"Economic anxiety" as a journalistic placeholder (2 of 2)

Will Bunch takes up the "economic anxiety" trope to mock it in An insurrection of upper-middle class white people Philadelphia Inquirer 01/12/2021.

This Morning Joe segments talks about the affluent profiles of so many of the known Capitol insurrectionists, How Riots Show Trump Supporters Not Just White, Disaffected Americans MSNBC 01/12/2021:

Both the Bunch column and the Morning Joe segment featuring Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough talking with Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times, who tweets as Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones), focus on debunking the idea that the most passionate Trump supporters are salt-of-the-earth working-class white folks who are just frustrated by the economy. Hannah-Jones wrote i the first of a tweet thread on 01/11/2021: "Turns out that instead of those endless rural diner profiles, political journalists should have been doing MAGA pieces in board rooms, on military bases, in private jets."

Both reports focus on the Capitol invaders of last week and the revelations that a significant part of the armed Trump mob of Radical Republicans prowling the Capitol seeking to lynch Members of Congress - and even the rightwing theocratic Republican Vice President! - were actually notably affluent Republicans. As Will Bunch puts it:

When fascism finally came to America in the form of an attempted coup to halt our presidential election, it came from lush-green suburbs all across this land, flying business class on Delta or United and staying in four-star hotels with three-martini lobby bars — the better to keep warm after a long day of taking selfies with friendly cops or pummeling the unfriendly ones, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and generally standing athwart democracy yelling “Halt!”

What else can one think after seeing the photo of Jenna Ryan, real-estate broker from the upscale Dallas exurb of Frisco (also a “conservative” radio talker) posing in front of the private jet that whisked her to the Jan. 6 pro-Trump rally and subsequent storming of the Capitol, where she smiled in front of a window broken by other rioters and tweeted that “if the news doesn’t stop lying about us we’re going to come after their studios next”?

Maybe Ryan is an extreme example, but her compatriots in rushing Capitol Hill on Wednesday included a father of three from another upscale Dallas suburb named Larry Rendall Brock Jr., whose 1989 degree in international relations from the Air Force Academy apparently never taught him that it’s a bad idea to be photographed leaving House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in a combat helmet, tactical gear, and holding zip-tie handcuffs. [bold in original]

In this post, I won't try to dig too much into the weeds of distinguishing the voting base from the most prominent activists. But it's also important to keep in mind how big Republican donors can simulate grassroots support by funding trips to demonstrations in Washington in "astroturf" operations like we saw with the Tea Party during the Obama-Biden Administration. Showing up to a riot in Washington on a Wednesday doesn't necessarily mean that the rioter is well-heeled personally. Nor does the fact that a miners or a cleaning lady might vote for Trump and the Republicans does not mean that Republican policies benefit them.

Because even the Republicans who don't want to join the Trumpistas in dropping the trappings of democracy and the rule are also committed to government of the people, by the oligarchy, and for the oligarchy.

The use of the "economic anxiety" phrase has taken on a particular ideological edge thanks to the left-vs-right fights in the Democratic Party. (Or left-vs-establishment, if you prefer, or left-vs-center). To use the 2016 and 2020 Presidential primaries as a very visible example, the Sanders campaign stressed the need to disrupt the Trump voting base and to win some of those votes for the Democrats by stressing economic issues like raising the minimum wage and social provisions like Medicare For All.

Sanders has a very solid civil-rights and women's-rights record, going back to his serious activism in the civil rights movement in the 1960. But in 2016 and 2020, establishment Democrats were committed to a neoliberal, very corporate-friendly economic program and hoped to use "identity" issues - more concretely, stress on anti-discrimination measures and celebration of diversity - to attract moderate suburban voters while implicitly assuming that white working-class voters interested in pro-labor measures would have no place to go in a two-way race but to the Democrats. And at least part of that narrative even tried to stigmatize the left's emphasis on economic populism as being in itself racist and sexist, or at minimum a bad-faith distraction from anti-discrimination policies.

Amanda Marcotte is someone who has leaned toward the latter position who has also been serious and carful in her arguments for it. As in this article from 2017: New election analysis: Yes, it really was blatant racism that gave us President Donald Trump Salon 04/19/2017.

The "economic anxiety" trope is also an echo of the "Sister Souljah" strategy of the Bill Clinton in his 1992 Presidential campaign. Which was in some ways the inverse of the establishment Democratic narrative just described from 2016-2020. The idea there was to rely on a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats approach to economic policy to win working-class votes while also pandering at least symbolically to white racism to show the Democratic Party wasn't being controlled by "Jesse Jackson," the worst bogeyman for white supremacists in 1992.

A sad but classic version of that argument was presented by Thomas Edsall with Mary Edsall in their book Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (1991). A more recent work presents a version of the "economic anxiety" version is Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) by Arlie Russell Hochschild.

My own framework on the angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin version of the "economic anxiety" narrative is that of course racism, sexism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism are all phenomena that are not purely dependent on immediate economic conditions or class identity. But they also exist within economic systems that both shape them are are shaped by them. The details of "intersectionality" will always present particular complications that will get translated into political rhetoric in a variety of ways.

But journalists using "economic anxiety" as a lazy placeholder for all that creates more fog than light.