TRUE BELIEVERS:
Trump’s Secret Weapon Has Always Been Status Anxiety: In a phone-powered age of diminishing social capital and growing identitarianism, the president knew just which fears to activate to get him back into the White House. (Alan Elrod, Jan 30, 2025, The bulwark)
The economic anxiety thesis is too easily contradicted by economic reality, which we have fairly reliable and objective ways of mapping and assessing. More useful for understanding what motivates Trump’s base would be a relative measure—one that could conceivably affect people in a variety of economic circumstances. The best starting point, as some observers have been arguing for years, is status anxiety.
That’s because while “status” comprises a number of signs of economic success—homes, jobs, bank accounts—it goes beyond them to include important intangibles. As Alain de Botton put it in a 2008 book on the subject, status also has to do with “a sense of being cared for and thought valuable.” And that kind of judgment is one we can only arrive at through comparison with others. He continues: “We see ourselves as fortunate only when we have as much as or more than those we have grown up with, work alongside, have as friends, or identify with in the public realm.”
This is the perfect pathology for citizens of a democracy: If merit, not rank, determines social value and achievement, as is meant to be the case in our country, then your average person will be confronted every day with the question of why they haven’t experienced greater success—a toxic recipe for self-righteousness, shame, anxiety, and self-consciousness. Especially when, thanks to our deranged media environment, the apparent success of others—including those we consider undeserving—is constantly in view. Why should they be so lucky, we might ask ourselves. Why isn’t my life like theirs? Why should I have to change my behavior to accommodate them? Why don’t people respect or value me?
As Anne Applebaum puts it in Twilight of Democracy, “When people have rejected aristocracy, no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth, no longer assume that the ruling class is endorsed by God, the argument about who gets to rule—who is the elite—is never over.”
The central role that status anxiety played in Trump’s most recent electoral success is attested in data gathered during the run-up to last fall’s election. For instance, a July 2024 survey from the Young Men Research Initiative and YouGov showed that men aged 18 to 29 who agreed with the statement “I do not feel financially stable”—that is, men experiencing acute economic anxiety—favored Harris by 10 points. Meanwhile, those who agreed with the statement “society looks down on men who are masculine” leaned +32 for Trump. A September 2024 CNN poll found 56 percent of respondents who voted for Trump feel that “growing diversity is threatening American culture.”
Status anxiety was also a key driver of Trump’s support in his first election. In 2016, survey analysis from the Public Religion Research Institute showed that “white working-class voters who say they often feel like a stranger in their own land and who believe the U.S. needs protecting against foreign influence were 3.5 times more likely to favor Trump than those who did not share these concerns.”
The inflection status anxiety gives to political issues like civil rights, wealth inequality, and cultural acceptance allows them to be separated from material needs that could be clearly quantified; they become instead a matter of competition between groups over position in society.
Shorter version, Eric Hoffer: “The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”