Thinking again about this Tyler Cowen quote on Brexit: Quite simply, the English want England to stay relatively English, and...
Thinking again about this Tyler Cowen quote on Brexit:
Quite simply, the English want England to stay relatively English, and voting Leave was the instrument they were given. That specific cultural attachment is not for Irish-American me, no, I feel no sentiment, other than perhaps good humor, when someone offers me “a lovely biscuit,” or when a small book shop devotes an entire section to gardening, but yes I do get it at some level. And some parts of the older England I do truly love and I am talking the Beatles and Monty Python and James Bond here, not just the ancients like Trollope or Edmund Spenser.
Much has been made of the supposed paradox that opposition to immigration is highest where the number of immigrants is lowest. Yes, some of that is the racism and xenophobia of less cosmopolitan areas, but it would be a big mistake to dismiss it as such or even to mainly frame it as such. Most of all it is an endowment effect. Those are the regions which best remember — and indeed still live — some earlier notion of what England was like. And they wish to hold on to that, albeit with the possibility of continuing evolution along mostly English lines.
To the extent that the “endowment effect” is real, it makes me wonder what drives younger alt-right types, or more broadly people of that ilk. (Taking the alt-right as the people on the extreme end, basically.) It seems pretty clear that the driving force of a young Trump voter is pretty different in some ways than the driving force of an older Trump voter. There’s less panicky loss/anger and more… dickishness that I’m not sure can just be chalked up to youth. Some of it is no doubt just recrudescence of typical nativist sentiment with the internet letting people express those sentiments without sanction. But something other than memory is the motivation. Maybe there’s more to it than has been articulated.
It seems clear that pseudo-ironic Trump worship is basically akin to Sanders’ youth support: kids latching onto an old outsider who’s not actually a natural fit for their support/”one of them” in the absence of a better alternative. If you were creating a candidate to appeal to them, you’d come up with someone substantially different. So what is it that younger rightists might want? I’m not sure. “The same policies with a different tone” seems too simple.
Will the new right be as successful as the old? I have some doubts. If part of the appeal of ethnocentrism is the remembrance of things past, what happens when multicultural atomization (?) is the norm rather than something that appeared within living memory? Will there be other sentiments for ethnocentrism to ally with? A permanent weakening seems at least plausible. There’s a lot of talk about rising right wing populism, but perhaps it’s an odd Indian summer. A too little, too late last gasp reaction without much of a plan and without much chance of perpetuating itself in its current form.
Which isn’t to say that either the right or nativism are going away, just that there may be some sort of reconfiguration the nature of which I can’t mentally bring into focus.
I think you’re sorting brushing up on the War Nerd’s theory there. When discussing ISIS, he talks about how there is nothing for young not-particularly bright men to believe in nowadays, that in modern western society we’ve taken away all the ideas and institutions that give people meaning, and so they find it in weird places.
Taking ISIS and the alt right as an extreme end of a bigger complex of ideas, you can see how they both might appeal (with obvious differences) to bored, washed up dipshits. But I’m not sure I understand that bigger complex of ideas that (presumably???) draws a bigger crowd than just the hardcore. I mean, I assume that that penumbra exists, but I guess I’m not totally sure. It would be weird if it didn’t.
I guess Straight White Male Resentment At The SJWs!!!!!! (or something similar) could be another sentiment that fits nicely with ethnocentrism. Not a feeling of loss, but a feeling of denigration. I’m skeptical that that’s really an important motivation in the culture at large though. And there’s no reason that those feelings need be limited to the younger cohort, so it’s perhaps not something new.
I dunno. The folks I encounter [1] who are all “pro-Trump” are pretty unambiguously resentful. One guy is a “white working class” type who frequently rants about how “HSLs (high status liberals) look down on people like him.” (Which, they do. So yeah. He isn’t wrong about that. He’s wrong about Trump, tho.) I dunno. I see a lot of folks who feel hella disrespected. It seems a big part of it.
Go back and look at any of the big-dumb-gender-fights on SCC. If you scroll through, see how many posts are tedious analyses of “status,” how much is about feeling “put upon” and “bullied” by the popular crowd.
I dunno. It seems like “a real thing” to me.
[1] yeah, selection bias, but I do “get around” a fair amount.
I think young Trump supporters are a mix of what Veronica describes (though I think most of these sorts of people wouldn’t use the LW/SSC commenter terminology), but also white male backlash to SJWs/political correctness/etc. I think this is much more common than David thinks. Sure, most aren’t reading the internet feminists we think about, but more they’re responding to the more vague but more widespread increase in “political correctness” and social justice themes in media and the culture and college campuses and workplaces and so on. I feel like a lot of young white people, especially young white men with a more conservative temperament, feel like they can’t say things that they feel are reasonable or express themselves because it might offend people, and they support Trump as a sort of rebellion against this. I know of a young Trump supporter IRL (a brother of somebody I know) who is like this for instance.
It’s a dumb reason to vote for somebody for President, but yeah.
Right. For the record, I don’t mean to imply SCC is a nest of Trump supporters, only that it is a culture space that we’re all familiar with that reflects a similar facet of the zeitgeist.
Hmm, I rigorously avoid that sort of attitude online as tedious & worthless, so perhaps I’m significantly underestimating its prevalence.
Jeunesse dorée. It’s usually the scions of the displaced elite that power a reaction.