IT'S WHY THEY HATE CRT:

Belief in moral progress is ubiquitous on the left and broadly pervasive throughout American culture (and the culture of the Western world more generally). Even most advocates of critical race theory would concede that the U.S. today is a better place than it was when Black Americans were held as slaves, with the rights exercised by the country's white citizens summarily denied them. First there were the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which brought emancipation and the promise of full political equality. That promise went largely unfulfilled for a hundred more years, until the civil rights movement finally goaded the government into backing it up, which, despite frequent setbacks and continued struggles for racial justice and equality, it mostly has.

But progress has been bigger than the history of African Americans. Women fought for and won the right to vote and then demanded more than the franchise, including reproductive freedom and much greater equality at home, in the workplace, and in other social settings. Gays and lesbians have likewise called for and received protections and the right to marry, which has been followed in recent years by a movement for transgender rights.

Then there's immigration. Wave after wave of immigrants has come to the United States from far-flung regions of the world, faced obstacles, and then made the country their home, expanding the bounds of American citizenship to include people from across the globe. Today there is widespread support, if not for open borders, then for allowing people fleeing political persecution and seeking a better economic future to be allowed in, and a reluctance to deport people who make it into the country and set down roots here, even if they arrived in defiance of immigration law.  

Put it all together and we're left with a story of moral progress on multiple dimensions that serves as a kind of theodicy for most left-leaning Americans, and even for many on the center right. It's a story of the providential unfolding of justice in the world rather than an expression of a series of contestable political positions from which one could legitimately dissent. Politics is supposed to be about the size of government and what policies it pursues. Journalist Matthew Yglesias spoke for many when he tweeted last week, "Just on a personal level, I miss when politics was more about tax/spending issues and think we should bring that back."

Plenty of Republican officials felt the same way until quite recently. That's what politics was mostly about from Ronald Reagan through the administration of George W. Bush, despite some (mostly rhetorical) bones thrown to social conservatives along the way.

But now, politics has become about something much bigger than public budgeting and policy formation. It's about fundamental questions of national identity. Who gets to be a citizen?

Few Americans can define what critical race theory actually is -- an academic framework that originated among legal scholars in the 1970s to help explain how racism permeates American institutions -- but it's not surprising that it has emerged as a bogeyman on the political right. Increasingly, the Republican base is politically animated by white racial grievances, which is a major reason why misrepresentations of critical race theory -- "every white person is racist" or "certain children are inherently bad people because of their skin color" -- have found such a receptive audience. After all, many of the same grievances helped fuel Trump's rise. 

From the earliest days of his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump's support has been most heavily concentrated among white Americans who think they face significant racial discrimination. In fact, perceived anti-white discrimination powerfully predicted voter preferences in the 2016 general election. One survey conducted shortly after the election found Trump voters were over four times more likely than Clinton voters to say white Americans face "a lot" of discrimination (45 percent versus 10 percent, respectively); other polls also consistently showed that Republicans and Trump's 2016 supporters saw racial discrimination against white people as a bigger problem than unfair treatment of racial and ethnic minorities in American society. Those views have only grown more pronounced in Republican politics. 

For example, the chart below, which draws on data from the American National Election Studies, shows that support for the Republican presidential candidate has steadily grown by 12-to-15 percentage points since 2012 among white Americans who think there's at least a moderate amount of anti-white discrimination in the U.S.

Meanwhile, the reverse is true among white Americans who don't think there's much anti-white discrimination: Support for the Republican presidential candidate has steadily dropped. The same pattern holds even after accounting for several factors that are also strongly correlated with presidential vote choice, such as partisanship, ideology and racial resentment. 

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