\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThinking again about this Tyler Cowen quote on Brexit:
\n\n\nQuite simply, the English want England to stay relatively English, \nand voting Leave was the instrument they were given. \u00a0That specific \ncultural attachment is not for Irish-American me, no, I feel no \nsentiment, other than perhaps good humor, when someone offers me \u201ca \nlovely biscuit,\u201d or when a small book shop devotes an entire section to \ngardening, but yes I do get it at some level. \u00a0And some parts of the \nolder England I do truly love and I am talking the Beatles and Monty \nPython and James Bond here, not just the ancients like Trollope or \nEdmund Spenser.
\nMuch has been made of the supposed paradox that opposition to immigration is highest where the number of immigrants is lowest. \n Yes, some of that is the racism and xenophobia of less cosmopolitan \nareas, but it would be a big mistake to dismiss it as such or even to \nmainly frame it as such. \u00a0Most of all it is an endowment effect. \n Those are the regions which best remember \u2014 and indeed still live \u2014 \nsome earlier notion of what England was like. \u00a0And they wish to hold on \nto that, albeit with the possibility of continuing evolution along \nmostly English lines.
\nTo the extent that the \u201cendowment effect\u201d 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\u2019s less panicky loss/anger and more\u2026 dickishness that I\u2019m 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\u2019s more to it than has been articulated.
\nIt seems clear that pseudo-ironic Trump worship is basically akin to Sanders\u2019 youth support: kids latching onto an old outsider who\u2019s not actually a natural fit for their support/\u201done of them\u201d in the absence of a better alternative. If you were creating a candidate to appeal to them, you\u2019d come up with someone substantially different. So what is it that younger rightists might want? I\u2019m not sure. \u201cThe same policies with a different tone\u201d seems too simple.
\nWill 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. \nThere\u2019s a lot of talk about rising right wing populism, but perhaps it\u2019s\n an odd Indian summer. A too little, too late last gasp reaction without\n much of a plan and without much chance of perpetuating itself in its \ncurrent form.\n\n
\nWhich isn\u2019t 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\u2019t mentally bring into focus.
\nI think you\u2019re sorting brushing up on the War Nerd\u2019s theory there.\u00a0 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\u2019ve taken away all the ideas and institutions that give people meaning, and so they find it in weird places.
\nTaking 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\u2019m 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\u2019m not totally sure. It would be weird if it didn\u2019t.
\nI guess Straight White Male Resentment At The SJWs!!!!!!\n(or something similar)\n\n could be another sentiment that fits nicely with ethnocentrism. Not a feeling of loss, but a feeling of denigration. I\u2019m skeptical that that\u2019s really an important motivation in the culture at large though. And there\u2019s no reason that those feelings need be limited to the younger cohort, so it\u2019s perhaps not something new.
\nI dunno. The folks I encounter [1] who are all \u201cpro-Trump\u201d are pretty unambiguously resentful. One guy is a \u201cwhite working class\u201d type who frequently rants about how \u201cHSLs (high status liberals) look down on people like him.\u201d (Which, they do. So yeah. He isn\u2019t wrong about that. He\u2019s wrong about Trump, tho.) I dunno. I see a lot of folks who feel hella disrespected. It seems a big part of it.
\nGo 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 \u201cstatus,\u201d how much is about feeling \u201cput upon\u201d and \u201cbullied\u201d by the popular crowd.
\nI dunno. It seems like \u201ca real thing\u201d to me.
\n[1] yeah, selection bias, but I do \u201cget around\u201d a fair amount.
\nI think young Trump supporters are a mix of what Veronica describes (though I think most of these sorts of people wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019t reading the internet feminists we think about, but more they\u2019re responding to the more vague but more widespread increase in\u00a0\u201cpolitical correctness\u201d 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\u2019t 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.
\nIt\u2019s a dumb reason to vote for somebody for President, but yeah.
\nRight. For the record, \u00a0I don\u2019t mean to imply SCC is a nest of Trump supporters, only that it is a culture space that we\u2019re all familiar with that reflects a similar facet of the zeitgeist.
\nHmm, I rigorously avoid that sort of attitude online as tedious & worthless, so perhaps I\u2019m significantly underestimating its prevalence.
\n
Jeunesse dor\u00e9e. It\u2019s usually the scions of the displaced elite that power a reaction.
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