Nearly 1600 people
have been charged for their actions
at the storming of the nation's
capitol on January 6th,
2021, in the largest
investigation in US history.
All of them could be pardoned by
President elect Donald Trump
as he prepares to take office
in ten days.
11 Wisconsin residents
have been convicted on charges
ranging from unlawful entry
on restricted grounds to
assaulting officers while armed
with a dangerous weapon.
One man serving a three year
sentence in federal prison
pepper sprayed officers bragging
in a Facebook message, quote,
You charge that line and start
spraying. They start running for
cover like you're coming at them
with an AK.
What lead someone to violently
breach the US Capitol.
Four years later, President elect
Donald Trump speaks of pardoning
insurrectionists because he
saw January 6th as a day
of love.
Whether that or a day of shame,
what particularly drives
his supporters all the way to
his reelection.
Research into that may surprise
you. Here to discuss is
UW Madison, professor of sociology,
Chad Alan Goldberg.
And thanks very much for being here.
Thank you for having me.
So the the kind of running
political theory has been that
Donald Trump won reelection
on the message of fixing inflation
and the economy.
But but describe what
you researched and what it showed.
Yeah.
So this is sort of, I
would say, the prevailing theme in a
lot of the discussion.
There's there are reasons for that.
So if you look at the exit poll
data, the
the voters who supported
Mr. Trump identified as
their top issues, immigration and
the economy.
But it's always a bit tricky.
It's complicated because
you have to dig deeper.
You want to know whether they're
talking about their own personal
circumstances, whether it's their
general idea about the economy as
a whole and so on.
So I can tell you about some
research that I did with a
colleague, my son, who
is now a postdoctoral fellow
at the University University of
Pennsylvania.
He earned his Ph.D.
here at the University of Wisconsin.
We have done some research based on
analysis of survey data.
And we were interested in trying
to understand
and trying to test some different
theories about support and
popularity for Mr. Trump.
We tested the idea
that this basically reflects a kind
of working class revolt against
economic conditions or a kind of
economic populism.
By looking at income and looking
at education and looking at
interaction effects between the two
of them. And our data set, we
were very surprised to find that
this didn't really hold up very
well. We tried to test
the effects of these variables in
different ways.
We tried to look at again at how
they interact.
We tried various things.
We one of the things we did was to
restrict our sample at one point to
states and the Rust Belt and Great
Lakes regions, thinking that maybe
it's a regional
kind of phenomenon.
But in all the various ways
that we tried to test this
hypothesis in our
dataset, we found no support
for this.
So I think this
does call into question
this story, this narrative,
and maybe encourages
us to think a little bit more
carefully about how we define these
terms like working class.
I think very often it becomes a
shorthand for anybody without
a college degree, but that's lumping
together a pretty
heterogeneous and diverse set of
people, some of whom may have
significantly higher incomes.
So that's that's a finding
that surprised us, but which we
think helps to illuminate what's
going on.
What is going on, according to your
research?
Yeah. What we we tested three
theories. So one is this economic
populism theory.
A second theory is what we call a
kind of political alienation theory,
which we try to distinguish from the
first one.
So if the first one is about
economic grievances, the second
one, the idea here is that
people support political outsiders
like Mr. Trump because they're
alienated from political
institutions or from government.
They feel like they're not
well-represented or that these
institutions
are not looking out for people like
them.
And then a third theory that we try
to test is a
kind of status threat
theory. So basically, the idea here
is that demographic changes
in American society, cultural
changes in American society
have threatened the status of
dominant groups in our society.
And that that is what's driving
support for Mr. Trump.
Now, none of these theories are
mutually exclusive.
It could be a combination of things,
right? So we wanted to test
the three of them, see if one of
them or some combination of them
helped to explain the data that we
had.
We tested this on the basis of an
analysis of survey data.
Again, we did
not find very much support for the
political emanation theory either,
which again surprised us.
We expected to find more support for
the economic populism theory
and more support for the political
alienation theory.
These ideas have been influential.
The theory that we found the most
support for is the status threat
theory. So we looked at
indicators of status threat in the
survey data.
So, for example,
people who say who asked the
question, do you agree
with the statement that
cultural racial diversity
is important for America?
Sort of what they say in response to
these kinds of questions,
questions about religion, questions
about gender.
And so looking at those questions as
indicators of how people feel about
these demographic and cultural
changes, what
we what we concluded
from our study is that the
the dataset that we analyzed,
the empirical evidence seems to
point to the status threat theory
as the the theory that holds
up best in light of our evidence.
As the driver of support
for Donald Trump.
Yes.
So you say in your research paper
that this is the first comprehensive
attempt to distill the existing
theoretical frameworks of
the rise of right wing populism
and then examine the extent to which
they explain it.
Why is it important to understand
this?
I think it's important because
as as as
virtually everyone recognizes
since 2016,
there's been dramatic changes in
American politics.
And when Mr.
Trump won the 2016 election,
people could say, well, maybe
this is an aberration.
Maybe after this, when Mr.
Biden was elected in 2020,
maybe there's a return to normalcy.
But it seems clear, given
Mr. Trump's reelection in 2024,
that there are fundamental changes
afoot in American politics.
So as political sociologist,
we think it's important to try to
understand what are the forces,
what are the mechanisms driving this
and how they're reshaping American
politics.
So the breach on the U.S.
Capitol began with the Trump led
conspiracy that the 2020 election
was stolen.
How was that kind of outsized
response informed
by a threat to people's status?
Yeah,
I think one of the
key factors here is feelings about
immigration.
So
American immigration law was
reformed in 1965.
This led over time to
significant
flows of immigration from new
sources into the United States.
It took decades for the effects to
fully manifest.
It was a gradual process.
But there are significant
there are significant changes going
on in terms of the
in terms of the proportion of
Americans who are foreign born, for
example.
Some people have compared the
current situation to the situation
in the United States in the early
1900s when there was also
a major upsurge of nativism
leading to the national
origins quotas legislation in 1921,
in 1924, which
essentially slammed the doors
for immigration for decades.
So we think it's connected to
this theory of status threat in that
way.
And I have seen some research
indicating that among those
who participated in the January 6th
insurrection motivations,
key motivations included the idea,
the belief that
the 2020 election was stolen.
And also concerns about
immigration.
So we think that this is
something that's that's
consistent with the status threat
theory.
So the status threat theory,
according to your paper,
includes features of racism,
sexism and xenophobia,
as well as cultural and moral
traditionalism.
Yeah. I mean, to put it bluntly,
yeah.
I think it's important to emphasize
that the way that we conceived this,
it's a combination of several
different sorts of status threats.
So sometimes people will
want to say, Well,
Trump, Mr. Trump was elected
because of racism in the electorate
or among his supporters or
because of sexism or because
of Islamophobia or
Christian nationalism or other kinds
of things. We thought it's important
to look at these various
kinds of status threat together
and to see how they might be
coming together to reinforce a
sense of being under siege among
some Americans.
So in your mind, what is wrong
with politics and policy if
so many Americans feel that their
very way of life is
threatened?
I think there
are two issues here.
And the question that you asks are
one is about policies.
That can
that can lift up all Americans, can
alleviate status anxieties,
but do it in a way that is not going
to be
detrimental to other Americans who
would be adversely affected by
certain kinds of changes that you
could imagine, for example.
But the other issue here is about
how those policies and the effects
of those policies are communicated.
And so, of course, we live now in a
world where
the media of communication
are also increasingly fragmented
and polarized by
partizanship and by politics.
In the early 20th century, there was
a well-known American sociologist,
Robert Park at the University of
Chicago, writing about
immigration in those years who said
that for democracy
to work, it's important that
Americans live and think in the same
world. And I have the feeling
and I think many Americans have the
feeling that more and more we
don't feel like we live and think in
the same world.
All right. Well, thank you very much
and thanks for sharing your
research. Chair, Alan Goldberg.
Thank you.
Longer.
I thought you were going to ask me
more about.
About the.
The insurrection itself.
Yeah. Yeah.
So, I mean, I didn't.
Because I kind of felt like
you.
You answered it in one
question, but is there something
more that you'd like that you think
we should touch on there?
I do. Yeah.
And we can right now.
Okay.
Yeah. Great.
So, you know what I was going to say
about the the
reaction, the public reaction to the
January 6th insurrection, which I
think is interesting, is
that from the very beginning,
immediately after the events,
if you look at the polling data,
there was a partizan divide and
reactions to it.
So when people were asked, for
example, whether
Mr. Trump was to blame for the
insurrection or even
more importantly, when they were
asked how important is it
to find and to prosecute
people who participated in the
insurrection and broke the law,
there was already a gap between
Democrats and Republicans in the
polling responses.
The percentage of Republicans who
said, for example, that it was
important to find and prosecute
those involved was significantly
lower than for Democrats
over time, that the proportion
of Republicans saying that has
fallen still more so
instead of the gap closing, instead
of there beginning to be a kind of
convergence or consensus around
this. The partizan gap has
widened.
I think that's connected to
something that you touched on in
your remarks,
opening the segment about
the way that Mr. Trump has
turned the narrative around
the January 6th insurrection on its
head, because his
his line about this is
that Democrats, that Mr.
Biden and the Democrats are the real
threat to democracy.
This is the way that he presents it.
So he has repeatedly
and incessantly claimed falsely that
the 2020 election was stolen.
He continues to say this.
We saw in the
end the election and the
vice presidential debates his
running mate, J.D. Vance, was
unwilling to disavow this
idea, was unwilling to distance
himself from this idea.
So this is one way in which Mr.
Trump claims that Mr. Biden and the
Democrats, the Democrats, are
the major threat to democracy the
other way, of course.
Mr. Trump,
we should keep in mind that he is a
convicted felon.
We should not forget that he is
going to be the first convicted
felon sitting in the White House in
American history.
And how does he respond
to this kind of situation?
His response is to say that
the judicial system, the justice
system has been weaponized against
him, to say that he's
being persecuted.
Again, these are false claims.
But this is the this is the
story that he tells and he
extends the story then to the
January 6th insurrectionists,
because he describes them
as hostages.
He describes them as political
prisoners. So the idea here is that
they, too, are victims of a
weaponized judicial system.
The the important thing to keep in
mind here, I think, is that
majorities of Republicans and the
polling data have increasingly
come to adopt this story
that Mr. Trump has told incessantly.
And so if you look at the exit poll
data for the 2024 presidential
election, if you look at
just those voters who in the exit
polls said that they think that
American democracy is under threat,
you might expect that most
of those who said so would be Harris
supporters.
But, in fact, it's roughly split
5050.
So of those voters who say they
think American democracy is under
threat, roughly half of them
supported Mr. Trump.
This, I think,
is a very troubling
and a very dangerous situation
that the the
reactions to January 6th, the
insurrection are so divided
along partizan lines.
And I think it is
instructive to compare this, for
example, to the Watergate crisis
in the 1970s.
So a colleague of mine, a
sociologist at Yale, Jeffrey
Alexander, did some very interesting
work about the Watergate scandal,
pointing out that when
the break in occurred in 1972,
there was no political crisis right
away. Many Americans thought
this is just politics as usual.
There's some minor crime going on
here. But it wasn't a crisis.
It didn't become a crisis until two
years later. By 1974,
when Mr. Nixon resigned.
Then it was a crisis.
And what Jeffrey Alexander
shows in his research is that in
the two years in between,
there's this process where
a consensus, a broad social
consensus emerges
involving significant groups in
American society, that this is not
just some minor criminal act,
but that this is a deviant act.
It's symbolically polluting, and it
threatens core American values that
regulate political authority and the
country only then.
Could institutional social
control mechanisms be brought into
play and ritual processes
of purification and
expiation should be brought into
play.
None of those conditions are present
today around January 6th.
We don't have that broad consensus.
It doesn't seem like one is
developing, and that means
that the institutional social
control mechanisms are hampered.
They can't be as effective without
that kind of broad consensus, that
feeling among a
wide bipartisan group of Americans
that core American values were
threatened in the January 6th
insurrection and continued to be
threatened by election denialism.
How does history treat
January 6th?
That remains to be seen.
I'm always hesitant to make
predictions. I think social
scientists are not very good at it,
but I think we can say
that if trends continue the way that
they are, and especially if Mr.
Trump follows through with his vow
to pardon those who were convicted
and the January 6th insurrection,
this will simply exacerbate and
worsen the situation
that I've described.
It will deepen the Partizan division
around this, and it will
make it even less likely
that January 6th will lead to some
kind of national unity and resolve,
unfortunately.
All right. Chad, Alan Goldberg,
thanks very much.
Thank you.