This week, both Slate and The Atlantic came out with articles featuring analysis performed by Robert Pape and his research team at the University of Chicago. (Both articles reference the same research.) The data, collected and scrutinized last year, show that the 1/6 insurrectionary crowd skews rather heavily middle- and upper-middle class.
The facets are striking. The Atlantic gave us this portrait:
A series of polls at the University of Chicago found that there is a substantial chunk of people in this country who believe both of two propositions. One, that Biden is illegitimate, and two, that violence is justified to restore Trump to power. We have not had tens of millions of people in this country believe that for something like 100 years. What happened on January 6 was an example of political violence. Historically, in recent decades, political violence has been conducted by young men in their 20s and 30s, unemployed, poorly educated. That is not at all the picture of the violent perpetrators on January 6. They are middle-aged. Their mean age is 42. They’re well educated. They’re white-collar. They’re well employed. And we haven’t had that kind of middle-class violence in this country since the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, in the 1920s.
The fact that the population that is being analyzed skews so heavily middle-class, as opposed to lower-middle class as has been usual for nascent fascist/right-wing extremist movements, is notable, because it’s known to sociologists that members of the middle-class have access to a different pool of symbols than those in the lower classes. Accordingly, the type of propaganda would be different. The grievances would be different. The projections from past experts regarding what high-risk subpopulations might be particularly susceptible to such grassroots movements might not apply, due to economic, socioeconomic, politico-religious, or any other set (or subset, or combination) of reasons. The panoply of permutations of who might be drawn expands, perhaps geometrically.
The location of symbols, shared ideas and cultural reference points, is important because while the locus might find its gravitational center in the middle class, those same symbols might be accessible to lower classes but in a more mass-media-centered or -distributed way. The more commoditized the symbol, the more ubiquitous and universal, the more flexible it could become in material meant to lure.
But what I mean to focus on here is the fact that what we saw on 1/6 might indeed have skewed one way for various outside reasons, and that very distortion prior to self-selection for participation in the event on the Ellipse (if not any possible advance desire or plan to storm the Capitol itself) would skew the data collected and so analyzed.
The skew very well may be answered by the fact that January 6, 2021 was a Wednesday. It was the middle of the new week of the first workweek of the new year. Working-class people would not have the superfluous means by which they might call off work, let alone travel to the event. This would be especially true in the middle of the pandemic, with many people at that time out of work or, if employed, somewhat fearful of losing their jobs (as is normal in an economic downturn, which we had entered); this was also evidenced by the increase in distribution of emergency stores of food. Working-class and lower-middle class people, arguably, were living on thinner margins than normal and certainly would have weighed pros and cons before heading to an elective in-person protest. (Factor in, also, that the temperature was chilly that day. People take temperature into consideration when planning for participation in outside events.)
Obversely, those of the middle- and upper-middle class, the white-collar folks who showed up in the data, would have more fluidity in resources that they could tap were they interested in participation. These people, as white-collar persons, would be expected to be middle- or upper-middle management, if not small-business owners (if not heads of corporations, particularly more obscure ones). They would not only have the finances that would permit travel (and perhaps lodging), they would also be able to take time off work on short notice (due to perks or rank in the company) or no notice at all, in the case of business ownership. In short, these people may have had more discretion and means than those who conspicuously did not show up but normally would be part of such a nascent fascist population.
Bear in mind that approximately 10,000 people showed up to the Capitol that day (some say up to eight times as many; I’m going with the conservative estimate). A quarter of that may have stormed the Capitol; about 700 individuals have been arrested. It is of these people that these analyses have been conducted: the people who showed up. The data crunching is valuable and insightful, and it reveals that we have much work ahead of us in order to get a root understanding of where the center of gravity of this movement is located. We need a better idea of what and where it is, in order to understand where it is going (and how it intends to get there).
What the data may in fact show us is the tip of the iceberg, where what is submerged is comprised of the rest of the movement that did not show up physically at the Capitol on 1/6, but who would have been there in spirit (and probably cheered internally or externally that day). Those people would be the lower-middle and lower class movement participants (MAGA or MAGA-curious). These people would be the ones consuming mass media, which in this day and age includes social media, as nearly everyone has a smartphone. Mass media becomes a democratized platform hijacked by propagandists to disseminate recruiting materials. They may identify with the movement in spirit but be restricted more in terms of bodily or other physical means of commitment.
Because social media, and the propaganda/deliberately crafted disinformation on it, is so democratized, it does not function merely for the mass man. The consumption of social media masses the man. The medium is the message, McLuhan famously said; but one becomes one’s consumption. And part of that mass audience is a segment that is firmly middle-class. These are the aforementioned middle managers. They’re also trade craftsmen, folks who work with their hands for a living and earn a high wage due to the niche value of their work.
This population of people have more means but may still consume a larger amount of popular cultural material than their socioeconomic peers, and thus they would have a greater susceptibility to whatever propaganda the movement is putting out for the lower classes. The cultural touchstones would align, thus allowing the middle-class population to tap into an underlying message they may not have otherwise encountered. This is self-radicalization.
Coming back to the fact that so many people participated in the insurrection (again, ~2500), and that it skewed so far middle- and upper-middle class, this makes me think that this self-selection of participants, this volunteer army, was precisely an advertisement that day of their physical availability. They went there to show en force, with their very bodies, that 1) the movement has presence, but more importantly that 2) they were fully devoted and thus possibly worthy of elevation in the movement. By the virtue of showing up, they demonstrated that they have the means, the dedication, and the willingness to participate in dangerous activity (i.e., violence) as well as the fortitude to withstand the process of martyrdom (which includes stints in jail or prison, a permanent criminal record, et cetera).
These people, if I am reading this correctly, were advertising their availability as leaders of the fiefdoms that are sure to arise once any postwar territory would ostensibly be divvied up amongst the victors of any upcoming altercation. In their minds, they are demonstrating fearlessness and loyalty. Their very numbers show us how broad the base is of people interested in being the movement’s future petty warlords (which, post-altercation, would certainly be tribute awarded in the form of official office or some other patronage).
The middle class often has served as the braintrust of fascist movements, and the application pool in today’s MAGA movement is broad indeed. Many want consideration. And they are showing they are willing to put their very bodies on the line. These are the middle managers of American Nazism. They are applying for jobs.
This may be the mesa top of a much larger iceberg.