DEPLORABLE-SHAMING WILL GET YOU NOWHERE.

A chat-room conversation among Young Republicans, some approaching middle age, went public a few days ago, and another round of deplorable-shaming has followed.

These people are weirdly disinterested in policy except for policy in service to their psychological issues — marginalizing the poor, minorities, and women who are not properly under their control. See The Symbolic Politics of Status in the MAGA Movement by a couple of academic nerds. Really, it all fits — the obsession with immigrants, often coming from people who are first or second generation Americans themselves (like Trump and Miller). The obsession with enforcing a weirdly un-Christian version of Christianity at a time when people are losing interest in organized religion. The disenfranchisement of minorities, the control of women’s bodies, the dismantling of the social safety net to provide more money for the rich. This is coming from people who, deep down, are terrified of a changing and diverse world. All this locker-room talk is false bravado masking their fears.

Perhaps Barbara "Maha" O'Brien should have recognized how pathetic those academic nerds are.  Here's the abstract, full of the expected nerdy tics.

While existing explanations emphasize partisanship, economic anxiety, racial resentment, rural identity, and media polarization, we underscore a less-explored explanation for Trump’s core support: it is a status-based social movement. We find that Trump’s activists are not simply voters responding to policy preferences or culture-war appeals but are also participants in a grassroots social movement organized around a shared perception of lost honor, declining esteem, and institutional disrespect. To make this argument we use the concept of the symbolic politics of status to explain how political conflict extends beyond contests over material distribution or moral values to include battles over whose values and lifestyles are considered worthy. For MAGA activists, reclaiming lost status means seeking public affirmation for identities they feel have been unfairly denigrated. The MAGA movement blends grievance with joy, cultivating pride, belonging, and celebration alongside anger at elites. By centering status in our analysis, we offer an integrative framework that connects material, cultural, and emotional motivations into a broader account of MAGA as a right-wing social movement grounded in grassroots populism.

All of what you'd expect of a Minimal Publishable Unit in Perspectives in Politics.  None of it of any value.  A chart in Ruy "Liberal Patriot" Teixeira's "Democrats and 'The Vision Thing'" does more than all the culture-studies-integrative-framework bafflegab can ever do.

Searchlight Institute "doomsday chart" retrieved from Liberal Patriot.

No doubt the Oh-So-Sophisticated will tut-tut about Les Deplorables basing their votes on being able to own a car or truck or being able to go on vacation: and yet, Outside the Beltway's James Joyner suggests the deplorable-shaming isn't working.

The opposition has spent a decade banging the “Trump is awful” drum, largely failing to persuade those who didn’t see that for themselves. And even many who agree nonetheless prefer Trump to the alternative. It’s not obvious to me what fixes that.

Thus far, the current standoff over extending temporary ObamaCare subsidies does not seem to be doing the trick.

You don't have to have a Ph.D. in economics to grasp that pretending health insurance is affordable to some people because other people are picking up the tab is still pretending!  You apparently have to have some kind of advanced degree to slag on Trump voters according to the Received Forms of Critical Studies, "in which an extended literature review could constitute an entire article, without any testable propositions or data collection."  "Symbolic Politics" is almost that bad.  "Rather than testing hypotheses or establishing statistical relationships, we engage in a 'constitutive analysis' that examines how status dynamics manifest among this group."

That's a convoluted way of saying "the population we are studying is primitive, but our discourse practice requires us to conceal our distaste."

Scholarship about Trump support has sought to understand his rise and popularity through the explanatory power of various factors, including partisanship, racial and ethnic resentment, place-based deprivation, and economic distress. Each of these explanations has produced important insights into contemporary politics, and each has explanatory power in understanding Trump support. But as we discuss in this section, they do not explain some key aspects of MAGA activists’ worldviews. In addition, much of their explanatory utility when it comes to MAGA activists derives from their connection with status.

I don't know, cracking down on illegal immigration, street crime, and technocratic overreach might have less to do with status and more to do with being able to build some wealth for your kids or take a vacation.  To the authors of "Symbolic Politics," there's dirty business afoot.

Northeastern Pennsylvania is a mix of urban, suburban, small-town, and rural areas. Further, in a region where Philadelphia and New York are a few hours away, participants expressed positive emotional connections to these cities, not only derision toward cosmopolitan elites. Most importantly, MAGA participants routinely articulated their status beliefs in national terms. We will show how they constructed a righteous “American” people, defined by national values, called to fight back against an “un-American” and corrupt elite. This type of American identity features prominently in right-wing movements.

All of which might be true, and none of which might be relevant.  Perhaps a New York or Philadelphia that is safe to visit for a shopping trip or a sporting event is what matters, all the pearl-clutching of the coastal cosmopolitans notwithstanding.  Look for the simplest explanation.

Our aim is not to dismiss explanations centering partisanship, racial identity, local decline, or economics. Rather, status is a lens through which to integrate these explanations and address their gaps and complications. As we show, MAGA participation cannot be fully reduced to universal human tribalism manifested in party loyalty, racial threats, cultural difference, rural identity, or economic self-interest. MAGA participants felt they were denied honor, esteem, and respect by powerful political forces, including mainstream Republican leaders. Members of Trump’s base were expressing their need for status in society and their suspicion of those they believed held power and used it to denigrate them. They targeted government as a source of their status loss and as the potential site of its redemption.

Isn't that how popular sovereignty is supposed to work?  The redemption?  It's not hard to find.

Core Trump supporters are not simply backing a candidate: they are embedded in social networks that position Trump as a central symbol in a broader system of symbols representing their identity and their vision of government’s role in restoring their esteem. These findings suggest that the impact of the MAGA movement will outlast Trump’s presence as a candidate.

MAGA participants believe they live in a world that has long disrespected them via unfair societal values designed to keep them low status. Four years of Trump’s presidency helped to reframe these losses as unjust, their opponents as immoral, and their values as high status. Yet it did not fully remove the fear and anxiety of their lost status or the power of their opponents to take it away again. For them, status lost, and then regained, must be defended.

That's something political strategists can understand, but it is in the nature of academics instead to sneer.  Fine with me.