Status?
By: Jeremy Butman
Tags: Socialism, Corporate Media, Whatswrongwithamerica, Status, Trump Voters

An op-ed in the Times today rehashed the argument that what motivates Trump voters is status. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/opinion/trump-social-status-resentment.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage). The idea: not material conditions, but the transformation of mainstream values (viz. gay marriage, black president) has left middle-class white voters feeling de-valued and vulnerable.

First, whenever we are told that ideas, not material conditions, are the cause of something, we’re forced to again work out what we think the connection between ideas and material circumstances is. This is difficult; it’s easier to assume a cause is either ideological or material. It is implied, not by this piece per se, but generally, that ideological forces are harder to rectify than material complaints — it would be one thing if these people only wanted a better paying job, but what they really want is status, which is conferred culturally not materially. It becomes a problem, ultimately, of culture war.

However, this is a red herring. Because, 1) ideological forces are only powerful to the extent that material conditions allow them to flourish; 2) in reality, transforming material conditions is much more difficult than intellectual persuasion.

Status means image, one’s image within culture. It’s entirely possible that all of American politics and culture is reducible to what’s on TV. The media has made it its job to fan the flames of culture war — at a superstructural level with the intent of neutralizing debates about material conditions, and at a structural level, in order to demonstrate the good will of the American mainstream (corporations) toward those historically materially marginalized.

The tokenization of minorities — even all the many ‘firsts’ of the Biden administration do little more than provide a culturally fuzzy sheen to a global corporate agenda that is anti-democratic and white-supremacist — and the media’s embrace of identity politics as an alternative to black power politics or socialist politics, are still experienced by white America as a threat to status. This is racism, certainly, in that it is essentially anxiety about anyone other than white men being celebrated in mainstream media narratives. However, the recourse to identity politics, like the culture war itself, is 1) encouraged by business, because thereby the problem of exploitation is eclipsed by the problem of representation, which is easier for business to address without hurting its core goals, and 2) exacerbated by that same exploitation, now left unchecked, which has led to a hollowing out of the middle class, which, given that this impoverishment occurs simultaneously with the tokenization and celebration of black stories in media, makes middle-class whites and poor whites feel that they as a ‘people’ are being replaced. It’s an illusion, more or less, but the illusion is not merely ideological, not merely a question of media representation, but also material, in that that media representation itself is generated as a response to material conditions.

If we maintain that ideological forces are only as powerful as material conditions allow, then to combat the argument about status, which is valid on the surface, we must create material conditions that will allow for intellectual persuasion to have a chance. That means, we must address material inequity directly, rather than cover it over by means of media narratives. It’s not that representation isn’t important; it absolutely is. It’s that media representation of members of a group, when it serves as amelioration for material marginalization of that group as a whole, is a volatile and illusory thing.

I suppose the conclusion is that in order to combat the anxiety about status specifically, in fact what is more important than either simple representation — of either whites or blacks — or the real material conditions in which any group lives, is the relationship between media and corporations. Corporate media seems to be that which confers the status whites have anxiety about and is certainly largely responsible for bad faith tokenism. As long as media serves corporate interests in the final analysis, it cannot be expected to provide meaningful analyses of the identity of this country. To escape status anxiety, we need both more and less media — less mass media and more local media. But if we are to have a national media that represents ‘America’ without stirring up culture war, we need more equanimity of material circumstances. We have to transform the media structures and ideologies and the material conditions on the ground at the same time, and because this is both ideological and material, presumably both persuasion and force — in the sense, at least, of boycotts, strikes and marches — are needed.