Line-Waiters, Line-Cutters, Donald Trump and the Pride Paradox

Those of us who want a more sane and humane America have a deep story problem, one that can't be fixed simply by throwing money at influencers.

I’ve read three pieces about technology and American politics in recent weeks that I think are worth dwelling on: Makena Kelly’s report in Wired yesterday on how Democrats “lost the internet” in 2024; Shane Goldmacher’s story (gift link) for The New York Times in early December about how the Trump campaign figured out how to micro-target young voters it thought were persuadable; and David Samuels’ essay for Tablet Magazine on how Donald Trump and Elon Musk (and Benjamin Netanyahu though in a smaller role) supposedly managed to blow up Barack Obama’s 15-year tech-powered “omnipotent thought machine.” The first two pieces are important both for what they reveal and leave out as guides to the future of politics; the third one is my nominee for the most insane piece of political writing of 2024, but it too reveals something important about the future ahead.

First let’s remember a few things about America. Because of the way the electoral game is structured, voters from smaller states and rural voters count more than ones living in the biggest states and urban areas. And because of the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court, billionaires can spend unlimited sums on elections and lobbying while unions—the only organizations that bring together large numbers of ordinary people as a counter-power to capital—have experienced a long assault on their ability to organize. Lastly, after decades of media deregulation that enabled both the rise of old moguls like Rupert Murdoch as well as new ones like Mark Zuckerberg, the Right’s media system now rivals or exceeds “mainstream media” in its reach and influence while traditional news has shrunk dramatically.

And despite all of that, the 2024 presidential election was, in historic terms, quite close. Trump beat Harris by just 1.5%--77.3 million to 75.0 million votes. And while those red arrows on the map show an overall move to the right in nearly every county in America, the main story of the election was not Trump’s ability to gain more support than he did in 2020 but the collapse of the Democratic vote. We won’t have really accurate data until voter files are updated, but, per Michael Podhorzer, it looks like 19 million people who voted for Biden in 2020 stayed home in 2024. The country hasn’t shifted as much to the right as it has shifted to the couch.

For those of us who believe in a sane, humane and inclusive society, that collapse to the couch ought to be one of our top concerns (along with a second one I’ll get to below, the way inequality in the “pride economy” is powering Trump and the whole MAGA movement). I’ll come back to that topic of the Great Democratic Resignation in future posts, I promise. But zeroing on the Democrats’ failure to purchase more positive coverage from “influencers” until late in the game last summer, which is what Kelly’s Wired story details, or the Trump campaign’s apparently astute use of hyper-targeting of individual voters that streaming services sell, which is what Goldmacher’s NY Times story covers, only makes sense if you think that the next round of elections will be won simply by hiring better marketing wizards.

All three of these tech and politics reporters presume that the path to power runs through media mastery, but none more than David Samuels, who spins one of the most fevered fantasies of mind control that I’ve even seen come from a top shelf writer, someone who was a contributing editor to Harper’s for more than two decades and has written cover stories for The Atlantic and the New York Times Magazine and more than a dozen features for The New Yorker. His piece in Tablet posits that Barack Obama, guided by theories about political messaging developed by his media guru David Axelrod, forged a powerful alliance with Big Tech companies to use digital technology to take control of public opinion. Samuels says this all became clear to him as he reported on the Obama Administration’s successful pursuit of the nuclear weapons deal with Iran. Here’s a bit of what he writes:

… the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves.

To my mind, the point of the story I was reporting … was twofold. First, it usefully warned of the potential distance between an underlying reality and an invented reality that could be successfully messaged and managed from the White House…Second, I wanted to show how the new messaging machinery actually operated—my theory being that it was probably a bad idea to allow young White House aides with MFA degrees to create “public opinion” from their iPhones and laptops, and to then present the results of that process as something akin to the outcome of the familiar 20th-century processes of reporting and analysis that had been entrusted to the so-called “fourth estate,” a set of institutions that was in the process of becoming captive to political verticals, which were in turn largely controlled by corporate interests like large pharmaceutical companies and weapons-makers.

What’s left out of this picture? Let’s start with how Obama’s political team mothballed its own grassroots activist army after winning in 2008, along with its choice to install a bunch of Wall Street-approved mandarins like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner at the helm of national economic policy. Then recall the Tea Party, an initially organic rebellion response to Obama’s election that was rapidly elevated by the Koch brothers and Fox News into a powerful backlash movement that helped the GOP retake the House in 2010. These developments, far more than any new digital power to create public opinion, are what shaped the contours of the Obama years. But not to Samuels, who apparently thinks they’re irrelevant. While he’s not wrong that the Obama White House worked hard to win over the votes it needed to get the Iran deal approved by Congress—including getting allies in the progressive arena to lean in to counter the power of AIPAC and its allies (another political faction Samuels ignores), there was nothing particularly nefarious or mind-controlling about that effort. Here’s a bit more raving from him:

What I did not imagine at the time was that Obama’s successor in the White House would not be Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Nor did I foresee that Trump would himself become the target of a messaging campaign that would make full use of the machine that Obama had built, along with elements of the American security state. Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built, and which it turned out he still controlled.

During the Trump years, Obama used the tools of the digital age to craft an entirely new type of power center for himself, one that revolved around his unique position as the titular, though pointedly never-named, head of a Democratic Party that he succeeded in refashioning in his own image—and which, after Hillary’s loss, had officially supplanted the “centrist” Clinton neoliberal machine of the 1990s. The Obama Democratic Party (ODP) was a kind of balancing mechanism between the power and money of the Silicon Valley oligarchs and their New York bankers; the interests of bureaucratic and professional elites who shuttled between the banks and tech companies and the work of bureaucratic oversight; the ODP’s own sectarian constituencies, which were divided into racial and ethnic categories like “POC,” “MENA,” and “Latinx,” whose bizarre bureaucratic nomenclature signaled their inherent existence as top-down containers for the party’s new-age spoils system; and the world of billionaire-funded NGOs that provided foot-soldiers and enforcers for the party’s efforts at social transformation.

It was the entirety of this apparatus, not just the ability to fashion clever or impactful tweets, that constituted the party’s new form of power. But control over digital platforms, and what appeared on those platforms, was a key element in signaling and exercising that power.

The piece goes on, imagining that everything from the rise of Black Lives Matter to greater societal openness to gay marriage to Biden’s victory in 2020 were all the product of the Democratic Party’s “control over major information platforms.” This is also why Samuels then argues that Musk’s decision to buy Twitter (which he laughably calls a “monopoly”) was so important to blowing up the Obama mind-control project.

Why does any of this matter? This conspiratorial view of how mass culture was supposedly created and directed for the last 15 years is pervasive now on the MAGA Right. People like Musk and the other tech bros being appointed to powerful positions around Trump, like incoming AI czar David Sacks, are big believers in this notion that the left’s “woke mind virus” is the greatest danger facing America. Musk tweeted just the other day that “legacy media must die.” Such attitudes will be a key driver of the Trump Administration’s interventions in media regulation. And this is just one of several ways that the next few years are going to be deeply weird.

The Message, Not the Medium

In fairness to Makena Kelly, though, her piece in Wired makes one additional point about Democrats and media that shouldn’t be dismissed—which is that left-leaning media creators aren’t as temperamentally willing to “get on board” with whatever message the Democratic Party leadership wants as right-leaning outlets are with the GOP. And that in turn makes Democratic-leaning funders far less inclined to invest in progressive media. Indeed, one way to think about the hundreds of millions of dollars that the Harris campaign spent on paid media in barely 100 days of campaigning is that a generation of Democratic donors have been trained to believe it is far better to burn their money on TV and digital ads that make corporate media companies a bit richer than it is to invest year-round in progressive media, because at least with paid advertising you have 100% control over the message.

But I want to offer a deeper point about all these conversations about the role of media, drawing on the work of Arlie Russell Hochschild. Much of the time, we think about media consumption simply in the context of the attention economy. That is, humans have a limited amount of time in each day, and so it matters a lot what we focus our attention on. The rise of digital media destabilized the old attention economy, where just a few programs and people dominated. Now competition for attention is fierce, with influencers and other new media creators building audiences as big or bigger than the ones consuming legacy media. So, if a new format like podcasting or streaming video becomes the “place” attracting attention from sought-after demographics like right-leaning young men, it makes sense to figure out how to compete for attention there.

What’s missing from this whole conversation, though, is why the Joe Rogans of this changing media world are attracting attention in the first place. The medium is only partly the message here—new formats alone and the Trump campaign’s willingness to flood them with content are not why he won this election.

And this is where Hochschild offers some very useful ideas, I think. You may have read her 2018 book, Strangers in Their Own Land, which explored why working-class residents of Louisiana were voting for Republicans who did nothing to raise their wages or protect them from polluters. In that book, Hochschild suggested that these people saw the world through a “deep story” that made emotional sense to them even as it led them to vote against their material interests. In this deep story, working-class whites (especially men) see themselves as waiting in a long line of aspirants to the American Dream, and while they wait, the line barely moving, up ahead they see people cutting the line—Blacks and women being boosted by affirmative action, immigrants and refugees being offered asylum, and Democrats waving them ahead. To make matters worse, people ahead in the line look back at these patient folks and call them names: ignorant, racist, sexist, homophobes. In the absence of any more compelling story, and offered an opportunity to strike back against the unfairness of that meta-narrative, they took it.

In her new book, set in rural eastern Kentucky, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right, Hochschild builds on this concept. First, she introduces the idea that we all experience life through two equally powerful lenses. One is the material economy, which as we all know has gotten more unequal and precarious in America since the 1970s. The other is the pride economy, where she uses the word pride as “a master term, with honor, respect, and status being distinct subtypes of it.” The flip side of pride is shame, and how we manage that feeling—who we blame for it, ourselves or others—is often a key driver of political attitudes, she writes.

Of course, one’s standing in the material and pride economies are linked. As Hochschild writes, “If we become poor, we have two problems. First, we are poor (a material matter), and second, we are made to feel ashamed of being poor (a matter of pride). If we lose our job, we are jobless (a material loss) and then ashamed of being jobless (an emotional loss). Many also feel shame at receiving government help to compensate for that loss. If we live in a once-proud region that has fallen on hard times, we first suffer loss, then shame at the loss—and … often anger at the real or imagined shamers.”

Hochschild builds on this idea by noting how differently Democrats and Republicans think about an individual’s responsibility for achieving success. Republicans are far more likely to ascribe poverty to an individual’s lack of effort compared to Democrats, who are more inclined to see larger circumstances beyond an individual’s control. This, she argues, has created a harsh and invisible “pride paradox” across America because of how different states operationalize these values:

“We have divided into two economies and two cultures, one red, one blue. Red states faced both tougher economic times and the more demanding, old-school brand of individualism in which no government help, no class or racial advantage—only one’s own hard work—could account for one’s fate. Those in blue states experience better economic times through a less shame-inducing cultural lens….Republicans also have stronger faith than do Democrats in capitalism without government help or regulation—that is, raw capitalism. In the states they control, unregulated capitalism has given them a rougher ride.”

When companies pull out of whole regions, as they did during the long decades of “free trade” and globalization, the people left behind—especially in red states and counties—find themselves in a pride paradox. The jobs that remain pay poorly, and breadwinners find themselves shamed again at their failure to be providers. Falling on welfare, or worse, drugs, only increases the shame. And then remember how the larger national culture depicts rural people as backward, uneducated and less worldly.

The pride paradox, Hochschild says, is what has made Donald Trump such a potent force across the country among people caught on the wrong side of it. To return to the deep story so resonant among so many who feel their shot at the American Dream is being taken unfairly by line-cutters abetted by Democrats, she adds a new layer. While Democrats and their politically-correct crowd bully the patriotic white people patiently waiting their turn for even daring to think that it’s unfair that minorities, women and immigrants are cutting the line, the line-waiters see a different bully appear who is on their side. Yes, he’s full of himself and mean, but that just makes him strong enough to push around the bad bullies. “He’s protecting you, he’s your bully,” one of Hochschild’s interviewees suggests. “So, when others criticize the second bully, you defend him not because he’s perfect but because he’s your bully.”

Trump’s fans, Hochschild argues, see him as “a master anti-shame warrior” who has figured out how to harness the pride paradox to his and his followers’ benefit. She describes a four-part de-shaming ritual that he has perfected: First, he makes a provocative public statement. Second, elites, which includes pundits, Democratic leaders and Hollywood celebrities, rebukes him. Third, Trump poses as the victim of shaming: “Look at what they are doing to me. I am good. They are bad. And this could happen to you so stand with me.” And then fourth, he “roars back” at the shamers.

“With the January 6^th break-in, Trump conducted the 1-2-3-4 de-shaming ritual on a grander stage. First was the break-in. Second, the public shock and indictments. Third, outrage at the shamers. And later followed an embrace of those who broke into the Capitol. Added to this was the message of bonding. ‘When they shame me, they shame you,’ and implicitly, ‘So together we should get revenge.’”

It's nice to imagine that there might be something we can do to break this cycle but in the short term I’m not optimistic. Seeing the people who have turned to Trump for relief from their lost pride as human beings caught in a bad system, rather than brainwashed idiots caught in a cult of personality would be a helpful start. But his and his allies are promising so many new provocations, it’s hard to see how the de-shaming ritual that binds his base to him won’t keep going full blast. First Trump has to be given a chance to fail on his own. I can think of any number of ways that could happen, none of which I will burden you with now.

And with that, Happy New Year!