We Need a Smaller Them – pt 3

TLDR: This is Part 3 in the Emotional Truth / Political Lies series: a loss of meaning can be more deadly than the loss of income when jobs go away for White working-class males. Their immiseration ripples out to affect us all.

(But first, friends links to a couple of new things on Medium:
Christianity from the Heart – Reverend Al makes a rare appearance.
Kevin Phillips – RIP – a history of today’s out-of-control Them-ing.)

Our plot so far:

We have a baked-in tendency to split the world into Us and Them. That’s being exploited to pit us against each other. We need to focus on the few Thems behind the Them-ing. In short, we need a Smaller Them.

This is a further step in a series of a dozen or so works of political analysis I’ve written since 2016. I’m building this in small sections. Please kibitz!

This is also the counterweight to a theme of mine: the need for a Bigger Us.

My thesis: the economic immiseration of a broad section of the American middle and working classes has unmoored them. Identity is up for grabs. The economic crisis creates a crisis of meaning and identity.

Political lies: significant resources are being spent to make sure widespread discontent doesn’t feed back into effective political action.

It’s expensive to make Americans this stupid, but the payoff has been rich.

Part 1 introduced the thesis and looked at who is to blame for our current laws and regulations.

Emotional truth: the feeling that government policy ignores everyday people is accurate.

• …analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
  –Testing Theories of` American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens , Gilens and Page (2014)

Part 2 reviewed Those That Work and Those That Don’t – an early Petri dish example of identity destabilization through job loss.

The author’s finding: identity resets outside economic factors, substituting intangibles such as ‘moral superiority.’

• Jobs are not just the source of money; they are the basis for the rituals, customs, and routines of working-class life. Destroy work and, in the end, working-class life cannot survive.
  – Anne Case and Angus Deaton from Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism 2020

Part 3 – Deaths of Despair

The next analytic touchstone after ‘Those That Work’ is the research of Anne Case and Angus Deaton. This takes us from the Petri dish of ‘Golden Valley’ out to the wider impact of job loss. In this section, the pattern of good ‘working class’ jobs disappearing is viewed demographically rather than through a specific case history.

The research

In 2015, life expectancy in the wealthiest country in the world fell for the first time in decades. Then came the nearly unfathomable: Life expectancy in the US fell again in 2016 — and for a third time in a row in 2017. It is hard to communicate just how disquieting that trend is.
– Roge Karma, Vox, 4/15/2020

Half a million people are dead who should not be dead.
– Case & Deaton 2015

In 2015 (in a study that they initially had trouble even getting published!) Case & Deaton announced the discovery of what has come to be termed ‘deaths of despair’ among non-college-educated middle-aged Whites…men in particular and women to a lesser extent.

They noticed a spike in death rate first in comparison to other US ethnicities and then in contrast to similar populations in other countries. Digging into the statistics, these additional deaths were a result of suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdose coupled with poor access to healthcare. Deaths of despair.

Groups less dependent on their job for a sense of identity (primarily because of their historical exclusion from ‘good jobs’ and, hence, centering meaning elsewhere, e.g., Latinos and women) did not exhibit the same demographic trends.

Let’s put the numbers in perspective.

What’s going on?

Repeating:

Jobs are not just the source of money; they are the basis for the rituals, customs, and routines of working-class life. Destroy work and, in the end, working-class life cannot survive.
– Anne Case and Angus Deaton from Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism 2020

If we apply Sherman’s discoveries across this entire demographic, identity was set adrift— decentered —for a broad demographic   with dire consequences both for those individuals and for society.

Individuals scrambled to find a new way to play a leading role in their own stories. As Sherman points out, being ‘moral’…being a ‘good guy’…became core.

Many of those who failed the challenge died. Between successful and dead lay degrees of emotional distress, typically a chronic low-grade sense of panic among those on the edge.

Into the breach came a huge billionaire-funded industry aimed at offering wedge ideologies as identity and toxic religion as a comfort.

A core strategic win was the political capture of the Southern Baptist Church during the ‘Conservative Resurgence‘, starting in the late 70s and consolidating gains through the subsequent 15 years and again now in a second cycle. The SBC’s ‘liberals’ were certainly not far left of center, but they and even center-right moderates were purged.

The impact of this can’t be underestimated. The SBC is the largest Protestant denomination even after close to 2000 churches broke away to form the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (the Jimmy Carter Baptists.) Huge monetary and organizational resources were now available. The SBC has six sizeable seminaries training thousands yearly and an annual budget of nearly $200M–all contributed by people in local churches.

Worse, in my opinion, those local churches, critical envelopes of support in the face of death, illness, trials and tribulations, and pillars of identity to many, now became organizing cells in the culture wars.

Add to this Koch-brothers-type think tanks, right-wing talk radio, and Fox News as the Ministry of Truth, and you have the enormous resources devoted to keeping the pot boiling.

Observing people seeming to vote against their self-interest, I hear friends asking how people can be so stupid. If we could calculate a ‘cost per unit of stupid,’ I think we’d find it’s hugely expensive to make people this ‘stupid.’ Obviously, it’s worth the investment to those footing the bill.

Two points:

First, if you combine the decentering of working-class identity and the way that it has been exploited, the result is that ideology has become identity. This is key to understanding what’s going on and looking for strategies to fix it.

An ideology is a narrow and brittle basis for identity. Under these conditions, a challenge to particular ideas is an existential threat!

Much of what seems crazy has to be understood in that light. It’s not at all a matter of ideas and evidence. The challenge is to the person’s sense of self, not some contingent idea that can be easily revised or corrected.

Another way to look at it: if people are acting against their economic interests, there must be something they see as more important.

I believe that dividing the world up into Us and Them is baked in by our evolutionary history. (Evidence on request.) That makes it a leverage point easily exploited.

Starting politics with a common rallying point…say, a commitment to decent jobs, good schools, health care that wasn’t a huge source of misery and personal bankruptcy, and a clean environment…could cut across the most common Us vs Them divides.

It would also mean that the corporate engines of consolidation and profit at any cost and the 1%’s domination of American politics would be imperiled. So, something divisive has to be substituted.

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Coming in future installments. Where do we go from here? Republicans and Democrats – heartless exploitation vs. gutless weasels. And more.

Side note: Wedge identities are only getting more unmoored. Even conservative pastors are starting to flip out. They’re being challenged over direct quotes from Jesus, e.g., love your neighbor as yourself or turn the other cheek. (But “Jesus said that” apparently carries insufficient weight.) A recent study found Trump supporters trust him significantly more than their friends and families, conservative media figures, or their pastors.

For a fascinating interview on the Christians vs. Jesus thing and how ideology becomes identity, listen to this podcast with Russell Moore, ex-head of the SBC’s policy arm and current editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, in this episode of Talkin’ Religion and Politics without Killin’ Each Other.