A SENSE OF PLACE
The profound ways we are shaped by our local cultures
Where you stand depends on where you sit. That’s some folksy wisdom, but I’ve found it to be true. Understand that principle and you’ll better understand politics, poverty, and even your own health.
Are Trump Supporters Racist?
A few weeks ago Donald Trump’s campaign was cratering into what seemed like inevitable defeat. Then suddenly last week, at least one poll by Rasmussen (a right-leaning org) has Trump ahead of Clinton nationally. Meanwhile, after seeming to flirt with softening his immigration stance, Trump emphasized in a speech in Phoenix last week that when elected he would immediately begin building “an impenetrable, physical wall” on the Mexican border.
Many of my friends in New York City cannot believe he is a presidential nominee. They know no Trump supporters personally and dismiss what supporters he has as racist and authoritarian-loving. From where they sit, supporting Trump is a stance that can’t be understood.
So I read Jonathan Haidt’s article on Nationalism “trumping” Globalism with great interest — because I’d heard it did such a good job of dissecting the appeal of conservative populism in the West at this moment in time. Haidt, who doesn’t seem like a Trump supporter, approaches the topic with dispassionate logic and empathy.
The main thrust of Haidt’s thesis is that the people who say they can’t understand Trump supporters or Brexit supporters are themselves provoking the populist sentiments that support represents. “Globalization and rising prosperity have changed the values and behavior of the urban elite, leading them to talk and act in ways that unwittingly activate authoritarian tendencies in a subset of the nationalists.”
The changing values of the western urban elite
Globalists, as Haidt calls them, are the urban elite who have financially benefitted most from the globalized economy. In their prosperity they have moved away from traditional values like security, deference to authorities, family, and religion, in favor of more “secular rational” values like change, progress, and self-expression. They believe national lines are less important than the universal value of humanity. “Cosmopolitans,” Haidt writes, “embrace diversity and welcome immigration, often turning those topics into litmus tests for moral respectability.” Conversely, they conflate anti-immigration policies with small-mindedness and racism. They denounce and shame those who disagree.
But many nationalists, argues Haidt, see patriotism as virtue and a real moral commitment. It is not window dressing for bigotry. “as many defenders of patriotism have pointed out, you love your spouse because she or he is yours, not because you think your spouse is superior to all others.”
Anti-immigration supporters, argues Haidt, don’t necessarily hate people who have different skin pigments (though that is surely some of it). Many just fear that their values and way of life are being threatened by those who are different. They hear Globalist calls for tolerance and diversity as being dismissive of the culture they have and the nation they love. Change threatens the values they hold dear.
Haidt sums up his argument in this paragraph (broken into sections by me for easier reading): “The answer to the question we began with — What on earth is going on? — cannot be found just by looking at the nationalists and pointing to their economic conditions and the racism that some of them do indeed display. One must first look at the globalists, and at how their changing values may drive many of their fellow citizens to support right-wing political leaders.
“In particular, globalists often support high levels of immigration and reductions in national sovereignty; they tend to see transnational entities such as the European Union as being morally superior to nation-states; and they vilify the nationalists and their patriotism as “racism pure and simple.”
“These actions press the “normative threat” button in the minds of those who are predisposed to authoritarianism, and these actions can drive status quo conservatives to join authoritarians in fighting back against the globalists and their universalistic projects.”
The globalists believe that anti-immigration nationalists need to better appreciate diversity and difference and the universal value of every human life. Ironically, it is just this sort of language that provokes suspicion, fear and resentment among the audience they are trying to influence.
Hillbillies vs. Globalists
The other night I was grabbing a beer at the good local bar with a friend who is one of the smartest guys I know. We ran into another friend, who is another one of the other smartest people I know. The second friend was there nursing a beer and reading J.D. Vance’s new book, Hillbilly Elegy. The first friend I was with said he couldn’t wait to read it and it was on his nightstand waiting for him. When these two guys are enthusiastic about the same book I feel like I should read it.
If my my second-hand recommendation isn’t enough to persuade you to invest a book’s amount of time, check out Rod Dreher’s review of Hillbilly Elegy as a smaller commitment. As he describes it, “If you want to understand America in 2016, Hillbilly Elegy is a must-read.”
Dreher’s summary: “The book is an autobiographical account by a lawyer (Yale Law School graduate) and sometime conservative writer who grew up in a poor and chaotic Appalachian household. He’s a hillbilly, in other words, and is not ashamed of the term. Vance reflects on his childhood, and how he escaped the miserable fate (broken families, drugs, etc) of so many white working class and poor people around whom he grew up.”
Vance is both a product of the local culture in which he was raised, but also someone who has moved past it far enough to reflect on it. He loves the people, but loves them enough be honest about their flaws. Here’s an example:
I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.
Where you stand depends on where you sit. And if you sit in hillbilly country, the risk is your unhealthy habits, your unfounded beliefs, and your unhelpful worldview may never be challenged. You may be trapped by circumstances of local culture in an intergenerational cycle of ugly poverty. And chances are it will shorten your life as well.
What if everyone in Detroit got cancer and no one in San Francisco did?
The gap between the wealthiest and the rest is growing and contributes to the resentment found in hillbilly country and in many more parts of America. We most often measure that gap in monetary terms, but you could also measure it in terms of health, more specifically, life expectancy.
According to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical association, there is a huge gap in life expectancy between the rich and poor in the United States:
For men, the gap between the top and bottom 1 percent nationwide is nearly 15 years. For women, it’s 10 years. And these disparities have widened since 2000. People in the top 5 percent have gained about three years of life expectancy. People at the bottom have gained almost nothing.
And where you live matters. “A poor person living in the San Francisco area can expect to live about three years longer than someone making the same income in Detroit. That difference is equivalent to how much national life expectancies would rise if we eliminated cancer.”
As Raj Chetty, the lead author of the article put it, “Think about their new data as if the poor in Detroit get cancer and the poor in San Francisco don’t. Then…you can see that this is a big deal.”
The study found shorter life expectancies among the poor “closely correlated with places that had lower exercise rates and higher rates of smoking and obesity.”
So the cities you think of as having active and healthy cultures, places like San Francisco, Denver and New York City, result in longer higher life expectancies for the poor. The poor in less overtly healthy cultures like the industrial midwest, can expect to die sooner.
It’s another example of how the around us culture affects us more than realize. We think we autonomously make decisions for ourselves and are in control of our lives, but in thousands of different ways we conform to the norms and culture around us. In New York, where I live, it’s evident on the sidewalk. You can tell who is a New Yorker and who is a tourist by their rate of footsteps per minute. New Yorkers walk faster. Almost all of them do. And if you moved to New York, eventually you would start walking faster too. And when did you would burn marginally more calories and likely live a marginally longer life.
How fast and how much you walk depends on where you live. And it turns out how long you live depends on where you live.
Where you stand depends on where you sit.
