Trump’s triumph marks the victory of the moneyed elite over the educated elite, with the Republicans winning over the outsiders. The erosion of once consensual values in the USA could ultimately affect democracy itself.
By Pierre Ostiguy and Johannes Völz
After the election defeat to Donald Trump, the US Democrats are divided over what actually happened. There are many possible explanations. Some point to Trump’s strengths, the persuasive power of his promise to lead the USA into a golden age. Others speculate that his racist and misogynistic demagoguery is simply catching on with people. Or they emphasize the traces left by decades of right-wing propaganda on talk radio, Fox News and in right-wing online filter bubbles. Others see the Democrats as victims of the Covid measures. After the pandemic, people almost everywhere voted their governments, right or left, out of office. In that sense, the Democrats are in good company.
Nevertheless, there are also analyses that see the causes in the Democrats themselves. Their candidate Kamala Harris did not manage to raise her own profile and set herself apart from Joe Biden. And – according to a now widely shared thesis – she focused on the wrong issues: Instead of focusing on the economic hardships of the people, especially the low-income earners, she concentrated on saving democracy and abortion rights. Senator Bernie Sanders delivered a scathing verdict on the campaign team of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party after the defeat: “It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party that failed working-class people is now finding that the working class has failed them.” In other words, the Democrats should get back to making policy for the little people.
However, the Democrats are no longer a party of the little people. The election result may have been surprising in its clarity, but it confirms a trend that has been apparent for more than two decades. 1996 was the last election in which the Democrats won the majority of votes among both the poorer and the less educated. Since the turn of the millennium, Democratic voters have continued to be less affluent on average than Republican voters, but they have fallen further and further behind Republicans in terms of education.
According to post-election polls, Trump received the support of around two thirds of whites without a school or university degree this year – as in the previous two elections. Among Americans with a university degree, on the other hand, the Democrats have a lead of 21 percentage points; among non-white college graduates it is as high as 33 points.
The educational divide between the parties has developed in parallel with the widening gap between voters in urban and rural regions. Even in the second half of the last century, the Democrats were predominantly a party of the cities. Today, they are particularly successful among well-educated city dwellers, while the Republicans have become the party of people with little education, especially in rural regions.
However, the finding of the education gap only becomes meaningful if it is decoded in socio-political terms. All too often, education is directly translated into the category of social class, as an indicator of rich and poor. And certainly: higher education – especially at the top universities – has increasingly become a privilege of the wealthy in the USA, and a degree from a top university in turn makes it easier to gain access to management positions across the professional fields that are of central importance to the knowledge society. In this way, education translates into wealth and wealth into education.
However, education has far more to do with more than just income. Educational differences have become a politically effective factor in US politics because they establish a hierarchy of social status. Status refers to that elusive variable by which material differences are translated into a symbolic, cultural hierarchy, without ever completely losing touch with the monetary economy. “Possession of money and entrepreneurial status”, wrote Max Weber a good hundred years ago, “are not in themselves qualifications of class”. In other words, status is not determined by wealth alone. It is not measured by money, but by prestige, respect and recognition. Those who fall behind in the status competition experience this in the form of negative feelings. These include resentment, anger and rage as well as shame and dejection.
Many people in this country find it hard to believe that education determines status in the USA. A common prejudice is that the USA is a thoroughly anti-intellectual country. Wealth alone justifies status superiority. But such an objection is based on a misunderstanding. The fact that education translates into status does not mean that people in the USA know how to talk about Shakespeare or Beethoven with a cultural flair and visit the Louvre in the summer. The prestige that comes with studying at one of the top universities is much more indicative of the status gains that education brings. Harvard students sometimes call it “dropping the H-bomb”: anyone who lets it slip into conversation that they attended this university silences all those around them.
Of course, the names of the top universities are not only good for making an impression. They also open the door to institutions of political, economic and cultural power. According to one study, 54 percent of managers in higher professions – lawyers, artists, scientists, journalists, politicians, entrepreneurs – come from the country’s 34 leading universities. In his theory of status differences, sociologist Norbert Elias argued that every society can be divided into established and outsiders. The established pay respect to each other by setting beliefs, attitudes and modes of expression as the norm, following these themselves in an exemplary manner and thereby elevating themselves above those to whom the status codes remain alien.
The fact that education has become a decisive factor in political affiliation in the USA therefore tells us something about how politics and status have become intertwined. The political landscape is no longer determined solely by the poles of political ideology and income, but also by a hierarchy of status. The Democrats have become the party of the establishment, the Republicans the party of the outsiders. The poles of left and right have intersected with top and bottom.
The fact that status and wealth do not have to coincide is also demonstrated in the USA by the super-rich, which include entrepreneurs as well as celebrities from entertainment, sport and sometimes politics. In his podcast “Ones and Tooze”, economic historian Adam Tooze aptly described the USA after the election as a three-tier society in which billionaires and celebrities are at the top of the income pyramid. Below them are the wealthy status elites, i.e. the educated classes described by Elias as the “established”, whose success is reflected in the occupation of institutional leadership positions. Although they have far less money than the super-rich, they do have status. Below them is the bulk of the population: those less well-educated classes who have neither money nor status.
This three-class structure, in which a money elite and a status elite compete with each other, is also the key to understanding the phenomenon of Donald Trump. Trump makes the interval between wealth and status resonate and derives his political energy from this dissonance. His supporters admire him not simply for his wealth and entrepreneurial success, but for the fact that he defies the status economy with his wealth. Although the established institutions do not give him any prestige – he lacks symbolic capital – Trump makes a virtue out of this circumstance of status degradation. He trumps the lack of respect with his exorbitant economic capital. For all those who are left behind in the great status competition, he offers himself as an avenger figure. His billions allow him to make himself independent of the symbolic power of the status elite and thus rise above them.
One of the Democrats’ current ways of dealing with the election defeat is to claim that they focused too much on “wokeness” during the campaign. Kamala Harris did her best to avoid making her own identity the subject of the election campaign, despite Trump’s defamatory attacks. It is almost tragic that the impression nevertheless arose that her election campaign was “too woke”.
How did this happen? The answer is provided by the politicization of the status economy. “Wokeness” is part of the value package of the establishment. Harris made this package her own through her style, her attitude, her way of speaking. This is because populist status politics, which pits the bottom against the top, is not primarily about political positions, but about habitus. And by trying to let Trump’s attacks bounce off her, Harris committed herself to a status-loyal habitus, which Michelle Obama summed up in 2016 when she postulated in response to Donald Trump’s foul language: “When they go low, we go high” (When the others lose the level, we defend it even more). Those who embody respectability also stand up for the set of values of the hated elites.
It is therefore to be feared that other once consensual values that the Democrats stand for could also fall into disrepute. In the end, this could also damage liberal democracy. Anyone listening closely to Donald Trump will notice that he not only quotes the language of European fascism, but that he also dismisses concern for democracy as a concern of the Democrats. In Madison Square Garden, just before the election, he spoke about the threat to democracy that he saw as actually coming from the Democrats. “Endangering democracy” – Trump only managed to get these words across his lips by adding: “to use their phrase”.
The logic of status politics, which Democrats and Republicans alike have embraced in the course of social polarization, could end up capturing democracy itself – and make it look like an elite project.
Pierre Ostiguy teaches political science at the University of Valparaiso (Chile).
Johannes Völz teaches American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt.
From the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 13.12.24, No. 291, Feuilleton, p. 11. © All rights reserved. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, Frankfurt. Provided by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Archive