Resentment

As I've mentioned before on this blog: despite not being resident in the state of Florida for more than a decade now, I still receive periodic e-blasts from the crudely right-wing member of Congress who represents the district where I was raised. Most of these mailings come in the form of ludicrously tendentious "polls," which purport to be a neutral way to gather information on his constituents' views, but always display the author's bias in their choice of wording—especially when it comes to matters of immigration. 

I had come to be inured, or so I thought, to most of this language; yet the last one left me baffled. The subject line read: "Payouts to Illegals?" In essence, the congressman was asking whether we supported a legal settlement that the Justice Department was apparently contemplating to families separated under Trump's "zero tolerance" policy. 

What surprised me wasn't that the congressman opposed paying these damages (that went without saying) but rather that so many people seemed to agree with him. Once I clicked through to the results page, more than 80% of the reading public apparently thought the same as him. 

To be sure, his question was worded in a deliberately inflammatory way, seeking to gin up as much revulsion to the idea as he could muster; but then again, all his emails are written that way, and the results aren't usually so skewed in one direction. Why on earth were people so opposed to providing some small recompense to families affected by what nearly everyone can agree was an appalling human rights violation—indeed, what medical experts have deemed a form of torture— that was willfully committed by our government against parents and children just trying to survive? 

Trump's family separation policy, after all, was unpopular and widely deplored. Yet here was a scheme with no aim other than to compensate its victims (in a woefully inadequate way at that), and it seemed to be polling just as poorly! 

(Underlining the point: in the week since I started drafting this post, Republicans in Congress have only succeeded in making even more hay out of the issue, forcing a number of awkward responses from the White House and now backing an amendment to this year's national defense authorization bill that would preclude the government from paying damages to these families.)

Such a result may not take everyone by surprise. After all, the psychological mechanism at work here is not hard to deduce. Someone is getting something; and not only that, but getting it for "free" (actually, at the incalculable human cost of having their children forcibly kidnapped and disappeared with no knowledge of where they were being taken, but let's set that aside for now). Perhaps we need look no further here than the simple motives of envy, xenophobia, and resentment. Many people feel that a "handout" is being given to the "undeserving," and they'd rather it went to them.

Simple enough, you might say; yet, as always with the mysterious alchemy of resentment, one must ask: why target these families, rather than the architects of the family separation policy itself? Can people really feel envy at the plight of people whose children were taken from them, sometimes for years, resulting in separations so long and traumatic that the families sometimes lost the ability to communicate with one another in their native languages? Can anyone be jealous of someone who has endured that? 

And then there's the question of the imbalance between the amount of outrage this has generated and the relative size of the individual settlements actually being discussed. In the scheme of things, how can these measly cash payouts be so offensive to people, when we compare them to the astronomically vast monetary rewards that people take home all the time for economic activities that are not only socially useless, but may even be actively harmful? 

Even more to the point, why wouldn't that same resentment and outrage be directed toward the people who put the families in this position in the first place, by concocting and inflicting the "zero tolerance" policy? 

I am reminded of how much success conservatives bizarrely had in the 1980s at similarly stoking public outrage and backlash over the size of legal settlements awarded in the major class action lawsuits of the decade—tobacco, asbestos, etc. There, we were talking about corporations that had pocketed outlandish amounts of money by pushing products on the unoffending public that caused cancer and devastated the health of countless ordinary working class Americans. 

Yet, Republicans were able to gin up popular revulsion not against these companies, but rather against the victims of their actions. So much so, that the GOP managed to pass tort reform in several states limiting the size of potential class action pay-outs. The dominant narrative in the public mind had become not one of arrogant corporations sticking it to the little guy, but rather of greedy trial lawyers and plaintiffs looking for (and unfairly receiving) a massive hand-out. 

Here again, we have to ask the same question: why were they so successful in re-directing people's outrage from the appropriate targets? If anyone had behaved with callousness and greed, surely it was the big tobacco firms and the companies that gave people cancer through filling their buildings with deadly asbestos. So too with family separation: if we should be outraged about anything, surely it should be at the thought that there might not be compensation, damages, and accountability for a policy that amounted to torture...

Instead, in both cases, the right succeeded in turning people's resentment against the victims. 

The reason for all this has to lie in Republicans' superior grasp of one of the most salient facts about the psychology of resentment: namely, that it is always horizontal, rather than vertical. In other words, we tend to feel most competitive toward people who are roughly at the same social level as us. When the emotion of resentment is activated, therefore, it is against them that we direct it. We don't want to see them get ahead of us, however slightly. Meanwhile, we are oblivious and indifferent to whatever may be happening far above or far below ourselves in the social scale. 

This is why voters and poll-takers are so likely to feel outrage at the thought of plaintiffs receiving cash settlements for unjust policies they have endured, or for the deleterious health consequences of industrial products in their environment. It's not because they view these plaintiffs as "other"—quite the opposite. It's because they can identify with them. They see themselves in them; they feel roughly at their level, and they fear the thought of such similarly-situated individuals getting just slightly ahead through a "free handout." This is what spurs their resentment.

Meanwhile, the executives and politicians who sold the asbestos or committed the family separation policy in the first place are on a much more remote social level, and therefore do not provoke outrage, even though they are the ones whose behavior was actually blameworthy.

It is because of the immense power of this "narcissism of minor differences" (as Freud called it) that conservatives will always win at the politics of resentment. Many people simply do not resent the super-wealthy private equity firms and hedge fund managers and tobacco executives and the high-powered architects of diabolical immigrant torture programs like Jeff Sessions—at least not half so much as they resent a fellow member of the middle class who might get an extra few thousands dollars from a court as compensation for enduring a preventable form of cancer. 

As Stefan Zweig once put it, in his novel Beware of Pity: "No envy is more mean than that of small-minded beings when they see a neighbor lifted [.... P]etty spirits are more ready to forgive a prince the most fabulous wealth rather than a fellow-sufferer beneath the same yoke the smallest degree of freedom." (Blewitt trans.) 

Within this one quotation is enclosed the key to the entire electoral strategy of the GOP, across so many decades of belligerent pratings about "handouts," "welfare queens," immigrants trying to "cash in" on public benefits, and on and on—right up to their latest proposed amendment to the NDAA to deny separated families any possibility of receiving monetary damages.

The question then becomes, of course: what can be done to respond to such a strategy? Many Democrats and left-wing pundits feel the key is to try to activate this same resentment and redirect it toward those who truly deserve it. Instead of attacking immigrants, racial and religious minorities, and other people who are generally disadvantaged in our society, they propose to try to get white middle- and working-class voters to see that they have a common interest with these groups in opposing the depredations of the super-wealthy.

As two political strategists recently put it, writing in the New York Times: "Democrats must [...] explain that powerful elites and special interests use race as a tool of division to distract hard-working people of all races while they get robbed blind. Then pivot back to shared interests."

This was only one of several recent thought-pieces on Democrats' electoral strategy in the wake of what came to many as a surprise loss in the gubernatorial race in Virginia. And while these authors' proposed messaging solution to this alarming situation (which many think bodes ill for the upcoming midterms) may sound plausible as a way to counter the GOP, I don't think it is either as untried or as effective as they claim. 

The "race-class narrative" that these authors favor, after all, is not a new idea. It has long enjoyed tremendous support from left-wing intellectuals, if few others. And left-wing Democratic candidates like Warren and Sanders have tried variants of it before. In essence, it boils down to one of the familiar themes of vulgar Marxism: people have been deluded by false consciousness into mistaking the identity of their true oppressors. If only they could rid themselves of this ideology, the argument goes, they would recognize their true class interest, which they hold in common with other members of the proletariat regardless of race or any other identity marker. 

The trouble with this, however, is that it is both intrinsically condescending (note that our two authors above couldn't even describe how Democrats should deliver this messaging without using the word "explain"), and it also wishes away the very salient fact of human psychology with which we began, and which Republicans have grasped and exploited so well: the horizontal nature of all resentment; the "narcissism of minor differences." 

You can't activate resentment and then expect to redirect toward the "right" targets. Resentment is inherently a conservative and reactionary emotion, because it is based in a sense of scarcity. It will therefore never do Democrats any good, and stoking it can easily backfire. 

This is the extraordinary danger of playing the politics of resentment and expecting it to result in progressive change. It is far more likely to rebound in the form of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and other manifestations of what are essentially "horizontal resentments" against other members of the middle and working classes. Think of how many "popular uprisings" in the 18th and 19th centuries took this form—such as the anti-Catholic "Gordon riots" in Great Britain of the 1780s. 

This doesn't mean political prospects for Democrats are hopeless. Just that resentment is not and never will be the winning political emotion for them—at least not if we want our party to remain a voice in the political sphere for a more inclusive, multicultural, multi-sectarian, and multiracial society. The good news is that there are other political emotions to activate that are far more conducive to Democratic electoral success and ultimately liberal outcomes, and which Democrats have appealed to in the past with great success: emotions like hope, generosity, and decency. 

A recent memo by political strategist Andrew Levison—also published in the spirit of intra-party soul-searching in the wake of the Virginia election—offers a list of some of the values that Democrats could activate to positive effect: "tolerance, open- mindedness and 'old fashioned' common sense." He also notes that the feeling of patriotism, in the sense of loyalty to American ideals, can be a winning emotion for Democrats, especially with rural white voters with high school educations who have largely been alienated from the party in recent decades. 

I have every reason to think that activating such feelings would indeed bring a larger number of new voters over to Democrats' side. After all, the white nationalism, nativism, and electoral anti-majoritarianism that the GOP now all-but-nakedly espouses is deeply at odds with the values most Americans cherish and that anchor their sense of national identity. Patriotism and national pride can therefore be winning emotions for liberals as much as their distortions (in the form of national chauvinism) have been for the GOP.

Where Democrats will go wrong is if they try to beat Republicans at their own game. It won't work. The GOP has the emotion of resentment cornered. It has it tied up with ribbons. Democrats need to take their own path, activate different emotions that motivate people to respond to new situations with generosity rather than a sense of scarcity. Michelle Obama's old advice: "when they go low, we go high" may sound overly idealistic in this moment, to people exhausted and demoralized after four years of Trump. But it was, lest we forget, the strategy that put the Obamas in the White House.