I’ve seen this story about how inequality leads to conservatism in a bunch of places and I find it fascinating, if depressing:
This idea is rooted in Gilens’s …argument is that during good economic times news stories focus on individualism (enhancing opposition to welfare) and during bad economic times stories emphasize people being down on their luck (enhancing support for welfare).
Given that rising inequality since the 1970s has been driven in large part by gains at the top of the income distribution, media frames over this period may have increasingly emphasized stories of individualism, thus generating a negative link between rising inequality and public opinion liberalism. The decline in inequality prior to the 1970s, by contrast, was driven primarily by increasing incomes at the bottom of the income distribution and may have generated stories emphasizing government’s role in education and job creation. This could explain why declining inequality up to the 1970s pushed public opinion in a liberal direction.
Mike Kay (Hippie Hunter)
yeah, of course.
you don’t have to be a student of Noam Chomsky to realize the corrosive and deleterious effective of the corporate media (ie meet the press, wapo,), let alone the entire right-wing propaganda apparatus (ie drudge, fox, hate radio, politico, etc.).
Hunter Gathers
It’s the old ‘What’s The Matter With Kansas’ argument. Once one comes to realization that you’re never going to make any money, you side with the political ideology that will go out of it’s way to punish and demonize the ‘other’, spout pious bullshit, and make you feel better about how much you hate everyone that’s not like you.
ornery curmudgeon
Maybe conservatism brings inequality, that’s how it’s seemed to me.
Mike Kay (Hippie Hunter)
@Hunter Gathers: well, ya gotta scapegoat someone.
Like when Lehman Bros. collapsed the repugs immediately went on tee vee and blamed the derivative bubble on black home ownership. It was an update on welfare queens driving Cadillacs to welfare queens buying mansions.
Southern Beale
So in other words it’s the media’s fault. Kinda what I thought.
BR
Maybe one way to combat this is for liberal politicians to praise, in collective terms, the only government run institution most Americans purport to praise: the military. That is, instead of praising individual valor, etc., liberal elected officials should find cases of a company / unit / etc. that does something extraordinary but does it in a way that shows they were watching each other’s back, etc. Standing up for the greater good of the unit, and the greater good of the nation.
Couched properly in the right language, this argument might be one that can branch out.
WyldPirate
Rapid societal change, economic hardships and the like not only cause more political conservatism, but it is also responsible for a lot of the past fundamentalist movements in each of the Abrahamic religions.
Karen Armstrong wrote an amazing book called The Battle for God. She does a particularly good job comparing and contrasting the fundamentalist movements in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It really sheds a lot of light on why Islam in particular is going through such a tumultuous period now. Moreover, it is fascinating to see that this period in Islam almost exactly corresponds with the length of time it took for the Protestant Reformation to hit Christianity.
jeff
I’d like to offer something I’ve seen frequently amongst baby-boomers who are now affluent, but who grew up poor or working class: they credit their own hardworking ethics and god-given brilliance for their success. It never figures in their minds that they happened to start working during the greatest boom in history (part demographic/partly the move to information technology), and to end their working lives at the peak of an historic secular bull run in stocks.
I remember a few years ago, after my grandfather died, going through his estate. He had been a mid-management engineer for one of the giant corps from the 1930s through the 1970s, and was compensated quite meagerly, actually, and his bonuses were in worthless company stock. From his retirement to his death, that stock went from maybe $1 to about $100 a share, and so he retired a middle-class guy and died a multimillionaire.
Same thing with my dad, who began working in a middle-paying job in the late 60s and retired in 2006. When I wanted to go to college, we had no money, and his retirement funds were very small. But all those stock options that were worth pennies in the 70s and 80s are worth a fortune when he cashed in.
Elia
Sort of relatedly…
I’m honestly more despondent right now about the current state of this country w/r/t justice, equality, rule of law (basically all of the fundamentals that separate a liberal democracy from a plutocracy/oligarchy) than I was during W’s reign.
DougJ
@jeff:
Very good point.
aimai
@BR:
Uh, no. The right wing and its media mouthpieces have an almost miraculous ability to undermine “counterexamples” such as the one you are describing. The military already has socialized medicine and a huge safety net but you won’t catch anyone connecting those dots. Often not even the military itself. And, of course, our own unionized firefighters and police are heroic, when they are heroic, because they are in strong unions. Immiediatly after 9/11 they were celebrated–as soon as they began demanding medical care and respect for their actions and care for their needy members they were excoriated. As were soldiers with PTSD or agent orange poisoning.
aimai
BR
@aimai:
True, the RW media is strong, but sometimes the effort needs to be made. I always found Grayson to be over the top, but we need at least a third of the elected Dems to be like him. (Well, minus some of the theatrics, but with the bulldog nature and willingness to not accept media and RW bullshit.)
Maybe this is part of the usual story of nobody even making the opposing case, so conservatism and inequality win by default.
Oh, and speaking of care for veterans, if you haven’t seen Frontline’s The Wounded Platoon, it’s very worth watching. And it highlights your point exactly.
Douglas
@jeff:
Any success of one’s own group is due to the hard work, superiority and so on of “people like me” (your example).
Any failures in one’s own group are due to bad luck or outside interference (taxes being one popular badguy here).
Any success of someone not belonging to one’s group are due to them adopting some of your group’s supposed qualities, or due to them cheating (Welfare, anyone?)
Any failure of someone not belonging to your group is due to some moral failing of them, usually including being lazy (unemployment etc.).
aimai
@BR:
Oh, yeah. I couldn’t agree with you more. I’m all for making the case–and making it again and again and again. I just don’t think that any one argument will be a silver bullet.
aimai
BR
@aimai:
Yeah.
You know, regarding no argument being a winner, but needing to make the argument: maybe the best thing to do is to get Alan Grayson to team up with George Lakoff and run a secret seminar series for Dems. Beat Frank Luntz at his own game.
chrismealy
People make virtue of necessity. They want what they can have.
The social scientist Jon Elster wrote a whole book about it called “Sour Grapes.”
Bernard
America was sold out, and to the Corporations, first by the Republicans, and joined by the Democrats. this was codified by the Supreme Court’s Citizen United.
the Elite Party of Republicans and Democrats sold us.
America and her inhabitants were sold to the Corporations. the Banks took their first grab just in time for the Election of the “Kenyan Usurper.” that’s my favorite take.
Watching the takedown of Obama as promised by countless Republicans was the way to Victory come election day.
and it worked so well!!! Surprise, so the Republicans are back to finish off Obama. Americans are now collateral damage.
second thoughts, for “Little People?” never.
at least the Republicans are true to their words. I’d watch out where it will take us all though. I don’t like what either Republicans or Democrats do, but Republicans usually follow through.
Democrats cave.
El Cid
The American tradition of rags-to-riches individualism and the dominance of the corporate super-rich:
This is why Birchers like Glenn Beck hate Progressivism. It fights against the tendency they love, which is the visitation of cleansing fire upon those they think unworthy of victory in the struggle against, well, the rags side of riches, and who want to actually do something to prevent the super-successful from exercising their Jesus-given right to vacuum up every last bit of societal resources they can get their hands on.
[Alger’s tales mostly involve a young boy demonstrating a worthy moral value which then gets a wealthy benefactor to take him in and help the young man have real success in America. A model which fits, given Alger’s apparent tendency to child molestation, Catholic priest style.]
El Cid
Maybe people ought to notice this Federal insider trading investigation based on 3 years’ worth of work, because it could be the largest ever.
However, I’m sure the bigger story to be discussed is
Right now I just don’t have any significant amount of snark left.
Ruckus
@Hunter Gathers:
Are you trying to say that when people feel they can’t get better they want everyone else to be like them? If I can’t have it no one can?
4jkb4ia
(Was shamed into writing comment)
I guess this is a self-reinforcing circle. If you have fewer places at the top you have fiercer competition to get into one of the few places and then individualism will be glorified by those who managed to earn one of them. The decline of local media outlets is part of this process.