The Rule of Racial Resentment

W. Yusef Doucet

So now the President of the United States has decided that the 1964 Civil Rights Act harmed white people in the United States, and particularly white men, that because of the Civil Rights Act, some white folks “have been treated very badly” because they couldn’t go to college or get jobs. The facts of history do not matter. It does not matter that white applicants not accepted to their “dream school” still have multiple options, like all other students. It does not matter that white college enrollment still outpaces the rate of Black college enrollment [41 percent contrasted to 36 percent, perhaps still too close for white comfort] (National Center for Educational Statistics). It does not matter that as of the year 2000 CE, white workers constituted 71 percent of the U.S. work force, and still made up 60 percent of the work force in 2024 (Lin, Horowitz, & Fry). In that same period, the percentage of Black workers increased from 11 percent to 12 percent. What matters to the president is not the facts but how he feels, how he feels about the 2020 election, how he feels about the economy, and how he feels about social progress in the U.S. since the mid-1960s; he feels aggrieved and resentful.

Donald J. Trump was 18 years old when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. Historians and journalists have confirmed the racist and discriminatory practices of Fred Trump, the father who raised Donald and shaped Donald, the father known to have had Klan ties and sympathies. Donald Trump grew up privileged and indulged, even if bullied by his father. The president’s personal history demonstrates that he embraced the lessons of racism. He is on video expressing, for example, his belief in the late 1970s that no one in the United States had it better than a Black person with a college degree, making this claim despite unceasing attacks on affirmative action and the fact of white male over representation in positions of power across the various sectors of public life in the U.S., particularly in governance and the economy. In the 2026 United States, white men hold 72 percent of U.S. Congressional seats, both houses, about 90 percent of state governorships, around 70 percent of judgeships, 79 percent of prosecutorial positions, a majority of mayoralties, at least 60 percent of college and university presidencies, 57 percent of CEO positions, and nearly 90 percent of movie studio presidencies. These percentages hold after decades of civil rights activism, affirmative action, equal opportunity programs, and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts have made inroads for women generally and people of color, but will likely increase in favor of white men given the racial and gender policies of the Trump regime.

What we now endure under the second Trump regime is the weaponization of the racial and gender resentments that have fermented these 60 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This includes grievance and resentment over the reform of the immigration system that opened the doors to more non-white, non-European persons. This also includes grievance and resentment of the challenges to so-called traditional family life embodied in the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Gay Liberation Movement. Moreover, as these movements became more radical in the face of retrenchment, that resentment only grew. That weaponized white and especially white male grievance and resentment have become operationalized through all the coercive apparatus of the state.

These traditionalists want to call it conservatism.  What are they trying to conserve? The answer to that question is the same now as it was 62 years ago, white male supremacy. These resentments over perceived loss of power have animated U.S. conservatism since the mid-1960s. Right-wing activists and organizers have successfully appealed to these resentments among the white working class, exploiting the inability and unwillingness of U.S. liberals to commit to structural change in support of the U.S. working class. So, when analysts and commentators wonder why white workers have continued to vote against their economic and social interests since the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, one only needs to look to these resentments that have been cultivated for decades.  Now these resentments have resulted in President Donald Trump, again, who also deeply resents Black people, other people of color, women, and workers for having had the audacity to demand and expect equality, and even equity.

This is the Wally George ascendency, Wally George, the long time talk show host on KDOC in Orange County, California, on UHF Channel 56, a show broadcast throughout Southern California. Wally George’s combative, jingoistic, over the top ultra-nationalistic, American patriot bluster performed white grievance and resentment politics with gusto and bile. The nominal “Mr. America” invited “controversial” guests, that is guests who supported liberal, progressive, revolutionary, and/or counter culture values and policies, whom he would take every opportunity to berate. Hot Seat, the name of his show, and it was a show, politics as entertainment and spectacle, was no William F. Buckley Jr. polite, even if as vicious, Firing Line conservatism. [The irony that both of these talk shows aired primarily on public broadcast platforms underscores the hypocrisy of U.S. conservatism]. Both brands of U.S. conservatism propagated the U.S. right wing idea that some people did not deserve access to resources administered by the state. Hot Seat was deeply reactionary, showing an intense attachment to the U.S. American civic religion of anti-communism.

A public access, low budget set featuring an image of John Wayne, the space shuttle and the American flag, Wally George’s Hot Seat was wildly popular with the local, young, Reagan-era through the Clinton-era white Orange County and Coachella Valley population, particularly young men like those who populated his studio audience. That televangelist Reverend Robert Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove hosted, presided over, and eulogized George at the talk show host’s funeral in 2003 indicates the breadth of his popularity with the conservative base in Orange County and parts of San Bernardino County.   Hot Seat  aired for 20 years! Multiple generations of young white men and women learned their political views from Wally. Wally George remains available to the world on YouTube. The Wally Georges of public access television and local radio, and all the various versions of Wally George have dominated local radio and often television air waves in suburban, exurban, and rural communities since the Civil Rights Act passed. Wally’s contemporaries Morton Downey Jr., Larry Elder, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage, among so many others, cultivated intergenerational grievance and resentment with a greater reach than Wally. Add to that mediascape the plethora of conservative religious fundamentalist radio and television programming sharing the same messages of white grievance and resentment with a Christian patina. Now, the proliferation of digital and streaming media right wing podcasters well into this Twenty-First Century has institutionalized the resentment of the white working class and middle class and upper middle class and oligarchical class, and others, bringing us to this fascist moment in the United States.

A Wally George ascendency, and as I think of it, there’s even some similarity in the personas of Wally George and Donald Trump. Wally George wore signature gray slacks, a white dress shirt with an American flag tie, a blue blazer and a trademark platinum blonde wig parted on the side, a man of smaller stature than Trump. Despite their physical differences, both men evoke the cartoonish through their grooming style, a cartoonishness that obfuscates their very real danger. I don’t know what else to call Trump’s penchant for orange tanner and the bouffant hair. There’s also plenty in Donald J. Trump that evokes the crassness, the bitterness, the cruelty, the clown show, the spectacle of Wally George and Hot Seat. They also share a commitment to the myth of the U.S.’s ego-ideal , as well as the arrogance of their certainty that they could never be wrong just as the United States could never be wrong or do wrong, an article  of civic faith. Trump is dismantling what most U.S. reactionaries and conservatives have wanted to demolish for decades, and with patience have engineered since President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and then the Voting Rights Act a year later. Indeed, this current Trump regime is going after what’s left of the New Deal, a conservative and reactionary dream since the 1930s.

I am not a fatalist. I do not think that the white working class is condemned to the toxin of white supremacy. The evidence of contemporary experience demonstrates to us the number of white citizens and residents of the U.S. who actively oppose the white supremacist practices of the current regime, at their own peril as has been tragically demonstrated in Minneapolis in this new year. This assault on the communities of color, symbolic, structural, and physical, continues what was signaled in the fall of 2024 after the election when the incoming White House crew celebrated Daniel Penny. Daniel Penny, a white man and military veteran, choked to death Jordan Neely, a poor, Black, unhoused man in the midst of a mental health crisis, in effect for being a nuisance, and then Penny received exoneration from a jury of his peers. I am convinced that many white men in this country celebrated vicariously through Daniel Penny and understood the permission granted when Trump invited Penny to join him, Vance and other members of what would become his cabinet in Trump’s box at the Army-Navy game. 

 Racial and gender grievance and resentment motivate the Trump regime, and they are willing, indeed feel they have a mandate from their resentment-fueled base -a genuine minority in this country- to war on the population of the United States in a massive project of ethnic and ideological cleansing, a massive project with a name, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and their follow up Project 2026. Some of us have known for eleven years now that “Make America Great Again” is nothing but code, barely hidden, for Make America White Again. That is to say, they want to make the United States something that it has never been, a white ethno-state. Falling short of that, they’re happy to make it what it was founded to be, a country where elite white men maintain the monopoly on power. That end lies at the heart of Projects 2025 and 2026. From that point of view, Trump’s point of view, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 most certainly represent harm, the kind of harm the 99 percent of us need.

Work Cited

“College Enrollment Rates.” Annual Reports. http://www.nces.ed.gov

Lin, Luona, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, and Richard Fry. “Key Labor Force Trends.” http://www.pewresearch.org.