After the Future

Understanding Tea Party Anger

From Nathaniel Rich's review of Arlie Hochschild's Inside the Sacrifice Zone in the NYRB

Hochschild is also unpersuaded by Colin Woodard’s argument for regionalism as the main factor in shaping political views, and Alec McGillis’s argument that those in red states who most need government services vote at a much lower rate than wealthier conservatives. She finds incomplete Jonathan Haidt’s view, in The Righteous Mind (2013), that Tea Party voters are not misled, but instead care more deeply about cultural values than economic principles. While each of these theories may have some merit, she writes,

I found one thing missing in them all—a full understanding of emotion in politics. What, I wanted to know, did people want to feel, think they should or shouldn’t feel, and what do they feel about a range of issues?

... How, then, do Tea Party voters feel? They’re angry, bitter, resentful—that much is obvious. Hochschild goes further, however. She develops for them what in brand marketing is referred to as the “back story,” a story that provides a unifying emotional logic to a set of beliefs. She calls it the “deep story.”

The deep story that Hochschild creates for the Tea Party is a parable of the white American Dream. It begins with an image of a long line of people marching across a vast landscape. The Tea Partiers—white, older, Christian, predominantly male, many lacking college degrees—are somewhere in the middle of the line. They trudge wearily, but with resolve, up a hill. Ahead, beyond the ridge, lies wealth, success, dignity. Far behind them the line is composed of people of color, women, immigrants, refugees. As pensions are reduced and layoffs absorbed, the line slows, then stalls.

An even greater indignity follows: people begin cutting them in line. Many are those who had long stood behind them—blacks, women, immigrants, even Syrian refugees, all now aided by the federal government. Next an even more astonishing figure jumps ahead of them: a brown pelican, the Louisiana state bird, “fluttering its long, oil-drenched wings.” Thanks to environmental protections, it is granted higher social status than, say, an oil rig worker. The pelican, writes Hochschild,

needs clean fish to eat, clean water to dive in, oil-free marshes, and protection from coastal erosion. That’s why it’s in line ahead of you. But really, it’s just an animal and you’re a human being.

Meanwhile the Tea Partiers are made to feel less than human. They find themselves reviled for their Christian morality and the “traditional” values they have been taught to honor from birth. Many speak of “sympathy fatigue,” the sense that every demographic group but theirs receives sympathy from liberals. “People think we’re not good people if we don’t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees,” one Tea Partier tells Hochschild. “But I am a good person and I don’t feel sorry for them.”

When Hochschild tells her deep story to some of the people she’s come to know, they greet it rapturously. “You’ve read my mind,” says one. “I live your analogy,” says Mike Schaff. She concludes that they do not vote in their economic interest but in their “emotional self-interest.” What other choice do they have?

Hochschild suggests that economic despair is the central motivation behind the Tea Partiers’ rage, while admitting that race, gender, and class biases contribute. But it’s difficult not to consider racial fear the formative aspect of this story, given our national history and the repeated expressions of racial disdain by her subjects, all of whom are white. Further evidence can be found in Donald Trump’s ability to cast off fundamental Republican economic views without sacrificing Tea Party support, while emphasizing positions dear to the hearts of white supremacists. Either way, race and the economy have for the far right become inseparable. Who’s to blame for lost jobs and opportunities? African-Americans boosted by affirmative action, immigrant laborers, Mexicans, Indians, Chinese.

...[Tea Partiers] may not have it worse than some other demographic groups in America today, but they have fallen the furthest. Hochschild quotes the economist Phillip Longman’s finding that fifty-somethings today are the first generation of Americans who, “at every stage of adult life,…have less income and less net wealth than people their age ten years before.” Trump’s pitch is simple: under his leadership, the Tea Party losers will be winners. They will win so much that they’ll be sick.

This seems a good supplement to the piece I posted yesterday about the "Realigning the Colors". I think it makes clear that the racial component to white rage is not racial so much as it's about feeling disrespected. Why do all these other groups--even pelicans--get more respect than we do? Why do they get to cut in line and not play by the rules that we've played by? Why does nobody care that we are slowly falling to the back of the line? 

I think this story combined with the Colin Woodard and Jonathan Haidt models gives us a pretty good picture about what's going on here. The sense of aggrievement is reinforced by regional cultures and the moral systems that are embedded in those cultures, both of which get little respect from Blue elites. And all three of these go far to explain why Tom Frank's basic thesis in What's the Matter with Kansas is basically correct--that angry whites do not vote in their own political and economic interests because they are so angry at the Blue Party and want nothing to do with it. Tom Frank in his most recent book, Listen, Liberal explains why Democrats deserve the anger that is directed toward them from Red America. Blue contempt is met with Red resentment, and these emotions trump all other political and economic considerations. 

So how does this get resolved? Well, this was the point of "Realigning the Colors". I am still a registered Democrat, but I'm seriously considering ripping up my card and becoming an Independent. The Dems don't stand for anything I care about. They are simply less worse than the GOP, which has become the Party of Demagoguery that exploits this justified white anger in destructive ways. Again, that's why Bernie was the last hope, IMO, for Blue redemption. He offered the possibility to channel this resentment in a constructive way.

So how does this play out? There are a lot of residents of Blue America who could care less about these aggrieved whites in Red America. They argue that they don't matter, that as the country browns they will become increasingly irrelevant politically. They've had their day, and now it's time for them to step aside. As they age out, their children and grandchildren will adapt better to a more multicultural America. They'll put aside their anger and resentment, and figure out how they can fight for their interests the way any other interest group does.  

I do think that something like this will happen, and when it does, when the resentment subsides, that's when the structural shift I talk about in Realigning the Colors will happen. That's when the justified grievances of non-elite whites will find common cause with the grievances of non-elite blacks and browns. That's when they'll all figure out that the Blues stand for everything that works against their collective interests. The only way this doesn't happen, IMO, is if the Sanders faction of the Dems finds a way to take over in such a way that it focuses the Blues on structural issues rather than on identity politics issues. I don't see that happening. The Dem elites are too deeply shaped by the Neoliberal social imaginary to be able to offer a real solution. 

I don't know what's going to happen to the current Red Party after Trump. I hope it breaks apart and goes into a death spiral. If it does, it just might put Red back on the market to be claimed by the people for whom it has been the traditional color. It won't happen right away, but I think something like it is inevitable. 

Realigning the Colors

What these figures suggest is that the 2016 election will represent a complete inversion of the New Deal order among white voters. From the 1930s into the 1980s and early 1990s, majorities of downscale whites voted Democratic and upscale whites voted Republican. Now, looking at combined male and female vote totals, the opposite is true. (Thomas Edsall in the NYT)

***

“It’s not what I’m going to do, but I’m scared that the country is going to go into a riot,” said Roger Pillath, 75, a retired teacher from Coleman, Wis. “I’ve never seen the country so divided, just black and white — there’s no compromise whatsoever. The Clinton campaign says together we are stronger, but there’s no together. The country has never been so divided. I’m looking at revolution right now.” (NYT)

***

“I think Trump is speaking to a certain population in our country that hasn’t had a place to belong for a long time,” he said. “I think it’s the depressed population that focusses on Trump, because it gives them a sense of purpose. But what happens when this purpose is in the White House?” The young veteran said that, originally, he had planned to support Trump, until the comments about women became public, and now he didn’t plan to vote at all.

He declined to give his name, because he didn’t want to be publicly attached to this election. He felt that most of his classmates would vote for Trump, but their commitment was shallow, in his opinion. After his time in the Middle East, he had concluded that Americans don’t really understand what an uprising is. “They’re talking about a revolution,” he said, of Trump supporters. “But they’re too lazy. Americans are too lazy. They’re fine with a rally. But they’re not up for a real revolution.”(Peter Hessler in The New Yorker)

Back in 2009, a month after Obama's first inaugural, I wrote what I thought then was a parodic treatment for a first episode in a bad TV miniseries entitled The Second Civil War. It imagined a Seven Days in May scenario where rogue military units in concert with militias all around the country take over federal buildings in the hopes of triggering a broad insurrection. I don't believe anything like that will happen; it was meant as a kind of spoof, but at the time I was surprised that the post got some play in the right-wing blogosphere. 

The guy quoted in the Hessler excerpt above who said Americans are too lazy to actually foment an insurrection is probably right--at least in the short term. But it's hard to imagine that the current red/blue impasse can just continue indefinitely. If it isn't resolved through political compromise, something more violent will increasingly become a possibility. HRC seems the least likely person to find a way to break this impasse. I do truly hope she will surprise us. But I don't think elite Dems feel any urgency. They seem to believe that time is on their side, that browning demographics favor Democrats in the long run, that the angry, white male at the center of Trumpism or the Tea Party is going to die out or exhaust himself in the next decade or so. Even if that happens, and I don't think it will, can we afford to wait before things spin out of control? Maybe we'll find a way to muddle through. Maybe there are forces at work that are invisible to us now that will change the game in unanticipated ways. But I just don't see how an HRC victory is going to change the game at all. 

I think there are two things at work that make me pessimistic about a muddling-through scenario: the first is tribal, and the second is structural. First is the tribal cosmopolitian vs. rural component. We're all familiar with the image below:

This isn't going away because it plays to a basic archetype in the American psyche explained colorfully here: 

There's this universal shorthand that epic adventure movies use to tell the good guys from the bad. The good guys are simple folk from the countryside ... while the bad guys are decadent assholes who live in the city and wear stupid clothes. In Star Wars, Luke is a farm boy ...while the bad guys live in a shiny space station. In Braveheart, the main character (Dennis Braveheart) is a simple farmer ... and the dastardly Prince Shithead lives in a luxurious castle and wears fancy, foppish clothes. The theme expresses itself in several ways -- primitive vs. advanced, tough vs. delicate, masculine vs. feminine, poor vs. rich, pure vs. decadent, traditional vs. weird. All of it is code for rural vs. urban. That tense divide between the two doesn't exist because of these movies, obviously. These movies used it as shorthand because the divide already existed.

We country folk are programmed to hate the prissy elites. That brings us to Trump. I was born and raised in Trump country. My family are Trump people. If I hadn't moved away and gotten this ridiculous job, I'd be voting for him. I know I would. (Source)

Whose side do you want to be on--the side of the aggrieved simple fold or the side of the decadent elites? In tribal terms, the Democrats have become the party of the cosmopolitan, urban, coastal elites, i.e., the decadent movie bad guys. Tom Frank has already already made the historical case that the blues don't represent ordinary, non-college educated folks anymore, and the Edsall article quoted above ratifies it. Black and Brown Americans, for the time being, align with these elites now because at least don't say awful, racist things about them, but in the long run the real interests of black, brown, and white non-elites do not align with the interests of Democratic elites--be they white, black or brown. This is where the structural factors come into play, and I believe that it will force a realignment of colors over the next decades . 

The Blues in this cycle can justify to themselves that they are the good guys only because the Reds don't care that they have put up such a bizarrely unattractive bad guy. There are lots of sensible Trump supporters who have no illusions about Trump's inadequacies, but they don't care about anything except throwing a grenade into a system they see as profoundly corrupt, and they see "candidate chaos" as their grenade. Dem elites don't understand how justifiably they are perceived as the corrupt bad guys, that they are more Caesar Flickerman than Katniss Everdeen. That's why the Democrats' smugness about demographics being on their side is largely illusory. While the political divide now is largely along tribal (i.e., cultrual values) lines, in the future it will start forming along structural lines.

There's a color realignment coming. Red has always been out of place as the color of upper case "R" convenntional, country-club Republicans. In epic movie terms, Blue has become the color of a morally decadent, anything-goes, cosmopolitan elite, and red is becoming the color of the down-to-earth, aggrieved, simple folk, be they white, black, or brown. It's the color of populist insurrection. Red is the color around which mostly whites rally now, but in the future, as the old racists die out, more blacks and browns will rally to it.  

As race- and ethnic-based tribal lines become less important in coming decades, structural lines will become more important. In every action movie we see, especially the futuristic ones, the good guys are a band of multi-ethnic, multi-racial, band of brothers and sisters. This is a normative social imaginary for most millennials. So as the old racists die out, that will makeroom for Latinos, Blacks, Muslims, and aggrieved Whites to find common cause together. Theirs will be the coalition of the virtuous simple folk against the corrupt elites. That, I would argue, is the real demographic future. The flag they fly will be red not blue. 

IMO, the Blues missed their chance for redemption when they rejected Bernie's bid. The underlying structural forces are against Blue redemption in the future. Bernie understood better than anybody that in the long run it's the structural issues, not the cultural (including racial) issues, that matter most. Again, HRC might surprise us, but she is the embodiment of elite Blue tribal values. The structural issues are simply not central to her understanding of the crisis we face. Even if she has seen the Bernie light to some extent, she is still perceived by the Reds to be someone they cannot trust and cannot work with. Better her than Trump, but if Trump would make things worse, it's hard to see how a Clinton will make things better. Some kind of re-alignment seems inevitable, if not in the next ten years, then soon after. 

The Storm to Come

We Americans are clearly having a moment. The Trump campaign isn't so much the cause of it, but rather the disclosing of something that has been developing for some time now. If the body politic has ben suffering from a low-grade fever for some time now, the temperature has been climbing steadily since 2008, and the question is whether Trump's candidacy and its impending defeat means the fever will have broken. Or will it rather be an indicator of a disease that at best will go temporarily into remission. Establishment iberals breathed a sigh of relief when Goldwater was defeated in '64, and so were unprepared for the emergence of Reagan a few cycles later. Will Trump's defeat in this cycle lull them into a similar false sense of security leaving them unprepared for something even worse to come?

I don't know. A part of me thinks that the Trump candidacy is the clearest indicator that whatever is left of our democratic traditions and institutions are a hollow shell, a rickety ruin waiting for a strong wind to blow them over for good. Trump is a tempest in a teapot, and he and his candidacy are nothing to be feared. He's a foolish narcissist channeling the frustrations of a naive American public that understandably and rightly feels forgotten, disenfranchised, and powerless. Trumpism is farce, the ridiculous product of a narcissist who has no real understanding of the world as it is in itself, and so it is not to be feared. But I do fear the psychopath, someone far shrewder, more intelligent, and charming than Trump, who even now, like Reagan in '64, is standing in the wings taking notes as Trump implodes on the main stage.

Trump does not frighten me. What frightens me is how many people would have embraced him if he were not such a self-destructive fool. We have a body politic now, a huge swath of whose members have little or no understanding of what's at stake. There are public intellectuals on the Left and the Right who do understand what's at stake, but their concerns are irrelevant for the half of the American public who has found it possible to seriously entertain the idea of Trump presidency. Yes, enough of them in the end have rejected his candidacy, not, however, because they reject what he stands for but because his personal characteristics are so obviously repugnant. 

You know the cliche about a person who "if he didn't exist, he would have to be invented"? All it means is that there are certain personalities who emerge--for better or worse--because circumstances demand it. For worse, Reagan emerged in '80, and that started us in this spiral of delusional thinking.  And for worse Trump has similarly emerged in '16. We are all grateful that he has proved himself to be such a fool. Maybe there is a scenario in which 'better' is possible to emerge. I thought for a while Bernie might have been such a 'better'. I don't know. Maybe he would have failed had the Democrats nominated him. But it's clear that he gave us a much better shot at finding a way forward than HRC will. Trump would never have defeated him, and he would have provided a constructive outlet for the legitimate pent-up frustrations of so many people who have turned to Trump for lack of an alternative. 

There is no way to predict for sure what will happen. Historical discontinuities will surprise us. But if things continue on the track they are on now, it seems very plausble to me that crises related to income and racial inequality, the environment, and global terror will continue to escalate and continue to be ineffectively dealt with by a feckless, ideologically blinkered, gridlocked congress. Does anyone really think that such a polarizing figure as HRC, no matter how well intentioned, can be effective? Her only chance is if by some miracle the House and Senate both get Dem majorities. But has she the imagination to exploit such a miracle if it were given to her? 

Circumstances in the next decade or so will otherwise require that someone emerge who will tell us that he or she is the only one who can save us, and the American public, forgetful or ignorant of its democratic traditions. will embrae him or her. This already was Trump's message, and while that message resonated, his claim to be 'the one' was not credible. What happens when someone comes on stage who is credible? That is the storm to be feared.