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In addition to the unprecedented challenges and stressors that university students faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian American students experienced specific hardships due to COVID-19-associated xenophobic attitudes, harassment, and assault against people of Asian complexions. This qualitative study aimed to explore the ways in which Asian American university students' experiences during the pandemic changed their views of their identities as Asian Americans by analyzing in-depth interviews of four case study participants. Secondary analysis of two waves of interviews, which were conducted during the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and during a six-month follow-up, and primary analysis of a newly conducted third wave one year after the initial outbreak yielded 12 themes that captured the essence of the Asian American university students' experience and redefining of their identity during the pandemic. The four participants identified these themes across four categories: Experiences and Events during the Pandemic; Categorization of Asians in America; Confronting Asian Discrimination; and Renewed Sense of Identity. The longitudinal findings revealed direct experiences and perspectives regarding the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on Asian communities, as well as the impact of the various social and political events during this time period, such as the Black Lives Matter Movement (2020) and the 2020 US presidential election. The implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On November 7, 2020, after being declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Joseph R. Biden delivered his President-Elect victory speech to a crowd in Wilmington, Delaware. Through a generic analysis of religious language in Biden's victory speech, I suggest that Biden uses religious language in the tradition of American civil religion in an attempt to unify the country after a highly divisive and contested election, as well as to provide hope and comfort in the midst of a global pandemic. While Biden's address adheres to the themes previous research has associated with the President-Elect victory speech genre, his address appears to utilize religious language more frequently than other victory speeches. I suggest that this is partly due to the unique circumstances in which Biden delivered his address: during a global pandemic, without the concession of his opponent, and at a time when many Americans refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of his election. Because there was no concession speech delivered by his opponent, Biden's President-Elect victory speech attempted to achieve all of the objectives usually accomplished by a victory speech working in conjunction with a concession speech. Biden's decision to utilize "Consoler-in-Chief" rhetoric in his victory speech is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This literature review aims to understand Donald Trump's contradictory and overwhelming support from Christians and especially white evangelicals, considering his public display of non-religious behaviors. Further, this literature review explores the association between Christianity and the Republican party throughout America's political history, drawing on instances such as Proposition 187 and Donald Trump's travel ban to display that white evangelicals are motivated to support Trump because of their fear of becoming a minority. These ideas are related to Christian nationalistic ideologies, reflecting that a main supporter of Donald Trump is Christian Nationalism. From a sociological understanding, this literature review analyzes how fear is capable of uniting people under views that are discriminatory and nationalistic. It also provides insight into how certain groups are able to stay intertwined throughout history, through the combination of leaders and those who are willing to follow out of fear and reassurance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A long line of sociological research has found that rural residents tend to be more conservative than urban residents in the U.S. on a wide range of attitudes and behaviors. Two primary arguments have been utilized to understand why these differences exist. First, rural/urban differences were thought to be largely a function of rural isolation and differences in types of employment. As rural areas have become less isolated and employment differences have diminished, rural/urban differences are thought to diminish as well. Any remaining rural/urban differences can largely be explained by social class variations. Second, differing interaction patterns in rural areas resulting from fewer people and lower population densities continue to make rural areas unique. This manuscript found strong support for the second argument that rural areas remain unique. Even when statistically controlling for race/ethnicity and social class, rural residents were much more likely to vote for Trump in the 2020 presidential election, were more likely to choose the conservative side on six controversial political issues than urban residents. These findings have important implications in understanding our deeply divided nation. The need for quality social science research to understand modern rural America is apparent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A long line of sociological research has found that rural residents tend to be more conservative than urban residents in the U.S. on a wide range of attitudes and behaviors. Two primary arguments have been utilized to understand why these differences exist. First, rural/urban differences were thought to be largely a function of rural isolation and differences in types of employment. As rural areas have become less isolated and employment differences have diminished, rural/urban differences are thought to diminish as well. Any remaining rural/urban differences can largely be explained by social class variations. Second, differing interaction patterns in rural areas resulting from fewer people and lower population densities continue to make rural areas unique. This manuscript found strong support for the second argument that rural areas remain unique. Even when statistically controlling for race/ethnicity and social class, rural residents were much more likely to vote for Trump in the 2020 presidential election, were more likely to choose the conservative side on six controversial political issues than urban residents. These findings have important implications in understanding our deeply divided nation. The need for quality social science research to understand modern rural America is apparent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The question, "What is rural?", has become increasingly salient to scholars of American politics over the past decade, especially after the 2016 election of Donald Trump. While social and political tensions between urban and rural residents of the United States are now widely recognized, rural cannot simply be defined as the antithesis of urban. Using survey data and voting returns from the 2020 election, we illustrate how urban-rural differences are best understood not as a dichotomy, but as a continuum. Large metropolitan core counties comprise one pole of this continuum: their residents are most likely to vote Democratic, and to express liberal attitudes on a variety of topics. At the other pole are counties far from urban areas with no towns, where conservative attitudes are widespread and Republican majorities are substantial. Between the two poles lie a continuum of counties with widely varying positions along the liberal-conservative dimension and voting records to match. We find this urban-rural continuum provides considerable analytical utility even in a multivariate spatial regression model that incorporates numerous other important demographic, economic, and social variables. Our analytical framework takes a step beyond the bipolarity that typically characterizes the discussion of urban and rural America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Trump presidency ushered in a heightened sense of ontological insecurity in the US, based on a national self-narrative that portrayed an emasculated America. Trump promised to return the US to primacy by pursuing policies and practices that focused on border protection, militarisation, and the vilification of external others, while amplifying racial tensions within the country. From caging immigrant children at the border, to an enabling of white supremacy and the Capitol riots, Trump's presidency was broadly seen as aberration in the self-narrative of America as a tolerant, democratic nation. In this article, I am interested in how gendered bordering practices inform ontological (in)security in Trump's narrative of the nation, domestic and external policy, and discourses. While Trump's electoral loss to Biden in 2020 has been described as a 'return to normal', this article instead considers how Trump's presidency exhibited lines of continuity when examined through a gender lens. Understanding how masculinism informs ideas of ontological security reveals how notions of gendered bordering, hierarchy, and ordering have been persistent threads in US politics, rather than simply an anomaly under Trump. This suggests greater potential to read ontological security in more complex terms through gendered bordering practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike the United States, China is still reliant on the Middle East for energy, importing nearly half of its oil from the region.[12] The Middle East also provides critical sea and land links for China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). After decades of wars in the Middle East, growing great power competition, and changing priorities at home, there is much uncertainty about America's place in the world today. Continued crises, often related to Iran, and longstanding commitments to regional partners - combined with bureaucratic inertia and the interests of major defense contractors - could keep the United States tethered to the region for the foreseeable future, even if a growing number of policymakers in Washington would no longer like to be there.[1] Is the United States really leaving the Middle East? Regional states have also increased their own diplomatic and military activism to fill the perceived absence of an assertive US role.[3] A post-American Middle East, however, is not a Middle East without America. [Extracted from the article]

"Through eating at Chipotle", they suggest, "the new-agrarian consumer-citizen would regain a material and timeless connection with wellsprings of clean food and moral virtue" (167). In I Rooted Resistance: Agrarian Myth in Modern America i , authors Jeff Motter, Ross Singer, and Stephanie Houston Grey examine various iterations of the agrarian myth over time, from Thomas Jefferson rhetorically linking agricultural work with civic virtue to contemporary representations of agrarian life targeting a "twenty-first century consumer republic" (171). [Extracted from the article]

In this paper, we use panel data from the 2016 and 2017 waves of the Voter Study and the 2018 American National Election Studies (ANES) Pilot, to better understand the relative influence of the Alt‐Right on mainstream US politics in the Trump era. Given the degree of formal alignment between Trump and a number of key voices within the movement, we first examine the strength of the association between affect for the Alt‐Right and support for Republican Party between 2016 and 2018. We also examine relative levels of affect for the Alt‐Right among Whites between this period, tracking a number of important changes. We find that, while affect for the Alt‐Right was strongly associated with support for Republican candidates such as Trump in the 2016 election cycle, we find a somewhat weaker relationship between affect for the Alt‐Right and White support for Trump and down ballot Republican candidates in 2018. We also find that, after rising between 2016 and 2017, levels of affect for Alt‐Right appear to have declined by 2018. The results are therefore reflective of exponential rise of the Alt‐Right during the 2016 election and the movement's subsequent implosion after the 2017 'United the Right', rally in Charlottesville, VA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the 2020 election, a constant question arose, "How can they vote for Trump?" Within the context of tribalism and the disenfranchised status created by the deteriorated blue-collar job market, I reflect on labor history to explain how those who are denied affordable education are often excluded from the American dream. This trend disproportionately affects the Black community. In turn, this population potentially remains reminiscent of how America was supposedly 'great' for them in the industrial past. Supported by descriptive statistics, I reflect on the educational line in red GOP states and contested states during the 2020 presidential election. The article concludes with the recommendation that higher education must be affordable to help communities transcend the dream of manufacturing for survival, but instead embrace education as a well-informed position in supporting themselves and our democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the new world order that has begun to be restructured, how national identities will be carried out together and how differences will be transformed into benefits, instead of problems has become a very important issue in terms of ensuring peace and prosperity in every society. The USA realized that they could no longer pursue the understanding of Americanism, based on a single American identity. America, where many different cultures live, has inevitably had to follow a policy which respects every culture and is based on cultural pluralism. In contrast to cultural diversity in the USA, it is possible to point out that racism, which did not stop under Obama, was endured with Trump's presidential process among the different positions of low-income black and minority societies. In this study, the question of whether new president of USA, Joe Biden is going to attempt to vary the otherization policy for the minority societies and immigrants which was maintained in the process of Trump's presidency, or not is aimed to be made out, by analyzing the news about the minority societies and immigrants in CNN (USA) throughout two months, December, 2020 and January, 2021 though the discourse analysis method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Barbara Heineback, the Biden Administration did not seem to have outlined a clear plan for solving many deep seated problems in spite of much important progress made by the Trump years; Bruce Wolpe instead saw a time with an experienced new president able to manage Congress and make much needed change. In the wake of the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election and the instalment of the Biden administration, The Sydney Institute held a Zoom meeting, on Thursday 25 February 2021, with Barbara Heineback, former strategic consultant with the Clinton Administration, and Bruce Wolpe, Senior Fellow (nonresident) at the United States Studies Centre and regular commentator on US politics. What we did see Trump do was install three Supreme Court justices, which was pretty phenomenal, 226 federal judges and, with the circuit judges, Trump installed 54 in the one term; Obama installed 55, or just one more circuit Judge, and his two terms are over an 8-year period. [Extracted from the article]

Christian Americans are on track to become a minority of the U.S. population by mid-century. Research on racial demographic shifts shows majority-group members experience status threat when reminded of similar demographic changes. Public debate about religious freedom and the role of Christianity in America suggest that fast-changing religious demographics similarly elicit threat, and trigger defensive political stances, among Christian Americans. In two preregistered experiments (total N = 766 Christian Americans), reminders of religious demographic shifts evoked perceived threat to religious rights and freedoms, which in turn accounted for increases in Christian nationalism, conservative political ideology, and support for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Results illustrate how America's fast-changing religious landscape can evoke threat for Christians and how this threat may influence political reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]