The Venn Diagram that Explains it All

By Micah E. Weiss

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, a thirty-second Boaters for Trump advertisement popped up on my Youtube video selection, and I was enraptured.  I was in awe, really.  It was not entirely unlike this one, and though I have yet to find the original on the wide internets, I continue to look, hoping, each day to be thus moved.    

What an extraordinary display!  Dozens of people out in their pleasure boats, pulling for their candidate.  Inspiring.  Sometime later, the old expression “never feel sorry for a man who owns a boat” occurred to me.  (Of course, it isn’t “boat” in the quote, it’s “plane,” and it’s not that old.  It’s from the sleeper hit The Edge, and Anthony Hopkins gives the line about himself.)  What struck me later was that for all of Trump’s bluster and complaints and apparent advocacy for “the people,” his most passionate devotees owned pleasure boats. 

This didn’t exactly strike me as a demographic in need of strong advocacy.  Not to be heartless, but their problems seemed, if not made up, at least minimal.  And yet Trump has often spoken of and to his followers as if they are under constant threat and struggling through immeasurable challenges—immigrant competition for jobs, replacement theory, crippling regulation, etc.  Trump was and now is again brimming over with grievances for a struggling American that, if he or she exists at all, surely can’t make it to the yacht club for rally day.    

Now the flip-side, Vermont’s obsession with Black Lives Matter.  Vermont has the highest ratio of BLM lawn signs to actual Black Americans in the lower 48, according to an empirical study I conducted looking out the window of my car.  In all seriousness, Vermont is the third whitest state in the union and a large number of its homes sport BLM signs.  Those homes also have a high probability of sporting an electric vehicle in the driveway and solar panels on the roof. 

What I am observing here is a demographic similarity on both ends of the political polarity, a financial similarity, to be precise, shared by most of the people who act as the movers and shakers and political trendsetters of both right and left.  They are the kind of people who can afford EVs, solar panels, and pleasure boats.  Whether we call them bourgeois, affluent, upper-middle class, or whatever, they are in fact the two most important demographics in politics right now. 

These are the inhabitants of MAGAstan and WOKEstan. 

I need to credit mathematician and hedge-fund manager Eric Weinstein with the terms—I’m not sure if he coined the terms, but I first heard them from him.  In his construction, these two groups include most of the journalistic class, university graduates like teachers, and the keepers of the institutional keys in media.  These mostly white-collar professionals across the cultural sphere explain much of WOKEstan, and some of MAGAstan, but I see additional members: Construction company, body shop, and auto shop owners.  Men and women who run fast food or fitness franchises, or those wealthy elites we aren’t used to thinking of as elites: plumbers (who almost always make more money than teachers—who are themselves smack in the middle of WOKEstan). 

These are the Americans who have pleasure boats, or snowmobiles, or four-wheelers, or side-by-sides.  They flock to where I live in New Hampshire with their boats in tow, or their toy-haulers, hitting the trails of the White Mountains with gasoline guzzling vehicles of limited practical value.  MAGAstan rumbles onto the trails utilizing mainly internal combustion technology.  But WOKEstan, not to be outdone, selects mainly cross-country and/or backwoods skiing and mountain biking and/or rock climbing.  These are the acceptable, yet costly, seasonally appropriate recreations of our political wings—at least where I live—Carhart vs Patagonia, F-150 vs Subaru.  Something they have in common is the obscene price they are willing to pay for a single recreational vehicle—side-by-sides can run you up to $9k, but a good mountain bike, that’s $10k and up. 

For these moneyed individuals, there are entire demographics whom they claim to speak for that they are definitely not a part of.  We return to the BLM signs in rural Vermont.  Or Trump speaking up for the interests of coal miners. 

Where did this come from? 

Thanks to Johnathan Haidt, I think we have the beginnings of an answer.  He quotes extensively from the work of More In Common’s Hidden Tribes report, and lays the cause of our strange political polarity directly at the feet of social media:

The “Hidden Tribes” study. . . surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.

I would bet this clear example of a Pareto distribution lines up rather nicely with an equivalent income distribution.  After all, Haidt explains of “devoted conservatives” and “progressive activists”:

They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elites who are not representative of the broader society. 

Which makes sense if you stop and think about it.  When the DEI trained director of HR from WOKEstan goes on her break, it’s time to #defundthepolice on her social media while she eats her quinoa salad.  While across the awful stroad from the corporate park, the vape shop owner from MAGAstan is sitting in his car sharing a Tucker Carlson meme about “legacy Americans”with his friends and employees. 

What these people are doing (besides fitting nicely into the stereotypes I’ve drawn for them) is engaging in the great LARP, or Live Action Role Play, that is our modern American political moment, and, I would argue, our new national pastime.  You can see them at the Women’s Marches and BLM rallies or crowding the capital on January 6^th.  Nowhere was the new dysfunction more obvious than our new “day of infamy”, of which there are now several documentaries and analyses that, when examined, make certain realities clear.  The people who stormed our capital building were not the poor downtrodden white working class that MAGAstan claims to speak for.  You could figure that out simply by asking yourself the question, “Who has the means to drive or fly all the way to DC on a work day?”  The answer is not the guy who changes your oil at the Jiffy Lube, it’s the guy who owns the Jiffy Lube. But a paragraph from an Atlantic article analyzing the participants of that riot is worth noting:

[T]he demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists. The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed.  

It's an odd thought for me to contemplate that such an absurd and tragic insurrection could have been perpetrated by professional, educated, Gen-Xers like me.  But if you watch the January 6th documentaries that have gotten some attention in the last few months, particularly This Place Rules on HBOMax, you can see in many of the rioters an almost playful attitude towards the entire day that at some point turned very, very dark.  This is recreation, replete with costumes, paramilitary kit, walkie-talkies, the works; a textbook LARP: playing dress-up to make pretend warfare against a pretend enemy for a cause that doesn’t affect your life, on behalf of a group of people to whom you have limited if any real connection.  Both sides even have a kind of militaristic heraldry in the plethora of tribal signaling flags–a market so rich it can support multiple online specialty stores.  

Recently I wrote about how the progressive left’s bored elite are fighting an unwinnable social justice war against forever racism.  The elite of the right is just as bored, and just as much in need of diversion. 

A new political elite has emerged with phones in their pockets hooked directly to the social media feeds that they themselves are feeding, and they are doing it as a form of recreation; for the lulz, likes, and accompanied dopamine hits and increase in social status in their respective “__stans.”  The LARP feels good.  Aside from the social recognition and validation, there is that sweet plum for the old ego: self-righteous indignation.  I’m feeling it right now.  Throw in some arrogance and a touch of narcissism, and everything in our public discourse makes more sense—a grotesque, toxic, counterproductive kind of sense. 

They aren’t enemies.    

MAGAstan and WOKEstan may appear to be at odds, but they are in fact symbiotic; they feed off each other—I’d argue they need each other.  What appears to be a debate or argument or just a dirty shouting match on the outside is really a bees-to-pollen relationship on the inside (argued quite well by CGP Grey here).  Where would Fox News be during Christmas season if WOKEstan dilettantes weren’t waging “War on Christmas”?  Where would MSNBC be without that MAGAstan school board banning Art Spiegelman’s Maus?  Both indulge in nutpicking and selective amnesia of their own side’s nuts.  Then, across the social media universe reposts, retweets, manipulations, political memes, subtle changes to the memes (again, see CGP Grey), video clips, insta-twit-toc-a-gram-i-tube etc., and you have a whirligig of giddy outrage run by a small percentage (6% right and 8% left) of people with more time and money than sense, and no skin in the game.  Despite the echo-chambers that are real, social media is a shared ecosystem for both “__stans,” and they need fecund ground to thrive, so naturally they use each other’s bullshit for fertilizer. 

The bored elites have been around many times before.  Some may know that the garment workers’ strikes in 1911 in New York City had several high profile society women from New York’s upper class on the picket lines in a show of sororal solidarity with the women of the sweatshops.  During the depression, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. once hired the openly communist Diego Rivera to paint him a mural (it didn’t end well).  Perhaps the best example, and certainly the funniest, was the 1960s era’s fad known as Radical Chic, which you can read about in an article for New York Magazine in 1970 by the incomparable Tom Wolfe.   His account of a party at Leonard Bernstein’s Park Avenue penthouse duplex that was intended as a fundraiser for the Black Panthers has many parallels and lessons for us today, but one glaring difference.

The well-meaning elites at the Bernsteins’s party are there to listen, learn, but mostly to just give money.  One of the tragedies of that political moment is how the reality of the Black Panthers clashed with the popular image of them that was, and still is, sold.  Even today, the Black Panther Party is somewhat romanticized as a post-civil rights era tragedy, proof positive of the persistent racism in our culture—and that’s no doubt partly true.  However, when you read the account, it's also true that the Black Panthers were minimally intellectually coherent, fantasists where they could find coherence, and when challenged to go off script for even a second, kind of clownish.  Reading about Don Cox, Field Marshal of the Black Panthers (his real title, no kidding), stammering mutilated Marxism as he collapses under the withering cross examination of an effete classical music conductor/composer is both tragic and comic.

The most famous exchange:

“You can’t blueprint the future,” says Cox.

“You mean you’re just going to wing it?” says Lenny.      

The scene does illustrate the position that the elites were in at that time and place, over 50 years ago—one of support.  It aligned somewhat with classic patronage and old world noblesse oblige, but with a bit of an American spin to it.  The elites invited the downtrodden to their penthouses and listened to what they had to say.  Our new elites in MAGAstan and WOKEstan are very different indeed from prior elites.  They bring their own ideas with them, administer them top-down, and then claim to speak for the downtrodden.  Meanwhile, the people they speak for aren’t allowed in the room. The influence has shifted direction.

The Venn diagram above is my attempt at illustrating that politically untenable reality.  Poor blacks and poor whites each have an advocacy group that, instead of listening, learning, and supporting, dictates to them what their problems are and what the solutions might be.  Defund the Police and Build the Wall are essentially the same absurd posturing proposed by a moneyed class who are in it for the lulz.  (The tug of war over poor Hispanics, and the Hispanic demographic generally, is another essay, but at last count, WOKEstan was losing).   

This is the new recreation.  The new fun.  Watching the January 6^th footage, those goons are having the time of their lives in their LARP, almost like at a rock concert or a mega-church service.  There is pathos, joy, catharsis, action, adventure, excitement, and no end in sight.  It was all very reminiscent of the racial reckoning “protests” (see: riots) in 2020.  Nothing was solved.  Nothing changed for the better.  But people had a great time.  

As I continue to point out, murder rates in poor black neighborhoods are increasing at a faster pace than in any other communities, and they were already high.  The leading cause of death for young black men is still other young black men.  And yet, somehow the recent abomination perpetrated by five black police officers in Memphis, Tennessee beating a black man to death on camera got blamed on white supremacy in many corners of WOKEstan.  Leftist intellectuals bending themselves into pretzels trying to explain that equation is not exactly how you derive sound policy proposals to solve what is and has been an epidemic of murder, but it is all part of the LARP.     

First meth, then opioids, and now fentanyl each in their turn have gutted rural communities that are disproportionately poor and disproportionately white.  Deaths of despair in those communities have been rising for a generation.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but MAGAstan isn’t rural America; once again according to the Atlantic data:

Importantly, our statistics show that the larger the absolute number of Trump voters in a county—regardless of whether he won it—the more likely it was to be home to a Capitol arrestee.

In other words, they were more likely to come from the suburbs and cities than rural areas–they are the owners of show-piece ’murica trucks with no dirt on them, rather than dented and dirty vehicles for a working man.  Which underscores not just the lack of understanding, but even the lack of proximity to the rural poor MAGAstan fetishizes in everything from country songs to campaign ads where the candidate waves a gun around.  

In 2020 over 24 million white Americans lived in poverty, compared to just 9 million black Americans—as a percent of their populations, it’s about 8% white vs 19% black, give or take some statistical noise.  I have seen nothing from either WOKEstan or MAGAstan that is in any way an authentic attempt to ease the suffering of those 33 million men, women, and children—though both “stans” are happy to fan the flames of resentment of those Americans for political gain.  I see a political environment of two echo chambers, each screaming at totems of the other with a perverse joy, and each with two Overton windows that are moving apart at the speed of social media.  I see pretense and noise and wind, ignorance and arrogance and a kind of grubby social glee associated with displays of political identity.  And I see it getting worse.  

Meanwhile, they are still there, 33 million underserved, underprivileged fellow citizens, waiting for someone to invite them to the party.