Fear, loathing, and a “third-class principle”.

I’ve had the same conversation repeatedly over the past nine years. I’ll be talking with someone about an upcoming election, and they’ll register some disbelief about hardline Trump Republican voters. “I can’t believe they’re willing to believe those lies.” “Why are they voting against their own self-interest?” “What do they even see in Trump?”

These questions are logical questions to ask, but I’ve realized they’re a little beside the point. Committed Trump voters do not operate, and have not operated, on that kind of logic for years. These voters have decided that their economic self-interest is less valuable to them than non-economic considerations. Indeed, I believe their behavior can be explained by a simple principle:

These voters are willing to live in a permanent second class—as long as they believe there is a third class that they can look down upon.

I’m going to say that again: These voters are willing to live in a permanent second class—as long as they believe there is a third class they can look down upon.

This “third-class” principle is at the core of almost every conservative political argument we’ve heard in the last decade. Now, it may not be an explicit belief for many of these voters. And many would deny it publicly and privately. But it’s the throughline that ties their politics together. Whether their sense of the “third class” is racially motivated, or driven by gender-based, LGBTQ+-based, or generational grievances, they place such a high value on sticking it to that third class that they are perfectly willing to ignore their own material well-being to do so.

In many ways, this shift in the GOP became inevitable almost 20 years ago. But if we understand it and take it to heart, it should help us understand the path to beating the Republican Party until they turn back from open hatred and fascism.

I. On Suffering

One of those core values in the American mythology is the idea of self-sufficiency—that we are a nation of self-starters, of resourceful builders, of people who don’t need the rest of society to function or even thrive. You can’t go an election season without hearing a candidate allude to our ability to create great things without governmental interference.

The corollary to this, of course, is the idea that anybody who relies on others, and especially the government, to help them succeed is somehow inferior for doing so. If you didn’t do these things yourself, if you didn’t suffer for them, then you’re not worthy of the success that comes afterward.

Taken to its logical conclusion, we end up with an insidious argument any time someone tries to expand the social safety net: I suffered, and thus you must suffer too. In its purest form, we see this argument applied to student loan forgiveness, but it’s an undercurrent of arguments against expanded health insurance access, expansions of support programs like the Child Tax Credit, and even expansions of things like free school lunch.

This argument is infuriating, but I would argue that it is the most policy-based way that we see the third-class principle at work: “I suffered (I am part of the second class), and thus you must suffer too (I demand the existence of a third class).”

This argument, of course, is not new, but it became a much more central expression of Republican policy preferences as an argument against Barack Obama’s policy plans…and along the way, the third-class principle morphed into something even bigger.

II. On “Owning the Libs”

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, “owning the libs” refers to a Republican/conservative strategy of deliberately trying to offend or get a rise out of Democrats, liberals, progressives, and leftists as a manner of asserting dominance in political discourse. Common strategies to own the libs include the use of terms such as “triggered” or “snowflake” rather than engaging in good-faith discussion, and other things that appear otherwise unproductive from a policy standpoint. While the term appears to date back to the 2016 election cycle, you can probably recall seeing examples of this kind of combative approach earlier in the Obama era.

What does this have to do with the third-class principle? I’d argue that it’s actually an extension of the principle—the jump that has brought us to where we are. “I don’t subscribe to the ideas of the liberal elite (I see myself as part of the second class), and thus I will make life difficult for people who do subscribe to those ideas (I will create a third class to feel superior to).”

We see this illustrated brilliantly by the practice of rolling coal, a commonly cited example of owning the libs. Rolling coal involves illegally modifying a pickup truck so that it will produce clouds of black smoke when being driven—in an attempt to offend the environmental values of liberals and others who drive fuel-efficient cars or ride bicycles/transit. There is no objective or economic upside to the practice: (1) the modification itself is expensive, (2) the truck is now less fuel-efficient and thus more expensive to drive, and (3) there may be legal trouble as a result of the modification. But to the coal roller, they are fine actively placing themselves in a poorer economic position (as part of the second class) because they draw great satisfaction from owning the libs (the third class they have created with those clouds of black smoke).

Why is this such an important shift? I see two reasons. First: While this approach can work in policy conversations, it no longer necessarily hinges on that policy conversation. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what any individual person believes “the ideas of the liberal elite” are. Someone might actually believe in expanding healthcare access, or student loan forgiveness, or LGBTQ+ rights, or labor rights. But if they identify with any grievance against some amorphous “liberal elite”, they too can find some joy, and even solidarity, in owning the libs.

Second: Because this approach no longer hinges on a policy conversation, it no longer requires somebody to engage at all on the underlying policy to own the libs. Anyone can do it, and indeed, the less you know, the better the feeling is that you’ve made some know-it-all liberal angry at you.

Once those floodgates opened, we saw, in the mid-2010s, a lot of internet trolls who were all too happy to refuse to acknowledge basic facts when a Democrat, liberal, progressive, or leftist tried to have a conversation about policy. And of course, the progression from “refusing to acknowledge basic facts” to “actively parroting lies” was a small step.

This is why, for example, the massive outrage over Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” didn’t actually persuade many conservatives—most of them saw it not as a gaffe or a troubling sign, but instead as a wildly successful gambit that truly and thoroughly owned the libs. And in the intervening 7 1/2 years, many of those folks have not seen a good reason to agree to even basic facts in these arguments. After all, you can’t let the libs own you. (Shoutout to the Republican poll-stander in 2022 that I had an hourlong conversation with, who told me “Well, police can’t be trusted with statistics” when I pulled out law enforcement figures about the decrease in violent crime.)

But why is it that Republicans found it useful to move away from policy, even as early as 2017? Was there something other than policy that was a stronger unifying grievance for their voters? Was…

III. On Race (and Critical Race Theory)

Republicans tried to make the policy case against Obama, and in some ways, it worked. But I would argue that it worked not necessarily because Republican policy ideas are popular (they aren’t), but instead because of the racial animus that was stirred up by a Black man becoming president and the willingness to push any line that felt damaging to Obama.

Without getting too far into it, so much of American history has been based on anti-Blackness, in one way or another. It’s been discussed to death, but Obama’s landslide victory in 2008 obscured the backlash to come, and the backlash that continues to this day.

However, while the rhetoric has gotten more and more troubling in the 16 years since, with escalating anti-semitism, xenophobia, sexism, and much more, one label that Republican voters are still unwilling to wear is the term “racist”.

What we’ve seen as a result is a series of elaborate logical leaps to justify the left, and even people of color themselves, as The Real Racists. Discussions about race in any setting are actually “critical race theory”. Gender-inclusive language or the acknowledgement of LGBTQ+ people at all are “because of woke”. Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are just “liberal brainwashing”. People of color who aren’t willing to bow to a Republican conception of racial hierarchy are “foreign agents” or “illegal immigrants” (or worse terms).

If someone buys into those justifications, it’s a powerful way to take the third-class principle and turn it back on those same “liberal elites”: I am falsely being called a racist (I am part of the second class), but only by people who are the real racists (the first class that’s annoying me is actually the third class, and I am morally superior to them). This is why conservative operatives have actively sought out concepts and terms, such as critical race theory, to get mad at, so that folks who have bought into this third-class principle can actually justify their approach with the exact same logic that drives their worldview.

IV. On Grievance Politics

We’ve seen this third-class principle taken close to its logical conclusion. The Republican news ecosystem has turned into a perpetual outrage machine, constantly running down and boosting stories that fit a preordained narrative—even sometimes when those stories are grossly exaggerated or simply untrue. This is what has been termed grievance politics—a repeated cycle of engaging with politics only by trying to find people that should fit in that third class. In plainer terms, it’s simply a repeated cycle of making up a guy to be mad at.

The lies about Haitian immigrants? The third class is immigrants, people of color, and in particular immigrants of color. The lies about trans folks in bathrooms or in sports? The third class is all LGBTQ+ people, who are sexual predators or cheaters. It starts to be easy to see how racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, anti-poor, or any other bias can get absorbed by the grievance politics machine, to the point where if you have a deep-seated bias, the Republicans can play on it.

And the perfect vessel for grievance politics is JD Vance. This is someone who can talk smoothly and discuss some of these same highfalutin concepts as the liberal elites, but who throws the principles of liberal discourse back in the faces of the elites and spews the same lies anyway. If Vance can lie, admit that he lied, and still get away with those exact lies on a debate stage, how can anybody criticize a regular person for saying the same things? For getting mad at the same guy JD Vance made up?

It could be a glimpse of the future of grievance politics: a future where powerful and credentialed elected officials have no compunction about creating slick, well-packaged outright lies to stir up fear, to gin up hate, and to actively make it impossible to have fact-based conversations about policy. To attack the fact-checkers as part of the problem, and to watch the libs be owned when they insist on those facts. It’s a grim picture, but it’s one that the apparatus of the Republican Party has to keep choosing for it to advance further.

So how can we make the party stop choosing that path, when it’s all they’ve enabled for the last 15 years?

V. On Vibes, and the Way Forward

As a recovering candidate for political office, I can tell you that politicians are in the business of wanting power. If they see that a certain path will make it less likely that they get the power that they want, they won’t take it. So how do we get there?

Full disclosure: When Tim Walz first started calling Republicans “weird”, I hated the messaging. I thought it would push Republican voters further into their bubble and simply stoke further resentment. But something fascinating happened: Republican elected officials and other people with power and platforms all melted down simultaneously, and it highlighted that most of these grievance politicians have actual policy views that are wildly out of the mainstream.

This highlights a fascinating asymmetry that’s existed in the political discourse in the last decade: Democrats have spent a lot of time trying to talk about policy, and Republicans have successfully avoided talking about policy in depth, at least in (and as covered by) mainstream outlets. In that period of time, Republicans’ grievance-based approach has given a platform to some people whose worldviews are, well, just plain weird.

The “weird” namecalling has proven surprisingly effective as public shaming within the national discussion, and I think it’s something that can work on a more local level given the right platform, but it isn’t as useful a tool in individual conversation. And this is where we can strike at the heart of what drives people toward the third-class principle.

It’s not quite as simple as the “white working-class anxiety” narrative that mainstream media propped up in the aftermath of 2016. There are plenty of GOP voters who don’t fit that demographic mold that fell into grievance politics for some other reason—older white-collar moderates with a disdain for millennials, farmers with a disdain for environmentalists, Black men with a resentment toward Black women. All of these folks have been trained to be in perpetual search of a third class to blame, to look down upon, to feel superior to.

But of course, this perpetual search for someone to blame is doomed to never end as long as it looks for a scapegoat among the marginalized. And many of these folks insist on looking down because they cannot bring themselves to accept that the folks who are responsible for their inability to advance are the corporate overlords at the top—or in many cases, it’s the setup of the power structure itself. Unregulated corporate greed in the Reagan era and beyond has concentrated wealth and power in the hands of very few, and there are a lot of GOP voters whose entire worldviews would crumble if they admitted that the runaway hyper-capitalism we have is not working.

So how do we reach those folks? With the way grievance politics has arisen, we can’t fight on the facts, the way that many of us have been doing since 2015. Instead, we have to reach folks on their feelings. What values do we share? It may seem like it’s impossible to share values with someone who can’t agree with you on the facts, but it is indeed easier once you get used to it.

“You think the game is rigged toward ‘DEI hires’ and immigrants? I’ll tell you what, I agree that the game is rigged. But the folks that I see who have rigged it are the corporate bosses who are sitting on billions of dollars. The ones who make it impossible to get a pay raise but still raise the price of groceries to pull record profits. And that’s why I’m voting for folks who will give you and me a fair shake against those bosses.”

“You’re worried about all of the wokeness they’re teaching in schools? I’ll tell you what, I’m definitely worried about whether our schools are giving our kids the best chance to succeed in this rapidly changing world. And this world is changing quickly, huh? It’s a little scary, isn’t it? And that’s why I’m voting for folks who will make sure our kids are ready to deal with whatever this world throws at them.”

There are pieces of that American mythology I mentioned at the top of this article that can help us. The idea that everybody deserves an opportunity to succeed. The idea that this country runs on the contributions of the little guy. We can do better at incorporating this into our message, but part of this is also on the Democratic Party and the politicians, the power wanters.

The Democratic Party has typically elevated a certain type of candidate: someone who believes in broadly popular left-of-center policy, but is willing to get very far into the weeds to defend it. Someone like me, a nerd whose vibe is “I know how to defer to the experts” rather than “I’m in your corner, and I’m going to fight like hell”. These are the folks who have been the target of a lot of grievance politics, and the Trump voter is ready to write them off before they even open their mouth.

And when given the choice about whether to change up policy or change up vibes, the party structure usually selects someone who moves on policy rather than on vibes: further toward the center, away from that broadly popular policy. In other words, the party structure is sacrificing the wrong thing in order to try to win votes.

This isn’t a knock on any individual Democrat in power—it’s a structural problem. But it’s one we can, and must, fix within our own house, starting at the local level. And while it’s a little too late to worry about these issues for November 2024, it’s the perfect time to get started on this work for local elections in 2025, then state elections in 2026, and beyond.

In sum, if we can do these three things: (1) expose the weirdness of the grievance politicians; (2) speak to our neighbors’ values rather than trying to haggle over facts; and (3) find standard-bearers who can turn grievance politics on its head, the Trump coalition will continue to shrink. And while it will not go away even if we beat it handily in 2024, we can build a future that increasingly marginalizes any politics of hate, of grievance, and of fear.

We can reject the politics that tries to find or even create a third class among us, and move back toward policy conversations that recognize our collective self-interest.

It will take a lot of work, but the work will be worth it.