The Crack-Up of the Michigan GOP

I think the good old terms “petit bourgeois” and “grand bourgeois” might help the analysis more than “business class.” This emphasizes that the management class–although pretty wealthy itself and undeniably part of the “business class”–is not part of the MAGA movement. Rich MAGAts own private firms, rather than manage public companies and answer to a board. Compare the MAGAt-y Cliff Assness to Jamie Dimon.

“The mainstream media often identifies the core Trumpist constituency with the ‘white working class’–i.e., white non-college voters. This interpretation makes too much of the idea that economic precarity and working-class economic grievance drives the Trump vote. Political scientists have been refuting that idea for years.”

It is commonplace for academics and their popularizers in the media to use a definition of working class as someone who doesn’t have a college degree, but with all due respect this is a misleading approach. I suggest working class voters are those families have to work for a living because they don’t have income generating property for people who will hire or fire them according to how much profits they are making, said profits being greater when they are paid less. (The question of class status for those whose “income” from sale of a house is vexed.) This is not original (I am almost never original) but I think such an approach would be vastly more useful.

In particular, the notion that economic precarity and working class economic grievance are phrases that naturally belong together, seems to be an error fostered by this false definition of working class. The car dealership owners, the pharmacist owner or physician who’s been buying real estate for years, the real estate developers, the local merchant, all these diverse kinds of petty bourgeois, can be economically precarious. Indeed, my reading of history strongly suggests that it is those who have a little property and money already who are most apt to rage at the prospect of losing it, or even at the thought of falling behind their dreams.

In an indirectly related error, the notion that Trumpery is driven by votes of the masses is incorrect I think. Trumpery is driven first and foremost by the truly rich, not just those who have been donating directly in campaigns, but funding, for instance, the policy institutes designing the New Order/Neue Gleichschaltung. The votes were carefully cultivated by massive investments in the media owned by the big bourgeois. Trying to “explain” Trumpery’s electoral successes, ignoring the equally carefully cultivated confusion about who won the votes and who won the election, by mass psychology seems better suited to me to producing more confusion.

And lastly, similarly, the notion that “WCN” is a mass driven movement and thus to be explained by the depravity of the masses, is not quite as obviously the same thing as ignoring Trump’s big money backing. But, even though churches in general still in the US have a popular influence unlike in Europe (reportedly, at least) most churches are deeply hierarchical. The hierarchy may not be formal but, are there really many churches whose leaders are not usually local notables? And, does it really weaken their informal power if they can collectively hire and fire the pastor who formally guides the activities of the church? To me it seems like rich donors picking their candidate.

Also, in a wider political analysis, the legal privileges accorded (some) religions are significant issues in themselves.

“This interpretation makes too much of the idea that economic precarity and working-class economic grievance drives the Trump vote. Political scientists have been refuting that idea for years.”

The linked article defines “pocketbook” (economic) grievances as having had a bad time economically in the previous 4 years, whereas it ascribes fears of Chinese dominance and desires for market isolationism as driven mostly by cultural factors (by fear of loss of status for whites).

This makes sense but is also very restrictive in terms of what it defines as “economic interest”, as the “left behind” explanation refers to people who perceive that they were left behind, rather than them being left behind in some objective sense, and these perception might well be lagged relative to the time period (that, as the study says, wasn’t really that bad economically for american blue collars).
After all, “inequality” is probably more relevant today in political discourse than it was in 1995, but the big increase in economic inequality happen between 1980 and 2008 I think.

So the “left behind” might be people who were actually left behind 20 years earlier, but the cultural backlash of it comes out today.

Another aspect that IMHO is halfway between economic and cultural is the kind of jobs that the DEM and the REPs seem to represent.
As Severin deMonterey @3 notes, “[…] The Dems OTOH derive from professional classes […]” and in many ways project this kind of self identity, and this particular interpretation of meritocracy.
People who don’t recognize themselves in this kind of meritocracy (blue collars, but also self employed and business owners etc.) will feel a very strong status treat from the DEMs, but also will expect them to create economic growth that favors “professionals” (or credentialed) people.
This is also IMHO somewhere between the “economic” and the “cultural” issues, in that it isn’t directlt “pocketbook” economic, but on the long term has an economic relevance.

A lot of this seems to point to theroot cause of this :gerrymandering. Because the republican legislatures so successfull aligned districts to be all but guaranteed “republican-safe”, there is no longer any need to heed more moderate voices in those districs. Coupled with the cult of personality effects within the republican party, they now can only lose their primaries to more idealogue right leaning verbal bomb throwers who percieve the act of governing as caving to some imaginary leftist agenda.

Although I am sure it is correct that gerrymandering makes it easier for the major conservative party to be taken over by extremists (who then benefit from more moderate but rusted-on partisans continuing to vote for the party despite its new radicalism), it isn’t by itself an explanation for the growing right-wing extremism. It also affects many countries with proportional representation, after all.

One may simply at some point have to accept that anywhere between 20% and 40% of the people in every country are evil in the sense that they would prefer a situation where they lose five thousand dollars personally but some minority they hate gets bullied over a situation where they and the members of that minority get a thousand dollars each. Concrete examples are that US business owner who was interviewed saying that Biden’s policies were better for his company than Trump’s but that he preferred to have The Wall instead, and most Brexit voters. The question is only if this type of person is empowered by politicians and media to be like that out loud or if they get a strong signal from politicians and media that they should not be so gauche about it.

A lot of what is happening here is, I think, that kind of person becoming politicians themselves, which is often discussed as a right wing party ‘getting high on its own supply’. Conservative politics are traditionally that they vilify immigrants and other minorities or rail against the federal government or the EU, white middle class voters vote conservatives in because they hate immigrants and other minorities or the federal government or the EU, and conservatives deregulate, privatise, and otherwise make off with the family silver while leaving things like immigration levels and EU membership untouched so as not to harm business interests.

But that only works until true believers rise into positions of influence. At some point they will actually try to implement self-destructive policies based on hatred and the simplistic idea that one can have all one wants without downsides instead of merely using these policies as a forever out-of-reach carrot for hateful voters, and then the Michigan Republican party, the USA, or the UK are variously in some kind of trouble. Not terminally so, as there is “a lot of ruin in a nation”, and gerrymandering similarly helps a party, but trouble nonetheless.

I think it could be, but rather than hate for the poor in strict sense, it is a defence of “status” that ends up as an attack on the poor.

This sentence is not clear, sorry.

My point is that the “hate” doesn’t happen directly, but what happens is that people, who have been socialized in certain values and ways of living, expect those ways of living to pay off (e.g. if I’ve been socialized into thinking that I had to study as a kid to get a better job, I will then expect my degree to pay off).
When people who believe they have played by the rules, and therefore expect to get to level X, realize that this is not going to happen or is in doubt, they will perceive the world as going in the wrong direction, not that their introjected values are wrong or not adapted to the current times.
They will thus perceive others as somehow cheating, and project this feeling of being cheated on others, so they can easily start scapegoating people of perceived lower social status, but also believe in weird theories where everything is the fault of a conspiracy by Soros and the Clintons, or something similar.

Then those beliefs get a life on their own and become diffused among a lot of people, who reinforce each other’s believe (echo chamber, reinforced by social media, this honestly happens to lefties too), and then the ones who become the symbols of this might not be the same ones whose anxiety depended on their own personal economic problems (or fears of problems).
IMHO.

I think inequality definitely encourages stigmatisation of the poor. I think I saw a comparison of countries that showed that the higher inequality the stronger the tendency to attribute economic outcomes to “merit”. But I don’t think this is limited to the right: despising the poor seems to be part of the American religion and the right mostly seems distinctive in centring it on categories like race and gender.

It seems to me that when the truly rich look at the world, they see the relative decline of the US vis-a-vis the PRC and competition from the EU and worst of all see persistent problems with the general rate of profit declining and an ever greater “need” to preserve and expand their wealth by an eternally rising stock market (and other financial instruments) and ever decreasing taxes and desperately want money that keeps it’s value while at the same time there’s market liquidity underwritten by sound US T-bills.

This is not economic precarity of the sort most of the people endure, but again, I think it’s those who already have some that are most ruthless in fighting. In countries where things have regressed to open violence, it’s the people with some money who hire the men in death squads, not the filthy masses acting out their vile backwardness.

Or so I see it.

… cannot understand why parents and students might want a robust alternative to America’s often lousy public elementary and secondary schools.

The issue is not whether some people may want an alternative to public schools but whether they want the public schools to be destroyed and replaced by private schools. In fact, the overwhelming majority of parents support their local public schools and don’t want private schools to replace them.

The institutional structure in my country is substantially different from that in the USA, but the underlying issue of principle is the same. My daughter had available to her more than one option within the public school system, and that was good. At an individual level, it is easy to understand that somebody might want to have extra options so that a student can escape a school that doesn’t suit them, but at the aggregate level the priority has to be making sure that everybody has at least one good choice available. If it’s possible to add additional options, great, but that’s not the overriding priority. If it’s possible for the government to fund good schools (and it is), then government funding should be applied first to making the existing government schools good ones; if the schools the government has are lousy, the government’s priority should be fixing them! A system which allows somestudents to escape bad schools into good ones is good for those students individually, but that will still leave students in bad schools: why should that situation be treated as inescapable?

(I have no information about how many American public schools, if any, are ‘lousy’, so I lend no support to the assertion that it is ‘often’ true, but I acknowledge that it is possible this is the case: my point is about how to respond appropriately on the hypothesis that it’s true. If it’s not, so much the better.)

I found the following sentence in your most useful post interesting and intriguing:

“Karamo, following Trump’s principle that Republican candidates are entitled to deny the legitimacy of any election in which they are not declared the winner, has refused to concede.”

It’s a good example of an argumentational strategy that is effective and should be used more often: when dealing with people engaging in bad behaviour, one can formulate a covering law statement that accurately describes the behaviour in question as a clear violation of a relevant general principle that ought to be followed in such cases, although here the expression of that relevant preferred principle is left implicit. The people engaging in the bad behaviour, when confronted and asked if the descriptive principle is the one they are following, will deny it; but usually they will either be unable to state the guiding principle they ought to be following, or any general principle at all, or they will offer reasons they consider valid for making exceptions to the approved and implicit general principle. So we have two different kinds of rule-statement, exemplifying two different kinds of “rule-following”, or two different senses of that term: 1) descriptive or “covering law” generic statements, that start with accurate descriptive propositions referring to the cases of bad behaviour, and then formulate a generic statement that would include propositions accurately describing the problematic cases. (There is no “inductive inference” here; one can formulate a generic statement at any time, and check the accurate descriptive statements to see if the principle will include the descriptive propositions or not); 2) first person explanations of purposeful action. While (2) aims to express the psychological level beliefs and intentions of individual actors and their relatively conscious reasons for their actions, (1) is concerned with purely logical relations of conformity of instance to rule. The initial problem is that I don’t think the above statement accurately expresses either the rule Trump is actually following (in sense (1) above), or the one Karamo is actually following; it’s actually worse than that.

Your post is quite valuable, not only because you, correctly I think, make the distinction between working class and non-college-educated “WCNs” and, otoh, elite “WCNs”, and their differential political motivations, but also because you at least raise what is the big mystery of these times (see, e.g., Krugman’s column in the NYT today, “The mystery of white rural rage”): What is going on with the Trump “base”? It seems like craziness.
The following sentence in your post seems to focus this question:

“Trump won the nomination because, notwithstanding his billionaire wealth and his regular business strategy of ripping off working-class stiffs, he authentically embodies vulgar, boorish, disorderly behavior. He revels in it and genuinely shares the resentments of non-college WCN against anyone who acts superior to them, whether they be the “woke” left or the GOP establishment.”

Could this sentence be modified in the following way (a possibility which I sensed when I first read it) and retain descriptive accuracy, maybe to a greater degree?

To: “… because … he authentically reflects what they proudly embrace as their own ‘vulgar, boorish, disorderly behavior’”. (And one could add other terms they would perhaps also take as descriptive of their own proudly owned properties, e.g., cruelty, antagonistic stance and distrust toward people different from them, managerial incompetence, dishonesty, racism, stupidity, and all the rest of it, including valorization of criminality. Certainly it would include love of Putin, which for them predates the rise of Trump. One could also add their belief that dominance, as opposed to equivalence and reciprocity, are good and desirable things politically.)

Are they (I mean to refer here to people in communities for which the conventional norms governing the kinds of things people say and repeat include or are dominated by the evangelical Christianity (so-called) of these communities, practiced or elapsed, and who support Trump in cult-like fashion) gripped by self-hatred and despair? I don’t think the phenomenon has anything to do with Christianity, or even religion as such, although it probably falls into the category of what Cassirer called “mythical thinking”. E.g., they seem not to accept or understand the Good Samaritan Principle (a variant of the Rule of Law Principle), which is central to Christianity; and what about God’s love, as in “for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son …”? Are they not to reciprocate and emulate that love?

The puzzle is, why do the people in that descriptive category believe what they believe (how have they come to believe), why do they understand the world the way they do, such that they could worship as an idol such an obviously execrable, idiotic, malevolent and uncaring person as Trump? The evangelical Christianity as practiced in other communities (e.g., African-American) does not seem to license this sort of response. To understand the phenomenon would require that the analysis should get beyond the identification of social categories correlated with voting behaviour. I still don’t understand it or have any good answers. But I think philosophers could contribute to this analysis in the public discourse in the Wittgensteinian spirit.

I thought this excellent post would have had more comments and reactions.