[MUSIC] Language and culture have long influenced election patterns and how political messages take hold.

The recent documentary "White with Fear" examines the role fear can play in shaping social behavior and highlights how some conservative figures have drawn on those emotions to build political power.

I spoke with Vanderbilt University history professor Nicole Hammer, who studies media, social movements, and political culture about the film and how political language has evolved over time.

Fear is the best motivator.

When Mexico sends its people.

They're invading, they're murdering, they're raping.

There is now a white fear industrial complex.

Mexican criminals.

Chaos in the streets.

Tapping into white grievance and anxiety and then exploiting and creating more and more of it.

This is strategic racism.

And when you're scared, you fight back.

Nicole Hammer, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, so for people who are just, they just watched the film and they're feeling either attacked or vindicated, depending on their politics.

What historical question would you like that audience member to sit with versus just their immediate emotional reaction?

I would really encourage people to think historically.

I think that's a way to get out of the emotion of the moment, that this is not a judgment on people as they are sitting at home, but rather an invitation to think about how the politics of the United States have changed over the past 50 years, how different political players have made specific appeals based on race in order to try to build a coalition, and how they have put in place policies that have shaped the state of our society today.

And so really just taking the opportunity to step back and say, well, what actually happened historically?

And what should we learn from that history?

The film argues that essentially fear and racial division became a deliberate strategy.

And I wonder, as a historian, how do you figure out whether this is by design or something that is a reaction or a reflection of society?

Historians tend to think that it's both.

Now we know that it is by design in the sense that we can look at documents from within administrations and campaigns and they explicitly talk about things like the Southern strategy.

Richard Nixon and his aides will talk about, well, how do we get those Wallace voters?

We think that those voters for George Wallace are being motivated by fear of change, are being motivated by racism.

And so what kind of appeals can we make in order to bring them over to our side?

So we have a historical record that shows a very deliberate set of political strategies, but they are also responding to what they think people see, feel and experience.

They see people, white people, selling their homes when black neighbors move in.

They see the riots that break out in places like Chicago whenever there are black civil rights marches.

And so they understand that there is a fear and an emotion to tap into and they want to mobilize and harness that.

So it's a relational process.

It's both coming from society and coming from politicians.

How much of this is political advantage that candidates and parties see versus the sort of underlying belief?

I mean, what I'm asking is, you know, if we knew that being kind to one another was trending, so to speak, and that there were lots of people that really believed in the good of their neighbors, would candidates automatically start to reflect that and say, "Oh, gosh, this is where we need to go.

This is where the direction of the country is."

Is that how the political vein works?

To a certain extent.

Yes, it is true that political candidates try to get the signal through the noise of what people want.

They try to take as many polls as possible to get a pulse on people's desires.

At the same time, they are motivated by an understanding of their understanding of how society works.

And that tends not to be a sense that a "Kumbaya" moment is going to bring people together.

We certainly have politicians that do that.

Barack Obama launched his 2008 campaign believing that what Americans wanted to hear was it's time to put the partisanship and the fighting behind us and he won that election.

So I do think it's fair to say that there's a number of different ways for politicians to frame their campaigns.

But one of the things that they have found, and in particular Republican politicians have found, that it's much easier to generate a sense of fear and competition.

And that not just is that an easy emotion to stoke in people, but it is an emotional reaction that is supported by the media environment.

That it is easier to stoke the emotion of fear through a political ad than it is necessarily to motivate people to go to the polls because they're feeling warm and fuzzy inside.

And so there's a relationship between that media environment and politicians, and they do tend to gravitate toward the flashy, the dynamic, and the shocking.

And that tends to be more aligned with with fear in politics.

So is white fear the right frame in understanding conservative mobilization since the 1960s?

What might be some other motives that played a role?

So I would say white fear plus white advantage in a way, like people also think in terms of power.

Like they wouldn't necessarily express it this way.

But is this politician going to put me in a better position or a worse position?

And that fear of losing a position can be part of the fear motive.

But also just this kind of what feels like a very rational sense of am I going to have more jobs open to me or fewer jobs open to me if this politician wins?

And that can that can cut along racial lines.

It does cut along racial lines in the United States.

But people are driven by a whole variety of motives, right?

When they go to the polls, the changing economic circumstances in the country, a sense of the country's place in the world and whether it's safe, their own economic futures, their beliefs in a set of values and religious ideas.

I mean, one of the big stories that takes place over the course of this documentary is the rise of the religious right.

And yes, there is a racist component to that, but there is also a values component to that.

And that is something that that drives people to vote for one party over the other.

You know, in your book, Messengers on the Right, you lay out how conservative media really became kind of an organizational home for the movement.

And that really, what did I guess those early conservative media folks understand that political parties and leaders didn't?

They understood the power of messaging in a different way, that it couldn't just be a once every two or four year messaging conversation with people, that they're in order to really turn the country around.

You had to change the composition of the electorate, right?

You had to motivate voters who weren't used to voting.

And you had to give them a sense of a kind of platform.

And I think it is that longer term perspective that right wing media activists were so devoted to that they they could they couldn't change the country in four years, but they could maybe change it in 10, if not 10, then 25, if not 25, then 50.

And I think that their sense of long term perspective is something that ends up shaping right wing politics, because you end up getting movements to say change the Supreme Court or overturn Roe v. Wade.

That are half century projects, but that the party devotes themselves to because they take on that longer time horizon.

You know, what's interesting is in your work, you also talk about how, I mean, the power of language and how we frame things.

Because we see that conservative politics move from sort of an explicit white supremacist appeal to what you'd call colorblind racism, right?

Where we're walking into language that's talking about race neutral law and order, but would still might influence policy the same way.

That's right.

That framing effect is something that conservative media activists really latch on to early on.

And you can see it specifically through racist appeals.

In National Review, which was considered to be this sort of high intellectual magazine, in 1957, they're writing about how the white people must prevail in the South because they are the superior race.

By the mid 1960s, they're talking more in terms of states' rights instead of that explicit racist appeal.

Down the line, as you were saying, they'll move to the language of law and order.

And even somebody like Ronald Reagan, he knows that it is, by the 1980s, probably not going to work to use racial slurs or to make very obvious racist appeals.

But he can make coded racist appeals, things that he does by launching his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, which was the site of where three civil rights workers were killed in the 1960s.

And that's what I mean by colorblind racism is that it purports to be neutral.

It doesn't always talk about race, but it puts in place policies that help to secure white racial advantage at the expense of non-white Americans.

We often hear this idea of a backlash when it comes to political reactions from social movements.

Are there moments in the last 25, 30 years that you say, "You know what?

This is now, and with the benefit of history, has it shifted mainstream culture?"

Absolutely.

I mean, you could see this as something like immigration in the United States.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there were certainly debates about immigration to the U.S.

and non-white immigration to the U.S.

But it's really in the 1990s that you get a right wing anti-immigrant platform that is based in many ways in racial grievance.

It's anti-Mexican, anti-Latino.

It starts with Pat Buchanan, who was a far-right candidate in 1992 for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party.

He goes down to the border and calls for what he calls the Buchanan fence.

And this would become the call for the wall.

This was considered a fringe belief in 1992.

And so you can see the way that something that might have seemed fringe 30 years ago has become sort of synonymous with the Republican Party.

And you see that actually with a lot of backlash politics.

You're seeing it today in a slightly different vein with anti-woman politics on the right.

That things that would have been maybe a little unthinkable in the 1990s are starting to move to the fore of right-wing politics in the United States.

And that is the power of backlash, is that ability to move very quickly politics among the base.

To try to move forward to where we are today, there's a scene that you are familiar with.

It was, I think, maybe 2015, and it's in Simi Valley at the Ronald Reagan Library.

And all the candidates are essentially trying to win the mantle of President Reagan, except for Donald Trump.

What did Donald Trump perhaps know that the other candidates weren't as savvy to?

It's a fascinating moment because Ronald Reagan in that moment looms literally quite large, right?

They're in Simi Valley, they're at the Reagan Presidential Library, Air Force One is behind them.

And the reason that that debate was set there was sort of honor and to channel the spirit of Ronald Reagan, who had been since he left office in 1989, really the sort of demigod of the Republican Party, the one that every Republican wanted to follow in the footsteps of.

But Reagan, when he was in office, he was pro-immigration.

He was pro-diversity, at least in his rhetoric.

He put forward, in many ways, that idea of, you know, it's morning in America again.

He brought a kind of sunny optimism to the rhetoric of the right.

And the thing that Donald Trump sensed was that that was not where the Republican base was anymore.

They weren't looking for sunny optimism.

They were angry.

They were upset.

They were fearful.

And he tapped into all of those ideas and he tied them to the kinds of policies that you just wouldn't have gotten in the 1980s from Ronald Reagan.

Most explicitly, the attacks on immigrants and the calls to close the border.

But also things like banning Muslims from the United States.

Those kinds of policies were just not the direction that people thought the Republican Party was going.

And it wasn't in line with Reagan's policies.

But what Trump understood was that it had been more than 30 years since Ronald Reagan, and that the Republican Party had fundamentally changed, that it had absorbed a much more radical base, and a base that was less white than in Reagan's day, but that was more motivated by its whiteness.

And he tapped into that, understood that's where the party was, and has successfully commandeered the party ever since.

- You know, Pat Buchanan wanted a border fence, right?

But what enabled Donald Trump to be able to kind of make that famous speech at the bottom of the escalator that really targeted immigrants from other countries in a way where Pat Buchanan, well, he didn't win on that.

-Pat Buchanan didn't win on that, but he got the ideas out there.

At the time in 1992, it's not that there hadn't been anti-immigrant politics in the United States, but that kind of nativism felt a bit like a relic of the past.

But Donald Trump had the benefit of another 25, 30 years or so in which not only had a strong nativist movement emerged on the right in the 1990s, you get organizations like VDARE, you get English only organizations, you get calls for a wall.

Those become part of the Republican Party in the 1990s.

But you also get the war on terror, which sort of solidifies that idea of Fortress America, the idea that the country is under threat from foreign invaders of all kinds.

And Trump is able to mobilize that.

And I would add there is a kind of coarsening of the culture that happens that you wouldn't have seen in the 1990s.

It was starting.

Papu Cannon could definitely say provocative things that would rile up a crowd and would make headlines.

He was very savvy at manipulating news media and cable news media because he was, after all, a pundit.

But the kind of language that Donald Trump used, his wholesale dismissal of Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals, it's unlikely you would have heard that kind of language from a presidential contender 30 years earlier.

And so I think we also need to contend with the changed media environment and just the changed social environment that allowed for that kind of just more open racism to not be disqualifying for a presidential candidate.

We hear a lot about the idea of dog whistle politics and kind of coded language that's been part of politics for a long time.

But there does, as you point out, seem to be a gap here where is it about the media ecosystem where you know that being more incendiary gets greater clicks?

Is it about a greater tolerance and just generally that we've all become more coarse?

I mean, what's responsible for how this language can become what it is today?

There's definitely a factor of the media environment that when you have an algorithm driven media that prefers high emotion and high emotional response, more incendiary materials are going to get spread much more quickly and are going to be read and responded to by many more people.

So that that changed technology and media environment matters.

But I also think it matters that at least for a certain segment of Americans, authenticity and offensiveness got blended.

This idea that there was something real and authentic about Donald Trump because he was saying the things that you weren't supposed to say, that he hadn't been sort of overcivilized by what the right would call political correctness.

Now it calls wokeness that he was not constrained in the same way.

And so you were getting a much more authentic politician and in a politics where people felt like their political leaders were corrupt and inauthentic and lying to them.

That sort of racism actually had an appeal in connecting with people because they felt like, well, at least he says what he thinks.

And I wonder, is there a line now, or how blurry is the line between politics and media?

Because it seems over these last 30 or 40 years, we've essentially seen these camps embrace their own TV channels, their own websites, their own YouTubes, right?

It's that the filter bubbles have become larger.

There's a larger media ecosystem, but it kind of starts to feed what you already believe.

Politics and media have always been entangled in the United States, but you're right that something has changed.

I would say it's not just that the space between politics and media have collapsed, in part because candidates can be their own media.

It's not just that somebody like Donald Trump can go on Fox News or Newsmax, but through X and through Truth Social, he owns his own media and he doesn't necessarily have or require any kind of interlocutor between him and his audiences.

And I would say the other big change is it's not just the media platforms have changed, but the lines between politics and entertainment have blurred considerably.

The people expect in some ways to be entertained by politics, whether that is, you know, in the prime time on Fox News or MSNBC that they see somebody who reaffirms their beliefs, but also is provocative and shocks them during the course of their programming.

But they expect their politicians to be a source of entertainment as well.

And that's something that Donald Trump understood.

And that blending of politics, news, entertainment, and the politician him or herself, that's new for the United States.

Is there a way forward where it doesn't get more fractured, more divided, because less people can even agree on a common fact due to the fact that they're listening to almost an affirmation of their belief systems.

They want to hear the candidates directly.

They go through their preferred channels to hear what that candidate says, and they might never see a rationed critique of that person's positions or policies or behavior.

And I would add to that, deliberate misinformation and the rise of AI makes it even harder for people to get agreed upon facts.

I mean, it's not the direction in which our culture is moving, right?

We're moving toward more division, more atomization.

But I do think that there is a real hunger among many Americans for something different.

I do think that it's going to be a generational project.

It requires rebuilding small d democratic institutions.

It requires a different kind of media.

You can't change an entire media ecosystem, but you can begin to build media that are trustworthy and honest and connect with people where they live.

So the return of local media, for one.

But it is going to be a real challenge because the structures of our society we're seeing into institutional collapse, institutional decline, democratic backsliding.

All of those things are going to require the work of millions of Americans to turn that ship around.

You know, part of that change comes from people feeling that their formula is not working.

And I'd argue that you see political actors on both sides saying, "This is fine.

This is working for us.

You know, we know exactly how to turn up the fear messaging, whether it's white fear, whether it's another kind of fear, and trying to, I guess, turn on those instincts that you have, saying, "Oh, I have to protect myself, fight or flight," and then, "Go ahead.

Let's vote for this person," right?

And it's-unless that formula breaks down, then I don't know why the political partisans and actors would change.

That's why I think that it's such a long term project, because all of the incentive structures are pushing people in the other direction.

It is something that almost certainly is going to require more than just individual actions and individual politicians.

You think about things like the changing amounts of money in politics these days, right?

As long as you have billions of dollars flowing through these campaigns, those billions of dollars are going to go to funding what's seen as the most effective kind of social manipulation, and that is hitting the fear button.

And so it's probably going to require regulatory and institutional changes along with those kinds of individual changes from voters.

You know, I don't know if it's my desire not to leave my audience so dejected by this conversation.

But look, you're a historian.

You've seen the benefit of things in kind of this longer arc.

I mean, have you seen examples of how our society can break out of these cycles that these things are not irreversible?

They're not irreversible at all.

I mean, this is sometimes it can be disheartening to hear that it might take a generation to change society.

But think about a black Southerner in the 1890s who's had a taste of freedom and representation and is having that stripped away systematically.

That person is not going to see true freedom in their lifetime.

They're not going to see a true multiracial democracy in the United States until the 1960s.

But they do the work anyway because they want a better world for the person who comes after them.

And I think that has to be the mindset that people go forward with because Americans have changed things.

I mean, the idea that a systematic structure of racial privilege could be dismantled in a relatively short amount of time, in just a couple of years, with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that was something that it didn't seem like it was going to happen until it happened.

History goes slowly and then all at once.

And so you do the work because you don't know when the change is going to happen.

And you want to have a map for the better world that you want on hand when that change begins.

So what are the what are the things that you would put on that map?

What are the structures that you would say most need a close inspection by us as citizens?

My belief is that we have been working in a society full of institutions that weren't built for multiracial democracy.

Right.

Our news media wasn't built for it.

Our universities weren't built for it.

Our constitution wasn't built for it.

Our government wasn't built for it.

In fact, a lot of the those structures were built to be anti-democratic.

So the challenge before us now is to radically rethink what our institutions look like.

How could we build a better constitution, a better Congress, a better Supreme Court, a better media for multiracial democracy?

What might that look like?

And that's a big imaginative undertaking, right?

Because it's imagining that society works a little differently than it does right now.

But I do think that that can be a source of hope.

Like what would it look like to have a more perfect union and what changes might have to be put in place in order to realize that?

I think looking forward to the future and to those kinds of reforms is something that people can engage in right now that can have them looking toward the future instead of focusing on all of the crises that are happening around them in the moment.

You know, there are so many reasons that people feel dejected about politics in America today.

I mean, what are the things that give you some hope going forward on why people should engage now?

Right, because they can give you a laundry list of reasons why they don't think their vote matters, they don't think their voice counts.

Why think the alternative?

There are big national and international problems, but the place where you can often feel democracy the most is at the local level, is with helping your neighbors, helping build a better culture and society around you.

And I think that investing in community, investing in, you know, healing and making better your little part of the world is is actually a small d democratic action that people can undertake as they're also thinking about these bigger national and international changes that need to happen.

And that's why I see green shoots, that when communities are under threat, what have they been doing?

They've been rallying around one another and people who have more power and more safety have been sacrificing their safety in order to help their neighbors.

And that is a pretty powerful example, I think, for us all to learn from.

Historian Nicole Hammer, thanks so much for your time.

Thank you for having me.

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