race theory is just the latest in a long line of manufactured outrages meant to tap into this same fear, and the strategy has proved depressingly effective.

There was the fear of “race-mixing” among children — including the notion that Black boys might begin dating white girls following the desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

There was the fear of a collapse of the Southern way of life and society following the successes of the civil rights movement. That gave rise to the Republicans’ “Southern strategy.”

Richard Nixon used the fear of a lost generation to launch his disastrous war on drugs, which was not really a war on drugs at all but yet another way to ignite white racial anxiety.

Ronald Reagan employed the myth of the welfare queen to anger white voters.

George H.W. Bush ginned up fears of white women being raped by Black former prisoners with his 1988 Willie Horton ad, hammering home a tough-on-crime message.

Even Democrats got in on the action during Bill Clinton’s presidency with their “crack baby” mythology. Black children and young adults, they implied, were “superpredators,” unrepentant, incorrigible criminals who roamed the streets, willing “to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons,” as thensen. Joe Biden said.

Sarah Palin tried her best to other Barack Obama and make white people afraid of him, accusing the Illinois senator of “palling around with terrorists.” At the same time, birthers were questioning if Obama was born in the United States.

Then came Donald Trump, the chief birther, who ratcheted up this fear appeal to obscene levels, positioning Mexicans as rapists and Muslims as people who hate America. He disparaged Black countries, demonized Black athletes and found some “very fine people” among the Nazis in Charlottesville.

So it’s no wonder Youngkin’s critical race theory lie worked. The parasite of white racial anxiety needed a new host, a fresher one.

Some of the very same people who voted against Donald Trump because they were exhausted and embarrassed by him turned eagerly to Youngkin because he represented some of the same ideals, but behind a front of congeniality.

Youngkin delivered fear with a smile.