I haven't yet read her book. But her project seems like a very useful complement to the much discussed study by Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016). I've criticized Hochschild's book that focuses on white people in the Lake Charles, Lousiana, area because she took too credulous a view of common white supremacist narratives. Silva, also a sociologist like Hochschild, focused on working-class people in Pennsylvania. Her study also apparently relies heavily on examining people's personal narratives of themselves and their lives but also takes a critical view of how closely those narratives reflect their larger social reality.
Silva is also the author of Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (2013), which is also briefly discussed in the interview and discussion with host Jen Pan and Ariella Thornhill that begins in the video after 55:00. It deals with the perennial political dilemma for the left of how is it so that many poor and working-class people decide to support candidates who pursue an economic agenda that primarily, or even overwhelmingly, favors the narrow material interests of the very wealthy.
In this interview, she has some worthwhile reflections on how social powerlessness can make conspiracy theories attractive.
One point that comes out in the discussion here is that Silva's working-class subjects were often proud of the way that had overcome real hardships in their lives and learned from the experience. The discussion suggests that this could be a reason Trump fans among this group were not put off by his bankruptcies because they understood in the context of their own life lessons of learning from failures.
And while it's an interesting point, we have to also remembers that reality matters. Trump's repeated bankruptcies were part of his own often dishonest, even criminal, approach to business. And risk and setbacks are qualitatively different for a trust-fund baby like Trump who benefitted from some $300 million in funds given to him by his father than they are for the average children of coal miners or factory workers in Pennsylvania.
Trump's business career also shows his fondness for thuggish, mob-like practices. His political mentor was Roy Cohn, who after his service as counsel for Joe McCarthy's redhunting Senate Subcommittee went on to prosperity and success as a mob lawyer in New York City. Jesse James or Pretty Boy Floyd or Bonnie and Clyde understandably make entertaining folk heroes, especially once they are dead and gone. But do you really want to put Al Capone in charge of the government you depend on to save your neighborhood and city during a sudden pandemic?
Trump certainly provided a real-world experience of what that looks like!
The question the video discussion addresses is variously framed but comes down to asking, "Why do so many working people vote against their own economic interests?" It's actually gets at a multifaceted phenomenon. That formulation of the question can easily create the hope that there is some "magic bullet" answer.
But there's not. One thing that is especially good about the interview with Silva is that it brings out the contradictions and inconsistencies in the way people express political opinions and attitudes. That's true of everybody to some extent, of course. This requires organizers and political campaigners to look for key areas they can use to mobilize voters and activists to their cause. And even if we take economic class and socially-constructed gender roles as being the basic formative forces of political consciousness, at any given time and place, political alignments do not correspond exactly to those categories. Factors like racism, authoritarian personalities, religion, and general social atomization are all factors at work. And timely access to relevant information on political issues and elections is also extremely important.
It's also important to remember that even though individuals may express a variety of opinions and attitudes that seem to be spread out all over the left-right political spectrum, voting behavior is more consistent. People have an inclination to vote or not to vote. And in the US, voters tend to lean Republican or Democratic from one election to the next. Navigating the working-people-voting-for-oligarchic-interests problem involves longer-term organizing and development of political identity, not just elevating the importance of single issues. We've recently seen state ballot initiatives on the minimum wage win a notably larger vote than the Democrats win in those jurisdictions. Which means some minimum-wage-increase advocates also voted for Republican politicians that are dead set against it.
In Jen Pan's opening commentary at the start of the program, she plays a portion of a CBS news report from 2017 on political polarization which indulges a basic failure of the corporate press, the Both Sides Do It trope. The Pew study referenced in that 2017 report showing 81% of people saying that cannot agree on basic facts is only meaningful in the context of what facts are being talked about.
The partisan polarization in the US is distinctly asymmetric, with the Republicans in a decades-long process of radicalization and the Democrats slowly dragging themselves out of the neoliberal bog. But if One Side says that space-alien lizard people are conspiring with George Soros to import Central American refugees, and the Other Side says, well, no, that's not true at all and it's also crazy and anti-Semitic, then Both Sides would be part of the 81%. But one side's reality-testing abilities are functioning far better than the other's in that case.
Jen Pan in her commentary also references this Jacobin article by Meagan Day, The Indifferent and the Defiant 02/08/2021, which looks at the question of Trump's increased percentage of the Latino vote in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas in 2020, a surprising and much-discussed outcome of the election.
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