Why it IS economic anxiety, at the root

Polling is important.  Polling can tell us where the participants in the current lifestyle consciousness are, and we do have to take it seriously.  But expecting the participants in the current lifestyle to accurately explain WHY they feel they way they do, or WHY they are willing to believe what they do, is truly problematic.

This latest article from 538 is convincing and compelling.  The graph showing how people "feel" about the economy, and how it directly correlates with political party and not how the economy is actually performing is likely the most convincing portion of the article.  The thesis is that the root of the Trump support is not due to economic anxiety, but rather to race and partisan politics that grew up in opposition to the Obama presidency.

I do not deny that that is the immediate cause.  I do disagree that it is the ultimate cause.

Hate must find fertile ground to overcome the messages we see all around us that tell us to love our brother as ourselves.  That homo sapiens are all one species, with no group being superior or inferior to another.  That we are all deserving of a decent life.  The real question is how do you get people to sign onto a political philosophy that pits black v. white, immigrant v native, man v woman, and IGNORE  the very real exploitation of rich v. poor?

Marvin Harris, the (in)famous Anthropologist, and author of, among others, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, (1973) argues quite convincingly that we can not take at face value how the participants in a lifestyle consciousness explain their own lifestyle.  He uses a plethora of examples.  For instance, a Hindu may say that they do not eat a cow despite starving because it is sacrilegious.  However, when you look at the history of the prohibition against eating beef, and the immense population of the subcontinent, and the fact that it was, at the time, a low energy economy, the prohibition was put in place by the powerful in order to ensure that cows, who are ox producing factories (tractors), survive through drought and other calamities.  Simply, the participants in the lifestyle do not always know the root cause or real reasons that they do what they do.

So while people may shift their opinion about how the economy is doing based on which party is in power, and the Obama presidency most certainly brought out the latent bigotry that is still very much a part of America; it does not explain, nor provide any real way out, of the current situation.

Harris' theory of Cultural Materialism states quite simply that human behavior is neither random nor capricious; in fact it is rooted in practical mundane circumstances.  Like economic anxiety.

I believe that the authors of the latest attack from 538 on the economic anxiety theory did not take into account two important factors.  First the wage stagnation and subsequent growth in income inequality that has been with us since the 1970's and accelerated due to supply side Reagonomics.  Second, that the current counter-culture tells people that they should ignore the material realities and focus on the inner life of feelings, imagination and expanding their own personal consciousness.

The first does explain why the opinion about the health of the economy does change with party.  For Republicans, a democratic presidency means that people who are not white may benefit and that has been sold as a decline in their already meager paycheck to paycheck existence.  The great economic dislocation caused by globalization in the past 50 years has led hard working people to feel true economic anxiety over generations.  

For democrats,  a republican presidency means a hastening of the inequality and all the injustice that comes with it by massive give-aways to the already rich.  That inequality is dangerous in its own right, as societies which allow great economic inequality tend to consume themselves in petty hate and anger, but all the other problems exacerbated by inequality; racism, sexism, and etc.

The second explains why the formation of a political consensus to make substantial change has not formed since the 1960's when affluent college students joined with the Civil Rights movement to end segregation and the Vietnam war.  Essentially, today's counter-culture is quite supportive of the mainstream culture in that it helps to DIFFUSE the energies of dissent.  The message in the counter culture is certainly "do your own thing."  But structural change does not happen when everybody is doing their own thing, it only happens when everybody is doing the SAME THING.

So yes, our politics have become racial.  But had the benefits of globalization been more equitably distributed among all the people, and not concentrated in the top quintile, what fertile ground would there be to support such hateful racist rhetoric?  Had we maintained a 70% tax bracket, as we did from 1946-1981, and CEO pay was only 20X the average workers pay, do you think that people would see their neighbors as the cause of their lack of upward mobility?

In short, if you want to change a culture, you must change the material conditions under which people live.  I want to see an end to racism.  I want to see the grand disparities between racial groups eliminated.  But that will take POLICIES, not awareness training, which has proved to be not only ineffective but also potentially counter-productive.  In other words, if I want to see the gap between white home ownership, 77%, and black home ownership, 44%, eliminated; I will not do it by awareness.  I will do it by creating policies that make it easier to find financing and increasing income for long disadvantaged groups. AND then I will need to create a political consensus to pressure our policy makers to enact those policies.  I will not be able to simply wish it into existence once everyone is aware.

This is why I take exception to this article; it helps befuddle the masses and prevents them from seeing the true culprit; economic inequality and the anxiety that that causes.