"What is the role of status
discontent in the emergence of right-wing populism? If it does play a key role,
does it matter more where someone stands at any given moment or whether someone
is moving up the ladder or down?
In the struggle for status, Michael Bang Petersen, a political scientist at
Aarhus University, Denmark, and the lead author of “Beyond Populism: The
Psychology of Status-Seeking and Extreme Political Discontent,”
argues:
Education has
emerged as a clear cleavage in addition to more traditional indicators of
social class. The highly educated fare better in a
more globalized world that puts a premium on human capital. Since the 1980s the
highly educated left in the U.S. and elsewhere have been forging alliances
with minority groups (e.g., racial, ethnic and sexual minorities), who also
have been increasing their status in society. This, in turn, pushes those with
lower education or those who feel challenged by the new emerging groups towards
the right.
It is hardly a secret that the white working class has
struggled in recent decades — and clearly many factors play a role — but what
happens to those without the skills and abilities needed to move up the
education ladder to a position of prestige in an increasingly competitive
world?
Petersen’s answer: They have become populism’s frontline
troops.
Over the past six decades, according
to Petersen, there has been a realignment of the parties in respect to their
position as pro-establishment or anti-establishment: “In the 1960s and 1970s
the left was associated with an anti-systemic
stance but this position is now more aligned with the right wing.”
Those trapped in a downward spiral
undergo a devastating experience.
Lea Hartwich, a
social psychologist at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural
Studies at Osnabrueck University in Germany, wrote in an email:
Those falling behind face a serious threat to their
self-worth and well-being: Not only are the societal markers of personal worth
and status becoming unattainable but, according to the dominant cultural
narrative of individual responsibility, this is supposedly the result of their
own lack of hard work or merit.
Instead of focusing on the economic system and its elites,
Hartwich continued,
Right-wing populists usually identify what they call liberal
elites in culture, politics and the media as the “enemies of the people.”
Combined with the rejection of marginalized groups like immigrants, this
creates targets to blame for dissatisfaction with one’s personal situation or
the state of society as a whole while leaving a highly unequal economic system
intact. Right-wing populists’ focus on the so-called culture wars, the
narrative that one’s culture is under attack from liberal elites, is very
effective because culture can be an important source of identity and self-worth
for people. It is also effective in organizing political conflicts along
cultural rather than economic lines.
In a January 2021 paper — “Neoliberalism can reduce
well-being by promoting a sense of social disconnection, competition, and
loneliness” — Hartwich, Julia C. Becker, also of Osnabrueck, and S. Alexander Haslam of Queensland
University found that “exposure to neoliberal ideology,” which they describe as
the belief that “economies and societies should be organized along the
principles of the free market,” results in “loneliness and, through this,
decreases well-being.
We found that exposure to neoliberal ideology increased
loneliness and decreased well-being by reducing people’s sense of connection to
others and by increasing perceptions of being in competition with others.”
Diana Mutz, a
political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, described the political
consequences of white status decline in her 2018 paper “Status threat, not economic hardship,
explains the 2016 presidential vote.”
“Trump preferences in 2016 reflected
increasing anxiety among high-status groups,” Mutz wrote. “Both growing
domestic racial diversity and globalization contributed to a sense that white
Americans are under siege by these engines of change.”
Mutz found:
Change in financial well-being had
little impact on Trump preference. Instead, changing preferences were related
to changes in the party’s positions on issues related to American global
dominance and the rise of a majority-minority America: issues that threaten
white Americans’ sense of dominant-group status.
In fact, status decline and economic
decline, which have fueled the increasing conservatism of the Republican Party,
are closely linked both psychologically and politically.
Gordon Hanson, a
professor of urban policy at Harvard and the author of “Economic and Political
Consequences of Trade-Induced Manufacturing Decline,” emailed me
saying that before the 2016 election, the assumption was that “the political
consequences of regionally concentrated manufacturing job loss” would be that
“left-leaning politicians” would be “the primary beneficiaries.” Trump’s
victory “dramatically altered our thinking on the matter.”
Instead, Hanson continued, “large-scale job loss led to
greater tribalism (as represented by the populist nationalism of Trump and his party)
rather than greater support for redistribution (as represented by your
run-of-the-mill Democrat).”
There was, in fact, “precedence for
this outcome,” he wrote, citing a 2013 paper, “Political Extremism in the 1920s
and 1930s: Do German Lessons Generalize?” by Alan de Bromhead, Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O’Rourke,
economists at Queen’s University Belfast, Berkeley and N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi.
The three economists wrote:
Consistent with German experience, we find a link between
right-wing politics and economic conditions, as captured by the change in
G.D.P. Importantly, however, what mattered for right-wing anti-system party
support was not just deterioration in economic conditions lasting a year or
two, but economic conditions over the longer run.
Many of the U.S. counties that moved toward Trump in 2016
and 2020 experienced long-run adverse economic conditions that began with the
2000 entry of China into the World Trade Organization, setbacks that continue
to plague those regions decades later.
Hanson and his co-authors, David Autor and David Dorn,
economists at M.I.T. and the University of Zurich, found in their October 2021
paper “On the Persistence of the China Shock”:
Local labor markets more exposed to import competition from
China suffered larger declines in manufacturing jobs, employment-population
ratios, and personal income per capita. These effects persist for nearly two
decades beyond the intensification of the trade shock after 2001, and almost a
decade beyond the shock reaching peak intensity.
They go on:
Even using higher-end estimates of the consumer benefits of
rising trade with China, a substantial fraction of commuting zones appears to
have suffered absolute declines in average real incomes.
In their oft-cited 2020 paper, “Importing Political
Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure,”
Autor, Dorn, Hanson and Kaveh Majlesi, an economist at
Monash University, found that in majority-white regions, adverse economic
developments resulting from trade imports produced a sharp shift to the right.
Autor and his co-authors describe “an ideological
realignment in trade-exposed local labor markets that commences prior to the
divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election.” More specifically, “trade-impacted
commuting zones or districts saw an increasing market share for the Fox News
Channel, stronger ideological polarization in campaign contributions and a
relative rise in the likelihood of electing a Republican to Congress.”
Counties with a majority-white population “became more
likely to elect a G.O.P. conservative, while trade-exposed counties with an
initial majority-minority population became more likely to elect a liberal
Democrat,” Autor and his colleagues write.
They continue:
In presidential elections, counties
with greater trade exposure shifted toward the Republican candidate. These
results broadly support an emerging political economy literature that connects
adverse economic shocks to sharp ideological realignments that cleave along
racial and ethnic lines and induce discrete shifts in political preferences and
economic policy.
The trade-induced shift to the right
has deeper roots dating back to at least the early 1990s.
In “Local Economic and Political
Effects of Trade Deals: Evidence from NAFTA,” Jiwon Choi and Ilyana Kuziemko, both of Princeton, Ebonya Washington
of Yale and Gavin Wright of
Stanford make the case that the enactment of the North American Free Trade
Agreement in 1993 played a crucial role in pushing working-class whites out of
the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party:
We demonstrate that counties whose 1990 employment depended
on industries vulnerable to NAFTA suffered large and persistent employment
losses relative to other counties. These losses begin in the mid-1990s and are
only modestly offset by transfer programs. While exposed counties historically
voted Democratic, in the mid-1990s they turn away from the party of the
president (Bill Clinton) who ushered in the agreement and by 2000 vote majority
Republican in House elections.
The trade agreement with Mexico and Canada “led to lasting,
negative effects on Democratic identification among regions and demographic
groups that were once loyal to the party,” Choi and her co-authors write.
Before enactment, the Republican
share of the vote in NAFTA-exposed counties was 38 percent, well below the
national average, but “by 1998, these once solidly Democratic counties voted as
or more Republican in House elections as the rest of the country,” according to
Choi and her colleagues.
Before NAFTA, the authors write, Democratic Party support
for protectionist policies had been the glue binding millions of white
working-class voters to the party, overcoming the appeal of the Republican
Party on racial and cultural issues. Democratic support for the free trade
agreement effectively broke that bond: “For many white Democrats in the 1980s,
economic issues such as trade policy were key to their party loyalty because on
social issues such as guns, affirmative action and abortion they sided with the
G.O.P.”
The consequences of trade shocks
have been devastating both to whole regions and to the individuals living in
them.
Katheryn Russ — co-author along with Katherine Eriksson and Minfei Xu, economists at the University of
California-Davis, Jay C. Shambaugh,
an economist at George Washington University of the 2020 paper “Trade Shocks and the Shifting
Landscape of U.S. Manufacturing” — wrote in an email that
trade-induced economic downturns “affect entire communities, as places with the
lowest fractions of high school or college-educated workers are finding
themselves falling with increasing persistence into the set of counties with
the highest unemployment rates.”
Even worse, these counties “do not bounce back out with the
same frequency that counties with the highest fraction of high school and
college-educated workers do. So we aren’t just talking about a phenomenon that
may influence the self-perceived status of individual workers, but of entire
communities.”
Russ cited a 2017 study, “Trade Shocks and the
Provision of Local Public Goods” by Leo Feler and Mine Z. Senses, economists at
U.C.L.A. and Johns Hopkins, which finds that “increased competition from
Chinese imports negatively affects local finances and the provision of public
services across U.S. localities.”
Specifically, “a $1,000 increase in Chinese imports per worker
results in a relative decline in per capita expenditures on public welfare, 7.7
percent; on public transport, 2.4 percent; on public housing, 6.8 percent; and
on public education, 0.9 percent.”
These shortfalls emerge just as
demand increases, Feler and Senses write: “The demand for local public goods
such as education, public safety, and public welfare is increasing more in
trade-affected localities when resources for these services are declining or
remaining constant.”
For example:
Public safety expenditures remain constant at a time when
local poverty and unemployment rates are rising, resulting in higher property
crime rates by 3.5 percent. Similarly, a relative decline in education spending
coincides with an increase in the demand for education as students respond to a
deterioration in employment prospects for low-skilled workers by remaining in
school longer.
As if that were not enough:
In localities that are more exposed to trade shocks, we also
document an increase in the share of poor and low-income households, which tend
to rely more on government services such as public housing and public
transportation, both of which experience spending cuts.
Eroded social standing, the loss of quality jobs, falling
income and cultural marginalization have turned non-college white Americans
into an ideal recruiting pool for Donald Trump — and stimulated the adoption of
anti-immigrant and anti-globalization policies.
Rui Costa Lopes, a research fellow
at the University of Lisbon, emailed in response to my inquiry about the roots
of right-wing populism: “As we’re talking more about those who suffer from
relative deprivation, status insecurity or powerlessness, then we’re talking
more about the phenomenon of ‘politics of resentment’ and there is a link
between those types of resentment and adhesion to right populist movements.”
Lopes continued: “Recent research
shows that the link between relative deprivation, status insecurity or powerlessness
and political populist ideas (such as Euroscepticism) occurs through cultural
(anti-immigrant) and political (anti-establishment) blame attributions.”
“The promise of economic well-being achieved through
meritocratic means lies at the very heart of Western liberal economies,” write
three authors — Elena Cristina Mitrea
of the University of Sibiu in Romania, and Monika Mühlböck and Julia Warmuth of the University of
Vienna — in “Extreme Pessimists? Expected
Socioeconomic Downward Mobility and the Political Attitudes of Young Adults.”
In reality, “the experience of upward mobility has become less common, while
the fear of downward mobility is no longer confined to the lower bound of the
social strata, but pervades the whole society.”
Status anxiety has become a driving force, Mitrea and her
colleagues note: “It is not so much current economic standing, but rather
anxiety concerning future socioeconomic decline and déclassement, that
influences electoral behavior.”
“Socially disadvantaged and economically insecure citizens
are more susceptible to the appeals of the radical right,” Mitrea, Mühlböck and
Warmuth observe, citing data showing “that far-right parties were able to
increase their vote share by 30 percent in the aftermath of financial crises.”
Economic insecurity translates into
support for the far-right through feelings of relative deprivation, which arise
from negative comparisons drawn between actual economic well-being and one’s
expectations or a social reference group. Coping with such feelings increases
the likelihood of rejecting political elites and nurturing anti-foreign sentiments.
The concentration of despair in the United States among
low-income whites without college degrees compared with their Black and
Hispanic counterparts is striking.
Carol Graham, a Brookings senior fellow, and Sergio Pinto, a doctoral candidate at the
University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, document this divide in “The
Geography of Desperation in America: Labor Force Participation, Mobility
Trends, Place, and Well-being,” a paper presented at a 2019 conference
sponsored by the Boston Federal Reserve:
Poor blacks are by far the most optimistic group compared to
poor whites: They are 0.9 points higher on the 0-10 scale (0.43 standard
deviations). Poor blacks are also 14 percentage points (0.28 standard
deviations) less likely to report stress the previous day, half as likely as
poor whites to report stress in the previous day, while poor Hispanics fall
somewhere in the middle.
Graham and Pinto measured poll
respondents’ sense of purpose, sense of community and their financial and
social well-being and found that “blacks and Hispanics typically score higher
than whites,” noting that “these findings highlight the remarkable levels of
resilience among blacks living in precarious circumstances compared to their
white counterparts.”
Graham and Pinto write:
The deepest desperation is among cohorts in the white
working class who previously had privileged access to jobs (and places) that
guaranteed stable, middle-class lives. Rather ironically, African Americans and
Hispanics — the cohorts that historically faced high levels of discrimination —
retain higher levels of well-being, especially hope for the future.
The data suggest that a large segment of the white,
non-college population lives day-by-day in a cauldron of dissatisfaction, a
phenomenon that stands apart from the American tradition.
This discontent drew many disaffected Americans to Donald Trump,
and Trump’s defeat in 2020 has produced millions of still more disaffected
voters who support his claim that the election was stolen."
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