Politics of Victimization, Resentment, and Cynicism

[flwyd]

In America, the political left and political right have conspired to create a culture and politics of victimization, and all the benefits of resentment and cynicism have accrued to the right. That's because resentment and apocalypse are weapons that can be used only to advance a politics of resentment and apocalypse. They are the weapons of the reactionary and the conservative — of people who fear and resist the future. Just as environmentalists believe they can create a great ecological politics out of apocalypse, liberals believe they can create a great progressive politics out of resentment; they cannot. Grievance and victimization make us smaller and less generous and thus serve only reactionaries and conservatives.

As liberals and environmentalists lost political power, they abandoned a politics of the strong, aspiring, and fulfilled for a politics of the weak, aggrieved, and resentful. The unique circumstances of the Great Depression — a dramatic, collective, and public fall from prosperity — are not being repeated today, nor are they likely to be repeated anytime soon. Today's reality of insecure affluence is a very different burden.

It is time for us to draw a new fault line through American political life, one that divides those dedicated to a politics of resentment, limits, and victimization from those dedicated to a politics of gratitude, possibility, and overcoming. The challenge for American liberals and environmentalists isn't to convince the American people that they are poor, insecure, and low status but rather the opposite: to speak to their wealth, security, and high status. It is this posture that motivates our higher aspirations for fulfillment. The way to get insecure Americans to embrace an expansive, generous, and progressive politics is not to tell them they are weak but rather to point out all the ways in which they are strong.

— Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, “Status and Security”

The thrust of the book is that people support environmental protection when their more basic needs have been satisfied and they're less focused on basic material concerns. The authors argue that we can better address environmental concerns by raising standards of living rather than focusing on limits and restriction. It's worth noting that the book was published in 2007 before the financial crisis, but I think many of their ideas hold in the post-crash world where even more Americans are worried about job security.

Comments

[sravakavarn]

I have come that similar conclusion myself and I probably have far more radical politics than the others. The victimization and umbrage trends are ENDEMIC to all sides of American life, but while left-liberals can make money on it, conservatives are far better at weaponizing it.

[medleymisty]

Whenever I see stuff like this, my question is: Okay, but how are you going to get policies that would result in a higher standard of living from the current society? From my observations, American humans are really really really attached to their resentment and apocalyptic paranoia, and if any policy ideas that would lead to a higher standard of living could even get a hearing in our culture, their proponents would be spit on and hated and trolled.

Sorry, I've just developed learned helplessness from watching things go downhill for almost all my adulthood - I was 20 when 9/11 happened, and it's all been a fall into paranoia and hatred and irrationality from there, and I don't see any way to reach people who are deep into that hole.

[flwyd]

Okay, but how are you going to get policies that would result in a higher standard of living from the current society?

A couple threads:
First, one of the authors' goals is to convince environmentalists to support raising standards of living for folks in the developing world, rather than hoping we can protect the environment by keeping people poor. They have a chapter focused on Brazil and protection of the Amazon: laws meant to preserve the forest are fairly ineffective because there are several stronger incentives in place to cut down the forest. The authors argue that if we can raise the standard of living for Brazilians—including by forgiving outstanding foreign debt that's draining government coffers—we can bring more folks into the middle class and in a position to be concerned about environmental preservation, who will then be motivated to apply political pressure from within to enforce environmental laws.

On the American front, I haven't finished the book yet, so I don't know their full proposal for "The Politics of Possibility," which is the title for the second half of the book. Earlier in this chapter, though, they say that by most standards, even poor Americans have a remarkably high material standard of living. We aren't struggling for food and shelter, but we are struggling for status, community connection, and other types of fulfillment higher on Maslow's hierarchy.

As I discussed in my review of George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, it's important to communicate in a way that activates your moral frame. Campaigning against someone else's point of view gets that position rattling around their brain. Campaigning for your vision of the world reinforces that idea. When Obama won in 2008, his primary messages were hope and change, not fear and reactionary. His focus on health care aimed to reduce one of the biggest elements of fear and worry that Americans face, and a further push for universal health care could solidify that.

Liberals have done a pretty poor job proposing a framework for a post-scarcity society where people find fulfillment even though the need for labor declines due to automation and efficiency. Imagine a politician who ran on a platform of national strength through community resilience and freedom and opportunity supported by a foundation like basic income. This is a positive message meant to raise standard of living and reduce fears. It's also not a message designed to activate those fears and folks into a fight-or-flight response.

[altamira16]

I hope that Trump breaks the whole notion of CEO as smart person. I also hope people realize that people who have a lot more money than they do get the biggest tax breaks.

[altamira16]

Do you find yourself having reasonable conversations with conservatives?

I am finding myself deeply exhausted by people defending propping up vile PAC-sponsored speech that they don't believe in as "free speech that must be supported" because it pisses off liberals.

I am seeing people high-fiving each other over this as proper exercise of gun rights instead of tragedy.

[flwyd]

I'm still in the "Honing my tools" phase, and I don't have many conservatives easily at my disposal[1], so I haven't had any political conversations with conservatives yet this year. I just volunteered to get involved in a drive to eastern Colorado participation in my nonpartisan climate group, so I'm hoping to get a chance to talk to farmers and ranchers and small business owners.

My goal isn't to get in internet fights with alt right trolls or try to convince white purists that multiculturalism is a better goal for society. My hope is to engage reasonable people with a conservative or libertarian mental framework that a lot of policies advocated by the Trump administration—climate change denial, xenophobia, executive opacity, publicly funded private education, etc.—are counter to many of their core values. I don't want to convince everyone in America; I just want to convince enough Americans that we're inoculated against the loonies.

[1] The only right winger in my immediate family was my uncle, who passed away (and was unconvinceable anyway). I have Republican second cousins, but I'm not on Facebook so we don't get into arguments about inaccurate memes. Plus, they're Minnesota Nice, so I think they mostly keep their politics to themselves. Most of my social interactions are in Boulder, which is very lefty, and with remote coworkers, who are also highly skewed in favor science, inclusiveness, and functional government.

[altamira16]

I guess I am experiencing some level of Facebook-related despair. This is usually why I left a social network when people that I grew up with joined.

It seems like people in other places are just now picking up on libertarianism because they don't want to identify with the Republican party anymore. They want to be pro-life libertarians. That just does not make sense.