Trump’s Secret Weapon Has Always Been Status Anxiety
In a phone-powered age of diminishing social capital and growing identitarianism, the president knew just which fears to activate to get him back into the White House.
TIMES ARE HARD FOR AMERICAN WORKERS. They’ve been let down by decades of broadly bipartisan neoliberal consensus in economic policy that has left them in terrible debt, with stagnant wages and few prospects of good-paying work. Anxiety over the horrible state of the economy and their general immiseration drove them into the arms of Donald Trump, whose populist appeal to them in 2016 centered on his ability to turn things around and get America back on a prosperous footing.
At least that was a popular story about Trump’s political success when he first ascended to the presidency, and it continues to enjoy the support of high-profile pundits. It has a lot to recommend it on an intuitive level, not least the way it pins his appeal to his supporters on something other than his aggressive hostility towards immigrants, women, and people of color. But every Trump-supporting boat parade and each positive jobs report or new Dow record set during the hated Biden administration served as a reminder that the “economic anxiety” thesis leaves too much out of its analytic viewfinder—namely, the real motive roots of Trump’s appeal, especially to those who actually live quite high on the hog.
The economic anxiety thesis is too easily contradicted by economic reality, which we have fairly reliable and objective ways of mapping and assessing. More useful for understanding what motivates Trump’s base would be a relative measure—one that could conceivably affect people in a variety of economic circumstances. The best starting point, as some observers have been arguing for years, is status anxiety.
That’s because while “status” comprises a number of signs of economic success—homes, jobs, bank accounts—it goes beyond them to include important intangibles. As Alain de Botton put it in a 2008 book on the subject, status also has to do with “a sense of being cared for and thought valuable.” And that kind of judgment is one we can only arrive at through comparison with others. He continues: “We see ourselves as fortunate only when we have as much as or more than those we have grown up with, work alongside, have as friends, or identify with in the public realm.”
This is the perfect pathology for citizens of a democracy: If merit, not rank, determines social value and achievement, as is meant to be the case in our country, then your average person will be confronted every day with the question of why they haven’t experienced greater success—a toxic recipe for self-righteousness, shame, anxiety, and self-consciousness. Especially when, thanks to our deranged media environment, the apparent success of others—including those we consider undeserving—is constantly in view. Why should they be so lucky, we might ask ourselves. Why isn’t my life like theirs? Why should I have to change my behavior to accommodate them? Why don’t people respect or value me?
As Anne Applebaum puts it in Twilight of Democracy, “When people have rejected aristocracy, no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth, no longer assume that the ruling class is endorsed by God, the argument about who gets to rule—who is the elite—is never over.”
The central role that status anxiety played in Trump’s most recent electoral success is attested in data gathered during the run-up to last fall’s election. For instance, a July 2024 survey from the Young Men Research Initiative and YouGov showed that men aged 18 to 29 who agreed with the statement “I do not feel financially stable”—that is, men experiencing acute economic anxiety—favored Harris by 10 points. Meanwhile, those who agreed with the statement “society looks down on men who are masculine” leaned +32 for Trump. A September 2024 CNN poll found 56 percent of respondents who voted for Trump feel that “growing diversity is threatening American culture.”
Status anxiety was also a key driver of Trump’s support in his first election. In 2016, survey analysis from the Public Religion Research Institute showed that “white working-class voters who say they often feel like a stranger in their own land and who believe the U.S. needs protecting against foreign influence were 3.5 times more likely to favor Trump than those who did not share these concerns.”
The inflection status anxiety gives to political issues like civil rights, wealth inequality, and cultural acceptance allows them to be separated from material needs that could be clearly quantified; they become instead a matter of competition between groups over position in society. That is to say, the price of eggs might not be as motivating to the average Trump voter as resentment towards influential liberal eggheads.
Importantly, no group or income bracket is immune. You do not have to be poor or marginalized to feel your societal position is threatened. The working-class person might feel betrayed by the economic elite while the legal immigrant feels other migrants have jumped the line while the white middle-class man feels his position and prerogatives in society are eroding. For Americans in every social stratum, the vibes have been off. And they’ve been off for a long time.
WHILE STATUS ANXIETY HAS ALWAYS PLAYED a behavior-motivating role in advanced societies, its influence has become more profound in tandem with another important development. Sociologist Robert Putnam, author of the 2000 bestseller Bowling Alone, has been warning for decades that social capital in America has been falling to perilously low levels.
Putnam’s key observation was that Americans were not participating in our democracy in the ways needed to make it flourish. Churches, fraternal organizations, and other organs of civic life all saw declining membership and attendance compared to their midcentury peaks.
Putnam’s notion of social capital is critically useful for understanding how people come together to build community—both within groups and across social divides. Putnam formulates it as follows:
Of all the dimensions along which forms of social capital vary, perhaps the most important is the distinction between bridging (or inclusive) and bonding (or exclusive). Some forms of social capital are, by choice or necessity, inward looking and tend to reinforce exclusive identities and homogeneous groups. Examples of bonding social capital include ethnic fraternal organizations, church-based women's reading groups, and fashionable country clubs. Other networks are outward looking and encompass people across diverse social cleavages. Examples of bridging social capital include the civil rights movement, many youth service groups, and ecumenical religious organizations.
Both the “bridging” and “bonding” forms of social capital Putnam sketches are necessary for a healthy civil society: Together, they make it more possible for individuals to integrate into their communities at large, and they help foster trust and sociability more generally.
Long after Putnam offered these analyses, things continue to be dire on the social capital front. Civic and service clubs from Iowa to upstate New York are dwindling. Nationally, data from the Census Bureau and AmeriCorps show that in 2021, formal volunteering reached its lowest rate in almost thirty years, although it started rebounding as the COVID-19 pandemic receded. Per the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, 65 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “The lack of civility and mutual respect today is the worst I have ever seen.” And as salutary civic participation of these kinds has declined, a new epidemic has emerged: According to fall 2024 data from Gallup, 20 percent of American adults report experiencing daily loneliness.
What’s remarkable is that while this larger withdrawal from community has left us increasingly atomized, our society has simultaneously become more identitarian. This is true both of historically privileged groups like white Protestant Christians and of minority and other marginalized groups. That is to say, the status anxieties of different groups of Americans has become a major driver of our nation’s politics even as our elective membership in groups has steeply declined.
It should not be surprising that a major vector of this change is the type of device you may very well be using to read this article—the smartphone—and the social media applications that can make it so hard to put down. In a study conducted over a decade ago, a team of psychologists found that frequent Facebook use was “associated with an increase in the extent to which participants reported making social comparisons.” While Facebook was designed to connect you with people you already knew, our connections on later-arriving applications like X, Instagram, and TikTok are often predominantly strangers. Psychologists at Pace University found that “following strangers may lead to or reinforce already existing negative feelings about the self by triggering negative social comparisons.”
Not only do these applications run on ambient social anxiety, they have been demonstrated to drive anger and resentment towards the individuals and groups that cause that anxiety. In an attention economy, anger and fear are easy to monetize; as journalist Max Fisher explains, content that generates these reactions dominates feeds in part because outrage-baiting posts “speak to a sense of social compulsion, of a group identity that is under threat.” This system of poisoned incentives helps explain Facebook’s role in enabling the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.
While social capital, as Putnam characterized it, helped people to make meaningful connections with people both similar to them and very different from them, the new identitarianism is a product of the sense of threat engendered by the algorithms that define the social media space. Bonding capital has become a singular priority, as Putnam himself put it in an interview with the New York Times: MAGA’s core constituency is constantly impelled to “vilify the other and glorify the fact that it is bonding social capital . . . they hate bridging social capital and they love their bonding social capital.”
This erosion of the communal basis for reaching out and making connections across deep differences, as with civic service groups, is a threat to the cohesion of large-scale modern democracies. A nation is, to evoke Benedict Anderson’s famous term, an imagined community. The kind of factionalism engendered by this elevation of bonding capital is a risk factor for serious civic instability. As Robert Talisse puts it, “democracy calls for us to see beyond ourselves.” Trump’s elevation is the sort of thing that happens when too many of us can no longer see beyond our phones.
PARTLY BECAUSE THEY DON’T ALWAYS have a straightforward relationship with material needs, status concerns can affect the political orientation of groups in ways that seem counterintuitive. Consider the gains Trump made with minority voter blocs in spite of his frequent comments denigrating non-white Americans.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of Latino Trump voters. Discussing Trump’s 2020 performance with this group, legal scholar Ian Haney López observed:
It’s true that status concerns among Latinos make some susceptible to Trump’s rhetoric. For more than 50 years, Republicans have weaponized insecurities and resentments, especially around race, creating in-groups and out-groups. Trump has mastered this strategy, which appeals not only to a majority of Whites but also many typically seen as people of color. Understandably, often people want to associate with the groups accorded higher status by our political leaders.
In 2024, anti-immigration attitudes among Latinos, including among immigrants, became more pronounced as Trump continued to beat the drum of the border issue. This brought them into unexpected alignment with Trump’s presumably intended audience: alienated and aggrieved members of the white working class. In a September article in the Atlantic, Paola Ramos summarized the curious situation well while recounting what she heard during a roundtable discussion with conservative Latinos who argued that immigrants in their communities must assimilate—that is, they must become real Americans like themselves:
Research suggests that opposition to immigration may have less to do with economic anxieties about jobs and wages than it does with cultural identity. Jens Hainmueller, a professor at Stanford, and Daniel Hopkins, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, reviewed more than 100 studies about attitudes toward immigration from more than two dozen countries. The pair concluded that nativism is rooted in a fear that newcomers will distort national identity and corrode cultural norms.
The rightward shift among Latino men in particular has emerged as one of the starkest trendlines of the 2024 cycle. Mark Hugo Lopez of the Pew Research Center told NBC News that “Hispanic men face many pressures, pressures about family, about economics, about roles they are expected to play.” University of Texas professor Luis Ponjuán added, “It’s abundant and clear to me that they need to see they are valued as a workforce, that they are invested in as a workforce.”
Trump’s campaign worked hard to court this demographic—in part by making its embrace of not just masculinity but machismo a topline theme while denigrating Democrats as a man-hating party.
Trump’s campaign, in short, was intended to make Latino men feel “a sense of being cared for and thought valuable.” It was meant to be directly pitched to their sense of status threat. Hispanic men swung 19 points in Trump’s direction from 2020 to 2024, and while their top concern overall was the state of the economy, the masculinity pitch helped to seal the deal, especially among the younger male Latino voters who swung the hardest in a MAGA direction.
As one Latino voter from Pennsylvania recently told France 24, “In the Latino community, we are still men. We still want to be men who take charge and lead our families into a better place. . . . We couldn’t live with the fact that we had a weak president [Biden] in charge of the greatest economy in the world.”
But their families and communities are now at risk, as Trump has already begun to apply heavy federal pressure on not just immigrants, but anyone who looks like one to an ICE agent. Last Thursday, ICE carried out a raid at Ocean Seafood Depot in Newark, New Jersey as part of nationwide actions the agency said resulted in 538 arrests that day. However, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka accused ICE agents of also “unlawfully” harassing U.S. citizens, including detaining a U.S. military veteran. The agents were reportedly acting without warrants.
Deportation efforts are now ramping up, creating concerns that ICE agents may, to fill Trump’s new quotas, act with even greater disregard for their proper remit and the rights of those they detain or target. The effects are being felt: Children are staying home from school; people are hiding their attics. Dr. Phil “embedded” with ICE to film one of their raids in Chicago. MAGA influencers describe the prospect of mass deportations being carried out in part as a media spectacle as “exciting.” Migrants who came to the United States legally are having their legal status revoked. Legal immigration pathways are being shut down; government support for recently resettled refugees has been abruptly canceled. Some deportations are being carried out using military planes.
So much immigration-related news is coming out every day that it is becoming difficult to keep track of it all. But the larger picture is clear: Latino voters who believed Trump would refrain from bringing the weight of law enforcement to bear on their larger communities might be in for a harsh realization about the scope of the president’s intentions as ICE field offices work overtime to meet his new expectations. Alleviating their sense of status threat was never his priority, and making life harder for them directly soothes the anxieties of the constituency with whom he himself most closely identifies: white nativist reactionaries.
Theirs is a pain the president can feel. Trump is the master of grievance and animus precisely because he himself is an exposed nerve of status anxiety. No one articulates this sense of injury quite like him because perhaps no one is as covetous, spiteful, and achingly needy as he is. His unprecedented political debut and continuing success has not freed him from his decades-old grievances. If anything, his elevation has made him into the ultimate sore winner.
In this civically anemic country where connection is rare and injury is common; in this increasingly lonely democracy where resentful factions endlessly proliferate; in this alienated society where the devices to which we are woefully addicted gin up our hatreds and weaponize our aspirations—in such a place, the green-eyed man is king.
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