New Political Science<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\nIn it, he examines how and why past successful political campaigns have used a lot of \u201ccultivated ressentiment\u201d to connect with potential voters.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey looked for narratives where they could point the finger at a group of people and say, they are the ones to blame,\u201d says Dolgert.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis allows movements to take advantage of the anger and woundedness that people feel. You give these people a simple story, where they can attach their own woes to some external enemy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s \u201ctarget group\u201d consists largely of white, working-class males in \u201cblue collar America,\u201d who typically do not have a university education, as well as with voters who identify with that demographic, says Dolgert.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor this group, it has been really difficult for them to gain back much of what they lost in the 2008 recession and its aftermath,\u201d says Dolgert. \u201cAlthough the U.S. economy is doing pretty well by some measures, the gains have been very unequal and so many of the losses sustained after 2008 have not been recouped by this group of people. Their employment has gone from being more secure to being more precarious.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are times that Trump blames the wealthy \u2014 usually from countries outside the U.S. \u2014 as being responsible for a certain amount of peoples\u2019 angst.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s got this nationalist lens, he\u2019s able to say, \u2018Look, I\u2019m for you guys. I\u2019ve been greedy in the past, but now I\u2019m going to be greedy for you people; the game is rigged against you, the average person, so I\u2019m here to help you because I understand the way the world works,’\u201d says Dolgert.<\/p>\n
All this takes place in a country that created \u201cresentment stories\u201d early in its history. British subjects, feeling threatened by European corruption, re-settled in what was to become America.<\/p>\n
The settlers quickly believed themselves to be superior to the indigenous populations already living on the land and, later, to Africans forcibly brought to America to be slaves. These groups became scapegoats that the settlers blamed for a variety of ills.<\/p>\n
In recent history, American politicians had become much subtler with their ressentiment. Dolgert gives the example of Richard Nixon and Ronald Regan\u2019s \u201cWar on Drugs,\u201d which he calls a \u201cclever way of redirecting resentment\u201d that the Republicans used to capture previously democratic voters.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmong many white Americans, the story became, \u2018It\u2019s just a war on crime, it has nothing to do with race, and if it happens to be that if African-Americans are the ones being more affected by that, well, it\u2019s because they are doing more crimes so they have nothing to complain about,\u201d says Dolgert.<\/p>\n
He notes that those on the political right tend to demonize certain groups or individuals more frequently than those on the political left. Left-wingers challenge the demonization by discussing structural injustice, structural racism and other concepts that Dolgert says are too sophisticated for the average person to relate to, despite the reality those concepts represent.<\/p>\n
Dolgert argues that those on the political left waste too much energy trying to \u201ccorrect\u201d or \u201cfact check\u201d rhetoric from politicians such as Trump.<\/p>\n
Rather, he says, those on the left should create a \u201cressentiment\u201d narrative of their own of who or what is to blame for peoples\u2019 difficulties.<\/p>\n
Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders did this by pointing the finger at big banks and the wealthy who avoid paying taxes by channeling money through their offshore accounts, a situation recently hitting the headlines through the \u201cPanama Papers\u201d revelations.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou are not going to be able to radically change peoples\u2019 perspectives as they head to the polls,\u201d says Dolgert.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat you can do is motivate them to come over to your side if you give them a better story about why they are suffering.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In this era of political correctness, how is it that U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump is able to get away with such highly inflammatory speech against Muslims, Mexicans and others whom he identifies as threatening?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":39714,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3319,1,5],"tags":[4218,894,3427],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39713"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39713"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39717,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39713\/revisions\/39717"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}