This, Strang suggests, is precisely what has happened to Trump. He has been chosen by God, and it shouldn’t really matter to evangelicals whether Trump is a Christian or has Christian values. The point is that he has been chosen to lead his supporters to power. To think otherwise is to ignore the common grace that God has given in his mercy. So, it is perhaps not surprising that Strang brings out his greatest invectives for Christian leaders like the Southern Baptist Russell Moore, who vocally opposed Trump during the campaign. Opposing Trump, Strang thinks, is tantamount to opposing the will of God.
The Logic of Status Threat
The question of why so many evangelicals supported Trump is just one instance of a larger question, one that was of clear interest to Arendt: why people support authoritarian leaders even when—and especially when—they are “willing to devour their own children.” Strang’s kind of answer, as we’ve seen, is solidly cultural, religious, and psychological, not economic. It is about identity and attitude, not money.
To some, however, this kind of explanation rings false for just this reason, particularly in the case of Trump. According to this counternarrative, the real reason people wanted to support Trump, the real reason they wanted to burn the house down, was not because he validated their attitudes, but because they are fundamentally frustrated with an economic system rife with inequality—a system that has rewarded coastal elites and left the rest of what coastal elites refer to as “flyover country” behind.
This economic explanation features prominently in a general and ongoing debate over strategy on the Left. According to one side of the debate, represented by political analyst Thomas Frank and others, a major reason that the Democrats lost the 2016 presidential election is that they assumed people were supporting Trump only out of racism or sexism.17 The thought is that this assumption led to two fundamental errors. First, by dismissing Trump voters as “deplorables”—to use Hillary Clinton’s notorious phrasing—progressives displayed an arrogant moral superiority that only served to galvanize the opposition.18 Second, by focusing solely on racist and sexist motivations, Democrats missed the single issue that galvanized followers of both Trump and Sanders: an economic power structure that benefits the elite over the vast majority of the working class. On this reading, Trump supporters were motivated to vote primarily because of economic class, not because of race, sex, gender, or other cultural issues. And ignoring that fact, according to this line of thought, continues to make the Left vulnerable.
There is no doubt that many Americans view those on the Left as arrogant know-it-alls looking down their nose at the rest of the country. Moreover, and as we’ll see later, there is more than an element of truth to this charge—although not, perhaps, for the reasons that some have thought. But the point I wish to make here is simpler—namely, that much of the debate over the 2016 election rests on the assumption that we must choose between either culture or the economy to explain why so much of white America voted for Trump. That is a false dilemma. There is a third choice: that the cultural and the economic explanations, both of which capture an element of the truth, are in fact different expressions of a more general fact. And interestingly, it is a fact that Strang’s analysis clearly supports as being explanatory: that many white Christian males voted for Trump because they felt that, in cultural and/or economic ways, the “American way of life” was under attack and they feared a perceived loss of status that would result.
The political scientist Diana Mutz has collected data over a wide-ranging series of studies that points to just this fact. Perceived threats to the “American way of life,” her studies show, were a reliable indicator of support for Trump in the 2016 election.19 In essence, Mutz argues, white Christian Americans who felt a threat to (1) their status in society and/or (2) the nation’s status in the world were most likely not only to vote for Trump but to do so even if they had previously voted Democratic. And significantly, the studies suggest that many of these voters had felt neither sort of status threat during previous elections. They had acquired one or both types over the last few years.
This point is important for two reasons. First, it goes against the received wisdom that political campaigns can’t (at least generally) give people new motivations to vote, but just make their existing motivations more salient (“It’s the economy, stupid!”). It suggests that the Trump campaign actually did succeed in motivating at least some voters in a new way: by encouraging fear of a loss of personal or national status. Second, it helps to explain why those voters who newly came to these motivations would vote for Trump. What it suggests, Mutz argues, is that people who came to experience status threat—who, in other words, were increasingly convinced of a threat to either personal status or national status—were prone to support the candidate who emphasized reestablishment of past hierarchies. For white people who were suddenly fearful, for example, that they were soon not going to be in the racial majority, or that whites were more discriminated against in the United States than blacks (yes, some people believe that), a candidate who promised to “make America great again” was intuitively appealing.
The crucial point here is that the status-threat explanation is consistent with the perceived threats coming from different sources. For some people, the greatest perceived threat may indeed be racial: fear of a future in which whites are no longer a majority of the population. For others, it might include gender-based fears: the fear by men of being supplanted by women in power roles. For others, that threat might, as the “left-behind” thesis suggests, be economic: the fear that global trade policies are undermining America’s ability to compete with other countries and thus maintain its status as the strongest economy in the world—an economy with stable jobs for, among others, white males. For still others, the perceived threat might consist in the fear that Christian values are no longer dominating discussions in the public sphere. Or it might be a combination of all of these.
What links these fears, what makes them similar, is that they are each, in their different way, a reaction to a real or perceived threat to the cultural status of certain interlocking groups of voters. And Mutz’s point—and I think, interestingly, also Strang’s—is that this threat to status is what matters most, for the simple reason that, as her data suggests, its presence continues to predict support for Trump whether or not, for example, one has experienced economic hardship or personally felt discriminated against as a white person.
Status threat does not require the kind of overt racism or sexism consisting of explicit beliefs that minorities or women are morally or intellectually inferior. Most Trump voters indignantly reject the idea that they are racist or sexist in this overt sense—and rightly point out that they are no more overtly racist or sexist than are many liberals.20 Overt racism and sexism can be beside the point when it comes to status threat. Threats to racial status can be felt simply on the basis of more subtle kinds negative racial, religious, or gender attitudes—for example, the perception that women or minorities are “sufficiently powerful to be a threat to the status quo.”21 As Mutz’s research reveals, the same “individuals who perceive whites as more discriminated against than minorities also see Christians and men as experiencing greater discrimination than Muslims or women, despite the former groups’ dominant status.”22
During the Trump campaign, these feelings were brilliantly distilled not only by “Make America Great Again” but by “America First,” which turned out to be another usefully ambiguous slogan. Initially, commentators treated it as expressing a simple isolationist mind-set—an endorsement of the policy that elected officials should look after the national interest, and should put it above the interests of other nations (perhaps, as some have thought, because the United States is “exceptional” or “historically unique”). But for Trump and many of his most ardent followers, the “first” in “America First” means simply “the winner” or “the best.”
Understood in this way, “America First” doesn’t state a policy; it expresses an atti
tude: that America is superior—not just as a matter of contingent historical fact, but intrinsically. The nation is tarnished, perhaps, by years of Democratic leadership, and in need of a bit of Trumpian polish to let its gold leaf shine through; but it is the best, the most winning, just the same. To understand the phrase “America First” in this way is to see it, like “tells it like it is,” as emotionally expressive—not an endorsement or statement in any intellectual sense; it expresses an attitude that has, paradoxically, become more entrenched in American culture even as events make it harder to rationally justify. And the attitude extends beyond just the political realm—all the way, for many whites, to cultural identity itself. America’s true greatness lies in its having created the greatest way of life that could ever be—a way seen hazily in beer commercials, in which white Christian Americans play a privileged part. A threat to that image—whether real or just perceived—therefore creates anxiety.
This kind of anxiety can itself encourage resentment. Hochschild offers a perceptive analogy. It is as if conservative whites in the United States see themselves as having been patiently waiting in line for the American dream. But as they wait, they hear that other people—many of them looking very different from them—are “cutting in line.” Moreover, various people far ahead of them in line—richer people who live on the coasts, perhaps—are holding spots for these other, browner people. Seeing this, they seethe with resentment. And they seethe even more when people farther up in line tell them to stop feeling resentment. By this analysis, Trump is like a person already at the head of the line who calls back and validates your feelings and promises to hold your place in the line and to prevent line cutters from taking that place away from you. It doesn’t matter that he isn’t much like you—that he is, in fact, more like the people you resent. Indeed, it helps; that’s what gets him his place farther up the line.
The analogy with standing in line is illuminating for several different reasons. It helps to explain the kind of resentment at play among many supporters of Trump in this country. And it explains the willingness to believe Trump’s repeated insistence that his wealth is what makes him the best man for the job—because if the job is reaching back and helping largely white voters to cut in line, it does.
But there is another point here, not emphasized by Hochschild but suggested by the analogy of the line cutter: Trump voters’ resentment stems from the perception that they have lost their rightful place farther up the line. If you know (or think you do) that you deserve to be farther up the line than you are, then of course you’ll feel angry at anyone ahead of you, and you’ll look for explanations. And you’ll put tremendous stock in those explanations, treating them not just as guesses, or even just as beliefs. They’ll become convictions, part of your self-identity. When people criticize you for holding them and for being resentful, you’ll be defensive. It will seem like you are under attack, like people are telling you what to feel. But the idea that you’ve lost your rightful place in line assumes that there was such a thing as a “rightful” place to begin with. The idea that there are rightful starting places, and that some people have one that is farther ahead than other people who are not white, is one of the oldest racial tropes there is—and one of the most dangerous. When liberals criticize Trump voters’ resentment, they are reacting to that trope. They are saying that white people shouldn’t feel resentment because they are white.
Naturally, that is not how many Trump voters regard the basis of their resentment. They’ve worked for what they have. They should be farther along than they are. These are reasonable views, and thus, as we’ve noted, it is entirely reasonable to think that income inequality also generates status threat—either on its own or mixed up with racial fears. What’s important is not to fall into thinking that it is either just identity/cultural issues or the economy that explains white support for Trump. The better explanation points to attitudes that both issues can encourage. And tellingly, the sociological analysis (from the outside) dovetails with Strang’s analysis (from the inside) of why Trump voters are filled with resentment and anxiety. The point in both cases is that many whites supporting Trump do so because of their attitudes—because they fear they’ve lost their rightful place in line and are anxious and angry because of that fear.
These very attitudes, together with the internal logic of status-threat anxiety, feed authoritarian politics. Arendt is clear on this point: “Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people are surrounded by ‘a world of enemies,’ ‘one against all,’ that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others.” Yet at the same time, “it claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others.”23 In other words, the language of nationalism is a language that speaks to status anxiety; it is the language of tribal arrogance.
Arrogance, Ignorance, and Contempt
I want to be clear about the arguments I am, and am not, making here. What I’ve been arguing is that the rise of nationalism and authoritarian politics is often related to the rise of a widely shared defensive psychosocial attitude—status threat. Status threat, I’ve claimed, is explanatorily distinct, but often stems from, either economic fears or racist fears or both. Those who feel status threat are apt to identify with political ideologies and narratives that encourage tribal arrogance, that promise a return to greatness, and that remind them they are really superior and deserve to be at the head of the line. And as Arendt has pointed out, such ideologies of arrogance are deeply dangerous.
What I’m not saying is that all conservative-leaning Americans have actively embraced this political viewpoint or feel status threat to begin with. The existence of conservative resistors to Trump—both within and without the administration—should make that obvious. Many conservative intellectuals—from Ross Douthat, to David Brooks, to Arthur Brooks and Jonah Goldberg—have been keen to distinguish political conservatism from the nationalist politics defended by Trump and his followers. Indeed, the distinction between more traditional conservatism and the ideologies of arrogance that I’ve been discussing is crucial, because we are still in the midst of a battle over cultural narratives. It behooves both sides of any war—literal or cultural—to declare that everyone is firmly committed to one side or the other. But that is almost never the case. Rather, many people will only lean slightly one way or the other. So if you want to win the culture war, or even defuse it, you need to understand that fact; you need to realize that the war is fought in the trenches of conviction. That is, it is fought over whose narratives can turn weakly held beliefs into strong convictions.
As opposed to middle-of-the-road conservatives, many on the far Right, I think, see this very clearly. They have sucked the nectar of arrogance and embrace its distortion of truth as a friend. A good example is the kind of conspiracy theory that pops up after virtually any act of violence associated with ultraconservative causes. In Chapter 2 we saw one such conspiracy—Pizzagate—but an even better example for present purposes is the one that sprang up immediately following the August 2017 events in Charlottesville.
In the second week of that month, neo-Nazis marched on the University of Virginia campus, shouting, “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and Soil” (a historical Nazi slogan). They were there ostensibly to protest plans by the city of Charlottesville to remove a memorial to Robert E. Lee. The next day a white man drove his Dodge into a crowd of counterprotestors, killing thirty-two-year-old antiracism protestor Heather Heyer. Almost immediately following these events, it was reported that Alex Jones of Infowars suggested that the murder and, indeed, the “Unite the Right” rally itself were actually staged “false-flag” attacks coordinated by the “deep state” and (Jewish) billionaire George Soros.24 The neo-Nazis were actually paid actors, Jones was reported to have claimed, as was the man who used his car as a murder weapon. To the surprise of no one, this theory spread throughout the dark corners of the internet, but it was also picked up by more mainstream voices, including se
veral Republican congressmen. Arizona Representative Paul Gosar, for example, was reported to have said in an interview, “Maybe [the rally] was created by the left” and, in another interview, “proof will be coming” that Soros was behind Unite the Right.25
This is all weird enough; the claim, after all, is that liberal activists would pose as Nazis and then kill one of their own under the same pretension. But it is just one instance of a far-Right political strategy that explicitly fans the flames of a wider cultural narrative about monuments to white soldiers who fought on behalf of the Confederacy. To many whites in the South, these statues represent not only their heritage but that of the whole region. But to others—including African Americans whose ancestors were slaves—these same statues celebrate a cultural and political movement that protected, and indeed fought for, slavery. The debate showcases the overall point of the last two chapters: that blind convictions form as a result of larger cultural narratives and that political ideologies can push people into acting on behalf of these narratives—often violently. What the advocacy on the far Right of conspiracy theories shows is that these ideologically fueled narratives work in part by encouraging narratives of tribal arrogance—a sense of certainty about the nature of the world that excuses and indeed, encourages, distortions of obvious facts.
We can begin to unpack this claim by examining the attitude of intellectual arrogance—and especially tribal arrogance—in more detail.
As I noted at the outset of this book, arrogance isn’t simply about misjudging self-worth; it is based on a self-delusion about its basis. While the intellectually arrogant think their felt superiority is due to their knowledge, it actually reflects a defensive concern for their self-esteem.
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