After I got back from lunch this afternoon I checked to see what the twittering classes were twittering about. It turns out that one of their big targets was an essay in Politico by John Harris about the underlying cause of our current political discontent. The problem, Harris says, is that unlike previous periods of turbulence, we don't really have one this time:
The real Civil War was about slavery — at the start, to restrict its territorial expansion, by war’s end to eliminate it entirely. Capitalists opposed to the New Deal knew why they loathed FDR — he was fundamentally shifting the balance of power between public and private sectors — and FDR knew, too: “They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.” The unrest of the 1960s was about ending segregation and stopping the Vietnam War.
Only in recent years have we seen foundation-shaking political conflict — both sides believing the other would turn the United States into something unrecognizable — with no obvious and easily summarized root cause. What is the fundamental question that hangs in the balance between the people who hate Trump and what he stands for and the people who love Trump and hate those who hate him? This is less an ideological conflict than a psychological one.
Harris is taking a lot of flak for suggesting that there's no big underlying cause to our current unrest. So let's examine the two most obvious candidates: race and money, with a focus on white men since they're the ones who seem most discontented.
Let's look at race first. Here's the non-white population of the country:
Are white people petrified about becoming "a minority in their own country"? Many of them probably are. But the rise of the non-white population has been on nearly a straight-line trajectory since 1950. Why would it suddenly turn into a huge source of discontent around 2000? One possibility is that it simply hit a critical mass: it was only when the non-white population rose to about a third of the total that white people began to notice they were increasingly not the majority skin color anymore.
Immigration angst is another racially-fueled concern. How do Republicans feel about that?
There's nothing much going on here. Republican dissatisfaction with immigration dropped in the '90s and has been hovering around 60% since 2000. Those are high numbers, but they haven't changed much.
Here's a direct measure of white racial resentment over the past few decades:
It went up a bit during the Obama years and then fell back down in 2016. Taken as a whole, nothing here suggests that racial resentment has been growing more intense lately—although the data doesn't yet cover the 2020 election, which took place after the George Floyd murder and the summer BLM protests.
Overall, it's hard to conclude that race and immigration have played huge roles in whatever it is that's eating us. It's obviously been an issue throughout the entire history of the nation, but the evidence suggests that, as an underlying cause, it's no more an issue now than it's ever been.
Now let's take a look at money. For starters, did China take all our jobs away? There's no question that this happened to some extent during the 2000-2010 period, but how much? Here's the labor force participation rate for prime working-age men:
The participation rate has been slowly declining for half a century, and nothing special happened during the aughts. Still, maybe pay dropped dramatically? Let's check:
This chart shows the famous white working class (white, no college, second quartile earnings) and it turns out that their earnings dropped a few percent during the aughts but that's all. The Great Recession did some more damage, and then they recovered by 2020.
But did they lose ground to Black men, thus stirring up some racial animus? Nope. They were $176 ahead of them in 2000 and $177 ahead in 2020.
Overall, the money theory is similar to the race theory: there are some things here that aren't great—fewer men working, flat wages—but they're part of trends that have been in place for decades. Nothing special has happened over the past 20 years.
The conclusion here is hard to avoid: neither racial animus nor worries about jobs and the economy seem to have recently skyrocketed among large numbers of white Americans. It's hard to believe that either of these things, on their own, are what's torn the country apart. There must be something else at work.
But what?
Extinction burst
We've had this kind of division and even violence whenever the proportion of foreign-born has reached about 10%. 1790s, 1850s, 1890s, now. Media certainly stirred the pot in the 1890s, maybe in the earlier cases, certainly now. But crossing that threshold has seemed to be a consistent trigger.
Interesting that the "white racial resentment" chart stops in 2016. Hmm, I wonder what it might show if it ran to 2021 . . .
Boredom and entitlement.
Boredom: The human animal demands constant stimulation. When it is not available, it must be manufactured. Conflict is the unimaginative and favored means of doing that.
Entitlement: Interesting story today about a Jan 6 defendant petitioning a judge for permission to travel to Jaimaca for holiday (it was denied). I attribute the growing sense of entitlement largely to wealth inequality, often far in excess of that needed for basic well-being
The dominate medium changed. Television, a cool media, was replaced by a hot media - the internet combined with smart phones. This post begins with a reference to Twitter, a medium utilizing the world wide web and smart phones used expertly by a demagogue to arouse the emotions of ethnic nationalism and provide the losers of the winner take all political economy the energy to "fight like hell" to save their country. This energy is being exploited by America's reactionaries to achieve political power despite not having any single underlying ideology to support it. Any progressive policy or demand for justice for crimes perpetrated by state authority against a traditionally persecuted minority becomes points of intense conflict. An intensity so hot it even results in a hope for civil war by those most affected.
This new medium also allows and encourages individuals to perform 'their own research.' The result has been a a tremendous rise in the dissemination of what the main propaganda organizations of television describe as misinformation and a nearly infinite number of conspiracy theories developed by provocateurs and crackpots. Conspiracies with some semblance of truth because of the many conspiracies perpetrated by the American security state in order to achieve global domination. A goal of the political economy's elites but without the concomitant 'trickle down' improvement promised, which is the source of discontent of a significant portion of the working class even if unrecognized by most American subjects. Subjects who can be convinced a presidential election was stolen without any evidence.
Agreed. In broad terms, the crazies have always been with us. The difference is that now they are embraced by the Republican Party. The Republicans realized they couldn't win on a policy of protecting the rich so they stirred the emotions of the crazies. As Kevin has often pointed out, Fox does a great job of this.
I suspect they are doing a very professional job of this. Frank Luntz is famous (infamous) for selecting the words and phrases that will trigger some people. Quite possibly there are others toiling away finding the right topics, headlines and images that will make some people's blood boil. The internet through FB and Youtube and such provide the greatest tool in the world for this. You can broadcast all sorts of propaganda then see what produces hits and what goes viral. Take those winners and refine them. Kind of an evil Darwinism.
I think you're too quick to dismiss the racial resentment part because you're looking at nationwide data. Some % of the rise in nonwhite population is in the big cities, where they don't stand out as much and white people are long used to having nonwhites around. But studies are showing that the Capitol insurrectionists specifically come from counties that also saw a decline in the white population:
"...the single most unifying factor among the insurrectionists is living in a county in which the population of white people dramatically declined between 2010 and 2020. This decline has hastened the mainstreaming of a once-fringe notion that white people are at risk of being stripped of their rights. “It’s been around a long time, but what’s special now is that that theory is embraced in full-throated fashion by major political leaders and also by major media figures,” Pape told Slate’s Aymann Ismail. “If you live in an area that’s losing white population, you can start yourself to connect the dots to the spinning that’s going around with these narratives.”"
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/01/insurrectionists-victims-banality-of-evil.html
So nationally things might not have changed that much, but the overall trend is more noticeable in some places than others (nonwhites going up but also whites going down), plus your old friend Fox News stokes the anxiety that produces.
I agree and good article, by the way. I think the thing that any national survey of "racial resentment" is that it misses just how resentful the minority of the nation who are Trumpists are at this time.
Not only that but "white ethnonationalist" anxiety might not always translate into convenient polling language measuring sentiments about race. It may also manifest itself in attitudes regarding immigration. And, as you point out, we have to be careful looking at national data. It may be that ever-growing pro-immigration (or pro-diversity) sentiment in affluent blue states masks regression on these issues in areas where education attainment lags. Certainly the animal spirits of the MAGA right (Bannon, Hawley, Cotton, Trump) all appear to believe xenophobia and immigration restrictionism plays well with the base.
How was "racial resentment" for the graph measured? Is there an instrument that does this like a thermometer? Maybe what dropped was the percentage of people admitting to pollsters that they are resentful. Shifting the ostensible cause of resentment is part of Republican strategy. Trump says "nobody is less racist than I am" and his followers take the cue: "No, I'm not racist, it's non-whites who are". Polls on subjects like this just can't be taken at face value. The big media, which favor conservative economic policy, tend to push the idea that people are opposed to "socialism" rather than motivated by racism.
Actually it is obvious that Republican's appeal to racial resentment has become more intense especially after Obama was elected, and the base has responded. Has Kevin forgotten birtherism, which is one thing that brought Trump into the political arena? I don't watch Fox, but it seems that their message has become more blatantly racist - when did the idea of "replacement theory" get so prominent there? At more or less the same time, anti-racists have become more active, causing more reaction.
Ultimately a main objective of the Republican party since Goldwater has been to distract lower-income whites from the way they are losing economically by appealing to "social" issues, mostly race but also religion and anything else that might work. Of course it has been working, and as the fraction of whites decreases they need to increase the intensity.
The MSM largely ignored how Republicans use racism until Trump got elected and that became impossible. Kevin still seems to be in the frame of mind that the media had before Trump's rise.
And again, racism is something that arouses basic instincts that cause people to act counter to rationality and even their own material welfare.
to distract lower-income whites from the way they are losing economically by appealing to "social" issues, mostly race but also religion and anything else that might work.
Bingo. Misogyny is also a big factor here. They played on these social anxieties as means of maintaining power without actually delivering what the mob wanted. Unfortunately, they lost control of the monster and now it's destroying all the villages.
Obama's election was the freakout moment.
GOPers said "you didn't tell us voting would put the black man in charge!" (And it hurt double hard to have to make the comparison between GWB - affirmative action case if ever there were one - and Barack Hussein Obama, self made law professor.)
There are a few things going on here so definite some require speculation. Political scientists used to assume that the trend would be towards political consolidation with fewer and larger states. They couldn't have been more wrong. There's a worldwide trend toward factionalism, I mean if the Czechs and Slovaks could hold together what hope did the Yugoslavs ever have? Much as the 19th century seemed to be a time of stitching nations together, the late 20th century and early 21st century seem to be a time of coming apart. So factionalism is just a trend in this era of history.
But I believe something else is going on as well. Since the advent of smart phones, and with them the always connected society, it seems the enemies of liberal democracy have figured out that to defeat liberal democracy you don't have to conquer them with armies or weapons, you only need to sow chaos and let them destroy themselves. The always connected society provided the perfect means to sow chaos. Troll farms sprang up in Russia and China exploiting existing fault points in societies. They crudely play both sides of almost every issue against each other, but people buy it. Mass migration was encouraged to the US and Europe not to overthrow those governments but to put them in uncomfortable positions and cause political problems, and raise the profile of reactionary politicians. We have given the opponents of liberal democracy the tools to bypass everything and to speak to people directly, and they're doing it constantly. Of course it wouldn't work if people weren't somewhat receptive to the message but that's another issue entirely.
I suspect you're on to something there, sir.
+
Fox News.
I think the immigrant/race thing might be a question of distribution. Haven't big cities like NYC always had a high proportion of immigrants, but maybe in the last 20 years or so more and more areas of the country are seeing the change, a presence they're not used to?
Unlike LGM I didn’t find Harris’ column not to be out of bounds. It was more a planted seed to start the conversation and KD has followed through. The question is what’s the deal with all these lunatics? The answer of course is multiples, so let me ramble a bit touching on a few things incoherently stated. The nation (and the world) has always had its share of end of the world mystical types. The US itself has gone through several religious revivals or awakenings. So yes, the GOP has latched into this and become a kind of theological party. Couple that with that nihilism of the younger folks in part due the gloom future, profit incentives in the discord, naivedom, real social problems and of course the ever present Fox News and you do have a recipe for a disaster. Every single problem is attributed to the government and even when there isn’t. So someone is always screaming even when they do not need to. (I have always thought that the nihilism credo exists in a world of abundance, after all, if you have to spend every minute surviving one cannot ponder -see the third world). In the US, we have an abundance of material wealth and many feel entitled. I cannot count the number of of old people who put little into the system, extracted more than their share and then rail against others. But that’s just part of it, every conservative voter I have seen engages in some form of self-deception on various issues and then yell about it and rational people then try to address them only to fall in deaf ears (the big lie is just an example of this). This lunacy is what we all have to deal with. And the point is that screaming does lead to certain results. I guess one can say the US is composed of many immature and overtly fanatical people. The result of course is that this leads to policy preferences that are not supported by the populace and then the cycle starts again.
Mr. Drum, stop toying with the inmates. Fin de siecle American capitalism, the end of the purely exploitive version of our experiment. The ruthless and possibly irreversible transfer of wealth and power to the oligarchic class in response to same (they are a lot of things; stupid isn't one of them). The concomitant plundering of the commonweal and existential insecurity engendered thereby. Race and class weaponized by master propagandists, both exploiting and building on this insecurity, in order to distract, brainwash (yes, brainwash),, cleave, and tribalize from functional society precisely the most vulnerable, trusting, and least worldly amongst us. Anything else?
I thought the humor was obvious though admttedly a bit dry. Should Kevin have added a snark tag?
You've answered this yourself before. Fox News, which constantly gins up fake controversies.
Good comments all over the thread, but there is also something I think I first saw on 538.
And that is you measure "divisiveness" by whether the two parties even agree on their respective "top 5" issues. At the moment, there is no agreement on that.
For Dems it might be:
1. The Environment and Global warming.
2. Lingering discrimination and its effects, including BLM and Me Too, for example.
3. Societal fairness between the poor, working class, middle class, upper class.
4. The effects of global trade on the third world.
5. Too much concentration of wealth.
The republicans don't even think those five are "issues" - let alone agree that they are issues but disagree on what government ought to to.
For R's is like:
1. Too much regulation.
2. Too many taxes.
3. Too many limits on personal language and personal discrimination, including such things as the government telling bakers they need to bake cakes for gay weddings (to pick just one example).
4. Too many benefits for whoever is undeserving (minorities, immigrants, etc).
5. Too much consideration for other countries, whether that be in the form of trade or military alliance or whatever.
You have to hand it to Trump for creating an entire new issue, which is "owning the libs" - which is rather sloppy way of being in favor of points 1 - 5, but Trump took it to a high art form.
And Trump also created this new "stop the steal" issue out of absolutely nothing, which now, for obvious reasons, cannot be ignored.
So, it doesn't matter to what degree R's are against immigration, the reason its so divisive is Dem's don't want open borders but they don't really care about immigration as a top 5 issue -- for a Dem, a competent, fair immigration program is like, I don't know, the Post Office? It should be run well but other than that we have always had immigration and we always will kind of a thing.
That doesn’t really explain the extremes of opposition between the parties - many on each side think the other is hell-bent on destroying America as we know it*; either turning it into a socialist hellhole, or a fascist one. People and parties that disagree on what the problems are can still have a reasoned discussion of their differences. The differences dividing us now are deeper, they are over values and our visions for the nation.
*Yes, I’m well aware that only one side has actually stormed the Capitol and attempted, however ineptly, to seize power through threats and force.
I have seen hints of this in pother comments, but perhaps let me be explicit.
My version of the narrative is as follows:
On or about 2010 the Republican Party realized it was facing an existential threat from the coalition being assembled by Obama.
The Re[publican party, recognizing its crisis and unwilling to change, turned to its more extreme elements (which had been suppressed in the Republican Party at least since Goldwater turned on the John Birch society) in hopes of reversing their fortunes.
Based on the behavior of the party elite, it wold appear that they believed that after the extreme elements had reversed the Obama trend, the extremists could again be bottled up.
Based on the period form 2016 to 2022, this apparent hope by the Republican elite has been shown to be incorrect.
The Republican party is now being eaten by the forces it let loose about 2010 in an effort to reverse the Obama coalition gains.
And yes, exploiting racial animus seems to have been a critical component of the effort to mobilize the extreme elements of the Republican party starting in about 2010.
The Republican party is now being eaten by the forces it let loose about 2010 in an effort to reverse the Obama coalition gains.
Yep.
One thing that changes rather fast, and perhaps less detectably, is conception of future possibilities: No idea how you'd estimate, but everything else being equal it's likely that the average outlook inside the US has really changed. End of Cold War finally hit for real; the US wasted decades in pretending to be a towering military empire, with little to show; China is now a major competing pole, including on technological know-how and economic prowess; climate change is something people say they are not worried mostly as a whistling in the dark palliative, but everyone knows stuff is happening and the downside has few built-in limitations. Then there is social media. I know you don't believe it's a major factor, but it seems to have radically modified social epistemology in a dozen scant years, so who knows. The contingent realignment of parties in the new economy has rendered what was already a creaky and exasperating political system into something out of a zombie nightmare. I wouldn't discount the cumulative drip-drip of hopelessness.
The great issue is the acute aggravated general anxiety underlying everything, deliberately provoked by conservatism to further it's own ends but which method has gone wildly out of control because of a need to keep upping the ante decade after decade.
To un-provoke people you have to tell them they're being provoked, tell them they're being misled and used, and criminalize the character in which it is done.
Without true opprobrium it's simply a disagreement, an optional view.
(a) Elite overproduction.
Whenever too many people grow up with the belief that they are entitled to something that it turns out they cannot have, things fall apart. This has played out differently at different times (for example we got a lot of elite overproduction once the age of plenty started and lots of second and third sons survived to adult hood rather than having most of them die in youth).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
The current US overproduction stems from the US myth that everyone should go to college, that everyone will benefit from college, and that everyone who has a college degree thereby "deserves" a particular type of job and lifestyle.
One way elite overproduction lays itself out is by an obsessive and relentless tearing down of those above you in the hope that this will open up a slot for yourself. In Victorian times this took the form of obsessive policing of trivial sexual conduct; in our time it takes the form of obsessive policing of identity conduct. In both cases the obsession was restricted to the elites and elite wannabe's; most of the population looked on in morbid fascination at this pathological spectacle, but had zero interest in taking part as either victim or blamer.
(b) Lack of shared culture.
Technology has resulted in so much choice along so many axes that most people can't find a satisfactory club to belong to. Whether you join the music club, model UN, LGBTQ, church, or the AV society you still find that most people don't live in your mental world (and vice versa). They haven't read most of the books you've read, haven't listened to most of the music you have listened to, watched the same movies you've watched, etc.
Most of the feeling of "meaning of life" comes from repetition of ideas, phrases, visual images, from continuity and stability. It's very difficult to get this nowadays outside
- extreme religious communities
- the scientific community
Note that this is not about disagreements, different ethics, different tastes, etc. It's about having enough in common to even care about disagreement. If I say "the new iPhone sucks" and you want to argue about how it's great, we have something in common. If I say the new iPhone sucks and you say "maybe, whatever, I don't really care about phones" that's a much stronger feeling of disconnectedness.
And yet that's the primary situation nowadays -- I've just finished reading all 3000 (or whatever it is) pages of Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota and all I want to do is talk about the ideas with someone -- and yet I cannot find a single person around me who has even heard of the books. Sure you can find someone on the internet, and that is better than nothing; but there is a real gap here.
So we have two kinds of discontent. Amongst the chattering classes, elite overproduction is dominant. Amongst the non-chattering classes, a certain type of loneliness, a feeling (ultimately caused by too much choice) is dominant.
I don't know how you fix either of these.
In theory fixing elite overproduction is easy; but the reality is that the US now takes it as gospel that more college is always better. There is just no way you can dial back the number of college positions and associated expectations.
Likewise while in theory we could limit the range of choices available, practically that won't happen. Even easier steps (like a common US curriculum, to ensure that we've all had essentially the same school experience, same references with regard to books or history) won't happen. Common cultural literacy died with the Great Books programs, and it simply cannot be revised in our current climate.
You may be on to something there. Back in the day we all went to the same school in different places and were read up (or told to read up on) Mailer, Bellow, Updike, Coover, yadda yadda. And it's still true in the down to, say, over-55, mebbe over-60 set. But the truth is, there's waaaaaay too much stuff out there to remain current on, let alone engaged in.
"So we have two kinds of discontent" is a terrible oversimplification, and doesn't really follow from your previous statements either (as a propositional matter).
Aside from that, who is the "we" that could "limit the range of choices available"? Assuming there is a problem because we have so many reading and music options is very unpersuasive, and hints at some kind of authoritarianism foreign to the American experience.
Just goes to show that the most valuable commodity of all is eyeballs. Now how do we train them?
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"Why would it suddenly turn into a huge source of discontent around 2000? One possibility is that it simply hit a critical mass: it was only when the non-white population rose to about a third of the total that white people began to notice they were increasingly not the majority skin color anymore."
1). 9/11 - The fact that it was caused by Saudi immigrants who easily got into the country and easily did what they did really shook a lot of people, especially a good chunk of white people. All of a sudden immigration reform legislation becomes impossible and border security becomes an salient topic on the Right (remember the Minutemen vigilante border patrollers in 2006 during the Bush II Administration?)
2). Immigration came to where lots of white people live in rural areas. People accept that immigrants will settle in diverse big cities. But immigrants coming to small towns? Towns that were like 99 percent white? It's very jarring if you're not one to have experienced seeing dark faces in town before. But one of the major industries in rural America is food processing, because such plants are closer to farms. Ergo, lots of dark-skinned workers for these plants and thus living in these small towns. Where did all the white workers for these plants suddenly go? Well when you bust the meat-packers union, as took place in Austin, Minn. in the mid-1980s (Documented in the movie "American Dream" which I urge everyone to watch to understand what happened) and cut wages for very hard and dangerous work, don't surprised if workers vote with their feet (as they're doing right now). The economy improved from the mid-80s onward, thus the supply underemployed whites in rural areas declined. Many just moved away for better opportunities, many of their kids went to college or the military, encouraged to do so for better jobs and when you break the generational ties in this way, the result is fewer white workers. (Not to mention the fact a good number of workers failed drug tests thanks to meth and or opioids) So Hormel and other food companies imported their workforce and found they could pay them even less and didn't have worry about them unionizing. And thanks to NAFTA decimating Mexican small-scale agriculture and the end of the Cold War and the breakdown of many societies and nations as a result, there was a huge pool of labor to draw from.
Here's a good example of what I'm talking about: Barron, small town in northwest Wisconsin. Has big turkey processing plant. Can't find enough local workers. Company sends recruiters to the Twin Cities. Find Somali immigrants willing to move to Barron to work there. So they do. And they bring their families, relatives. Now there's a mosque in town. Now there's public signs in both English and Somali. Dark faces in town where there weren't before. Now some of them running for local public office. Democrat used to represent area in state Assembly. Since 2011, a Republican has held the seat without significant gerrymandering. You get the picture. Stop wondering why in some rural areas Dem support has collapsed.
That's where the discontent lies. It lied with me for a long time before I changed my mind because I rejected the notion it's about place and blood and soil and not about ideas. And it's made me realize if we don't get more immigrants from wherever, these communities are going to die slowly and painfully, racial angst be damned.