Score one for the economic insecurity theory of Trump . . .
From the WAPO:
Despite her outward signs of success, Ryan had struggled financially for years. She was still paying off a $37,000 lien for unpaid federal taxes when she was arrested. She’d nearly lost her home to foreclosure before that. She filed for bankruptcy in 2012 and faced another IRS tax lien in 2010.
Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.
The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.
. . .
“I think what you’re finding is more than just economic insecurity but a deep-seated feeling of precarity about their personal situation,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a political science professor who helps run the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab at American University, reacting to The Post’s findings. “And that precarity — combined with a sense of betrayal or anger that someone is taking something away — mobilized a lot of people that day.”
When Trump was elected in 2016 there was a big debate over whether victory reflected economic or cultural factors. A lot of the initial research downplayed the influence of economic factors, although subsequent research shows a more complicated picture. This article shows how difficult economic and social factors are to disentangle . . .
Yeah, no score.
Racists are stupid people. Stupid people make bad decisions personally and financially.
” At Least 9 Far-Right Insurrectionists Have A History Of Violence Against Women
A HuffPost investigation found that multiple men arrested for the U.S. Capitol insurrection have restraining orders against them over domestic violence accusations. Others have faced charges and served prison time for sexual assault.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nine-far-right-insurrectionists-have-a-history-of-violence-against-women_n_60198d1ec5b6bde2f5c35bd6
As the man said, “Stupid is as stupid does, Sir”.
” The Not-So-Strange Death of Right Populism
To no great surprise, Trump didn’t move left on economics. Workers did benefit from the hot economy of his first three years in office, which MAGA ideologists spun as proof of the president’s unique business acumen (much as Third Way ideologists had once taken the 1990s economic boom as proof of the virtues of Clintonism). But instead of an infrastructure bill, there was a massive corporate tax cut; instead of a family leave plan, there was a failed attempt to strip healthcare from tens of millions of people. Up and down the federal bureaucracy, a familiar cast of industry shills set to work dismantling labor rights and environmental protections. Trump’s most durable accomplishment was the rubber-stamping of scores of Federalist Society judges, each one a devoted steward of the interests of capital.
If Bernie Sanders had won the White House only to spend his presidency cutting Social Security and deregulating industry, his core supporters would have reacted with fury. The reaction of avowed right populists to Trump’s abandonment of their ostensible program was strikingly different: they did nothing. Figures like Tucker Carlson and Josh Hawley lined up in support of the administration, while the MAGA faithful bristled at any suggestion that Trump might not be keeping his promises.
This dynamic came to a head in recent months, as Trump—by this point getting his advice from figures like Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore, high priests of supply-side theology—dithered in pressing for a second coronavirus relief bill. Perhaps a forceful push from his base might have stirred him to bully Senate Republicans into passing a bill. The push never came, as the populist right instead focused its ire on Anthony Fauci and Black Lives Matter. Trump’s failure to press for relief in the run-up to the election might go down as the final fatal blunder of his presidency. To the bitter end, movement publicists like Sohrab Ahmari were still issuing fawning odes to the leader for having “addressed the plight of the working class as an affront to national greatness.”
The striking thing about this record is not so much the lack of outright defections from Trumpism (with rare exceptions like Julius Krein, whose magazine American Affairs has been the most heterodox voice of the movement). It’s the lack of any sustained criticism, even as Trump made it ever-clearer that he had no interest in the agenda that right populists ascribed to him. This doesn’t look like the behavior of a faction genuinely dedicated to winning ideological battles.”
I think the idea that a substantial portion of GOP supporters are morons or racists or both is spot on and explains their economic “ insecurity”. There is a reason that college educated people have left the GOP in droves—they can get beyond their cultural biases to consider what policies might actually improve their and their families lives. The GOP has basically convinced its base that anything which upsets smart, educated, principled people is good no matter how much it hurts them personally. You have to be a moron to fall for that.
Not enough money to pay the mortgage, but plenty of money to buy guns and ammo.
As my 4-year-old grandson would say: “bad decisions means there will be consequences”.
OK, among the insurrectionists, more than the national average have financial problems. And yet, the vast majority of people with financial problems didn’t murder, incite murder, rebel, or incite rebellion.
Another view . . .
“Based on the early arrests and news reports from the riot, the Capitol insurrectionists represent a bigger slice of white America than just the low-class knuckle-draggers who rolled in from the sticks on Donald Trump’s command. Many of the protesters and rioters we have met through rap sheets and press accounts are solidly middle class. Some of them are professionals and businesspeople who are as cosmopolitan as Flanagan, a longtime Atlanticwriter who ordinarily cuts through sanctimony and sloppy thinking. Her miscalculation of who participated in the riot might make the people who like to look down their noses at the proles feel good, but it obscures the wide-ranging appeal the mob enjoys in America, it underestimates the mob’s true strength, and it slows our understanding of the mob’s motivation and masks the great difficulty we will have in nullifying their violent brand of politics.
As authorities continue to book additional rioters for criminal offenses, charges that may eventually include sedition and murder, we will gain a sharper picture of the crowd’s profile and learn more about these people who have embraced the QAnon religion and fallen under Trump’s spell. But in the early going, we’ve learned that many who rallied or rioted on January 6 were, in Trump’s memorable 2016 phrase, only ‘the best and most serious people.'”
Politico, “We Mock the DC Protestors as Ignorant Buffoons at Our Own Peril“
I agree variously more or less with all the above, yet believe that it still leaves sufficient room to be missing quite a bit. Like FDR said, “There is nothing to fear,” but all the stupid shit that we are afraid of. Well, at least we saved Nikita Khrushchev all the trouble of burying the US.
Rather than using this data to adduce economic precarity as more significant than previously supposed, you should give more weight to a confounding common antecedent: personality disorders that lead to both economic precarity and MAGA. Note that Ryan must have been quite well off to have acquired a $37,000 lien for unpaid federal taxes.
Rick,
You don’t know what Ryan’s income was from that lien. Could easily have been a relatively small income where no tax was paid and penalties and interest piled up through the years.
The “stupidity of the right” reminds me a lot of the “stupidity of blacks” and “shiftlessness of the poor” that caused all their problems according to the two hundred years of political propaganda from the haves.
maybe we need a better meme.
hint: ALL people are stupid. some of them fall into poverty. some of them get rich. poverty makes people desperate and insane. money makes people greedy and insane. it doesn’t do any good to call them stupid, since we are the same. the problems of managing an economy are difficult, perhaps unsolvable. but Roosevelt showed a way that would relieve much of the pain. he didn’t do it by blaming the poor. or even by blaming the rich, except perhaps for a few members of his own class whom he knew well.