The Spread Of The Politics Of Resentment
There's an excerpt of Francis Fukuyama's new book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, at Quillette. In it, he explains the nature of what he says "might be called the politics of resentment":
In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilized followers around the perception that the group's dignity had been affronted, disparaged, or otherwise disregarded. This resentment engenders demands for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question. A humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more emotional weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage.Thus, Russian president Vladimir Putin has talked about the tragedy of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and how Europe and the United States had taken advantage of Russia's weakness during the 1990s to drive NATO up to its borders. He despises the attitude of moral superiority of Western politicians and wants to see Russia treated not, as President Obama once said, as a weak regional player, but as a great power.
...The Chinese government of Xi Jinping has talked at length about China's "one hundred years of humiliation," and how the United States, Japan, and other countries were trying to prevent its return to the great power status it had enjoyed through the past millennia of history.
When the founder of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, was fourteen, his mother found him fixated on Palestine, "tears streaming down his face as he watched TV from their home in Saudi Arabia." His anger at the humiliation of Muslims was later echoed by his young co-religionists volunteering to fight in Syria on behalf of a faith they believed had been attacked and oppressed around the world. They hoped to re-create the glories of an earlier Islamic civilization in the Islamic State.
Resentment at indignities was a powerful force in democratic countries as well. The Black Lives Matter movement sprang from a series of well-publicized police killings of African-Americans in Ferguson (Missouri), Baltimore, New York, and other cities and sought to force the outside world to pay attention to the experience of the victims of seemingly casual police violence. On college campuses and in offices around the country, sexual assault and sexual harassment were seen as evidence of men not taking women seriously as equals.
...And many of those who voted for Donald Trump remembered a better time in the past when their place in their own societies was more secure and hoped through their actions to "make America great again." While distant in time and place, the feelings among Putin's supporters over the arrogance and contempt of Western elites were similar to those experienced by rural voters in the United States who felt that the urban bicoastal elites and their media allies were similarly ignoring them and their problems.
...In all cases a group, whether a great power such as Russia or China or voters in the United States or Britain, believes that it has an identity that is not being given adequate recognition--either by the outside world, in the case of a nation, or by other members of the same society. Those identities can be and are incredibly varied, based on nation, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender. They are all manifestations of a common phenomenon, that of identity politics.
Fukuyama looks at economic grievances through this lens:
While the economic inequalities arising from the last 50 or so years of globalization are a major factor explaining contemporary politics, economic grievances become much more acute when they are attached to feelings of indignity and disrespect. Indeed, much of what we understand to be economic motivation actually reflects not a straightforward desire for wealth and resources, but the fact that money is perceived to be a marker of status and buys respect.
I think he's picking up on a lack of belonging and meaning I've been sensing in our society for a while.
I suspect that people join Internet mobs because they provide a sort of replacement for religion.
I'm an atheist, so I'm not proposing the church (or any god belief) as the answer. But what religion gave people was a structure and a society and a sense of meaning that I think a lot of people are having a lot of trouble finding on their own.
A "tweet" from the internet's popular "Twitter" telecommunications service.
Crid at September 14, 2018 10:52 PM
"I suspect that people join Internet mobs because they provide a sort of replacement for religion."
There is a lot of truth in that. In a very real sense when you reject the older organized religions you don't get no religion or rationality. Instead you just get disorganized religion.
Ben at September 15, 2018 6:39 AM
Too often, declarations of atheism are simply rejections of the religion in which one grew up, the religion of one's "old ass" parents, and not an acceptance of science, humanism, or any other philosophy; rejecting one structure without replacing that structure with another structure or framework. Destruction without reconstruction.
So, when a philosophical framework is needed, one is constructed ad hoc, often with the flimsiest of materials. I think the embrace of socialism among Millennials is very similar - reject the capitalism of one's parents and replace it with the utopian promises of a barely-understood system one has not critically examined.
Conan the Grammarian at September 15, 2018 8:01 AM
"A humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more emotional weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage."
Imagine the humiliation and indignity of being told you are precious, and that your opinion matters, then finding out on Twitter and Facebook that neither is true.
Grip that bedazzled smartphone tighter, and hit "Send!" harder! Damn those people who do not hold my specialness in awe!
Radwaste at September 15, 2018 8:41 AM
The appeal of socialism is in its language extolling fairness, decency, and stability. To a population segment who have known only recession and sluggish economic growth mated with scandals and market chaos, the stability promised by socialism holds a strong appeal; the chaos inherent in capitalism's creative destruction not so much.
Millennials are decades from nightly news stories about gulags and secret police raids. For them, it's easy to dismiss North Korea or Venezuela as the historic aberrations that the self-declared democratic-socialists claim they are.
"It may sound noble to say, 'Damn economics, let us build up a decent world' but it is, in fact, merely irresponsible. With our world as it is, with everyone convinced that the material conditions here or there must be improved, proved, our only chance of building a decent world is that we can continue to improve the general level of wealth. The one thing modern democracy will not bear without cracking is the necessity of a substantial lowering of the standards of living in peacetime or even prolonged stationariness of its economic conditions." ~ F. A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom)
We've had Hayek's "prolonged stationariness of ... economic conditions" under Bush's second term and both of Obama's terms. That's part of what got Trump elected.
Conan the Grammarian at September 15, 2018 4:26 PM
Another warning about economic stagnation leading to totalitarianism from Hayek:
It should never be forgotten that the one decisive factor in the rise of totalitarianism on the Continent, which is yet absent in England and America, is the existence of a large recently dispossessed middle class. ~ F. A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom)
Conan the Grammarian at September 15, 2018 4:34 PM
This is all nothing but "The True Believer" -- Eric Hoffer's classic treatice on how to create mass movements
https://smile.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Movements-Perennial/dp/0060505915/ref=sr_1_1
wambut at September 15, 2018 5:45 PM
The problem with the desire for more respect is that no one out there is able to fulfill this wish. There is no "respect" agency that can dole it out. Respect is often truly in the eye of the "victim" who decides he deserves more respect. It is an adolescent wish. The world truly doesn't give a sh*t about you and we don't like that answer. I wish the college kids would recognize that colleges don't care about them either--it is a pose. Students pay the bills and colleges want them to believe that the college cares, but they don't really. Students are being suckers.
cc at September 15, 2018 6:12 PM
Too often, declarations of atheism are simply rejections of the religion in which one grew up,
As an atheist myself I gotta say a large majority of those I interact with who claim to be atheists just seem to be pissed off at their godc
lujlp at September 16, 2018 1:39 PM
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