David Brooks has come close to figuring out what is going on, which is an accomplishment. Yet, he still has some mileage to go before he reaches true understanding.
He’s identified many of the sources of alienation among rural and non-college educated Americans, particularly white people: their jobs are less secure, their already low status is under threat, their religious beliefs are no longer ascendent, their communities are hollowed up, they’re suffering through a health and drug crisis, and the rules of the game seemed stacked against them.
But nowhere does he mention fascism. He simply wants to know why right-wingers seem to be suddenly much more predisposed to believing utter bullshit than left-wingers, since this can’t be explained by technological change alone.
Brooks recognizes that right-wing propaganda feeds a need.
For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.
With that, Brooks has arrived at the explanation but simply walks right past it.
The right is filling this need and the left is not. Perhaps the collapse of international communism in the 1990’s has something to do with it, or maybe the waning power and de-radicalization of the labor movement is by itself an adequate cause. The key is that communities that used to be so organized around opposition to remote, capitalists’ control of their lives that they stuck with Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis when no one else would, are now organized around radical Facebook groups. While they used to explain their powerlessness through a hard-left prism, they now explain it through a hard-right one.
When right-wing populism is the only populism on the menu, what you get is fascism. The reason is simple. The populism is pretty much inevitable, especially whenever things take a turn for the worse. The question is whether this populism will be tamed or weaponized. When you’re talking about minority populations, often in urban areas, the populism can be weaponized in the service of social activism and the power of the state will tame the excesses. But when you’re dealing with an ethnic and religious majority group, if it’s not organized around economic issues then it will be organized around nativism and nationalism, and the state power will often take their side.
It’s not that the left can be blamed for the growth of white nationalism and the rotted brain of the Republican Party. It’s more that the left isn’t a passive spectator with no agency over the problem. Many of the left’s virtues contribute to the problem. If you’re unwilling to provide your own baseless conspiracy theories and cherry-picked explanations for people’s woes, then you’ve left the marketplace of ideas to people less scrupulous. When you value reasoned discourse above all else, you easily overestimate its persuasive powers and feed the alienation between yourselves and the downtrodden communities that increasingly despise and distrust you.
The right is filling this vacuum out of pure need. They can’t find their votes any other way. And, since their demographic problems only grow more challenging, they actually have to feed the paranoia and resentment to get the same results. In simplistic form, they want white people to vote with racial self-consciousness so they can win a greater share of their votes, but this is done by creating distrust in every honest messenger who might challenge their phony facts.
The left finds it curious that this is so effective, but also as proof that these voters are unreachable and, often, unworthy of their outreach or help. That doesn’t solve the problem, but rather serves as an accelerant. It makes it easier to convince folks that the left is not on their side, and it solidifies right-wing nationalism as the only populism on offer.
My formula is that when the left abandons or gives up on a struggling ethnic majority population, the inevitable result is fascism. The clearest sign of the disease is a sudden lack of faith in the legitimacy of elections and the underpinning principles of representative democracy. Longstanding norms fall away with shocking ease. Lawbreaking can be pardoned with impunity. Civil and human rights protections are instruments of weakness and oppression. The organs of that the state that protect the embattled majority are given carte blanche to beat down ascendent minority populations.
The left watches this stupefied, wondering how things can slip away so quickly and with so little resistance. A good part of the right –the educated part– has the same reaction.
It’s not actually a giant mystery. People are not rational. They’re highly suggestible. When their passions run high, those passions need to be addressed and channelled. Good policy can keep passions from running high in the first place, but they’re near powerless to put out a populist fire once it has begun to spread.
The modern, technocratic Democratic Party has no clue how to put out this fire, and is mostly opposed (for some fairly virtuous reasons) from even making the attempt. But the left is bigger than the Democratic Party, and they have grown too weak in rural and non-college educated white America.
To solve this problem, the left has to understand that these communities will only get more threatening if no one is willing to fight back. They will get more racist and more violent. They will become more impervious to facts and more hostile to experts. And they’ll be less supportive of democratic institutions and restraints on state power. Leaving them to the right is not an option. Fighting back with the rules of the academy and the newsroom hasn’t worked, and it won’t work in the future.
The left needs to get organized from within these communities, not from without. The reason I’ve talked about antitrust enforcement so much in this context is because it’s both what these people need and because labor unions have grown too weak and placid to do the job themselves.
Most of all, people need to understand that this is how you fight fascism without guns. Eventually, we’ll have to fight them either way.
I don’t know that this is for sure true, Martin. Keep in mind that this is not just a US problem but is all over the world. The shift of the educated moving to left wing parties has been ongoing for decades, and similarly international, and only Barack Obama was able to reverse or pause the trend of non-college whites moving to Republicans.
But Obama aside, he was also in power before media environment shifted (or from another POV, he perpetuated and contributed to the shifts by allowing mergers and anti-competitive behavior). We also have evidence that when rural broadband and 3G internet reaches ancestral Democratic areas, they move to the right.
I’m not agreeing that “the internet” causes fascism. Fascism existed and thrived aplenty before its invention. But perhaps what is actually happening is that these voters are learning through the internet they don’t agree with the Democrats at all, on policy or partisanship, and are embracing and demanding the fascism Republicans are willing to feed them.
If you want to put a feather in your cap, however, this thread by Sarah Jones is interesting in how it intersects with everything:
https://twitter.com/onesarahjones/status/1333103149406629891?s=21
The communities in my region were served by two hospitals and one medical center (each with their own set of urgent care centers) when I first moved here. One was run by a conglomerate. The other hospital was locally run, as was the fairly sizeable medical center. The conglomerate already in the area bought up the medical center a few years ago. Not long afterwards, a conglomerate bought up the other hospital. I’ve noticed since then that urgent care is a bit more understaffed, and that some high-skilled specialists have headed elsewhere. So, a bit of decline in health care services has followed. Don’t get me wrong. The staff I interact with are almost to a person conscientious and competent. But getting in to a doctor (especially if you need a specialist), etc., is definitely more of a challenge. I’m sure the locals have noticed, and with it a loss of trust perhaps. I dunno.
who is it on “the left” that has resources to do anything? as opposed to the Democratic Party, which is deeply hostile to anything resembling left-wing populism.
and I cannot see any signs that the “god guns & gays” faction is persuadable with economic arguments. You’re going to offer antitrust enforcement to people who are calling you a baby-killer?
That subset that was always right-wing authoritarian has always been and always will be unreachable, wherever they reside. Even a cursory reading of the social science research on authoritarianism should drive that point home. That predates Trump and will continue long after Trump. I’m less interested in that faction (which probably amounts to about 25-30 percent of the population) than those who are skeptical about the Democratic Party but who might be willing to give someone with a D next to their name a listen. How that ends up working? No idea, honestly. I live in a state that did have a tradition of agrarian populism prior to the Red Scares at the end of WWI. We’re so removed from that era that I’m not sure how to reconnect to that, even, and how to keep that from being demonized into something it wasn’t.
“when the left abandons or gives up on a struggling ethnic majority population, the inevitable result is fascism.”
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applied to the UK, I think this explains why the much-maligned Jeremy Corbyn wouldn’t make Labour the anti-Brexit party. Older poorer white people still voted Labour and he wouldn’t run against them.
Wasn’t Biden supposed to be the answer?
Maybe it’s time we showed them what it really means to be under siege.
I think this is accurate, and wearing my Pessimist hat, I believe it is just too late.
They’ve believed in the delusions fed to them by their right-wing handlers for so long that to admit that they’ve been lied to, and that they’re just useful idiots for their idols would be just too much to come to terms with.
No amount of “reason” is going to turn these people back to objective, observable reality.
We have to tell them that we’re going to help them specifically, mention that it’s going to help everyone else as a side effect, and then literally just do it. Which means we need at least 50 Senators, the House, and the White House.
What we do matters. It MUST immediately help them. Anything less is just fodder for conspiracy theories about how Bill Gates and Ben Ghazi are implanting them with a gay gene, right before we come and finally take all of their guns.
MASSIVE Stimulus, no means testing, DIRECTLY to people. $10,000 to every US Adult. Forgive all student loan debt, with massive tax credits for everyone else, say $100,000 (meaning no more Federal taxes for the vast majority of Americans, at least for a few years). And changing the tax system so that you don’t pay a nickel of Federal taxes until after you’re making $50,000 or more.
Also… STOP. TALKING. ABOUT. GUN. CONTROL. That fucking ship sailed decades ago. It’s never going to happen. Just stop.
I like this. Call the $10K Biden Bucks. Raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hr and call it the “Biden Bump”. Pass an expansion of Obamacare to include a public option called Bidencare. If the senate won’t pass it make sure people know who to blame. Pass stricter laws against corporations that hide their earnings offshore, move jobs overseas, and engage in anticompetitive behavior. Every day, figure out a way to show people that the president is doing something to help them.
Free cash for everyone, no more Federal Income taxes for people earning under $50k, tax credits for everyone else, forgive student loan debt, raise the minimum wage to $15, Medicare enrollment for everyone who wants in.
Nuke the filibuster, do that. If it doesn’t bring back any “rural white” voters, then they’re fucking lost and we just have to outlive them.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see more anti-trust populism on our side, but I’m not sure that these people are even close to voting issues- They are voting their identity, which is increasingly synonymous with “Republican”. Unfortunately, an irresponsible (and profit driven) propaganda apparatus has succeeding in convincing them that they are under attack, which is traditionally how fascism gets going. Defending their group becomes the primary goal and then they are very easily manipulated by all those that seek power and profit,
I’m not sure that any policy action is key to reaching these people- because anything that conflicts with the goals of the billionaires will never make it through the propaganda filter intact. Even if you make their lives better, by the time the talking heads on the screen get finished screaming about it, they will hate you for it (See: the ACA) I think arguably the better solution might be to deal with the right wing propaganda arm and the billionaires that own it first.
This is all true but what explains rural areas in, say, South Korea moving right. They don’t have guns there. Or a Murdoch funded media. Something else is happening beyond what we see on the surface.
There are a limited amount of natural resources on the planet at any given time. Everyone everywhere are watching oligarchs buying everything up and renting it out to everyone else.
The move to the right is because the “left” has become the status quo…neoliberalism itself is kind of the standard. And they don’t care that the right is accelerating it, because the right is lying through their teeth saying they’re fighting it.
Close Fox News and all the imitators. Fire Rush. Getting rid of the oxygen puts out the fire. Also, asking Dems to sidle up to deplorables is alike asking the abused wife to go back to their abusive spouse.
I’m going to dissent here, for a few reasons:
1) Historically, how often has left-wing populism been an animating force for rural working classes? I’m going with “not very often”. There are relevant twentieth century counter-examples that emerged from the Great Depression (the New Deal in the US, and Maoism in China). But most leftist movements throughout history emerged from the urban poor and middle classes. Moreover, many of the attempts of leftists to pander to the rural poor were just laughably bad (Going to the People, anyone?).
2) How we can have this discussion without mentioning religion is completely insane. There’s a huge cultural schism in this country and it goes a lot further than conservative intellectuals whining about political correctness. At the core of this divide is religion and religious identity. You might note that religious identity in the US is collapsing in virtually every ethnic group and in virtually every socioeconomic stratus, and that is true. But there’s a notable exception: white evangelical protestantism.
Evangelicals are concentrated in rural areas, and declining in most cities. Many evangelicals believe a lot of outre shit, as far as mainstream religion is concerned. Many churches are staunchly opposed to the values of the enlightenment, so reason as a means of persuasion is completely useless. And it goes without saying, that white evangelicals as a whole are firmly in support of Trump, who they believe has fought hard for their interests despite his own personal shortcomings (see: “White Evangelicals See Trump as Fighting for Their Beliefs, Though Many Have Mixed Feelings About His Personal Conduct”).
Fixing economic problems in rural America is a worthy cause on its merits. But let’s not assume that there will be a significant political benefit for doing so. After all, we saw the response to ACA.
Oh hell lets just drop money from a helicopter. That might work for awhile until inflation eats it all up and Pastor John tells us it is all socialism so, of course, it can’t work: people gotta work you know.
My money’s on guns. We could conceivably turn back from this, but I’ve been convinced for several years now that at least some blood is going to flow before people get shocked back into their proper senses. The money driving this societal schism with nonstop misinformation and propaganda does not sleep, does not tire, never even naps, and is as ruthless as it is unrelenting. It will reap an inevitable result. I sorely wish I believed things were otherwise, because I don’t like our chances with what’s coming–especially considering how we’re dealing with what’s right here in front of us.