Depending on one’s political orientation, the Trump presidency either feels like 4 or 40 years have elapsed since it began. As the evidence and our lived experience make clear, his watch has been accompanied by a divisiveness in the United States not seen since the Civil War. Even more, his tenure has posed a serious challenge to American democracy. Notwithstanding an assist from Russia, many have sought to explain how such an unqualified (by any metric) temperamental bigot won the White House. Many seem to have cast their lot with authoritarianism. After all, the Trump administration has threatened to jail political opponents, challenged the rule of law, and cracked down on dissidence with what amounts to federal police. Others say economic anxiety, felt by working-class whites, is responsible for Trump’s unexpected triumph. Of course, racism is always a popular explanation among a subset of progressives. But what if there is another explanation, one routinely overlooked that can shed light on how Trump won the White House?

In her new book, White Identity Politics, Ashley Jardina provides such an alternative explanation. The central question animating this volume boils down to this: What motivates whites to mobilize around issues of race and diversity? This leads to a related question concerning why Trump is so attractive to many whites. She argues that threats to whites’ dominance—both real and perceived—trigger white racial solidarity. In short, the demographic and cultural shifts now underway cause many whites to believe that the advantages associated with “whiteness” are under siege, something that causes them to turn toward their group as a means of helping them make sense of their changing circumstances in the United States. More to the point, Jardina argues that identity, “a psychological, internalized sense of attachment to a group, …provide[s] an important cognitive structure through which individuals navigate…the social and political world” (p. 4). Unlike other models of race-based conflict in the United States that emphasize outgroup antipathy, she suggests that an approach like white solidarity, one that focuses squarely on ingroup identification, provides a fresh lens through which to understand preferences and behaviors in the white mass public.

White Identity Politics unwinds over seven well-written substantive chapters. In chapter 2, Jardina elaborates her theory of the contents of white racial solidarity (white identity and consciousness) and when it is activated (under threat). In chapter 3, she details the measurement of white racial solidarity, and in chapter 4 she begins to identify for whom white solidarity is salient: older, less well-educated, rural folks who are predisposed to authoritarianism. In chapter 5, the book illustrates the connection among white solidarity, white grievance, national identity, and white privilege. Chapters 6 and 7 explore the explanatory power of white solidarity, where Jardina demonstrates how it informs white opinion on immigration (chapter 6), as well as on means-tested welfare programs, Social Security, Medicare, and globalization (chapter 7). Chapter 8, the final substantive chapter, drills down on the ways in which white solidarity shapes political choice.

This book offers a timely intervention for the politics of the current moment. Among other things, Jardina shows that white solidarity is largely incommensurate with flat-out bigotry. With great care, she shows that white solidarity is more a reflection of “ingroup love” than “outgroup hate.” This does not mean that it is not related to racism and prejudice—it is. However, the relationships between white solidarity and policies designed to help racial minorities are smaller than one might expect and even are modest. Further, Jardina makes good use of open-ended items, where respondents confirm her hypothesis on the content of white solidarity: it is more about ingroup affection than anything else. That educational deficits, rural residency, and prioritizing social conformity are all conducive to white racial solidarity confirms what many already thought true. However, the fact that increasing solidarity is positively associated both with patterns of white grievance and acknowledgment of white privilege is puzzling.

Jardina’s findings on immigration, the social safety net (means-tested and non–means-tested programs), and globalization further drive home her central point: white solidarity is not hostile (for the most part) to racial outgroups. Rather, it is about the preservation and integrity of the ingroup. For instance, taken together, the results Jardina brings to bear on immigration suggest that whites who are more connected to their race than others see immigrants (presumptively from south of the border) and policies that ease immigration as threats to the American way of life. Contrasted with analyses of welfare and affirmative action, where the results suggest that white racial solidarity offers little in the way of explanatory power one way or the other, these findings largely support her claim that it is not racism per se that explains preferences in these domains.

Jardina’s findings on Trump and Obama, among others, are also of a piece with her theory. Those scoring high on measures of white solidarity preferred Trump in 2016, while rejecting Obama in 2012. Why? Because Trump promised to safeguard whites from the encroaching threat; Obama, in contrast, was a source of threat. Auxiliary analysis, on data collected more than 50 years ago, demonstrates the continuity of her argument. Using a white feeling thermometer as a proxy for white solidarity, Jardina shows that it (solidarity) militated against support for the civil rights movement.

White Identity Politics is an example of careful social science. It confronts an important, timely question while using complementary sources of evidence as a means of sorting through competing claims. In concert, the observational evidence, along with the experiments and open-ended questions, go a long way toward elaborating a mostly convincing narrative. However, there are a few loose ends about which I am curious.

To begin, one wonders how white solidarity represents a departure from status threat. There are many places in the book in which Jardina claims that white solidarity is activated by threats to white dominance and their (whites’) desire to “reassert” or “restore” it (dominance). This suggests something beyond threat: it implies loss of some kind. This sounds very much like status threat, an approach to intergroup relations pioneered by Joseph Gusfield and Richard Hofstadter in the early 1960s. Further, recent work in political science (Diana Mutz) and many works in social psychology draw on this theory to explain the recent angst of many in white America. Yet, this work is never fully engaged. This is important because Jardina acknowledges in an endnote that “status threat …is an argument very much in keeping with my own,” yet I am not sure where her argument ends and where status threat begins (p. 317). They seem to do the same work. If this is true, I am not sure what white solidarity can tell us beyond what status threat already explains.

Another observation related to theory concerns the omission of the social dominance orientation (SDO) from the models of immigration, affirmative action, and welfare dealing explicitly with race. Jardina rightly notes, in chapter 2, a robust correlation with SDO, and this was with data collected in 2013—before the beginning of Trump’s run for president. As far as I know, measures for SDO were included in the 2016 ANES, a data source on which she draws. One wonders, therefore, how much white solidarity is capable of explaining in the presence of SDO, especially after 2015 when Trump announced his candidacy. On the measurement side, for most of the analysis, she uses a single item to measure white identity. Of the six datasets on which the evidence rests, there is only one survey for which multiple items are available. By contrast, there are four surveys on which multiple items for white consciousness are available. Further, to the extent that white identity represents a component of white consciousness, one wonders why Jardina did not stick with white consciousness instead of jumping back and forth between the two. Given this and the lack of more robust measures for white identity, one also wonders why she did not simply use white consciousness as the proxy for white solidarity.

Having said that, White Identity Politics is a must read for students of American politics, particularly those who study race and racial politics. It is a well-written, mostly careful account of how we arrived at the current political moment. Jardina has mapped a potentially fruitful path for herself and other scholars who wish to explore a more benign alternative to white nationalism and racism. More scholars should follow her path, asking big questions that address emergent contemporary issues in American society.