Shortly after the 2016 election, Democrats started telling voters — particularly racial and sexual minorities – that they were idiots for dabbling in “identity politics.” By this they meant that the values these voters held were too controversial, and too “divisive.” Instead, Democrats rolled out an election strategy based on economics, launching it from the one Virginia county where HIllary Clinton had won a majority of votes. Fast forward to 2024 and the Dems are again flogging “Bidenomics, Bidenomics, Bidenomics” – as if it were the only issue over which American voters ought to worry their pretty pointy little heads.
Even though Biden’s numbers have long been stuck at levels absolutely guaranteed to sink his campaign, a vast gaslighting project has emerged to explain why voters aren’t buying the whole economics shtik and to tell voters that they’re idiots for not buying it.
Everybody from James Carville to Robert Reich has offered a contribution to the oevre. The Washington Post thinks that, while personal finances are generally OK, voters are actually more worried about the national economy. Bloomberg takes the completely opposite view. Zachary D. Carter’s recent article in Slate offers the online lede, “I think I can explain Joe Biden’s Bad Approval Ratings” and then proceeds to roll out his own incoherent theory of “new beginnings.”
In other words, Democrats have completely written off what Richard Hofstadter called “interest politics” – or what today we would call the concerns of “value voters” – in his groundbreaking book on the American Far Right, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”
So, having read Hofstadter and in contrast to Zachary Carter, I think I can actually explain why Biden’s approval ratings are in the toilet. And it has nothing to do with the economy.
Though he studied American politics in the first part of the 20th Century, in Part I of “The Paranoid Style” Hofstadter offers us a solid clue about much of what is happening today. In fact, Hofstadter’s formulation below explains voter disinterest in Bidenomics, the Christian Nationalist Supreme Court, the phenomenon of people “voting against their own interests,” and also explains why the moral furor over Gaza has taken Democrats by surprise and will likely tank Biden’s Presidency:
The wealth of the country and the absence of sharp class-consciousness have released much political energy for expression on issues not directly connected with economic conflict; and our unusually complex ethnic and religious mixture has introduced a number of complicating factors of great emotional urgency.
Significantly, the periods in which status politics has been most strikingly apparent have been the relatively prosperous 1920’s and the 1960’s. In periods of prosperity, when economic conflicts are blunted or subordinated, the other issues become particularly acute. We have noticed that whereas in depressions or during great bursts of economic reform people vote for what they think are their economic interests, in times of prosperity they feel free to vote their prejudices. In good times, with their most severe economic difficulties behind them, many people feel that they can afford the luxury of addressing themselves to larger moral questions, and they are easily convinced that the kind of politics that results is much superior to the crass materialism of interest politics. They have fewer inhibitions about pressing hard for their moral concerns, no matter how demanding and ill-formulated, as an object of public policy, than they have in pressing for their interests, no matter how reasonable and realistically conceived.
In the following essay, I will try to show that Barry Goldwater was one campaigner who saw with considerable clarity the distinction between interest politics and status politics, and went out of his way in his campaign to condemn the immorality of the first and to call for an intensification of the second.
Today, Americans from both political extremes feel America is morally on the wrong track and the two ethically-compromised antediluvian candidates for President are no answer to their concerns. The only question is: given this focus, which candidate will have the edge in November?
Well, that’s easy. Trump, with his coterie of “prophets” and preachers and a side-line as a bonafide Bible-thumping Bible salesman – as transparently fraudulent as this vaudeville act is – still comes closest to what Hofstader recognized in Barry Goldwater and the successful Far Right revolution he launched sixty years ago.
Biden, though he hasn’t been convicted of any felonies or bribed a porn star lately, has a crackhead son and has enthusiastically coupled his fate to that of an accused war criminal (who like Biden can’t survive politically) in carrying out a well-documented genocide.
Bidenomics isn’t going to save Joe any more than it can save America.
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