Friday, February 11, 2022
My friend Rita read my newsletter from Wednesday and sent me Thomas Edsal’s column on a similar theme that appeared in Wednesday’s New York Times. Definitely worth reading and sharing, if you have a Times subscription (or can otherwise get past the pay firewall). Edsall summarizes here a lot of recent academic work on the relationship between the growth of right-wing populism in Europe and America and status anxiety among less-educated, less-skilled working-class whites.
Status Anxiety Is Blowing Wind Into Trump’s Sails https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/09/opinion/trump-status-anxiety.html?referringSource=articleShare
One of the ironies in this overall theme, something that commentators have been aware of at least since the 2016 election, is that, although there’s a distinct economic element in white-working class resentment, right-wing populists, fueled by anger, seem to vote in ways contrary to their own economic interests. And they do so even when they’re aware that they’re voting against their own economic interests. In other words, partisan and racial identity now trump economics.
This is the subject of two excellent books that I’ve read, Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl (2019) and Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us (2021). Race and identity and anger and resentment seem to drive politics in ways that make nonsense of simple economic interests and policies. In Dying of Whiteness, Metzl, who is both a medical doctor and a sociologist, interviews poor white and terminally ill voters in Tennessee with no access to health care who have no regrets that their Republican-controlled state slammed the door on Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. Their explanation is that they don't want "their" tax dollars also going to Mexicans and "welfare queens": these are poor white Tennesseans dying of cancer without treatment who are still glad that Medicaid isn’t available to them in their state. The Sum of Us is an expansive look at how spending on all sorts of public goods in the U.S. plummeted after the civil rights era, and why Americans seem to have become so stingy when it comes to investments in education, infrastructure, heath care, and public services. McGhee’s conclusion is that lots of white Americans would rather do without “nice things” if they have to share them with nonwhites.
Some of this, though, just demonstrates how effective right-wing propaganda has been over several decades—how many people just assume, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Republicans manage the economy better than Democrats.