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?
Kevin, with respect, you gotta be shittin' us. You were there, you watched as racial resentment rose thru the roof, and continues to this day. I mean .... c'mon, man. C'mon.
And then there's reproductive rights -- again, you've been here the whole time, watching as Red states chip away at these rights.
I think it's much more likely that whatever survey you're citing just didn't do a good job of *measuring* racial resentment, than that said resentment isn't much bigger a factor today. Also, it's not that all white people have this resentment -- it's that for the GrOPer base, their resentment has risen *significantly*. It's quite possible that the average for racial resentment for white people is unchanged, while GrOPers become rabid racists and Democratic white voters become much, much more accepting of diversity. That's possible, y'know.
Emphatically agree, we need to see stratified data over multiple factors here. Here’s an interview with Robert Pape, who has looked at the characteristics of those arrested for their roles in the Capitol assault on 1/6/2021. They are white guys from counties that have seen the fastest decline in the white proportion of the population, mostly counties Biden won.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/01/january-6-capitol-riot-arrests-research-profile.html
Meanwhile white Democratic voters from those counties were lined up at the taco trucks for lunch …
I interpret Kevin to simply be pointing out that, while racial resentment is growing, the growth itself is nothing new If this is indeed what to blame, why did things seem to go crazy only recently?
I'd guess he's pointing the finger at Fox News. But maybe I'm wrong!
(I agree with him, as it happens, that Murdoch bears a lot of the blame).
Just looked at the graph and re-read his words. Racial resentment is apparently not only not new (that's not controversial), but (per his graph) it's dropped a bit.
I would counsel caution, though, on reading too much into a ten point drop from a single survey. If there's one thing I've gleaned from reading David Shor, it's that everything you've heard about being careful not to over-interpret polling is true. Only double.
Also, speaking of Shor, I recall his mentioning that he's found pretty substantial evidence that the issue of immigration played a significant role in the 2016 election. Maybe it's the case that many voters are now savvy enough not to give Archie Bunker answers to pollsters. They don't dislike non-whites! They just don't want them coming to live here...
It surprised me that immigration (actually Mexican/Latino immigration) became an important issue in 2016 because Obama had been pretty tough on it and many thought too tough. I thought he had basically diffused it as an issue. Trump was able to make it an issue by creating the impression that it had somehow become an existential crisis. A deliberate attempt by Democrats to replace whites with people of color and to have them vote illegally. And the “replacement theory” is now what most Fox News watching Republicans now believe.
Just as they didn't reveal their hands in 2016 polling. They hate the media, lie to pollsters - I think.
Because at least half of them think it's going on 'their permanent record'.
Right. And, importantly, if you look at the leading lights of the MAGA movement (which is now the vast bulk of Republicans who mean anything these days) they're all pretty uniformly, explicitly restrictionist in their positioning on immigration. It used to be that many Republicans said "We're not against immigration, just illegal immigration." But these days the Cottons/Bannons/Milers/Hawleys etc are generally calling for curbs on legal immigration quotas, H1Bs and so forth. Certainly the previous administration messed with the the country's legal immigration channels with zeal.
And not just with immigration, but with encouraging hatred for those already here - even legally. My friends have included immigrants from a number of countries; my second Muslim friend is a US citizen whose family feared for her as a result of trump's messaging & came to take her back after her husband's death. I still fear for her - born in a small town, she is now in Tehran. And others have already been discriminated against & verbally attacked. Recovery from the past few years will take longer than I initially hoped.
Soon as I saw “But what” I thought oh, he’s saying Fox News.
Leaded gasoline.
To reiterate antiscience’s point, this is aggregate data. It cannot by definition show divergence between two sizable groups. Over my lifetime, New England shifted from reliably Republican to almost solidly Democratic; the old Confederacy went in the opposite direction. Republican strength is now in Dixie and the Mountain West. Aggregate data can’t by definition explain those shifts. If liberal/progressive/left-of-center Americans became more sympathetic to BLM and racial justice (as data supports to a degree) while others became more fearful/resentful of POC, aggregate data can’t show that either.
Kevin and Harris are trying to explain polarization with data that cannot possibly shed any light on it.
Harris's argument is simply incorrect. The trigger for many civil conflicts has been the emergence of a political movement that offers to resolve longstanding, simmering resentments: Solidarity, Bolshevism, People Power in the Philippines, Nazism, Mao's 'Long March', Franco's Falangists. Sometimes there's nothing but a very prolonged struggle; it took the Irish nationalists 400 years to defeat the loyalists.
What we're witnessing in America is another eruption of internal divisions that have existed since the nation was founded; the same divisions, broadly speaking, that underpinned the other eruptions he nominates. This time, it was triggered by Trump's demonstration that the right can ride roughshod over lots of conventional norms and not pay the political price most people always assumed it would.
I agree. Almost all our current flashpoints have existed for a very long time. Trumpism has given both the people and politicians the freedom to let their freak flag fly.
Abortion.
When an Iowa farmer can say that even if Trump cost him money, and his wife says that the man makes her skin crawl, as long as the Democrats support baby-killers they cannot ever support them, regardless.
Abortion is to our time what slavery was in the 1850s. there is no in-between, no let us come together and reason.
To continue the analogy, when Roe v Wade is overturned, it may have, likely will have, the same impact as the Dred Scott decision.
Abortion is a side show to distract the "Iowa farmer" from the real issues being fought over. And 40% of America aren't farmers.
A small minority believe that abortion should be illegal in all cases and another small minority believe it should be legal in all cases. The majority of Americans are in the murky middle.
Try a mental experiment:
Imagine that the Democrats nominate a pro-life candidate for President at any point in the foreseeable future.
Imagine that the Republicans nominate a pro-choice one.
Simply impossible.
And remember it never is the majorities that determine the future, but the passionate minorities. From revolutions to civil wars...
The conclusion here is hard to avoid: neither racial animus nor worries about jobs and the economy seem to be growing problems among 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.
There are indeed a couple of other things at work, but I wouldn't be too quick to write off the economy or white anxiety as underlying reasons. Flat(ish) wages aren't anything new from our perch in 2022. True! But this trend was new starting in the early 70s. I'd suggest it just takes a while for resentments and insecurities to build up. This (post oil-shock) period of expanding economic inequality and sluggish working class incomes coincided with a visible growth in the non-white population after the Kennedy immigration bill. I'd suggest by the 1990s these two forces were beginning to reach the point where they were reinforcing each other and were poised to create political disruptions: sometimes deep forces just take time to build up; look at the long, multi-decade road to Civil War starting in the late 18th century, characterized by gradually increasing hostility between north and south. It didn't happen overnight!
If Republican bigwigs were civic-minded OR if Fox News didn't exist OR if we had a constitution capable of producing outcomes that counter post-industrial economic forces (that is, significantly strengthening the safety net), perhaps we'd have avoided our current predicament. But none of these hypotheticals represent reality.
History doesn't owe America a happy ending any more than it owed one to Rome or the Ottomans. We're facing a perfect storm.
Kennedy immigration bill was irrelevant. The 1951 bill which Truman opposed was large for nonwhite immigration.
The Civil War unlike above was due for no need for slavery and the southern planters to buy equipment. Europe has pretty much whipped out slavery by the rise of industrial employment by the 1820's, the institution was fully dropped. Unlike what the negro thinks, the era which Europeans became worshipped for was after "black slavery". Health wise, manufacturing production and nominal wealth. The Civil War was really a war about industrialization and American nationalism, which the Tory's down south hated. It's why they refused the cotton gin.
Evangelicals are losing out
Prosperity gospel was a scam for global plutocracy.
Meh, what is "white" though??. Is being white fighting against capitalism and climate change for Avalon against the swarmy polluting darkies??? The only difference between Romney era and Trump era Republicans are single issue voters in the Midwest.Race was irrelevant. If Obama had done that poorly, the maps would have been similar.
Trump is overblown spinster who needed shunned and ignored. Zionism and semitic philosophy is the real underpinnings. His lackeys, genetically weak and pathetic.
I lived in one of the most Republican parts on Ohio, go back there....darker than ever. A lot of Puerto Rican transfers. They even asked me, where is the racism???? I think going back to the 80's and the supply sided revolution and crime wave decline played a large role with baby boomers and dying silents. They drank the Kool-Aid, slowly opening their eyes in 2008). Should've liquidated in 2008. The same slow recovery from a lower level may have really forced their eyes open.
Kevin, that's a lot of words you typed there pretending you don't know the answer. But you know the answer.
Rush Limbaugh, and then Fox News
Over the last couple decades we've all watched our dad's and uncles slowly driven over a cliff of outrage, not even knowing what they're outraged about 95% of the time. It turns out that "you won't hear this anywhere else" propaganda isn't self-evidently laughable, it works. It's how you build a cult.
This is the correct answer.
You beat me to it: Rush, then Fox, then Facebook for even crazier lies and organizing.
Yes, and I wish I had any idea how this will end.
Right-wing media is strangely durable. I would have expected it to burn itself out or pendulum-swing back to the middle by now, but it is still completely self-sustaining and even self-reinforcing.
My friends who watch Fox truly have no idea what is going on in the country or the world.
(...and meanwhile way too many Democrats bitch about "algorithms" and Facebook groups while Fox is eating them alive)
If anything the right-wing bubble is becoming far more impenetrable by their migration to their own social-media platforms.
The fundamental questions haven't changed. It's still about the New Deal, Equality, and sending fewer kids off to die in foreign conflicts (while killing fewer foreigners). The battles we fight today are the same ones we were fighting when Reagan was president.
We could have recovered from the Great Recession relatively quickly in the same way we recovered from the Covid Recession: by handing out money to the masses. Or by spending to invest in better infrastructure. But the people who would become Trump-lovers refused to improve the economy because it would give a win to the other party.
And because we are still fighting the real underlying economic issues of the Civil War. Do Free Men who are well educated and well paid earn more for their corporate masters, or do slaves (including wage slaves)? Will Well Paid Free Men be lazy and refuse to work because they can survive without working, or will they be productive and innovative and be happy to strive for luxuries without being burdened by the stresses of surviving?
On one side we have a party that embraces cooperation and the great things we can do when we work together. On the other side we have a party that embraces disrespecting their fellow Americans.
I agree with Citizen Lehew that the key element missing from Kevin's analysis is the growth of right-wing media. Sure, there are no sharp shifts noticeable over time in the data, but what has changed is that large segments of the population have increasingly been told that the root cause of society's ills and the primary danger to a future America are "leftists." Add into the mix those demographic changes and the several wins for progressive policy like homosexual rights and socialized medicine that have occurred, and the narrative of a "lost" America is complete.
I also suspect how right-wing media has brainwashed nearly every conservative into mindlessly repeating the lunacy "the US isn't a democracy it's a republic" also plays some unmeasurable but important role in what we're seeing today.
And that's why they hang onto the Republican name, even though many fly Confederate flags, Gadsden flags & revere Lee & both Jacksons - not Lincoln. They are just the know-nothing party, reborn.
+1
It's a fallacy to think you need a majority to create havoc. The nazis were not a majority. I doubt the Taliban are a majority. But my take from watching reasonable, non-racist (or closeted racists) people become Trumpers is that we nurture resentment in this society because...
Our educational system and meritocracy-driven rewards system make many people, especially white males (but also other ethnic males) lacking an advanced education, feel like they are losing. Or that they are seen as losers. Religious people are mocked for being dumb. Add in the fact that women have more agency and many middle-aged men are divorced, alone, angry and many have no larger support system (i.e. religion, unions, larger extended families) to buffer their worst tendencies. So their seed of resentment is exploited by Fox News and talk radio to grow the ugly plant we see today.
What happened?
Politics became entertainment in the 1990's... a profit center for 24 hour cable news (See CNN Crossfire) and right wing talk radio (Rush Limbaugh). The Gingerich revolution and Clinton impeachment. 9/11 was weaponized to fund a war on Islam and the subsequent hysteria caused more political polarization. At the same time, Bush let millions of immigrants into the US and the China trade shock did a number on the middle class. Fights over gays in the military (1990's) and same sex marriage (2000's) led to more culture war conflict. All along, the so called news media became an ever more polarizing force. The 2008 recession... the tea party movement... the Obama birth certificate drama made racism fun again... Social media... and finally trump. Meanwhile, Democrats tried to push income inequality and health care improvements as pillars of their agenda. This led to a complete collapse in democratic control of government from 2010 to 2017. You can argue all you want about Obamacare being a social good, but it was a political disaster. Endless talk about income inequality with no actual solution in sight leads nowhere. Over promise and no delivery.
All this, of course, in a symbiotic relationship with crazy bloggers and extremist opinion media who comment of every goddamn thing and make us pick sides.
Along the way, decent people simply stopped running for congress and state legislatures. That left us with bomb throwing mentally ill hacks running the government to the point of complete dysfunction.
So yeah - Fox News happened, but so did all these others and a hundred more awful things (like pandemic politicization). They fed on each other.
The result... I don't give a crap about saving this country at all. It isn't worth it.
See... not just Fox News.... crazy people using the media to attack and harass.
"But some people in Brevard County have another, related theory for why so many of their neighbors were arrested in the storming of the Capitol: They were inspired in part by the rhetoric and actions of their local elected lawmakers and officials.
Brevard is home to a group of bellicose Republicans — all of whom have embraced former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen — who in recent years have targeted their political opponents with a particularly vile and vindictive mix of harassment and mendacity. The result has been incidents of alleged violence, vandalism, intimidation and even a false report of child abuse.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/brevard-county-florida-capitol-rioters-maga-politics_n_61d75b5fe4b0bb04a6425e0d
It's quite a wild story. America has simply come apart. I don't want to know republicans... I don't want to work with them. I don't want to help them one bit. For all I care, they can just drop dead. So when a republican dies of Covid, it's a cause for celebration.
I look forward to your book report on the perfect county :).
Is a "majority" necessary? A committed radical minority full of passionate intensity and ruthless enough to do what it takes can get you a long way , as both Hitler & Lenin found.
Victor Orban is doing fine, ruling by decree on less than 50% of the national vote. The GOP could do the same: gerrymandered vote , conservative Supreme Court , lopsided Electoral College tilted in their favour, Senate filibuster & its own propaganda news network. Ingredients of a right wing revolution.
Don't you need to look at White racial resentment separated out by party affiliation, just like the immigration graph? My guess is racial resentment would show a similarly growing gap between the parties.
Similarly, broad measures will miss pockets of major change. There is a lot of rhetorical power in the narratives of major negative change. That's what keeps West VA in its political mess.
The racial resentment graph is obviously wrong. A sudden decline with the election of the most racist president in history—since the Civil War— is just wrong. Not even close.
The other issues cited by other readers such as abortion; guns; breaking down of separation of church and state, unfettered capitalism vs regulations; and good old American money driven selfishness contribute as well. Our Supreme Court is a disgrace.
What’s your alternative data, then?
a couple of points (maybe related, i dunno, and i'm not gonna address the "money" stuff)
-i'd be wary of polls purporting to measure subjective elements like "resentment", especially in the absence of, e.g., question framing, follow up questions, self-identification of the responders, etc. (both in one poll and across polls) And even taking all that into account, there's all sorts of ways to interpret the results. My own gut reaction on seeing that drop was "so the cult extremists purged the softies. good to know" (IOW, a drop in number of bodies with a corresponding increase in intensity of those left) and IMO that's just as valid as KDrum's interpretation.
-in that vein, KDrum's lack of engagement with the *entirety* of the "preference for reducing immigration" graph is...odd. again, there's a myriad of ways to interpret, but my gut reaction is that conservatives/the GOP/whatever *has grown increasingly out of step with the rest of the country since the start of the century, and ESPECIALLY since about the time Obama was elected*
-looking at all 3 graphs together, my take is that this is something of an equivalent to a toilet seat divorce. there's no single flashpoint where you can credibly say "THIS is where the right wing lost its goddamn minds" any more than you can credibly blame a married couple's split over the husband not putting the toilet seat down one time on New Years Eve. But as other commenters have mentioned there's been an obvious "simmering" of white resentment for fscking decades now in the context of societal changes (off the top of my head: the longest sustained period of high immigration basically ever (1965 through the start of COVID, including a MASSIVE spike in the mid-80s with Reagan's amnesty); the usual "get off my lawn" attitudes towards the young recontextualized in racial/gendered/self-identification terms; and the complete and utter conquest of the GOP by "movement conservatives", rendering that party thoroughly incapable of governing and degenerating that party into rank tribalism (e.g., murder IOKIYAR shooting BLM protesters). does the RWNM have a lot to answer for? sure it does. but frex MTG is a living breathing adult woman capable of making her own decisions and accepting the consequences. pretending that FOX News is at fault for her worm-ridden sociopathic slimy excuse for a brain takes away her agency and responsibility and i'm not prepared to do that)
Of course it’s FOX “News”. I’ve been asking myself lately, “What do these people really want?” and the answers are trivia and nonsense.
But, one could apply the same reasoning to the Nazis. The Jews weren’t doing anything. Removing them would solve no real problem. But - the Holocaust and WWII.
The impact of Kevin’s thesis is not that the GOP base will realize they’ve got nothing, but that there is no way to appease them. Close the border and they’ll scream about vaccination. Let COVID run free and they’ll scream about CRT. Turn the schools into white supremacy training camps and they’ll find something new.
I guess another way of saying what I and several others have mentioned is that factors like racial resentment or even opposition to (or support of) abortion used to be more spread between both parties, but through the media and the increase of dominant party stances on specific issues, a self-sorting has occurred. That's why changes in overall sentiment don't adequately express the amount of polarization clearly evident today.
Yes, can’t apparently make this point often enough: aggregate data can’t by definition explain polarization.
It’s the Internet
It's the Culture War.
One quibble with your 'straight line from the 1950s'. There's clearly an inflection point in the early 1990s. Had the nonwhite share of the population continued increasing on a straight line, the nonwhite share would have increased from about 20% then to about 30% today. Instead it increased to about 40%. That increased rate of growth corresponded with an era of increased salience of immigration politics both on the left (early 2000s fear of guest workers taking union jobs) and right (both the respectable right's "self deportation" and Trump himself).
The problem here is that Harris is saying that in each historical instance the trend toward partisanship arose in response to one big thing: Slavery, federal regulation of private markets/labor. Things are NEVER that simple, so it's really a straw man argument.
The political divisions Kevin cites all arose from multiple causes; the Civil War wasn't just about slavery, but about many related issues that galvanized different groups. It was about how to continue expanding and balancing federal and state political power in the West, longstanding imbalances in the federal system among the states, freedom of the press and gag rules in the Congress, religious sentiments splitting institutions like the Baptist Church (over slavery, of course, but other things, too). Since they all have some link to white supremacy and slavery, it's easy to reduce them to that one cause. But that wasn't how the different interest groups viewed it at the time. Each group responded to different grievances that arose from the common cesspool of slavery. For instance, the rise of the abolitionist movement was critical, and it arose to oppose slavery, of course; but different groups within the movement were seeking different ends in addition to the end of slavery.
Also, Southern whites had a completely different concept of liberty than northern whites, and a social order that they had erected on it. A threat to slavery's expansion was a threat to ALL of it: "We must defend our way of life!" The South seceded because it perceived an existential threat.
There's nothing like that on the near horizon except among a few far-right folks in isolated places (Montana seems to have a lot of organized racist extremists). Like the period leading up to 1860, Americans are arguing over liberty and equality and what they mean -- to different groups, in different contexts.
Reductionist straw man arguments will not help.
+1, very important point-- hindsight simplifies, and often too much
No. It really was overwhelmingly about slavery.
I say it's the adoption of unleaded gasoline.
Bingo! Lead would have pushed those nutters storming the capitol to a life of crime early on, and they would have been in jail years ago.
😉
Any American over 40 would have grown up with fairly serious atmospheric lead levels, so, I think it's clear plenty of the Jan 6 traitors suffered brain damage as kids.
I am a Democrat who grew up surrounded by Republicans. Further, I work in an industry/firm (finance) with lots of Republicans. My flawed insights are based on my personal observations.
Republicans and Democrats, at a basic level, see the world differently. If I describe Denmark (high taxes, robust social services and a strong social safety net) my Democratic friends, generally, would say ‘yes, that is the right direction that the US should move towards.’ In contrast, the Republicans I know would say ‘ First, the US can never be like Denmark: we are not small and homogeneous. Second, the Danish model is unappealing: you surrender a ton of control to the Government.’
To use an limited analogy, the Democrats and Republicans are like two captains of a plane, both sitting in the cockpit, each taking turns on controlling the vehicle: they disagree on what airport to land at….
First, the US can never be like Denmark: we are not small and homogeneous. Second, the Danish model is unappealing: you surrender a ton of control to the Government.’
I think this is a fair representation of how a lot of conservatives think and I've heard it myself. My reply, continuing with the example of Denmark, is: it may be small, but it's no longer really that homogeneous. Also, see diverse countries like the UK, Canada and Australia that have similar social safety nets. Second, other than paying higher taxes, what "control" are you ceding to the government? Denmark routinely ranks near the top of the world in quality of life, social mobility, education, and lack of corruption. Viewed from another angle, what Scandinavian social democracy has done is actually foster a far greater sense of individual liberty by freeing people from the constraints of private financial and social dependencies that often limit your options in societies like ours. Is it fair that only the wealthiest are truly free?
JTE - I vote with my feet and have picked my team: thus, I generally agree with your insight.
My broader point, as long as lots of Republicans strongly reject the Denmark like path for the US, we will suffer from deep rooted partisan politics.
Good points; I’d just like to add that Denmark routinely ranks highly on ‘ease of doing business’, see https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.BUS.EASE.XQ?locations=DK&most_recent_value_desc=false
Hardly a Socialist hellhole.
KenSchulz - my sophisticated Republican friends, most of the folks I work with have graduate degrees, do not claim that Denmark is socialist. Rather, they claim that Denmark has very high taxes and lots of redistribution. They prefer lower taxes and less redistribution.....
My reply, continuing with the example of Denmark, is: it may be small, but it's no longer really that homogeneous.
It's also not the case that "smallness" is an advantage in maintaining a robust safety net (although yes, right wingers incessantly bang on this particularly inane drum). Germany's not a small country. Nor is France. Nor is Canada, really. The thing is, small economies are far more vulnerable than large ones to exogenous shocks*. This is a challenge for public finances. The US, with its huge GDP and sovereign currency, could easily maintain a more robust safety net if its politics permitted.
*The classic example is Finland when the USSR broke up. At the time, Finnish exports to Russia probably accounted for what, a fifth of GDP? The US could never be in a position where a single trade partner's woes create so much disruption, because there's no single country large enough to absorb such a gigantic quantity of US exports.
I scrolled down Kevin's post expecting for a big reveal at the end blaming Fox News, but was disappointed.
But seriously, I think a lot of it has to do with the way Roger Ailes and Fox News, with a major assist from Rush Limbaugh, successfully weaponized race and the economy as grievance issues for white men.
He just wants us to say it for him 😉
The lack of an existential threat. The fall of the Soviet Union means we do not have worry about nuclear annihilation.
Falling life spans, esp. in the "heartland"--opiod/meth/etc. epidemics and "deaths of despair".
Kids will fall behind?
survey: 2013:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/160166/youth-say-better-off-parents.aspx
survey: 2021:
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2021-07-21/majorities-in-wealthy-countries-say-children-will-be-financially-worse-off
Bingo, at kind of a meta level.
The Cold War gave the US a mission in the world that the country was organized around, down to individual lives and careers. Before that, it was WWII, and before that it was getting out of the Depression-- but that last one was less successful than the next two. Before that, we went through a long period of bitter division-- 1890s through WWI-- that we resolved basically by adopting consumerism as our unifying creed and mission in the world. It's no accident that consuming remained a patriotic duty during the Cold War.
We've been either without a credible unifying national mission, or fighting over competing ones, since the end of the Cold War. (The opioid phenomenon you mention is an indirect result of this, imo, as well as to other losses.)
Lets see, who sells grievance and hostility, 24/7/365? Thinking here. Yup, the answer is, um Fox News.
You answered this before, many times: Fox News.
It's not any "one" thing, it's the combination of everything and the increased ability to amplify grievances through mass media and social media.
In addition, wages for white working class have risen, but there are a lot of pressures put on them since 2000 that they didn't have before: Retirement, health care costs, etc.
What’s causing discontent in this country is that reality, facts, and truth no longer matter to a sizable swath of citizens. ~40% of them prefer a siloed information system that sanitizes and rationalizes their preferred world view, reality be damned.
A politician that likes to “grab ‘em by the pu**y” = OK (because locker room talk)
A President who claims biggest Inauguration = OK (because alternate facts ok)
A President that obstructs an investigation = OK (because damn right he should)
A President who redraws a hurricane map = OK (because who really cares)
A President that extorts foreign military allies = OK (because read the transcript)
A President who insists there is no pandemic = OK (because meh, just old folks)
A President that incited a mob at the Capitol = OK (because hey, he’s out of office)
(later because, damn right he should)
A political movement this in lockstep against truth and dedicated to alternate realities is bound to cause a national schism.