Transcript: How Democrats Can Defeat Trump’s Identity Politics

This is a lightly edited transcript of the March 26 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Good afternoon, everybody. I’m Perry Bacon, host of Right Now at The New Republic. I’m honored to be joined by Justin Gest. He’s a professor of policy and government at George Mason University. Justin, welcome.

Justin Gest: Thanks so much, Perry. It’s great to be with you.

Bacon: Justin is an author and professor who has written a number of books I want to get into, but he wrote a piece in September that I happened to catch and really want to talk about. It was part of a symposium by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, which works on economic policies to help the working class. The piece is titled “Populist Voters Feel a Sense of Loss That Is Reshaping Democracies Around the World.”

Justin and some fellow academics studied not only the U.S. but also 19 countries in Europe, really digging into the populist movement and where the appeal of populist parties comes from. I want to get into this because I think there are lessons for what we’re dealing with here in America. Let me start with this: you have an idea in the piece called “nostalgic deprivation.” Explain to people what that means.

Gest: Sure, great question. Nostalgic deprivation is really about feelings of loss—a sense that you, your family, and people like you have lost wealth over the years. You may have lost social standing and status: how important you feel. You may have lost political power: how capable you feel of impacting change in your community or your country. This is something I studied very closely between 2012 and 2014, in the run-up to Trump’s first election victory here in the United States, but also in the run-up to the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, where they decided to separate from the European Union.

Both of those elections were really driven by white working-class voters who swung from the left—or from not voting at all—to the right-wing parties in their respective countries. I wanted to understand what was driving this shift in perceptions and in politics. And what I really came up with, from a lot of interviews, was this sense of loss. In this article and a number of other works I’ve written, I went ahead and tested it statistically with public opinion data. But ultimately what it comes down to is a feeling that you’re being left behind.

Bacon: This sense of loss is not purely financial—talk about that. It’s not just that you lost your job, and it correlates with non-college-educated voters, but it’s not just about economics.

Gest: No, it’s not purely a sense of economic loss. To be sure, many people do feel that they, their families, and people like them have lost a source of wealth or financial stability that they once had years before. The question we use in our public opinion polling to understand this is: how wealthy are people like you today? We give them a 10-point scale, and then we ask: how wealthy were people like you 25 years ago? We simply subtract the difference between where they are today and where they were 25 years ago to determine whether they feel a sense of deprivation—a sense of loss from the past.

But we do precisely the same thing when it comes to social standing and political power. For political power, we ask: how powerful do you think you are today, and how powerful were people like you 25 years ago? The reason we ask about “people like you,” by the way, is that some people were children 25 years ago—they weren’t around. So we want to make sure we capture everybody. But ultimately it is a sense of collective loss of power or wealth.

For social standing, it’s a little more interesting, because we give people a diagram that looks like a bullseye—like a dartboard, with concentric circles. We tell people that this is a model of society: the people on the outer rings are peripheral, they matter less in their societies, and the people in the center are the core, the center of their societies. Where would you place yourself today, and where would you place people like you 25 years ago? We asked this first in the United States and the U.K., as I mentioned—but in the study you read, we look at 19 European countries beyond the U.S. and Britain. So we’re studying this more broadly.

Bacon: To be very reductive: which of the three factors drives decline the most—power, wealth, or social status—when it comes to predicting support for the far right or the far left? Is one more important, or more correlated with change, than the others?

Gest: They’re all correlated. We see different trends depending on how you slice the data—by country, by income class, by region, by whether people are rural or urban. But all three are correlated with far-right voting and populist voting more broadly. And actually, that’s a really important point: they’re not just correlated with far-right voting, they’re also correlated with far-left voting. So basically we see a rush to the fringes of our political systems. It’s just that the far right has far more support—not only in the United States but also across Europe. And those three phenomena are clearly correlated with each other; they just have different effects in different places.

Perry Bacon: So we’re talking about the United States and a lot of countries in Europe—all of which have experienced significant globalization and immigration. Speaking broadly, how important are those two factors?

Justin Gest: I think those are really the most essential ways of understanding our politics today—it really dates back to the movement away from an industrial manufacturing economy into a more service-driven, high-technology economy, which took place across high-income countries beginning basically in the 1970s. And during that period, where we see the shift of this massive economic transformation with a lot of people displaced, is exactly the same time when we also see great demographic shifts because of the entry of immigrants.

A country like the United States basically had a closed-door policy—with a few exceptions—between the 1920s and the late 1960s, when immigration reform was passed by Congress. So there wasn’t a whole lot of immigration coming into the country for decades. Beginning in the late 1960s, we opened the doors to more people coming in, and that’s when the population of the country began to embrace a lot more people of Latin origins and people of more Asian origins as well. We went from a country that had about 4 percent foreign-born to now close to 15 percent foreign-born today. And so that great demographic transformation—we’re now on our way to a majority-minority milestone where white, non-Hispanic European-origin Americans will cease to make up the majority of the country in about 20 years. That milestone, and the transformation that leads up to it, takes place at precisely the same time as this big economic change.

Bacon: So these things are happening at once—economic change and demographic change—and they’re not necessarily causing each other, right? They’re just happening simultaneously. The economic change is mainly about technology and so on, right?

Gest: They do have some relationship. Because while you have new technology that is automating things and mechanizing processes that were previously manual, you also have a shift offshore: more open trade regimes opening the borders of other countries to foreign investment, which led to the offshoring of a lot of American and European industry. At the same time, the same forces that opened those borders also opened them for people to move. And so people were moving into countries like the United States and Europe, which had a voracious appetite for labor in the service sector. These countries were getting wealthier, they had needs they previously didn’t have, and immigrants filled a lot of those needs. So these phenomena are separate, but also in many ways tied to the same globalization dynamic of the late twentieth century.

Bacon: So what interested me about this article is that we’ve now moved to a stage where the narrative—particularly on the center-left, which is more where The New Republic sits—is that Trump won because inflation was high, and now that he’s in charge of the economy, Democrats are going to do better. And particularly, Democrats should focus on so-called affordability. In other words, we’re telling politics through this economic story. But your argument would say that we should not assume inflation and affordability are the whole of politics.

Gest: Certainly not. If you look at the irony of all this—and it shows you how short our news cycles are—when Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, the narrative was that it was all culture-war-driven: that he was in office because of a backlash against immigration, driven by white identity politics seeking to reassert supremacy over the United States.

And now that’s ignored, even though the Trump administration has really doubled down on a lot of these identity politics and culture-war issues—everything from DEI to the funding of universities, nonprofits, Voice of America, USAID, and so on. These things are all connected. So I think the lesson that a lot of people on the center-left have taken away is that they feel they have a better chance of winning over independents and swing voters if they’re not focusing on divisive culture-war issues and are instead trying to rally people around issues like affordability.

Bacon: I guess what I’m getting at is that people are still going to consider these status and social issues. They’re still in their minds, right? This isn’t going to go away.

Gest: No, no way. This stuff is hardwired. People feel a sense of loss that is really powerful and pervasive. And the other thing that’s important to emphasize, Perry, is we can’t assume that this loss is something we can objectively identify. Scholars have done research on people’s incomes, and in many cases respondents report feeling a sense of economic loss even though they’re actually making more money.

And so it’s really perceptual—it’s in the eye of the beholder, a subjective sense of status deprivation, a subjective sense of loss. And that is something that—you can make people richer, you can pay them better, you can facilitate more social services to ease the transition into new economies or higher costs of living, and sometimes people still don’t feel it. That was one of the challenges facing the Biden administration when they were in power. And now those same forces are facing Trump: even when people are making more money, sometimes they don’t feel any richer and feel like they’re barely able to get by.

Bacon: Now, since you mentioned Brexit and Trump winning: when the group that feels like it’s losing social status or respect sees its candidate or cause win, does that change anything? Do they feel more empowered? Does it reduce the sense of loss? Is that something you’ve been able to study?

Gest: I haven’t studied it, so I can’t tell you—I’m of two minds. I do think that for people who felt a sense of lost social standing or power, particularly white working-class people, Trump has made them feel more centered. And I think a lot of this is rhetorically driven—not by delivering specific policy goals that people were desperately seeking over the years, but mostly through rhetoric. The Trump administration has proven to be masters of symbolism and symbolic politics. And that’s what a lot of culture-war politics is, politically speaking, because often you can’t legislate social status—at least not in a way that wouldn’t violate the Constitution. So my prior would be that there probably has been some remedy for them. But I don’t know—we haven’t studied it, and that’s just me speculating.

Bacon: You’ve used the phrase “white working class” a couple of times. Do we have any sense of how immigrants in Europe, or African Americans, Asians, or Latinos in the U.S., experience this? Do they feel the status loss less acutely because they weren’t the high-status group to begin with? Is that the broad conclusion?

Gest: Yeah. A lot of people who are of immigrant origin feel deeply indebted to their countries of destination, particularly the first generation. They feel very grateful—the memories of their countries of origin and the challenges they faced there are really fresh in their minds. And the amount of gratitude that I’ve observed in studying immigration over the decades has been really remarkable. It’s a powerful sentiment—as powerful as nostalgia. And you do see that among immigrant populations, particularly the first generation, the generation that came over. They remember what the home country was like. Many of them still think they might go back one day.

Now, once you start talking about second and third generations, sentiments change, because those folks are born in the United States, born in Britain, born in France, and the sense of indebtedness turns into a sense of entitlement. They’re equal citizens—why should I feel grateful toward my country? I’m entitled to these rights.

Bacon: In a certain sense they belong here.

Gest: Absolutely. So it’s a different phenomenon when people are of foreign origin. But even those second-generation folks hear the stories from their parents, and I think that instills a sense of appreciation as well. And I think they know how bad it has been before.

Bacon: Let me come to your conclusion here, because I thought this was very well said. You write: “For mainstream political parties, the power of subjective feelings associated with fear, loss, and exclusion create a dilemma. Technocratic solutions, policy proposals, and GDP growth alone will not restore trust among these voters. Instead, what is needed is a re-engagement with the emotional fabric of democratic life and an understanding that people vote not just with their wallets or their ideologies, but also with their sense of belonging.” That’s well said. But what does it look like in real life? I agree with you, I think—but I want to hear what that looks like on the ground. What does a sense of belonging actually look like?

Gest: I think it means that people on the left have to engage in symbolic politics too. They have to be conscious of people’s desire to revere their—

Bacon: —basically you’re saying center-left and center-right parties. You’re really critiquing establishment parties, not just the left one. In the U.S., that’s the left one, but in Europe—Labour and the Tories are both falling apart, right? Sorry, go on.

Gest: Yes, totally. And that’s true across Europe—it’s not just Labour and the Tories in Britain. It’s the Republicans in France, it’s the Socialists in France. Center-right and center-left parties are absolutely getting decimated, just picked apart—death by a thousand cuts. And I think what this shows is that they need to engage in the politics of symbolism as well. People want their heritage to be revered. They want a sense of dignity. They want to be told that they matter. And I think for a long time, a lot of voters have believed that they’ve simply been drifting to the periphery.

And so what that means, I think, is engaging that imagination and cultivating a sense of belonging, social cohesion, and collectiveness across our countries. And that’s hard right now, because the forces that are really driving politics are divisive—basically making people think it’s every man for himself. In an increasingly atomized society, that is really treacherous for solving collective action problems, redistributing wealth, redistributing power. It’s really challenging.

And in a lot of ways, I always liken these kinds of political issues to a Chinese finger trap. The harder you pull to try to resist these forces, the tighter the grip on your fingers. And the only way to escape a Chinese finger trap is to embrace those forces—to allow your fingers to enter the trap in order for it to loosen so you can exit. And in many ways, I think that’s a metaphor we can use in our politics more broadly.

Bacon: Let me put it very reductively. I don’t want the Confederate monuments to stay up—I think we’re right to pull them down. But I think you’re saying we need to put something else in their place. What is that? I don’t know what the symbol is—the symbol that says we’re not racist anymore, but we’re multiracial and pluralistic. What does that look like? Do you have a sense of what you build instead?

Gest: It’s an interesting question. My general thought on monument questions is that we should actually be reorienting people’s attention. Look, we’re going to disagree about monuments—but I think what we both really agree on is: blank, healthcare, the cost of housing. Monument politics just takes our eyes off the ball. That’s where we get tangled up, because no one wins from these monument questions.

Bacon: I guess I was asking: is there a monument we can all agree on? That’s what I’m getting at. Is there something—should the airport have something, or is there something we all agree about that we can look forward to?

Gest: I think there are a lot of things we can agree about. I’ll come to that in one second, Perry—but let me just say one thing about monuments, because there’s an interesting anecdote from my own life. I was very young, in my early twenties, and I was in Germany, and I happened to stumble upon an immense amphitheater in Nuremberg. I started looking into what it was, and it was a Nazi amphitheater—built by Hitler to give grand speeches in Bavaria. After the war, he presumably had hoped he would still be in power and could give grand addresses from this amphitheater. And I was stunned that it still existed 70 years later.

What was remarkable was that the German government’s approach was not to tear down this monument to Nazism. It was to let it rot. They literally let it rot—it was crumbling, covered in weeds, basically a monument to something that was extinct, left in disrepair, like the ideology behind it. And so it’s an interesting approach to the question of monuments.

In terms of what holds us together: there are many things that I think are core to the American creed, to who we are as a country, that are just too easily glossed over. Almost every single person in this country today has foreign origins—everyone can trace it back. Even if they’re Native American, they’re likely of mixed heritage, with some European, Latin, Asian, or African heritage they can point to.

Everyone has that in common. And almost everyone in the United States—or their ancestors—came here with some kind of dream they were chasing, a dream that their descendants continue to chase today. And as part of that dream, I think everyone also identifies with a struggle. Everyone can understand this—and this is not some kind of vulnerability Olympics where we compare who’s had it harder. The point is that we’ve all struggled in some kind of way, and we can bond over those things and identify America as that struggle, America as the work it takes.

Teddy Roosevelt—who was a eugenicist, not an innocent figure in these kinds of identity politics debates—used to say that America was really the labor that you put into it: that if someone were to homestead and toil in the dirt of the country to establish and settle land, that made them American enough for him. This was coming from a thoroughgoing racist. But the idea was that you earned your way into American heritage.

And in many ways, I think of it a little like the way American Express treats its members. Everyone is an equal member—you all have the right to charge expenses to your card. But on each card there’s a little line that says “member since.” And in a lot of ways, that’s what America is. Some of us have really recent dates of arrival—my father was a refugee in the middle of the twentieth century. Other people go back to the sixteenth hundreds.

I was just in Jamestown on a field trip with my daughter, and they were learning about the very first American settlers and their encounters with Native Americans—and those folks were here a great deal longer than my family. Does that make them any more American than me? No. But it makes that heritage something they can talk about. We’re just different—we all come together and can break bread. And I think a lot of our politics today fails to honor those things that hold us in common and that ultimately bring us together.

Bacon: I’ll finish with another idea here that I liked. You write about policies that might help deal with globalization, and particularly that “these policies must also be laden with meaning. They must recognize that identity, history, and belonging are not just cultural touchstones—they are political forces as well.” So it’s a politics of recognition. I want to stop there and ask two things. First, I think “identity” has become a negative word, and I don’t think it always has been—identity, if we’re talking about counting how many Greeks and Italians there are, yes, that’s contested. But identity itself, I don’t think is bad. So I want to talk about that a little bit, and then talk about what a politics of recognition means.

Gest: Sure. Ultimately, this goes back to the rhetoric and the symbolic politics I mentioned earlier—that Trump is particularly good at, and that the left really struggles with. It’s uncomfortable. It’s about being seen. It’s about someone actually recognizing the struggle you’re going through, what your family has been through, what you’re experiencing right now. And I think understanding that and placing identity into a greater fabric of American life is the key—is how to stitch all this stuff together.

And what’s really interesting is that in the middle of this identity-driven and culture-war backlash we’ve been experiencing over the last decade or so, there has actually never been a moment in American history where the racial, religious, and ethnic lines between Americans have been more blurred. The fastest-growing demographic group in the American population is people who claim more than one race—people of mixed heritage. And those folks are so precious, so special, because they’re basically at the frontier of America. They recognize in themselves that they transcend the boundaries that other people would draw between us.

And I think the more that people recognize that they themselves transcend those boundaries—in myriad ways, whether it’s their professional identity, their sexual orientation, their religious identity, their geographic identity, or their hobbyist lives—the more we see that we are all basically defying the simple lines that people would otherwise draw between us. And so the irony of what we’re experiencing is that it’s almost like a last gasp of identity politics, because it doesn’t take much to scratch beneath the surface to recognize that the idea of whiteness in America—the very concept subject to so much tension in our politics right now—is itself a false concept.

Because through a nineteenth-century lens, Perry, we’ve already reached the majority-minority milestone. Italians were never white. Jews were never white. Greeks were never white. Slavs and Middle Easterners were never white. And so what we’ve seen is the expansion of the boundaries of whiteness, but we haven’t seen the expansion of what it means to be an American. And I think that’s really what’s next for us, if we want to move beyond the racial, ethnic, and identity politics that we’re facing.

Bacon: Let me ask a maybe naïve question at the end. Are you someone who thinks we should get rid of census racial categories? That came to mind—I’m not sure how I feel about it. Is that an important idea, or is that not quite what you’re talking about?

Gest: No, it’s exactly what I’m talking about. I actually wrote a piece about this for The Atlantic a few years ago. I think we should absolutely ask people about their origins—I think everyone should have the opportunity to pick as many countries from a list as they want, every national origin they know of in their background. I don’t think we need racial categories. You can make it optional, and I think you can generally infer those racial boundaries from the national origin data anyway. But I think we really are this amalgam of a country, and rather than squeezing people into five tight identity categories, we should allow people to select all that apply—and that will reveal just how undividable we really are.

Bacon: It reminds me of the Zohran Mamdani campaign. There was a New York Times piece about Zohran and his background. They implied he had checked that he was African or something on an application, and they were suggesting he was falsely claiming Blackness—but in reality he’s of many origins, as you say many of us are.

Gest: That’s exactly right. He could plausibly claim to be of African heritage even if he’s not phenotypically Black. And there are a lot of South Asians who previously lived in places like Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa. And frankly, even all of North Africa—we’re talking people of Arab or Berber descent who also classify as African. And so these categories are just terribly flawed. The best thing we can do is specify: where are your ancestors from? And even if that belies how you identify, I think we will recognize just how blurred our lines really are.

Bacon: Great place to end, Justin. I enjoyed this a lot. Thanks for coming on. Good to see you.

Gest: Of course. Likewise.