by Bruce Hood
One common assumption is that Trump rose to power because of economic hardship experienced by his core voters. It is true that inequality in the Midwest Rust Belt, where Trump enjoys the strongest support, has increased as traditional industries in the region have been devastated by technological innovation and competition from cheaper foreign imports. In the past few decades, increased globalization has spurred these economic shifts. It is ironic, then, that the poor voted for someone who comes from the wealthiest 1 per cent of society who have all benefitted from globalization at the expense of domestic workers.
According to the economic hardship perspective, this inequality, rising economic insecurity and social deprivation among the left-behinds has fuelled resentment of the political establishment in not being represented or in control of their destiny. It is certainly true that much of Trump’s voter base includes this sector of society, but economic hardship alone does not explain why populism has also gained wide support across Europe as well. Nor does it explain why populist support is generally stronger among the older generation, males, the less educated and the religious.
The explanation comes down to fear. Most people aren’t authoritarian, but they can easily become so. One reason is uncertainty for the future, which makes people more inclined towards the obedience and authority appeal of the far right. In their analysis of the current political environment, psychologists Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt concluded that a third of adults across Europe and the US were predisposed to authoritarianism, while 37 per cent were non-authoritarian and 29 per cent were neutral.32 However, when we feel we are under threat or perceive that our moral values are being eroded, we shut down our openness and prefer individuals with power. For example, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, national surveys found no change in attitudes to civil liberties among US citizens who already scored high on measures of authoritarianism. Rather, the perceived threat led to increased support for more aggressive and restrictive policies among those who had previously been more liberal.33 Those who sit on the fence when it comes to politics are easily pushed over to the right when they are frightened.
This shift in response to threat is argued to be one of the main reasons why the majority of otherwise liberal Germans supported the rise of the Nazis, as a backlash against the economic hardship they faced after the First World War.34 The reason people react like this is that they cannot easily cope with uncertainty. Across a wide range of studies of both humans and non-humans, conditions of uncertainty produce psychological and physiological stress. This uncertainty triggers the so-called ‘fight or flight’ response, an evolutionary preparation for action that, if not resolved one way or the other, produces chronic anxiety. In times of uncertainty, we seek reassurance from leaders who articulate a strong, resolute vision to compensate for our own weakness. This partly explains the support for individuals like Trump. ‘Often mistaken but never in doubt’ is considered a virtue in such climates. This hypothesis received support in a study of 140,000 voters, across sixty-nine countries over the past two decades, which revealed that those experiencing the greatest economic hardship voted for populist candidates unless they reported a strong personal sense of control.35 However, economics still does not explain why Trump also received the support of rich, white males for whom hardship was not a primary concern.
Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist, argues that, in addition to economic inequality, we are witnessing the effects of a reaction against post-materialism that began in the 1970s.36 For much of human history there has been constant conflict and economic uncertainty, which leads to frugal and cautious behaviour. Following the end of the Second World War, industrialized countries, especially the US, experienced a sustained economic boom that lasted from 1945 to the recession in the early 1970s, a period commonly known as the Golden Age of Capitalism. When Trump talks about ‘making America great again’, he is referring to this period of prosperity. The majority of the workforce during this time was made up of individuals born between 1925 and 1945 who are known as the silent generation because, having experienced the austerity of the war years as well as the insecurity of the post-war years linked to the threat of nuclear Armageddon, they were more cautious than their parents.
As the major wage earners in the workforce during this period, the silent generation invested in material possessions and provision for stability through investments and financial planning. However, the generation that followed did not share the same values. By the 1960s, the children of the silent generation were rebelling against their parents’ values. These were the teenagers and twenty-something baby boomers who represented the counterculture. Many of them became political activists, resisting authority, control or convention. As a consequence there was an intergenerational shift from those who survived years of uncertainty to those who grew up taking their security for granted. This was a post-materialist movement that was less materialistic, less conformist, less authoritarian, more secular and more sexually diverse, and which valued human rights, equality and self-expression over the establishment. This counterculture of the 1960s railed against the establishment, but eventually the frenzied activism was replaced by a period of relative calm in the 1970s when the world recession hit. Inglehart contends, however, that during this period of apparent inactivity, a ‘silent revolution’ backlash was brewing among the older generation, who saw these social changes in the younger generation as a threat to their traditional materialist values.
According to Stenner and Haidt, things changed too fast for the older generation, as ‘Western liberal democracies have now exceeded many people’s capacity to tolerate them’.37 Among this group, progressive change is perceived as moral decline. Moreover, as we noted in the Prologue, declinism – the tendency to view the past more favourably through rose-tinted nostalgia and fear for the future – is also more prevalent in older generations. For example, the market research company YouGov reported that most UK citizens they surveyed in 2012 thought that since the Queen’s coronation in 1953 Britain had changed for the worse, with the greatest proportion endorsing this negative view among the over sixties.38 However, when the pollsters asked whether the quality of life for the average person had improved, respondents overwhelmingly agreed that it had. People can objectively recognize better healthcare, better education and a better quality of life but this does not translate into an appreciation that things are getting better overall. When asked whether the world was getting better in a second poll in 2016, only 11 per cent thought the future would be better, with 58 per cent saying that it was getting worse.39 Again, the older participants were, the more pessimistic their responses. As the witty columnist Franklin P. Addams noted, ‘Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.’
A silent revolution would explain why older members of society voted for populist politicians. In their analysis of the shifting political landscape, Inglehart and his colleague Pippa Norris discovered that the economic hardship account could not explain all the data they analysed from the demographics of voters for 268 political parties in 31 European countries.40 Rather, there was more consistent evidence for a cultural backlash against post-materialism and the changing social values that engendered:
We believe that these are the groups most likely to feel that they have become strangers from the predominant values in their own country, left behind by progressive tides of cultural change which they do not share. Older white men with traditional values – who formed the cultural majority in Western societies during the 1950s and 1960s – have seen their predominance and privilege eroded. The silent revolution of the 1970s appears to have spawned an angry and resentful counter-revolutionary backlash today.41
If populism reflects deep resentment of big business, banking, multinationals, the media, government, intellectual elites, scientific experts and the privileged rich, then it is somewhat ironic that much of this list resonates with the anti-establishment attitudes of the post-materialist movement. The similarity of gr
ievances, however, makes more sense when the issues are considered from the perspective of ownership. Each generation wants to take back control of the values they hold most dear from the current generation who seem to be squandering them.
CAN YOU OWN AN IDEA?
We usually think of property as material possessions but, increasingly, our understanding of property reflects an appreciation that immaterial things can also be owned. With the rapid expansion of digital technology into everyday life over the last twenty years, consumers are increasingly aware of how easy it is to create and own information that forms the basis of original ideas such as songs, images and stories. These used to be stored on physical media such as vinyl, film and paper but now they are patterns of noughts and ones stored as computer code. In the past pirates stole physical things, but now simply downloading or copying a file of code can be theft of intellectual property.
Intellectual property has been legally protected – and disputed – for hundreds of years. In one of the first documented cases of copyright infringement, dating back to the sixth century, an Irish missionary, St Columba, copied a religious text belonging to St Finnian, who demanded the copy back. Finnian petitioned and received the support of King Diarmait, who ruled, ‘To every cow belongs her calf, therefore to every book belongs its copy.’ However, Columba was undeterred and argued that no one could own the word of God. With the support of the O’Neill clan, the dispute escalated and resulted in the battle of Cúl Dreimhne (also known as the Battle of the Book) in c.560 CE and the loss of 3,000 lives.
Today, intellectual property disputes are less bloody but much more common. In 2017, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued 347,642 patents, most to protect intellectual property. We not only recognize the legal ownership of intellectual property, but we despise those who plagiarize others’ ideas. Often the complaint is financial, but for many claimants it is also a matter of pride and principle. For example, consider one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time, the structure of DNA. Teams of scientists from the universities of Cambridge (Watson and Crick), London (Franklin and Wilson) and the California Institute of Technology (Pauling) raced against each other to be the first to discover the double helix. Rather than working together, they competed to claim the prize at the cost of personal conflicts and dubious professional conduct. Scientists are notoriously sensitive about who can claim the right of discovery even when there is no financial gain involved. The venom directed at those who take credit for someone else’s ideas conveys the extent to which plagiarism is considered a despicable act.
Even children intuitively understand the basics of intellectual property from around six years of age, as they tend to dislike ‘copycats’. They prefer those who draw their own pictures, compared to those who copy, and value original ideas over effort.42 In one study, a group of six-year-olds was asked to value pictures where either an adult or the child provided the idea of what to draw, or where they simply provided the labour. Irrespective of who actually drew the picture, they preferred those pictures with original concepts.43 Even when the output has no material content, young children have a concept of intellectual ownership. When they are told that Steven hears Zack talking about a mathematics problem he is trying to solve, and provides Zack with the answer, children reason that Steven is the owner of the solution. If Tim overhears Steven explaining the answer to Zack and tells other members of the class, six-year-olds think Tim has stolen the idea. Likewise, if one child comes up with a story, then it is not acceptable for another child to change the ending.44
Despite this concern for the ownership of ideas from an early age, there really is no such thing as an original idea. Take a moment and try to think of one. You can’t logically, because all ideas are preceded by earlier ideas that have come from someone else. Like the ancestral lands of the North American indigenous peoples, there has always been someone there before you. Somehow intellectual property lawyers must establish that the idea you claim ownership over is sufficiently different to any pre-existing ideas, and that really comes down to a judgement call. Even if there is a pre-existing idea, it has to be recognized as such in order to be judged as the original.
Figments of the imagination can be property too. Not only do people spend around $165 billion on video games, but some are prepared to spend considerable amounts of money acquiring virtual property. The current record is for a virtual property, ‘Club Neverdie’, located on a virtual asteroid, in a virtual universe, that sold for $635,000 in 2010. Before you question who in their right mind would pay that amount for something that does not exist in reality, the club was earning an average of $200,000 per year for its owner, Jon Jacobs, from players who bought virtual goods and services. According to Forbes magazine, Jacobs bought the virtual asteroid back in 2005 for $100,000, after taking out a mortgage on his real-life house.45
What about our digital property? If someone takes your picture in the street, do they own your image? Like selling body parts, it depends on where in the world you are. In many countries photography in public places is considered acceptable, whereas in other countries you require the permission or consent of the person being photographed. You can look at other people, but you can’t record that experience as a photograph.
Probably the most surprising (and, for many, the most worrying) development in intellectual property concerns ownership of personal data. In 2014, Facebook was criticized for conducting an experiment on 700,000 unsuspecting users where the company manipulated the content of the news feed to present either happier or sadder stories.46 When positive stories were reduced, Facebook users produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative stories were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. Even though the effect was very small, the researchers concluded that, given Facebook’s scale, this would have corresponded to hundreds of thousands of emotional expressions per day.
The concern was that people’s choices were being covertly manipulated and controlled by others. In 2016, the personal information of 50 million Facebook users was stolen by a data analysis company, Cambridge Analytica, in order to influence the outcome of the Brexit vote in the UK and to propel Donald Trump into power in the US – or at least that was the claim.47 Here the property of value was the list of users and their friends that enabled targeted marketing strategies, which were believed to influence voting by ‘psychographic’ manipulation. Despite the media frenzy surrounding Cambridge Analytica and the paranoia of psychographics, there is very little scientific evidence that people’s choices could be so easily controlled.48 Much like the myth of subliminal messages, where it was claimed that cinema audiences bought more popcorn or soda when a brief image of the item was inserted into a frame in the movie without them noticing,49 there is no good evidence that either consumers’ or voters’ choices can be swayed by such subterfuge.50
It is not so much that we are being manipulated by advertising that offends (because most of us realize when it is happening), but rather we become indignant when we think our personal data has been taken and used without our consent – a violation of ownership. In truth, we have been giving it away for years. Digital companies who provide us with ‘free’ services, in the forms of platforms, games and all the other amazing software that is readily available today, make money out of the personal data we give them. And we willingly consent to this. When you sign up for some online service or download an app on to your smartphone, then it is highly likely that, buried within those ‘Terms and Conditions’ that you need to assent to in order to access the service, there will be a series of statements allowing the service providers to harvest, process and store your personal data. How the data will be used has to be described, but very few of us have the time, inclination or legal knowledge to decode the pages and pages of legal jargon – so we simply tick the box saying that we accept the terms and conditions. This data can be used or sold on to other companies that analyse how people vary and how they behave. Such data is extremely valuable because it enables
companies to discover patterns and trends that can be used to shape commercial strategies. In the past, this market research was very expensive and limited as it required individuals to conduct the sampling and surveys, but with digital technology it is trivially easy, if somewhat overwhelming in the sheer volume of data we provide. That’s one of the reasons why digital companies can become so valuable, even though they do not charge for their services. If a service is free, then you and your personal data are the product.
Every time we use our smartphones, we can be tracked in terms of what we do, where we go and who we speak to. There are laws that are meant to protect us, but if we tick the consent box then these companies are acting perfectly legally. In fact, not many of us seem to care that much, at least not until our attention is drawn to the fact that these companies are in the business of data mining. Recently, it has become a legal right to take back ownership of your personal data by having it removed or deleted, so that you can be effectively ‘invisible’ online, but aside from the hassle, in doing so you will lose out on the conveniences and benefits these companies provide. It’s the price we pay to be part of the digital generation.