https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/opinion/the-trump-legions.html

Despite their sudden rise, they didn't come out of nowhere.

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The Trump Legions

Despite their sudden rise, they didn't come out of nowhere.

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.

· Nov. 1, 2018

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Image

Thumbs up on President Trump in Murphysboro, Ill., last week.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

When reporters asked President Trump last week if he bore any responsibility for the pipe bombs sent to many of his critics and adversaries, he declared his innocence:

"Not at all, no. There is no blame. There is no anything."

At the same time, an Oct. 29 PRRI survey revealed that 69 percent of voters believe that Trump has "damaged the dignity of the presidency."

Trump reinforced this public assessment in his answer to another question: Did he plan to phone any of the officials who had been targeted with bombs, including his predecessors in the White House, the Clintons and the Obamas? His reply:

"I think we'll probably pass, thank you very much."

These exchanges raise the same two questions that have been posed repeatedly during the Trump presidency:

How could this man have been elected to the highest office in the land? And how can Trump not only remain in office but, for the moment at least, appear to stand a reasonable chance of being renominated and even re-elected?

To get some answers to these questions, I turned to a 2018 paper by Ronald Inglehart and two fellow political scientists at the University of Michigan, as well as to a new book by Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, who are political scientists at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

In "The Silent Revolution in Reverse: Trump and the Xenophobic Authoritarian Populist Parties," Inglehart, Jon Miller and Logan Woods provide fresh insight on a subject to which Inglehart, at times writing with Pippa Norris of Harvard, has devoted much of his career: the ongoing tension between materialist and post-materialist values and the political consequences of that tension.

The core of the Inglehart thesis is that scarce resources lead to "materialist" values, while abundant resources are conducive to "post-materialist" values. Inglehart argues that before the Second World War.

the unprecedentedly high levels of existential security experienced in developed democracies during the postwar decades were bringing an intergenerational shift from Materialist values that emphasized economic and physical security above all, to Postmaterialist values that gave priority to individual autonomy and self-expression. Rising emphasis on Postmaterialist values eventually brought massive social and political changes, from stronger environmental protection policies and antiwar movements, to higher levels of gender equality in government, business and academic life, greater tolerance of gays, handicapped people and foreigners and the spread of democracy. Postwar prosperity brought these changes with a substantial time lag, since they moved at the pace of intergenerational population replacement.

Beginning in the 1970s, Inglehart writes, while economies continued to grow,

in high-income countries virtually all of the gains have gone to those at the top. During the past three decades, a large share of the population has experienced declining real income and job security, in context with a massive influx of immigrants and refugees. This has fueled support for xenophobic populist authoritarian movements such as British exit from the European Union, France's National Front and Donald Trump's takeover of the Republican Party. Cultural backlash explains why given individuals support xenophobic populist authoritarian movements — but declining existential security explains why support for these movements is greater now than it was thirty years ago.

Hetherington and Weiler, in their new book, "Prius or Pickup," join Inglehart in raising a warning flag for the Democratic Party — that the rightward movement in contemporary politics is neither evanescent nor trivial.

Hetherington and Weiler divide the electorate into three constituencies (which I discussed briefly in an earlier column). Those voters with what they call a "fixed worldview" and those with a "fluid worldview" are at the two extremes. A group they call "mixed" falls in between. Hetherington and Weiler describe the two extreme categories:

The term "fixed" describes people who are warier of social and cultural change and hence more set in their ways, more suspicious of outsiders, and more comfortable with the familiar and predictable. People we call "fluid," on the other hand, support changing social and cultural norms, are excited by things that are new and novel, and are open to, and welcoming of, people who look and sound different.

The authors have categorized the degree to which voters are fluid or fixed by answers to questions that have traditionally been used by sociologists and political scientists to identify levels of "authoritarianism" — with Hetherington and Weiler substituting the phrase "fixed worldview" for authoritarian in order to avoid pejorative implications.

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Just over four in 10 voters, 42 percent, fall into the fixed worldview category. Just under a third (32 percent) of the electorate falls into the fluid category. The remaining 26 percent are categorized as being in the middle.

Those with fixed worldviews voted 3 to 1 for Trump over Hillary Clinton, and those with fluid world views backed Clinton by the same 3-to-1 margin.

EDITORS' PICKS

As recently as 1992, Democratic and Republican voters included roughly equal numbers of those with fluid and fixed worldviews. By 2016, however, as the accompanying chart shows, those with a so-called fluid orientation showed a decisive Democratic partisan preference, while those with a relatively fixed orientation identified overwhelmingly as Republican.

When Worldview and Party Begin to Align

Two largely opposite views of society — one open to change, one resistant — used to be home to people of both major parties in close to equal proportions. Now they are more lopsidedly partisan.

1992

Percent who were Democrats

Independents

Republicans

People with "fluid" views:

open to diversity,

changing norms

"Fixed" views: wary

of cultural change,

suspicious of outsiders

2016

Fluid views

Fixed views

By The New York Times | Source: Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; because of rounding, not all figures add up to 100 percent.

The fixed-fluid divide has strong links to a wide range of views on public policy. "When asked whether they thought China was a military threat, 54 percent of the fixed said the threat was 'major' while only 29 percent of the fluid saw it that way," the authors write.

Along similar lines, "fewer than 10 percent of people with a fluid worldview believe in the biblical account of creation" compared with "60 percent of those with a fixed worldview."

MIDTERM ELECTIONS 2018

Read more commentary and analysis on the coming elections from the Opinion section.

Hetherington and Weiler write about the underlying logic of Trump's appeal to those with a relatively fixed worldview:

For those with more fixed worldviews, especially, threats to safety and security are omnipresent. If certain aspects of the Bill of Rights — such as related Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections against unwarranted search and seizure and in favor of due process — are just tools for terrorists to hide behind, then those who invoke them aren't just naïve. They're acting in bad faith in order to hurt America.

In other words, for a substantial percentage of voters, Trump's disregard for constitutional niceties is not a violation of a critically important democratic norm. Instead, from this particular conservative perspective, it is viewed as a safeguard, designed to prevent terrorist attacks and to save American lives.

The 2016 election, in the authors' view, forced voters to choose between two extremes: "Trump embodied the fixed worldview and Hillary Clinton the fluid one."

Even more important, when it comes to taking liberal or conservative positions on issues of race, immigration, Islam and so forth, voters whose worldviews are midway between the fixed and fluid "are more like the fixed than they are the fluid."

Put another way, the authors write, while many voters "may not have relished" Trump's attacks on racial and ethnic minorities,

neither were they completely turned off by his comments. Indeed, they probably found them more palatable than the tendency of liberals to bend over backwards seemingly at every turn to defend groups of people who aren't exactly angels in the eyes of many Americans.

Most voters may say that they prefer politicians who take moderate stands on these divisive issues, the authors argue, but when polarized nomination processes offer voters a choice between two extremes, the American electorate is more wary of the liberal extreme than of the conservative one.

"Members of Trump's base," Hetherington and Weiler caution,

are much more like the average American than are his staunchest opponents. A lot of Americans are susceptible to the kinds of rhetoric that won Trump the presidency: especially his appeals to people's innate xenophobia and fears of threats both internal and external. The liberals, people of color, and traditional conservatives who are outraged by Trump's comportment and who have avowed to oppose his every move — these are the real outliers.

Hetherington and Weiler demonstrate in chart after chart that the views of those in the middle — comprising 71 percent of the electorate, including the evenly divided, the leaning fluid and the leaning fixed — view Trump's hard-line views more favorably than they do the liberal views of fluid voters.

Take a look at the accompanying graphic on racial resentment, which, while not exactly surprising, is nonetheless revealing.

Not Budging

Americans with "fixed" (and mixed) views of society have higher levels of racial antagonism than those with "fluid" views. The latter became markedly more tolerant in 2016.

SCALE OF RACIAL

RESENTMENT:

Most

resentment

Fixed worldview

(resistant to change)

Mixed worldview

Neutral

Fluid worldview

(open to change)

2000

2004

2008

2012

2016

Least

resentment

By The New York Times | Source: Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

"People with fluid worldviews are now in a completely different world when it comes to race than other whites," according to the authors, who repeat: "They're the outliers."

Or take the case of immigration:

As out of bounds as Trump's constant pillorying of immigrants, especially the way in which he demonized "Mexicans" to create an image of immigrants more generally as dangerous, might have seemed to the fluid, it didn't turn out to be disqualifying.

These divisions have significant implications, especially for those who worry that Trump has undermined important American norms and traditions:

This yawning gap between the country's fluid citizens and the rest of its population is very real, and it has put the country in a serious predicament. Trump's seemingly antidemocratic propensities have already led to attacks on cornerstones of American democracy, including the free press, the judiciary, and other political institutions. These propensities were obvious when he was a candidate for president, and they have only become more so since his election.

Inglehart and his University of Michigan colleagues raise similarly pessimistic conclusions based on a division of the electorate between materialists and postmaterialists — analogous to the fixed-fluid division. They argue that the postmaterialist left — those most supportive of the civil, women's and gay rights revolutions, backers of environmental regulation and proponents of personal autonomy — have, in many respects, abandoned what had been the working class core of the New Deal era left:

Traditionally, the left parties were based on a working class constituency, and advocated redistribution of income. In striking contrast, the postmaterialist left appeals mainly to a middle class constituency and is only faintly interested in the classic program of the left.

Of critical importance to the rise of Trump and other right-wing populist leaders abroad, Inglehart writes, is that

Postmaterialists are intensely favorable to major political and cultural changes that frequently repel the left's traditional working class constituency, stimulating the rise of authoritarian populist parties.

Inglehart places strong emphasis on economic trends as a major factor in the emergence of authoritarian populism. He and his co-authors argue that as inequality has increased — and as parties of the left have shifted from economic to postmaterialist agendas — the populist right has filled the vacuum:

For decades, the real income of the developed world's working class has been declining, while the material basis of what counts as an acceptable standard of living has been rising.

They go on:

Inequality and insecurity are likely to become even more severe as these societies move into a mature phase of the Knowledge Society — that of Artificial Intelligence Society.

A theme common to both "Prius or Pickup" and of "The Silent Revolution in Reverse" is that fear — fear of loss, fear of scarcity, fear of terrorism, fear of cultural challenge, fear of immigrants — is driving the least secure in society to the right, with significant support from those caught in the middle.

And this insecurity is not limited to those with stagnant or diminishing economic resources. It also includes those who are doing well individually but who live in declining areas, those who fear the loss of white hegemony, and those who think they see a morally alien culture taking hold around them — on television, movies and the internet — and those who feel that their status is threatened by the rise of racial, ethnic and cultural minorities.

Consider the tactic developed by Trump to make a key point: his recitation of "The Snake," a poem he has turned to at public events that capitalizes on the widespread fear that a liberal agenda will lead the nation onto dangerous terrain. There is nothing subtle about this, as the last few weeks have shown. Trump showed his hand, again, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February when he said, just before he began to recite the poem: "Think of it in terms of immigration."

On her way to work one morning

Down the path alongside the lake

A tenderhearted woman saw a poor half-frozen snake

His pretty colored skin had been all frosted with the dew

"Oh well," she cried, "I'll take you in and I'll take care of you"

"Take me in oh tender woman

Take me in, for heaven's sake

Take me in oh tender woman," sighed the snake

She wrapped him up all cozy in a curvature of silk

And then laid him by the fireside with some honey and some milk

Now she hurried home from work that night as soon as she arrived

She found that pretty snake she'd taken in had been revived

"Take me in, oh tender woman

Take me in, for heaven's sake

Take me in oh tender woman," sighed the snake

Now she clutched him to her bosom, "You're so beautiful," she cried

"But if I hadn't brought you in by now you might have died"

Now she stroked his pretty skin and then she kissed and held him tight

But instead of saying thanks, that snake gave her a vicious bite

"Take me in, oh tender woman

Take me in, for heaven's sake

Take me in oh tender woman," sighed the vicious snake

"I saved you," cried that woman

"And you've bit me even, why?

You know your bite is poisonous and now I'm going to die"

"Oh shut up, silly woman," said the reptile with a grin

"You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in"

At a January 2016 rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Trump's hard-core working- and middle- class supporters burst out in laughter and cheers at the conclusion of the poem. They did so again at a rally in March that year in Bloomington, Ill. and they did it again at a rally in April 2017 in Harrisburg, Pa. Trump continues to get requests for "The Snake," and his audiences continue to delight in the recitation, with no end in sight.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter, @Edsall.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to The Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Thursday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @edsall

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