The Politics Of Resentment

 I came across this piece in Vox about how Asian American communities - while voting 2 to 1 for Biden - have been inundated with actual fake news. Because "Asian American" includes a wide variety of ethnic groups, from Vietnamese to China to Taiwan to Korea...that's a lot of cultural and historical difference. 

A lot of (white) Progressives assumed that Trump's naked racism and xenophobia would repel immigrant groups across cultural divides. They tended to neglect the impact of "Biden is a socialist" on communities that have a large number of people who fled communism. Florida Cubans have always trended towards the GOP, but Venezuelans have the same dynamic. Those same trends apply to many Asian American groups.

What's interesting is the advent of Epoch Times, a news organization tied to the Falun Gong exercise cult. While Falun Gong are...weird...the amount of persecution they have suffered at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party is appalling. Still their virulent opposition to the CCP has led them to embrace Far Right Populism from Germany, France to Trump. Like many aspects of the Far Right, the Epoch Times/Falun Gong movement feeds on resentments without actually properly identifying the accurate source of those resentments.

The focus on resentment feeds into something called "relative deprivation theory." Basically, revolutionary movements feed off the gap between where people are and where they think they should be. In the US, this accounts for why the Rose Twitter Socialists are largely college educated podcasters from Brooklyn. They live in one of the more affluent countries in the world in a time of relative abundance and yet the gap between what they expected and what they have is so large, they want a "revolution" that will overturn a system that seems to hold their dreams at an arm's length.

This politics of resentment isn't inherently constructive or positive. It is - at its roots - negative. It is also non-ideological and can be grafted onto the Democratic Socialists of America as easily it can be wedded to Trumpism. It can apply to Falun Gong political refugees in Orange County as easily as it can Marine Le Pen's National Front in France.

What's more, the politics of resentment finds objective, balanced truths unimportant. Anger and fear are emotions that chew up reason. Since reason ideally sits in the center of democratic governance, the natural alliance between groups like the Epoch Times and Donald Trump is disturbing.

The good news, if there is any, is that there remains potential growth for Democrats among groups that have been fed a steady diet of resentment and fear. Biden is not a scary socialist and many that lauded Trump because their stock portfolios were doing well are not likely to be upset by a Biden Administration. Incumbents usually win, because things aren't usually THAT bad. 

Combatting the end of objective truth is a tall order for a political movement, but that is where we are. Despite the efforts of groups like the Epoch Times, Biden DID still win close to 2/3rds of Asian American votes. Twitter basically started flagging Trump's tweets as lies, as did mainstream media outlets. The next question is how to bring factual accountability to Facebook and other news aggregators. People who want to watch OANN or read Breitbart...they are lost causes. Fighting the casually misinformed is a necessity for the political survival of democracy.

UPDATE: Martin Longman has a slightly different, but more profound take.