Politics on the radical right and left is often aimed directly at status concerns. They use plain-spoken language repudiate politically correctness or political elites. The left evoke the virtues of working people, those on the right emphasize themes of national greatness. The “take back control” and “make America great again” slogans of the Brexit and Trump campaigns were perfectly pitched for such purposes.
There is a relative decline of class politics. Then there is the influx of immigrants, leading to the perceived dilution of traditional identities.
There are status concerns due to educational expansion and generational value change, creating a constituency of “cultural losers of modernization” who found a voice that Trump sought to fill.
We have older generation, non-college graduates, the working class, white Europeans. We have the more religious, men, and residents of rural communities that have moved to the right in part in response to threats to their status.
These groups feel that they have become estranged from the silent revolution in social and moral values, left behind by cultural changes that they deeply reject. The interwar generation of non-college educated white men — until recently the politically and socially dominant group in Western cultures — has passed a tipping point at which their status, power, and privilege are fading.
The emergence of partisans who incorporate their values, their race, their religion — their belief system — into their identity as a Democrat or Republican, together with more traditional polarization based on partisan differences in policy stands, has produced heightened levels of partisanship. Partisans in the American electorate are now seeing each other through prejudiced and intolerant eyes.
And so, status competition serves to calcify the animosity between Democrats and Republicans.
Scholars say there are two basic methods of achieving status: the “prestige” approach requiring notable achievement in a field and “dominance” capitalizing on threats and bullying. These are destabilizing events that give us the emergence of demagogic leaders, the onset of street riots, circulation of misinformation and extremely hostile political engagements on social media.
The core of extreme political discontent are motivations to achieve status via dominance through the use of fear and intimidation. Essentially, extreme political behavior reflects discontent with one’s own personal standing and a desire to actively rectify this through aggression. This extreme political behavior often coincides with the rise of populism, especially right-wing populism, but that behavior is distinct from populism:
Radical discontent is characterized by verbal or physical aggression, thus directly capitalizing on the competences of people pursuing dominance-based strategies. Second, current-day radical activism seems linked to desires for recognition and feelings of ‘losing out’ in a world marked by, on the one hand, traditional gender and race-based hierarchies, which limit the mobility of minority groups and, on the other hand, globalized competition, which puts a premium on human capital.
Extreme discontent, they continue, is a phenomenon among individuals for whom prestige-based pathways to status are, at least in their own perception, unlikely to be successful. Despite their political differences, this perception may be the psychological commonality of race- or gender-based grievance movements and white lower-middle class right-wing voters.
Political actors from the right and the radical right actively campaign on the status issue. They emphasize changing status hierarchies that might negatively affect the standing of their core constituencies an aim to mobilize voters who fear, but have not yet experienced, societal regression. Campaigning on potential status loss is politically worthwhile.
As an ex pa, and looking at the basic profile of a Brexiter in England suggests that we need to be careful with a simplified narrative of a ‘revolt of the left behind’. A good share of these voters can be found in what we might call the lower middle class, which means they might well have decent jobs and decent salaries — but they fear, often for good reasons, that they are not on the winning side of economic modernization.
Voters who are, and remain in, jobs susceptible to automation and digitalization, so called routine jobs, who vote for the radical right and not those who actually lose their routine jobs. The latter are much more likely to abstain from politics altogether.
This segment of the electorate is associated more with intermediate levels of education than with low or absent education, in particular in the presence of a perceived declining economic position. And Brexiters hold features of malaise due to declining economic conditions, rather than anxiety or anger. Voting to Leave the European Union is associated with self-identification as middle class, rather than with working class.
The downfall of the working class over the last thirty years is not just a question of its numerical shrinkage, its political disorganization and stagnating wages. It also signifies a loss of status. The political consequences are evident and can be seen in the aftermath of the defeat of President Trump/
Those who cannot adopt or compete in the dominant status order — closely associated with the acquisition of knowledge and the mastery of complex cultural performances — make opposition to this order a badge of pride and recognition. The proliferation of conspiracy theories is an indicator of this process. People make themselves believe in them, because it induces them into an alternative world of status and rank.
IStatus competition serves to exacerbate some of the worst aspects of polarization.
If polarization is understood as the progressive division of society into clusters of people with political preferences and ways of life that set them further and further apart from each other, status politics is clearly a reinforcement of polarization. This social division becomes particularly virulent when it features no longer just a clash between high and low status groups in what is still commonly understood as a unified status order, but if each side produces its own status hierarchies with their own values.
These trends will only worsen as claims of separate “status hierarchies” are buttressed by declining economic opportunities and widespread alienation from the mainstream liberal culture.
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SourceL New York Times
