The politics of resentment

There’s lot of food for thought in Thomas Edsall’s latest survey of academics and other intellectuals about what I’ve come to think of as simply “the crisis.” (Gift link.) For example:

In an email, Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School, described the complex interplay of cultural and economic upheavals and the growing inability of politics to give voice to disparate interests as key factors driving contemporary dysfunction.

Some developments, Norris wrote,

are widely documented and not in dispute, notably the decades-long erosion of blue collar (primarily masculine) work and pay in agriculture, extractive and manufacturing industries, especially in unionized and skilled sectors which employed high school graduates, and the massive expansion of opportunities in professional and managerial careers in finance, technology and the service sector, in the private as well as in the nonprofit and public sectors, rewarding highly educated and more geographically mobile women and men living in urban and suburban areas.

These developments have, in turn,

been accompanied with generational shifts in cultural values moving societies, and in a lagged process, in the mainstream policy agenda, gradually in a more liberal direction on a wide range of moral issues, as polls show, such as attitudes toward marriage and the family, sexuality and gender, race and ethnicity, environmentalism, migration, and cosmopolitanism, as well as long-term processes of secularization and the erosion of religiosity.

What kinds of political systems, Norris asked, are most vulnerable to democratic backsliding when voters become polarized? Answer: two-party systems like the one operating in the United States.

In this country, Norris argued,

Backsliding is strengthened as the political system struggles to provide outlets for alternative contenders reflecting the new issue agenda on the liberal-left and conservative-right. The longer this continues, the more the process raises the stakes in plurality elections and reinforces “us-them” intolerance among winners and especially losers, who increasingly come to reject the legitimacy of the rules of the game where they feel that the deck is consistently stacked against them.

All of which lays the groundwork for the acceptance of false claims.

Norris continued:

The most plausible misinformation is based on something which is actually true, hence the “great replacement theory” among evangelicals is not simply “made up” myths; given patterns of secularization, there is indeed a decline in the religious population in America. Similarly for Republicans, deeply held beliefs that, for example, they are silenced since their values are no longer reflected in “mainstream” media or the culture of the Ivy Leagues are, indeed, at least in part, based on well-grounded truths. Hence the MAGA grass roots takeover of the old country club G.O.P. and authoritarian challenges to liberal democratic norms.

These destructive forces gain strength in the United States, in Norris’s view,

Where there is a two-party system despite an increasingly diverse plural society and culture, where multidimensional ideological polarization has grown within parties and the electorate, and where there are no realistic opportunities for multiparty competition which would serve as a “pressure valve” outlet for cultural diversity, as is common throughout Europe.

Various aspects of MAGA ideology are classic paranoid style stuff: the fantasies of stolen elections, conspiratorial pandemic fabricators, drag queen story hour forced gender conversions, the whole Q cinematic universe, etc. etc.

But what gives these paranoid visions so much political power is that there is, in fact, an empirical reality in which the MAGA base is suffering a massive ongoing status degradation. The country is becoming less white, less religious, and less culturally conservative, while people who aren’t part of the increasingly mobile and increasingly credentialed professional classes are bearing the brunt of increasing economic inequality, and the precarity that comes with it.

It’s an oversimplification to say, as this Politico horse race with no horses piece does, that the Republican party is now divided between college educated people who are embarrassed by Trump and prefer their tax cuts and cultural reaction is a more genteel form, and a working class base that is all in on the MAGA paranoid vision, but there is something to this.

Trump’s support comes primarily from downwardly mobile less educated white people, small business owners obsessed with low taxes, lax regulation, and good old days (read: white supremacist) nostalgia, along with a non-trivial percentage of ethnic minority members who are attracted enough to the authoritarian patriarchal cultural reaction he represents to ignore their own out status within that hierarchy.

It’s a coalition that reflects a rapidly dying vision of America, but one that may not die fast enough to save an increasingly sclerotic constitutional system that, as almost all the experts Edsall interviews assert, is moving into a potentially existential crisis.