Is a vote for an anti-migration party a 'cultural preference'?

Votes for right-wing populists often get explained as a reaction to the (neoliberal) breakdown of the welfare state. Migration - popular populist talking point - is a stick with which to hit the political establishment: the so-called “protest” vote. Jesse Frederik recently argued something very different. People vote for anti-migration parties simply because they want less migration - and now there are parties that offer to translate that wish into policy. To Frederik, it’s not unlike a market - it’s all about supply and demand. Very simply put: the demand was always there, but now there is also supply.

• Right-wing populist parties are increasingly successful because they are able to gather people behind them who might have different opinions about, say economic policy, but who are united in their rejection of liberal multicultural migration policy. This ability is the sea change: previously, parties rallied people who might have different opinions about, say migration policy, but who were united in their economic convictions.
• So political supply has changed. But why should people stop rallying around their economic convictions? Because, Frederik argues, people are now better off - better off than in the 80s, which was about the last decade when there was still a pretty clear division of the electorate along economic convictions. The argument in short: people can now afford (literally, almost) to vote on their cultural preferences rather than material interests. Cultural identity as political luxury product. Call it the Maslovian hypothesis of right wing populism.

I find the argument in part convincing, especially the role of changing political supply: people vote for right-wing populist parties, because there are right-wing populist parties - especially when they are credible candidates, as shown in the recent Dutch elections results, during which the main liberal party broke the effective cordon sanitaire.

There is also no reason to doubt that people tend to be skeptical about foreigners in their midst and that we live in a world shaped by colonial and racist ideas, which only define and legitimize such skepticism. Still, the theory of demand does not have me convinced:

• We may have had gotten increasing material abundance, but inequality has been rising too, and the feeling of being left out or left behind is pretty pervasive. Neoliberal politics and culture has made success and/or stability less certain. Being “better off” is an ambivalent experience. Now, Frederik does cite research that shows that “economic malaise” can explain only a small part of the increased popularity of right-wing populism, but the indicators that were used to capture “economic malaise” (like, trade openness of a country) might not capture this pervasive feeling of insecurity or exclusion. You don’t have to be an objective “loser of globalization” to experience either. So, the insecurity hypothesis still stands, I think.
• What's more, Frederik may be guilty of Dutch myopia here. While the Netherlands is still one of the more equal and most wealthy countries, it is not alone in seeing right wing populist success. Right-wing populism is on the rise in countries like the UK, US and farther afield in the global South too (did someone say Argentina?). People in these countries experience poverty and impoverishment, relative and absolute. In other words, increased wealth might have something to do with it, but right wing populism does not come with increased wealth alone.

Let me therefore venture an alternative reading: what if the age of neoliberal deconstruction does have something to do with it? That is, what if it’s not a matter of a latent demand finally being met by new supply? What has been characteristic of the neoliberal age since the 1980s? It’s the combination of people's increased - and frankly unprecedented - material abundance and increased (generalized) insecurity. Globalization has made things very cheap to make, but the welfare state has been dismantled or transfigured, while labour lost its grip on the conditions of work. That combination creates fertile soil for anxiety about losing what one has gained, or what people feel like they can just hold on to in the age of decline and decadence.

This is in fact the argument of a recent book by Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams. They are saying: nobody liked the neoliberal policy program. Nobody wants essential services to be sold off, scaled back and broken down. But most people mostly went along with it, because the program also came with untold consumer goods and accumulation of private property. However, since the financial crisis, this grand bargain is off: welfare is still being dismantled, but life has gotten more expensive too. The centre-left has had no good answer to this, because they’ve also participated in the grand bargain. In this political vacuum, voting for right wing populist parties makes a certain kind of sense:

1. These parties portray themselves as outside of the political establishment that has betrayed the grand bargain (the “protest” part of the vote), but:
2. They also promise to build an ethno-nationalist defence ring around the job market and welfare state. Migrants embody the threat to everyone's weakening claim to a piece of the pie. The fear for one’s loss of identity (Frederik’s “cultural preferences”), which shows up in the many values surveys Frederik cites, goes hand in hand with a perceived loss of grip on status and stability (material interests).

Two final remarks:

• The conjunction of identity and material interests reveals a fundamental problem with the Maslovian hypothesis: there is no such thing as a hierarchy of needs: all needs are enmeshed with one another. People are fundamentally meaning-making creatures. There is no material need that is not also spiritual, cultural, aesthetic or moral. Looking at human behaviour from a Maslovian lens, people - from rich to poor, secure to vulnerable - would be utterly bewildering.
• There is also a fundamental problem with any mechanical market theory of politics, which presumes desires pre-exist supply. As we all know from that ad we just clicked on, supply shapes demand, it’s not just catering to it. Frederik would agree with this, by the way, though he underplay its importance. Xenophobia might be from all times, insecurity may sharpen it, but migration as a topic of primary political importance also requires political ‘manufacturing’, by framing migrants as a threat to identity or welfare.

Please do read Jesse Frederik’s piece for yourself, if you can: it’s well researched, well argued and quite informative.