rufus
rock and roller
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/a-disease-of-affluence/
The median US household income is $80,000. By most estimates, the median Trump voter’s is somewhat higher. This would be considered upper-middle class in most of Europe and upper-class in most of the world.
The country has recovered much faster than any peer nation from covid. It has pursued an aggressive full-employment, pro-labor economic policy that has seen rising wages, particularly at the bottom. The theory that growing income would overtake price increases, and inflation would be managed to a ‘soft landing’, has been clearly validated.
All this provides some context for why the poverty narrative was so easy to revert to for many. Also, I think it’s comforting: It validates people’s priors—it turns out all we needed to do was implement the exact policies they happened to favour anyway! It also lets us sidestep harder conversations (to which I will return). As much as anything though, it’s a morality play, one that emerges from our implicit frameworks and subconscious assumptions. Consider it in parallel to other explanations of the election: ‘it was a backlash to woke/cancel culture’; ‘young men are sick of feminism’, ‘the Democrats weren’t civil about Trump supporters’; and ‘Democrats shouldn’t have campaigned on trans rights.’ Notice that in all these narratives voters moving right are not granted any agency. They are just reacting to something liberals have done. As a result, liberals are implicitly assumed to bear responsibility for the outcome.
I call this ‘what did you say to make him hit you?’ politics. The implication is intentional: We tend to perceive both liberalism and the Democratic party as female-coded—the result of decades of heavily gendered use of language by conservatives. This filters into our assessment of moral responsibility (which is also gendered), in which we offer explanations for the bad behaviour of male-coded groups and shy away from direct condemnation. We are asked to ‘understand’ the perspective of those who shift to the right and cautioned against ‘dismissing’ them. Long narratives are concocted in which explanation fades into excuse.
But it isn’t true. The core of the MAGA base isn’t people who can’t afford enough $2 packs of pasta and $3 jars of tomato sauce to feed their children. I’m not saying that person doesn’t exist, but statistically they’re not representative. MAGA is someone who earns $70,000 a year and is angry that their overpriced Whole Foods costs a bit more. MAGA is someone who is angry that they might have to shift from buying their goods at a middle-class-coded supermarket to the cheaper, working-class-coded supermarket.
The American Republic has been pulled down, possibly past the point of no return, by affluent people. People who have lives their ancestors would have literally killed for. Who on average spend 10% of their pay on groceries, the lowest in the country’s history, not to mention human history. Who are lashing out at others at the slightest inconvenience, because they want to lash out at others.
Americans are prosperous, but without any deep sense of obligations to others. We are a highly commercial, individualist people, and when we let go of even a thin liberal conception of the public good, we become nasty, petty, small, vindictive and irrational. J.S. Mill, a philosopher who truly prized individual development, also warned of its dangers in isolation:
It's not that the middle-class professional family doesn’t know or care that the driver bringing them their food delivery makes what a British doctor does. I think when they are aware, they’re often quite angry about it. They like having the people who serve them be desperate. They see it as an insult that someone, in their eyes, so far beneath them is charging that much for their services. It matters little to them that they themselves earn what a British Member of Parliament does precisely because America pursued a bottom-up labor market strategy.
Abraham Lincoln prior to the Civil War argued against slavery not just on moral but economic grounds: large plantations would be displaced by free workers. A free society would be a more prosperous one. This, to slavery’s defenders, completely missed the point. John C. Calhoun, a proslavery senator, in a famous speech responded:Can as much, on the score of equality be said of the North? With us, the two great divisions of society are not rich and poor, but White and Black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected... and hence have a position and pride of character which either poverty nor misfortune can deprive them.
It wasn’t, for Calhoun, about absolute financial status, but about always having someone beneath you. This, I think, is the common impulse behind both Trump’s core support, and the marginal gains he’s made from Democrats with many groups. People use this quote to show how voters will often privilege social concerns over economic, symbolic goods over material. Clearly that is a big part of the story here: many Americans, including many non-white Americans, are deeply troubled by the prospect of a symbolically equal citizenry.
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