"Psychological reactance"

Thomas Edsall reports in the New York Times,

...The furor over political correctness has been brewing for a half century, since the broad rights revolution of the 1960s, which included the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act on the heels of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The 1965 legislation and subsequent measures shifted United States policy to raise the total number of immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America and to sharply reduce the proportion of European whites.

The result was unanticipated by the sponsors of the original act, according to the nonpartisan website History.com, which reports that in the 1950s, more than 50 percent of immigrants were from Europe, and just 6 percent from Asia. By the 1990s, Europeans had fallen to 16 percent of the total and Asians had grown to 31 percent.

More to the point:

Between 1965 and 2000, the highest number of immigrants (4.3 million) to the U.S. came from Mexico, in addition to some 1.4 million from the Philippines. Korea, the Dominican Republic, India, Cuba and Vietnam were also leading sources of immigrants, each sending between 700,000 and 800,000 over this period.

The African immigrant population in the United States grew from 80,000 in 1970 to 1.8 million in 2013, according to Pew. The immigrant population from Middle Eastern countries grew from 235,000 in 1980 to 1.02 million in 2013, according to the census.

...Jonathan Haidt, a professor at N.Y.U., suggested to me that one way to better understand the intensity of Trump’s appeal is by looking at something called “psychological reactance.” Haidt describes reactance as

the feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination. Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination.

...The kind of messages that provoke reactance and a defiant or oppositional response, according to one study, include “imperatives, such as ‘must’ or ‘need’; absolute allegations, such as ‘cannot deny that …’ and ‘any reasonable person would agree.’ ”

...(Trump) has won a unique admixture of support, based in part on what might be called an anti-rational or irrational loyalty but also in part on his recognition of legitimate grievances among his adherents that many other politicians belittle or deny. This loyalty, as Republican candidates found during the primaries, is far wider and deeper than anyone not sharing it expected.

Read more here.