Trump Changes Nothing

In his “vocation lectures,” sociologist Max Weber stressed that, at bottom, politics ultimately comes down to violence, coercion and expropriation: who gets to enact these, against whom, under what conditions, and towards which ends.

I have personal experience with how the stakes of politics are ultimately life and death, and this completely transformed my work. However, under typical conditions, most symbolic capitalists are insulated from the actual consequences of politics. As I put it in We Have Never Been Woke (p. 201-202):

“The government programs on the table for being cut or painfully restructured aren’t usually ones that we directly rely on; it is generally not our jobs being automated or outsourced; our neighborhoods are not being hollowed out by economic forces, ravaged by drugs, or plagued with crime and blight; it’s not our children getting caught up in the criminal justice system, deployed into a war, or staring down especially grim life prospects. “Those people” and their problems are largely abstractions for us—little more concrete than the principles we are trying to score points for, or the hypothetical future generations for whom our symbolic advocacy, we assert, will somehow pay off.”

This lack of “skin in the game” allows us to approach politics as alternatively a sport, a holy war, or a means of self-expression. It lets us feel comfortable seeking purity over pragmatism, engaging in political behaviors that may cost us influence, or undermine the institutions or causes we associate with, but that seem worth doing anyway because they feel good for us.

For example, there is abundant data showing that mainstream symbolic capitalists are out of touch with most other Americans on political and moral issues, have pretty bad instincts for what messaging will resonate with “normie” voters, and are quite resistant to recognizing just how extreme and alienating we actually are. However, even when political practitioners exercise discipline in identifying and refining messages that should play well with the masses, party activists and representatives regularly go “off script” and deliver political messaging that is persuasive and satisfying to them personally, with little regard for the available information on what might resonate with others.

We saw this play out in 2024, when Democrat-aligned polling consistently showed that the “democracy is on the ballot” messaging was their weakest strategy for moving voters. Nonetheless, the Harris campaign, her surrogates and supporters hammered this ...