Obama’s presidency accelerated the link between racial attitudes and white partisan identity.

Evidence

Trump is the dominant manifestation of our after times. His presidency is the response to the political and social possibilities of Barack Obama’s election and the radical demands of the Black Lives Matter movement. Both Obama and Black Lives Matter indicated a significant shift in the political climate of the country. And millions of white Americans did not like what they saw. Political scientists had already seen a pattern developing in our national politics, where racial attitudes were closely aligned with partisan identification: How one felt about black people or Muslims or immigration mapped onto how one voted. In many ways, party identification, particularly for white Americans, was becoming a proxy for racial identity. Obama’s eight years in the White House worked like a massive release of fossil carbon in the political atmosphere and accelerated the linkage. For many, his ascendance signaled the end of entitlement for whites, and the protests in the streets over police violence solidified a deepening sense of racial anxiety. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 120

Categorization

• XREF: Causal chain from the introduction’s ‘after times’ concept into the specific mechanism of partisan-racial fusion; connects to Democracy in Black, which the author cites in the next paragraph. — connects to: The racial-views mechanism nearly fully accounts for Southern whites’ partisan shift. — Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington, Why Did the Democrats Lose the South?…, 462; Racial anxiety about Obama ignited the Tea Party movement — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian…, 270