Status Anxiety Is Blowing Wind Into Trump’s Sails

"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."

 

It is beautifully written about globalization here. There is not much good writing here about the status of whites. There is a perception that gentlemen scientists think whites are selfish because they are so concerned about their status. Unfortunately, if you destroy the culture of white Americans, the world will become much culturally poorer. After all, these are the people who were the first of us to visit the Moon. Let us leave them to fight for their culture, which contributes to the cultural diversity of the world.

Ar pas mus visos guminės antelės jau surikiuotos? Ne

 „Vasario 4 d. Pekine vykęs Vladimiro Putino ir Xi Jinpingo susitikimas padarė tai oficialiu: JAV ir jos sąjungininkės dabar susiduria su Rytų ašimi, besitęsiančia nuo Baltijos iki Ramiojo vandenyno.

 

    Tai, ką dabar turi bendro Rusija ir Kinija, yra svarbiau, nei tai, kas jas skyrė praeityje. Jos atmeta pokario ekonominę ir politinę tvarką, kurią sukūrė JAV ir jų sąjungininkai. Tai revanšistinės jėgos, pasiryžusios susigrąžinti teritorijas, kurios, jų manymu, buvo neteisingai atskirtos nuo savo tėvynės. Jos išgyveno ilgus nacionalinio pažeminimo laikotarpius, kuriuos pakeičia ryžtingu nacionaliniu pasididžiavimu. Ir jos žiūri į Vakarus, kaip į grėsmę tiek savo sienose, tiek už jų ribų.

 

    Prieš atvykdamas į Maskvą aptarti taikos sutarties su V. Putinu, Prancūzijos prezidentas Emmanuelis Macronas sakė, kad Rusijos susirūpinimas saugumu yra „teisėtas“ ir kad Vakarų šalys turi geriau suprasti „šiuolaikines šios didžios tautos ir didžios valstybės traumas“. Jis įspėjo, kad Vakarai turės nusileisti, kad pasiektų susitarimą. Atvykęs į Maskvą, jis pareiškė, kad Ukrainos „susuominimas“ bus „vienas iš modelių ant stalo“ per pokalbius su V. Putinu. Suomija yra neutrali.

 

    Naujasis Vokietijos kancleris Olafas Scholzas buvo dar dviprasmiškesnis . M. Scholzas buvo kritikuojamas dėl atsisakymo aprūpinti Ukrainą gynybiniais ginklais, o Vokietijos priklausomybė nuo Rusijos gamtinių dujų sukėlė įtarimų ir kitose Vakarų sostinėse.

 

    Gindamasis M. Scholzas pirmadienį išskrido į Vašingtoną pasitarti su Bidenu ir Kongreso vadovais. Po abiejų lyderių susitikimo JAV prezidentas Bidenas pareiškė, kad Rusijos invazija į Ukrainą „padarys galą“ gamtinių dujų vamzdynui „Nord Stream 2“ tarp Rusijos ir Vokietijos. Vokietijos kancleris kalbėjo apie vienybę, bet aiškiai neįsipareigojo laikytis šios pozicijos.

 

    JAV viduje Ukrainos klausimas suskaldė respublikonus. Senato mažumos lyderis Mitchas McConnellas ir Pietų Karolinos senatorius Lindsey Grahamas suteikė visišką paramą Bideno karių dislokavimui Europoje, Misūrio senatorius Joshas Hawley, klestinčio „nacionalinio konservatorių“ judėjimo numylėtinis, pavadino „klaida siųsti daugiau amerikiečių karių“ į Europą“.

 

    Praėjusį savaitgalį trys šio judėjimo intelektualiniai lyderiai paskelbė „New York Times“ straipsnį, kuriame kritikavo Šaltojo karo eros „žiauriai ekspansinę užsienio politiką“, kurią jie pavadino „liberaliu imperializmu“, ir paragino konservatorius atmesti „kryžiuočių projektą“ ir vietoj to priimti „kultūrinio nepuolimo užsienyje“ pozą. [1]

Mes jau pumpavome didžiulius kiekius pinigų ir ginklų korumpuotiems mūsų remiamiems Afaganistano vadovams. Kuo tai baigėsi? Visiškais nuostoliais mums. Dabar pumpuojame  didžiulius kiekius pinigų ir ginklų korumpuotiems mūsų remiamiems Ukrainos vadovams. Kuo tai baigiasi? Spėkite iš trijų kartų.

1. Politics & Ideas: The New Axis of Autocracy. Galston, William A. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 09 Feb 2022: A.15.

Do we have all our ducks in order? Not yet

"The Feb. 4 meeting in Beijing between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping makes it official: The U.S. and its allies now face an axis of the East stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific.

What Russia and China have in common now is more important than what has divided them in the past. They reject the postwar economic and political order that the U.S. and its allies created. They are revanchist powers determined to regain territories they believe were separated unjustly from their homelands. They endured extended periods of national humiliation, which they are replacing with assertive national pride. And they see the West as a threat, both inside and outside their borders.

Before French President Emmanuel Macron flew to Moscow to discuss a peace deal with Mr. Putin, he said that Russian security concerns were "legitimate" and that Western countries need to understand better "the contemporary traumas of this great people and great nation." He intimated that the West would have to yield ground to reach an agreement. When he arrived in Moscow, he stated that the "Finlandization" of Ukraine would be "one of the models on the table" during his talks with Mr. Putin.

Olaf Scholz, Germany's new chancellor, has been even more equivocal -- so much so that Germany's ambassador to the U.S. felt compelled to warn him that Washington was coming to regard Germany as an "unreliable partner." Mr. Scholz has been criticized for refusing to provide Ukraine with defensive weapons, and Germany's dependence on Russian natural gas has generated suspicion in other Western capitals.

Very much on the defensive, Mr. Scholz flew to Washington on Monday to confer with Mr. Biden and congressional leaders. After the two leaders met, the president declared that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would "put an end" to the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. The chancellor spoke of unity but did not explicitly commit his country to this position.

Here at home, the issue of Ukraine has proved divisive for Republicans. While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham have given Mr. Biden's troop deployments their full support, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, darling of the burgeoning "national conservative" movement, called it a "mistake to send more American troops to Europe."

This past weekend, three of the movement's intellectual leaders published an article in the New York Times castigating the Cold War era's "violently expansionist foreign policy," which they dubbed "liberal imperialism," and called on conservatives to reject the "crusader project" and embrace instead a posture of "cultural nonaggression abroad." [1]

We have already pumped huge amounts of money and weapons for the corrupt leaders of Afganistan we supported. How did it end? Total loss to us. We are now pumping huge amounts of money and weapons for the corrupt leaders of Ukraine that we now support. Where does it end now? Guess three times.

1. Politics & Ideas: The New Axis of Autocracy. Galston, William A. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 09 Feb 2022: A.15.