VIEWPOINT / WHERE DO INSURRECTIONS COME FROM?

By Timothy Weaver, Ph.D.

Three elements must come together to cause the disruption we witnessed on January 6, 2021. First, the social conditions had to be just right to cause a significant number of people to strike out by violently attacking the government, risking arrest and, in some cases, long jail sentences. Second, there had to be a target for the anger and despair caused by the social condition. Thirdly, to create a target, there had to be a long-term, concerted propaganda campaign that focused anger on a particular target. The critical elements of spreading propaganda are social media and ignorance, which makes many susceptible to believing lies. These three elements are interactive and form a dynamic system; each must be present for an upheaval.   

SORTING OUT THE ELEMENTS

Sociologists study “latent effects.” These suddenly occurring events seem out of the blue but are the visible effects caused by long-term underlying dynamics. One of the best examples in our lifetime is the violent insurrection against the US Capitol. The latent effects are not always intuitive and are just as often counterintuitive. The turn of the working class to the extreme right is the opposite of what seems logical. They have become rabid supporters of politicians who consistently supported policies that make the rich richer and them poorer. 

There appears to be a hidden assumption among insurrectionists that by supporting Trump and the agenda to destroy or declinate the “deep state,” they eliminate the cause of their troubles. The puzzling thing is why they believe in a lie. More Trump means more benefits for the rich and powerful at their expense. Yet, they believe the opposite. They assume the state is the reason for their condition, and removing it will fix their situation. This is where conspiracy enters the equation. This population is susceptible to believing conspiracies. Why? I will address this later.

This insurrection is the outcome of decades of robust increases in the proportion of wealth going to the upper 20% at the expense of the lower 80%, creating intolerable social and economic conditions for the bottom half of the income distribution. The transfer of wealth has been accompanied by an effective propaganda campaign that blames every social problem that has resulted on the federal government and those who believe it can solve those problems. 

The disruption brought about by decades of wealth transfer significantly impacts social cohesion, fostering what sociologists call “anomie.” Anomie is a condition in which a substantial sector of the population feels a sense of hopelessness, disconnectedness, despair, and desperation. This phenomenon is abundantly clear among the working classes, and most of the middle as generation after generation stagnates and experiences downward social mobility. 

An enormous shift in the burden of educating our children has occurred from the state and federal government to the families. This has created a crisis, as higher education is the ticket to upward social mobility. The ballooning student debt problem is a direct result of the tax cuts at state and local levels that have benefitted the upper 20% at the expense of the lower 80%. The stagnation of wages at the lower end of the earnings spectrum has had a ripple effect causing the impoverishment of many families struggling to make ends meet even with two or three jobs. The social fragility and instability caused by unlivable wages at the lower end of the spectrum have caused social upheaval, broken families, and rampant drug abuse. Let’s examine wage stagnation further.

WAGE STAGNATION

Average home prices in the US have now climbed to $428,000. Real estate is typically considered a hedge against inflation, meaning that as inflation rises, real estate values keep pace with it. An excellent way to gauge purchasing power is to estimate how many years of salary are required to buy an average home. 

Take teacher pay as an example. My starting salary as a teacher was $4800 in 1962. An average house in Montgomery County, MD, where I was teaching, was about $18,000-20,000. A new car was about $3,000. The average home in my area would require about 3.75 years of a starting teacher’s salary. Let’s compare that to the current situation. That would mean the average starting teacher salary would be $114,000 to keep pace with wages 60 years ago—to keep pace, not advance. Hmm. Maybe, that explains why school boards can’t find teachers. The average teacher’s salary today is $65,000. The average starting teacher salary in 2020 was $41,000. That means that it would take about 10.5 years’ compensation to pay for a house. The salary gap has tripled since I started in 1962. And school boards are puzzled about why they can’t find teachers.

The picture I paint of teachers could apply to all workers, including service workers such as social workers, aides, nurses (although nurses are doing better than teachers), government employees except those at the highest levels, servers, and others in the hospitality industry, and just about all wage earners. For example, in 1965, executive pay was 20 times worker pay overall. In 2021, executive pay was 400 times worker pay. All of these worker groups have fallen hopelessly behind. In effect, there have been over two generations of a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the upper class. 

HOW DID WE GET HERE? WHAT ARE THE MECHANICS?

On FOX News recently, a guest admitted that tax credits for the working classes would lift millions of children and their families out of poverty. However, the guest observed that using taxation to transfer wealth to the lower half of the income spectrum is never a good idea. Why? He said it would be inflationary and does not do anything long-term “to lift all boats.” It will cost taxpayers billions, and it is money wasted. To quote the esteemed Senator from West Virginia, Mr. Manchin, “they will just use it to buy drugs.” Here we see a classic example of how the political right blocks or attempts to block any program that redistributes income to the lower 40% of the income distribution while using tried and true propaganda methods. 

The same thing has happened to Biden’s effort to reduce the student debt burden. Six red states were granted a temporary stay in implementing the plan. Horrible idea, they claimed. It would hurt those investing in the student loan business. It would harm taxpayers. In short, it would hurt the top 20% and help the bottom 80%. The money we are talking about is $400 billion. That represents a severe threat to investors who won’t receive interest on those loans and the taxpayers who will pick up the tab. Who are those taxpayers? Mainly the top 20%. It should surprise no one that behind the lawsuit is a company that stands to lose money with fewer student loans to service. Yes, that’s right. The Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, a state-created loan company known as MOHELA, is at the center of the legal challenge from six Republican states. The company and its political allies are trying to stop Biden’s plan to forgive student loan debt for more than 40 million Americans. 

This proposed transfer of wealth sounds very similar to the trillion-dollar tax cuts to benefit America’s wealthiest families that Paul Ryan spoke so lovingly about, except on a smaller scale. The real difference is who benefits. There was no hue and cry, gnashing of teeth that such a wealth transfer would harm the bottom half of the income spectrum by denying money for programs that help them. Instead, the propaganda was the same as the previous four times—this will jump-start the economy and lift all ships. Yes, the four sizeable Republican tax cuts since Reagan have reduced revenues by trillions (the Reagan cuts alone over 40 years have denied the Treasury some $26 trillion (roughly 3% of GDP annually over 40 years), without a nickel trickling down to the middle and working classes. This was nothing more than a multi-trillion-dollar gift to the rich through taxation policy. The only ships lifted were the mega yachts of the rich and famous.

Those tax cuts alone constituted the most significant transfer of wealth from the lower classes to the upper in world history. The means for doing so was manipulating tax policy. The middle and working classes benefit disproportionately from federal and state investments that reduce the cost of education, healthcare, transportation, food, child care, elder care, mortgages, and job training. These programs cost money. By cutting taxes for the rich, who pay 40% of the federal income taxes, these programs have been underfunded significantly because the revenue isn’t there. 

I have studied these trends since the early 1980s. Data show the consequence. Today, the wealth gap between upper and lower quintiles is as wide as in the 1900s during the Robber Baron era. But, according to FOX, the sky fails if that transfer is downward rather than upward. In FOX World, wealth transfers are beautiful to behold when they are headed up, and they are ugly, sinful, and unAmerican when going down. 

How do the drivers of these mechanics benefit? How do the Republicans, who engineered five significant tax cuts for the upper 20% themselves, benefit? When the Republican party as a whole in the House and Senate passed the Ryan-Trump tax cuts, how did the party benefit? The GOP constitutes the drivers of the mechanics, meaning taxation and other means to convey privileges to the already privileged. Among the other means is lockstep voting to rescind or refuse to fund programs enacted by the Democrats to help the working and middle classes. A recent example is the effort to block student loan forgiveness. The GOP benefits directly from helping the upper 20% by receiving large amounts of money through campaign contributions. But how does this help the individual members? 

Recall that elected officials can keep their campaign funds even if not expended directly on campaign expenses. Those funds can be transferred into PACs the politician controls. Under the SEC rules, the PACs are loosely monitored and provide significant leeway on how the funds can be used. In short, this is a loophole that allows politicians to be legally bribed for doing the bidding of the briber. Both parties are guilty. The Republicans are better at attracting substantial contributions from corporate donors and wealthy Americans. The founder of Home Depot just bragged about giving $63 million to Republicans over the last several years. 

MALDISTRIBUTION OF INCOME AND ITS ROLE IN THE INSURRECTION

Did the transfer of wealth over several decades cause the insurrection? The answer is not simple. The continuous transfers of wealth accompanied by stagnation, anomie, and instability among the working class played a definite role in the sudden striking out against authority and those they blamed for the conditions they found. 

However, it seems counterintuitive to strike out against the Democrats rather than the Republicans. It is the Democrats who have done the most to move through programs that benefit the working and middle classes—everything from tax credits and child care to education and health care programs. The recent Democratically controlled Congress passed several bills that directly targeted families that need help—direct cash payments during the pandemic, loans to businesses to retain workers, help with food assistance, child care, better roads, and bridges for commuting to work, extended tax credits, reductions in drug costs, and an attack on climate change that is most often devastating to the poor and working classes. 

Why would the insurrectionists then target the Democratic party to reinsert Trump in power? 

When broad social movements occur, it is hard to grasp at first how the results make sense. In the Russian revolution, the outcome for the poor may have been marginally better, but the net result was replacing one form of tyranny with another. The working classes in America have internalized the lie that there is a deep state, and that deep state is hurting them in particular. The government is the problem, not the solution. So, dismantling the government makes sense. From Ronald Reagan to Steve Bannon, preaching this nonsense has found an eager audience who wholeheartedly agree with them. Reagan and Bannon were feeding them what they already know is the truth—the federal government is their enemy. Tearing it down to size will benefit them directly. 

Why is such a lie indistinguishable from the truth for some people? Suffice it to say that education plays an important role. One of the benefits of more advanced education is the mental skill to form conclusions based on some evidence, not just what others say. Then, there is the issue of cognitive complexity, the capacity to sort, analyze and organize various perspectives and to integrate them into a coherent set of conclusions and actions. Education is one of the keys to reaching the stage of complexity that helps us separate facts from lies. Research suggests that there are differences between those passionately supporting Trump and the rest of us. The Trump followers are far more susceptible to propaganda. This assumption becomes more apparent with more analysis and a deeper understanding of the underlying facts and causation of the current social and political upheaval.

COGNITIVE COMPLEXITY

The nation is dividing itself alone lines of intelligence of a certain kind—the capacity to reason, search out factual information, use deductive reasoning, draw valid conclusions from data that is complex and not always completely clear, read complicated material, and comprehend not just a thread of information but the more profound points and meaning of the material, to be able to place data in a context, make connections among seemingly disparate factors, to see various ways of framing and reframing the same information. 

These have become evident as a cluster of intellectual skills separating us more. One term for this is conceptual complexity. Along a spectrum from simple to complex, I now observe from social media an increased skewing at either end by two groups who identify as conservatives, but among conservatives, a subset who repeatedly post Trump slogans as diehard loyalists, and at the other end of the spectrum those who identify as liberal and a subset who seem to be either independent or progressives.

The universal thinking characteristic of the ignorant is black and white. Instinctively, they react to parody, satire, and sarcasm by confusing it with realism. They are blind to complexity and subtlety and reflexive in their response mechanism. The ignorant respond to every stimulus with a threat/non-threat response. Black or white. Retreat or fight. They are simplifying the complicated. Those with his type of cognitive structure fail to grasp the complexity of satire, parody, dark humor, and sarcasm when that sarcasm is intellectual in nature. That lack of cognitive complexity is evident to the trained eye. 

Here is what I observe: The ignorant on Facebook tend to pounce with their usual crudeness, rudeness, lack of knowledge, and ad hominem attacks. The reason they do so is to be found in the literature on “cognitive complexity.” The simple cognitive system must render all stimuli to a simplistic level to comprehend and respond, which is about as predictable as gravity. My research at Syracuse University tells me how robust this theory of human thinking is. I found that cognitive complexity was predictive of responses to questions requiring speculation and a high level of cognition. 

The trigger for such ignorance becoming unified is social media. Before the instant gratification of having the worst gibberish in the world published for six billion viewers to see, the publication of ideas was limited to professional journalists, writers, academics, writers of letters, editors of newspapers and magazines, and books. Only those with appropriate training and professional backgrounds could publish (except letters to editors), but even then, printed material was reviewed by editors or peers. No one was free to post lies, conspiracies, or falsehoods except through the vanity press and the occasional rogue book (Clifford Irving’s fake autobiography, as told by Howard Hughes). 

The undereducated now have a voice, and Facebook and Twitter have become their fora to blather and spread ill-conceived arguments.

SUMMARY

Like the perfect storm, three elements must be present to trigger insurrections: conditions that produce despair, anomie, hopelessness, anger, and fear of downward mobility. When these forms of discontent are present, the stage is set. Surveys for years have shown that a large sector of society sees our direction as a country to be downward. Research shows that discontent has risen over time, especially since the mid-80s, and underlying hope has declined that social mobility is possible. Today it is taken almost as a given that the current generation will not do as well as their parents—the opposite of the ‘American Dream.’ 

The blame seems to rest with institutions that fail to respond to the individual’s needs. College attendance has become unaffordable for the working classes and much of the lower middle class, and the response has been an upsurge in student and family debt. In short, many Americans feel let down, victimized, and left behind. The rich seem to get richer, and the poor get poorer. Of the arrested and tried insurrectionists, a majority were experiencing financial problems.

For an upsurge in violence, two more things must happen as well. The growing anger and resentment need a specific target to blame; attention and focus must also be orchestrated and directed at that target. Victims are victims because something out of their control made them so. That something is to blame, not them. Hatred, resentment, and outbursts of anger have been building for decades. The target to blame has historically been the government. The government was the target of the Timothy McVey bombing. Since that tragic event, more planned and deliberately focused attention has been placed on the federal government and, to a lesser extent, state governments. The attempt to kidnap Governor Witmer in Michigan is an example of the eruption of violence at the state level. Although the plot failed, the perpetrators are now serving jail time. Since the election of Donald Trump, more and more focus has been directed at the Congress and its perceived failures to help the ordinary person. 

We have the ingredients of an insurrection, but the target has to be identified, and the hatred directed at that target. This is where the combination of an aroused need to blame, to attack, to tear down something is fostered by a propaganda campaign that convinces many to think alike, to decide the target is real, and the target must be eliminated. 

Propaganda is the gasoline on the fire. Propaganda moves people to act, not just lament and blame. In this case, propaganda was needed to fix attention on the following: only Trump can fix what has caused so much despair and damage to the lower and middle classes. The interesting thing about this is that the working and lower middle classes must be made to believe that a billionaire New York real estate developer is their savior. Only he can fix the problems of the lower classes. To come to such an illogical conclusion, propaganda, spreading repeated falsehoods and outright lies, has to be effective. In effect, conspiracies must appear to many to be accurate and comprised of facts.

This is where cognitive complexity comes into play. Recall that studies show a difference in cognitive complexity between conspiratorial believers and nonbelievers, between more liberal-minded Americans and the supporters of Trump and the right wing of American politics. The capacity to hold several factors in mind, some of which may appear contradictory, to sort out and make new connections between disjointed facts, and the ability to process complex information internally and not rely on reference groups or persons for an interpretation is all part of the measure of cognitive complexity. 

Finally, there has to be a torch to light the gasoline. The torch was provided by Trump’s months-long campaign to discredit the election as rigged and fixed somehow by Democrats to rob him of his rightful election to a second term of office. Trump found the torch. The Big Lie was born. After 60-plus courts turned back the lies and non-existent evidence of fraud, Trump continued with the lie. When his lawyers and close advisors told him and showed him that he had lost, he persisted in pushing the lie. He pushed the lie and used it to persuade others to take action by assuming it was true. Among other things, he pushed Georgia to find the votes he ‘knew’ were there to elect him in the state. “Just find me 11,780 votes!” The more Trump pushed the lie and others around him echoed the lie, the more his supporters were motivated to stop the perpetrators. The attack on the capitol was the means of preventing them.

Will this happen again? In a word from Timothy Snyder of Yale, yes! Yes, because the ingredients for such an insurrection remain. The three elements are still present—deep-rooted discontent, propaganda, and those who benefit from spreading it, and the Congress and federal government as well as the Democratic Party as targets. For these elements to work, there must be widespread ignorance among those who think the government is to blame. Then, the conditions are ripe for more outbursts and disruptions–as long as these ingredients exist, there is an insurrection in prospect. 

This is the condition we live with in modern America.

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