A fascinating study indicates that the president’s support is based on more than political animus alone

Envy in Politics review: why keeping up with the Joneses is a political trump card

What motivates Donald Trump’s political base, a major factor behind the silences and squirms of Republican officials these days?

Dissections of what the president’s mass of supporters thinks, feels and perceives have pointed to their vanished jobs, stagnant incomes and precariously low savings; their ideological commitments to conservative judges, lower taxes and nationalist foreign policy; and their abhorrence of a Washington establishment said to run roughshod over their cultural traditions and racial preferences. Deep, sharp partisan loyalties cement the bond, burnished by bulletins from @realdonaldtrump, Fox News and similarly attuned voices.

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To this assay of the Trump base’s psychological composition, Gwyneth H McClendon would have us add its members’ sense of where they stand socially among their peers.

People tend to envy neighbors who have more than they do, to spite those who have less, and to crave local admiration. These emotions, McClendon shows through elaborate data analysis, have the power to get people to take political positions at odds with their material interests.

The envious, the spiteful and the seekers of recognition will sacrifice time, money and even personal safety – McClendon focuses on protesters in one of her case studies – in order to satisfy their urges.

Her big insight is that the seething and yearning focuses not on class conflict, but the Joneses. That is, while emotional cues may come from national voices, it’s the people nextdoor who churn minds to the point where their bodies will clamber into the arenas of politics.

When the folks down the street happen to be immigrants or of different color, I would dare to add, the aggravation increases.

Parsing the emotional contents of political movements (the emotion-movement word echo is deliberate) traces back, as do so many topics, to Aristotle. His psychological analysis in Book II of On Rhetoric was geared toward enhancing persuasive power; he discussed emotions in pairs, with anger and calm up first and envy and emulation at the end.

This dichotomous approach is invaluable for political practitioners, a guide to parsing leaders’ speeches and constructing counter-demagogic strategies. Civility is a virtue but not a counter-strategy, as anyone who has ever tried to calm an angry person by telling him to calm down knows.

Contemporary philosophers of political emotion have taken up the question of what to do about the envious.

Martha Nussbaum has prescribed a “mandatory program of youth national civil service” of three years’ duration. John Rawls argued that strengthening the proverbial social safety net could mitigate these feelings. Judith Shklar proposed that status should be publicly awarded on multiple dimensions of comparison so more may benefit.

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McClendon cites these and other philosophers but offers no remedies of her own, focusing her last chapter instead on sketching out a fuller research program.

Although I wouldn’t make it mandatory, Nussbaum’s idea sounds right to me, in that it would award people badges for working with their neighbors and thus diverting them from stewing about their possessions.

Among the viable presidential candidates at this writing, Pete Buttigieg’s public service program stands out on this score. His plan calls for developing a Climate Corps, a Community Health Corps and a Inter-generational Service Corps. Service fellows would be considered for student debt forgiveness, hiring preference and vocational training.

The Peace Corps stamps souls for a lifetime, as a conversation with any alum will demonstrate. Public service programs can make a base more noble.