Emotion - more than ideology or dogma - is the motor force of populism. The classic emotion associated with populist movements is resentment. Resentment is anger directed at those perceived as above oneself or one’s class. The inverse of resentment is contempt. Contempt is anger directed at those people or classes seen as below one’s class. Since Trump’s election America’s liberals have been admonished repeatedly not only for having lost the traditional working-class base of the Democratic Party, but as well for having conveyed contempt for the Americans who have been “left behind.”
Some of the most influential books among liberals have been on-site examinations of the grievances of Tea Party and Trump supporters. Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land offered a deeply empathetic understanding of rural Louisianans who staunchly supported the Tea Party and rejected Democrats despite living in conditions of grotesque environmental damage brought on by the oil and gas industry. In The Politics of Resentment, Katherine J. Cramer investigated the depth of feeling in rural Wisconsin against “urban elites” in a state whose narrow swing to Trump was fundamental to his electoral victory. J.D. Vance’s unflinching first-person account in Hillbilly Elegy highlighted the ingrained social history of Appalachian American that would resonate with Donald Trump’s candidacy.
What is a good deal less well known than the charge of liberal contempt is that among themselves- on social media, on rightwing news sites like Breitbart, on radio talk shows - right-wing populists talk in a way that is a mirror image of this perceived contempt from the left. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is more common in these exchanges than expressions of the stupidity of the liberal world. That the “libtards” are hopelessly unintelligent or imbecilic, naïve, brainwashed, and ultimately laughable - or even mentally ill - is both a taken-for-granted reality and a favored expressive trope when right populists are talking among themselves.
