The Fear of Demographic Eclipse
By Wade Lee Hudson
Throughout the Trump era, in his lengthy, weekly New York Times column on politics, demographics, and inequality, Thomas Edsall has analyzed the intersection of race and class and how it has impacted Trump’s ability to generate support for his activities. Professor of Public Affairs Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and author of several books, he draws on email correspondence with numerous academics to present multiple viewpoints in his substantial columns, as well as mining books and articles.
After the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, his Jan. 13, 2021 column, “White Riot,” was particularly clear and insightful. In this piece, he addresses “how racism, grievance, resentment and the fear of diminished status came together to fuel violence and mayhem.” After considering how the lack of a college education and having different social values leads to a group consciousness that reinforces group conflict, Edsall concludes, “None of these forces diminishes the key role of racial animosity and racism. Instead, they intensify racial resentment.”
Edsall has concluded that many white men have experienced a loss of power and status. This “involuntary subordination” has encouraged “desperate behavior and a willingness to believe a pack of lies.” They claim their self-righteous actions protect democracy. In fact, they undermine democracy.
He quotes a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, Andrew Cherlin, who wrote by email:
They fear a loss of attention. A loss of validation. These are people who have always had racial privilege but have never had much else. Many feel passed over, ignored. Trump listened to them and spoke their language when few other politicians did. He felt their pain and was diabolical enough to encourage their tendency to racialize that pain. They fear becoming faceless again if a Democrat, or even a conventional Republican, were to take office
In a September 2020 paper, “Theories of power: Perceived strategies for gaining and maintaining power,” Dacher Keltner and Leanne ten Brinke, Edsall reports, argue that “relatively low socio-economic status individuals perceive the powerful as dominant and threatening — endorsing a coercive theory of power.” Edsall summarizes: “In other words, resentment toward successful white elites is in play here, as evidenced by the attack on Congress, an overwhelmingly white seat of power.”
Those who fell behind and suffered melancholy, stress, and despair lacked “a narrative to legitimate their condition.” According to the American dream, everyone must work hard to get ahead and those who don’t are to blame for their condition. This despair and self-blame mutate into a moral certitude that scapegoats the elites and justifies violence.
In this new world, Christopher Federico argues, “promises of broad-based economic security” were replaced by a job market where
you can have dignity, but it must be earned through market or entrepreneurial success (as the Reagan/Thatcher center-right would have it) or the meritocratic attainment of professional status (as the center-left would have it). But obviously, these are not avenues available to all, simply because society has only so many positions for captains of industry and educated professionals.
Jennifer Richeson wrote by email that there is
very consistent and compelling evidence to suggest the some of what we have witnessed this past week is a reflection of the angst, anger, and refusal to accept an “America”’ in which White (Christian) Americans are losing dominance, be it political, material, and/or cultural. And, I use the term dominance here, because it is not simply a loss of status. It is a loss of power.
Michael Kraus addressed “the pathways through which racism creates these conditions. An individual experiences their standing in society as relative and comparative, so sometimes the gains of other groups feel like losses to Whites.”
Emily G. Jacobs argued that all the rights revolutions — civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights — have been key to the emergence of the contemporary right-wing. “QAnon offers a way for white evangelicals to place blame on (fictional) bad people instead of a broken system.”
Compared to most industrialized countries, in the United States, social tensions are exacerbated by extreme income inequality, economic insecurity, a weak safety net, illiteracy, religious fundamentalism, and deeply embedded racism rooted in a unique history of slavery. On top of that, Herbert P. Kitschelt argues: “Many lines of conflict mutually reinforce each other rather than crosscut: Less-educated whites tend to be more Evangelical and more racist, and they live in geographical spaces with less economic momentum.”
The result, according to Edsall, is the makings of an ongoing civil insurgency. At the same time, however, Edsall cautions “hostility to Trump on the left can make it easy to overlook the shortcomings, such as they are, of the center-left political coalition in this country — and I think it is important that liberals, among whom I count myself, keep this in mind.”
Bernard Grofman put it this way in an email:
We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class. The decline of labor unions proceeded at the same rate when Democrats were president as when Republicans were president; the same is, I believe, true of loss of manufacturing jobs as plants moved overseas.
President Obama, Grofman wrote,
responded to the housing crisis with bailouts of the lenders and interlinked financial institutions, not of the folks losing their homes. And the stagnation of wages and income for the middle and bottom of the income distribution continued under Obama. And the various Covid aid packages, while they include payments to the unemployed, are also helping big businesses more than the small businesses that have been and will be permanently going out of business due to the lockdowns (and they include various forms of pork…. White less well-educated voters didn’t desert the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party deserted them.”
Grofman believes Trump
speaks in a language that ordinary people can understand. He makes fun of the elites who look down on his supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and who think it is a good idea to defund the police who protect them and to prioritize snail darters over jobs. He appoints judges and justices who are true conservatives. He believes more in gun rights than in gay rights. He rejects political correctness and the language-police and woke ideology as un-American. And he promises to reclaim the jobs that previous presidents (of both parties) allowed to be shipped abroad. In sum, he offers a relatively coherent set of beliefs and policies that are attractive to many voters and which he has been better at seeing implemented than any previous Republican president. What Trump supporters who rioted in D.C. share are the beliefs that Trump is their hero, regardless of his flaws, and that defeating Democrats is a holy war to be waged by any means necessary.
Edsall and his correspondents describe a torn social fabric — a broken social system that relied on the myth of the American Dream to keep people happy. Keeping up with the Jones, climbing one social ladder or another, and looking down on and dominating those below was the driving force. Overcoming this breakdown will require building a new widely embraced culture that affirms mutual respect for everyone’s essential equality, cultivates partnerships and collaboration, redefines power, assures life-long economic security for all, and establishes new structures throughout society that nurture these goals. To help with this effort is the goal of the Systemopedia: Change the World, Change Yourself; Change Yourself, Change the World.