On status – Thomas B. Edsall in NYT:

‘Roughly speaking, Trump and the Republican Party have fought to enhance the status of white Christians and white people without college degrees: the white working and middle class. Biden and the Democrats have fought to elevate the standing of previously marginalized groups: women, minorities, the L.G.B.T.Q. community and others.’

(…)

‘Just over a decade ago, in their paper “Hypotheses on Status Competition,” William C. Wohlforth and David C. Kang, professors of government at Dartmouth and the University of Southern California, wrote that “social status is one of the most important motivators of human behavior” and yet “over the past 35 years, no more than half dozen articles have appeared in top U.S. political science journals building on the proposition that the quest for status will affect patterns of interstate behavior.” Scholars are now rectifying that omission, with the recognition that in politics, status competition has become increasingly salient, prompting a collection of emotions including envy, jealousy and resentment that have spurred ever more intractable conflicts between left and right, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives.’

(…)

‘Understanding “the effects of status — inequality based on differences in esteem and respect” is crucial for those seeking to comprehend “the mechanisms behind obdurate, durable patterns of inequality in society,” Ridgeway argued: Failing to understand the independent force of status processes has limited our ability to explain the persistence of such patterns of inequality in the face of remarkable socioeconomic change.
“As a basis for social inequality, status is a bit different from resources and power. It is based on cultural beliefs rather than directly on material arrangements,” Ridgeway said: We need to appreciate that status, like resources and power, is a basic source of human motivation that powerfully shapes the struggle for precedence out of which inequality emerges.
Ridgeway elaborated on this argument in an essay, “Why Status Matters for Inequality”: Status is as significant as money and power. At a macro level, status stabilizes resource and power inequality by transforming it into cultural status beliefs about group differences regarding who is “better” (esteemed and competent).
In an email, Ridgeway made the case that “status is definitely important in contemporary political dynamics here and in Europe,” adding that Status has always been part of American politics, but right now a variety of social changes have threatened the status of working class and rural whites who used to feel they had a secure, middle status position in American society — not the glitzy top, but respectable, ‘Main Street’ core of America.’

(…)

‘Peter Hall, a professor of government at Harvard, wrote by email that he and a colleague, Noam Gidron, a professor of political science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, have found that across the developed democracies, the lower people feel their social status is, the more inclined they are to vote for anti-establishment parties or candidates on the radical right or radical left.
Those drawn to the left, Hall wrote in an email, come from the top and bottom of the social order: People who start out near the bottom of the social ladder seem to gravitate toward the radical left, perhaps because its program offers them the most obvious economic redress; and people near the top of the social ladder often also embrace the radical left, perhaps because they share its values.
In contrast, Hall continued, The people most often drawn to the appeals of right-wing populist politicians, such as Trump, tend to be those who sit several rungs up the socioeconomic ladder in terms of their income or occupation. My conjecture is that it is people in this kind of social position who are most susceptible to what Barbara Ehrenreich called a “fear of falling” — namely, anxiety, in the face of an economic or cultural shock, that they might fall further down the social ladder,” a phenomenon often described as “last place aversion.’

(…)

‘In this context, what Gidron and Hall call “the subjective social status of citizens — defined as their beliefs about where they stand relative to others in society” serves as a tool to measure both levels of anomie in a given country, and the potential of radical politicians to find receptive publics because “the more marginal people feel they are to society, the more likely they are to feel alienated from its political system — providing a reservoir of support for radical parties.”’

(…)
‘Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester in the U.K., argued in an email that three factors have heightened the salience of status concerns.
The first, he wrote, is the vacuum created by “the relative decline of class politics.” The second is the influx of immigrants, “not only because different ‘ways of life’ are perceived as threatening to ‘organically grown’ communities, but also because this threat is associated with the notion that elites are complicit in the dilution of such traditional identities.” The third factor Ford describes as “an asymmetrical increase in the salience of status concerns due to the political repercussions of educational expansion and generational value change,” especially “because of the progressive monopolization of politics by high-status professionals,” creating a constituency of “cultural losers of modernization” who “found themselves without any mainstream political actors willing to represent and defend their ‘ways of life’ ” — a role Trump sought to fill.’

(…)

‘Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, describes it this way: The alignment between partisan and other social identities has generated a rift between Democrats and Republicans that is deeper than any seen in recent American history. Without the crosscutting identities that have traditionally stabilized the American two-party system, partisans in the American electorate are now seeing each other through prejudiced and intolerant eyes.
If polarization has evolved into partisan hatred, status competition serves to calcify the animosity between Democrats and Republicans.’

(…)

‘Kurer argued that it is the threat of lost prestige, rather than the actual loss, that is a key factor in status-based political mobilization: Looking at the basic socio-demographic profile of a Brexiter or a typical supporter of a right-wing populist party in many advanced democracies suggests that we need to be careful with a simplified narrative of a ‘revolt of the left behind’. A good share of these voters can be found in what we might call the lower middle class, which means they might well have decent jobs and decent salaries — but they fear, often for good reasons, that they are not on the winning side of economic modernization.’

(…)

‘Voters in the bottom half of the income distribution face a level of hypercompetition that has, in turn, served to elevate politicized status anxiety in a world where social and economic mobility has, for many, ground to a halt: 90 percent of the age cohort born in the 1940s looked forward to a better standard of living than their parents’, compared with 50 percent for those born since 1980. Even worse, those in the lower status ranks suffer the most lethal consequences of the current pandemic.
These forces in their totality suggest that Joe Biden faces the toughest challenge of his career in attempting to fulfill his pledge to the electorate: “We can restore the defining American promise, that no matter where you start in life, there’s nothing you can’t achieve. And, in doing so, we can restore the soul of our nation.” Trump has capitalized on the failures of this American promise. Now we have to hope that Biden can deliver.’

Read the article here.

A few notes. For those who were paying attention this might not come as a big surprise, but it’s neatly summarized in this article.

Status is not the same as money, it will overlap but not always. As I argued before, and I was hardly the only one, despite his resources Trump could be seen as a pariah, that made him attractive to voters who consciously or unconsciously identified with the pariah, or as it’s called in this article ‘cultural losers of modernization’.
The fear of falling is a big big reason to feel alienated by the political system.
Since status is not purely about money and power it makes sense that even in fairly functional welfare states like Sweden or Germany the extreme-right managed to do well in elections.
If you feel alienated from the mainstream you might as well feel alienated from the convictions held dearly by the mainstream, don’t be overly racist or anti-Semitic, don’t believe in conspiracy theories, the EU is despite all its flaws a valuable institution et cetera.

Meritocracy might function less than we hoped, might even be a failure, but I’m not sure what could replace it.

Status is by nature scarce, probably scarcer than money. The Central Bank can hand out money, even without risking inflation, but how can you hand out status?

One solution is that each group creates its own status hierarchy, this will divide countries of course.

Also, this article makes clear what nationalism in this century is. It has nothing to do anymore with really “loving” your country, whatever that meant, or dying for your country, but it’s a sense of entitlement, I’m a true American, a true German, and for that reason I deserve status.
The compartmentalization of status will turn out be less than satisfactory. I’ve status in my own street, but in order to keep this status I cannot leave my street anymore. The bubble of comfort is a bubble of status, sometimes a fairly small bubble.

What we see happening on a daily basis on social media is first and foremost a fight for status, likes, retweets, hearts, comments et cetera.

The fight for status undermines the idea that you can be respectable – and you deserve to be respected just for being human, we don’t even have to use the word ‘decent.’

This is something that cannot be resolved by the redistribution of power and money, at best only partly. I repeat myself.

This demands a cultural shift, the realization that our culture of fame – and fame is status at its sexiest – turned those without this kind of capital into undesirable human insects, at least in our imagination.

You can blame capitalism, you can always blame capitalism, but especially in this case that’s less than half of the story. The culture of fame is more than a side effect of capitalism.
The longing for mythical beings, for demigods is extremely human, the longing to become a demigod is also human.

The fact that almost everywhere in the West medical workers are referred to as heroes nowadays is maybe the beginning of the realization that we must provide citizens with different options to become a hero or a demigod.

But also here I must state, if everybody is a demigod there will be the desire to become a four star demigod.
We won’t be able I’m afraid to unravel the promise of social mobility and severe status competition. But we can make the side effects of this competition less destructive, for example by trying to lessen the daily humiliations of our undesirable neighbors.

On status – Thomas B. Edsall in NYT:

‘Roughly speaking, Trump and the Republican Party have fought to enhance the status of white Christians and white people without college degrees: the white working and middle class. Biden and the Democrats have fought to elevate the standing of previously marginalized groups: women, minorities, the L.G.B.T.Q. community and others.’

(…)

‘Just over a decade ago, in their paper “Hypotheses on Status Competition,” William C. Wohlforth and David C. Kang, professors of government at Dartmouth and the University of Southern California, wrote that “social status is one of the most important motivators of human behavior” and yet “over the past 35 years, no more than half dozen articles have appeared in top U.S. political science journals building on the proposition that the quest for status will affect patterns of interstate behavior.” Scholars are now rectifying that omission, with the recognition that in politics, status competition has become increasingly salient, prompting a collection of emotions including envy, jealousy and resentment that have spurred ever more intractable conflicts between left and right, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives.’

(…)

‘Understanding “the effects of status — inequality based on differences in esteem and respect” is crucial for those seeking to comprehend “the mechanisms behind obdurate, durable patterns of inequality in society,” Ridgeway argued: Failing to understand the independent force of status processes has limited our ability to explain the persistence of such patterns of inequality in the face of remarkable socioeconomic change.
“As a basis for social inequality, status is a bit different from resources and power. It is based on cultural beliefs rather than directly on material arrangements,” Ridgeway said: We need to appreciate that status, like resources and power, is a basic source of human motivation that powerfully shapes the struggle for precedence out of which inequality emerges.
Ridgeway elaborated on this argument in an essay, “Why Status Matters for Inequality”: Status is as significant as money and power. At a macro level, status stabilizes resource and power inequality by transforming it into cultural status beliefs about group differences regarding who is “better” (esteemed and competent).
In an email, Ridgeway made the case that “status is definitely important in contemporary political dynamics here and in Europe,” adding that Status has always been part of American politics, but right now a variety of social changes have threatened the status of working class and rural whites who used to feel they had a secure, middle status position in American society — not the glitzy top, but respectable, ‘Main Street’ core of America.’

(…)

‘Peter Hall, a professor of government at Harvard, wrote by email that he and a colleague, Noam Gidron, a professor of political science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, have found that across the developed democracies, the lower people feel their social status is, the more inclined they are to vote for anti-establishment parties or candidates on the radical right or radical left.
Those drawn to the left, Hall wrote in an email, come from the top and bottom of the social order: People who start out near the bottom of the social ladder seem to gravitate toward the radical left, perhaps because its program offers them the most obvious economic redress; and people near the top of the social ladder often also embrace the radical left, perhaps because they share its values.
In contrast, Hall continued, The people most often drawn to the appeals of right-wing populist politicians, such as Trump, tend to be those who sit several rungs up the socioeconomic ladder in terms of their income or occupation. My conjecture is that it is people in this kind of social position who are most susceptible to what Barbara Ehrenreich called a “fear of falling” — namely, anxiety, in the face of an economic or cultural shock, that they might fall further down the social ladder,” a phenomenon often described as “last place aversion.’

(…)

‘In this context, what Gidron and Hall call “the subjective social status of citizens — defined as their beliefs about where they stand relative to others in society” serves as a tool to measure both levels of anomie in a given country, and the potential of radical politicians to find receptive publics because “the more marginal people feel they are to society, the more likely they are to feel alienated from its political system — providing a reservoir of support for radical parties.”’

(…)
‘Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester in the U.K., argued in an email that three factors have heightened the salience of status concerns.
The first, he wrote, is the vacuum created by “the relative decline of class politics.” The second is the influx of immigrants, “not only because different ‘ways of life’ are perceived as threatening to ‘organically grown’ communities, but also because this threat is associated with the notion that elites are complicit in the dilution of such traditional identities.” The third factor Ford describes as “an asymmetrical increase in the salience of status concerns due to the political repercussions of educational expansion and generational value change,” especially “because of the progressive monopolization of politics by high-status professionals,” creating a constituency of “cultural losers of modernization” who “found themselves without any mainstream political actors willing to represent and defend their ‘ways of life’ ” — a role Trump sought to fill.’

(…)

‘Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, describes it this way: The alignment between partisan and other social identities has generated a rift between Democrats and Republicans that is deeper than any seen in recent American history. Without the crosscutting identities that have traditionally stabilized the American two-party system, partisans in the American electorate are now seeing each other through prejudiced and intolerant eyes.
If polarization has evolved into partisan hatred, status competition serves to calcify the animosity between Democrats and Republicans.’

(…)

‘Kurer argued that it is the threat of lost prestige, rather than the actual loss, that is a key factor in status-based political mobilization: Looking at the basic socio-demographic profile of a Brexiter or a typical supporter of a right-wing populist party in many advanced democracies suggests that we need to be careful with a simplified narrative of a ‘revolt of the left behind’. A good share of these voters can be found in what we might call the lower middle class, which means they might well have decent jobs and decent salaries — but they fear, often for good reasons, that they are not on the winning side of economic modernization.’

(…)

‘Voters in the bottom half of the income distribution face a level of hypercompetition that has, in turn, served to elevate politicized status anxiety in a world where social and economic mobility has, for many, ground to a halt: 90 percent of the age cohort born in the 1940s looked forward to a better standard of living than their parents’, compared with 50 percent for those born since 1980. Even worse, those in the lower status ranks suffer the most lethal consequences of the current pandemic.
These forces in their totality suggest that Joe Biden faces the toughest challenge of his career in attempting to fulfill his pledge to the electorate: “We can restore the defining American promise, that no matter where you start in life, there’s nothing you can’t achieve. And, in doing so, we can restore the soul of our nation.” Trump has capitalized on the failures of this American promise. Now we have to hope that Biden can deliver.’

Read the article here.

A few notes. For those who were paying attention this might not come as a big surprise, but it’s neatly summarized in this article.

Status is not the same as money, it will overlap but not always. As I argued before, and I was hardly the only one, despite his resources Trump could be seen as a pariah, that made him attractive to voters who consciously or unconsciously identified with the pariah, or as it’s called in this article ‘cultural losers of modernization’.
The fear of falling is a big big reason to feel alienated by the political system.
Since status is not purely about money and power it makes sense that even in fairly functional welfare states like Sweden or Germany the extreme-right managed to do well in elections.
If you feel alienated from the mainstream you might as well feel alienated from the convictions held dearly by the mainstream, don’t be overly racist or anti-Semitic, don’t believe in conspiracy theories, the EU is despite all its flaws a valuable institution et cetera.

Meritocracy might function less than we hoped, might even be a failure, but I’m not sure what could replace it.

Status is by nature scarce, probably scarcer than money. The Central Bank can hand out money, even without risking inflation, but how can you hand out status?

One solution is that each group creates its own status hierarchy, this will divide countries of course.

Also, this article makes clear what nationalism in this century is. It has nothing to do anymore with really “loving” your country, whatever that meant, or dying for your country, but it’s a sense of entitlement, I’m a true American, a true German, and for that reason I deserve status.
The compartmentalization of status will turn out be less than satisfactory. I’ve status in my own street, but in order to keep this status I cannot leave my street anymore. The bubble of comfort is a bubble of status, sometimes a fairly small bubble.

What we see happening on a daily basis on social media is first and foremost a fight for status, likes, retweets, hearts, comments et cetera.

The fight for status undermines the idea that you can be respectable – and you deserve to be respected just for being human, we don’t even have to use the word ‘decent.’

This is something that cannot be resolved by the redistribution of power and money, at best only partly. I repeat myself.

This demands a cultural shift, the realization that our culture of fame – and fame is status at its sexiest – turned those without this kind of capital into undesirable human insects, at least in our imagination.

You can blame capitalism, you can always blame capitalism, but especially in this case that’s less than half of the story. The culture of fame is more than a side effect of capitalism.
The longing for mythical beings, for demigods is extremely human, the longing to become a demigod is also human.

The fact that almost everywhere in the West medical workers are referred to as heroes nowadays is maybe the beginning of the realization that we must provide citizens with different options to become a hero or a demigod.

But also here I must state, if everybody is a demigod there will be the desire to become a four star demigod.
We won’t be able I’m afraid to unravel the promise of social mobility and severe status competition. But we can make the side effects of this competition less destructive, for example by trying to lessen the daily humiliations of our undesirable neighbors.