'Status Anxiety' Underlies Current Conservative Anger

This analysis, of course, has been circulating for quite a while, and it reached a high point after the 2008 presidential election, when the GOP's "grievance and resentment" fared dismally against the Democrats' "yes we can." But watching the August town halls nearly a year later, it's clear just how seductive and widespread that deep, loud and vicious anger can be.

Why? For an answer, go to historian Richard Hofstadter's 1954 essay on what he called "pseudo-conservatives." He was responding to wild accusations of anti-Americanism against Chief Justice Earl Warren and even President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. What made right-wing politics so vituperative?

Mr. Hofstadter points to the fundamental rootlessness and heterogeneity of U.S. society, and the "peculiar scramble for status and [the] peculiar search for secure identity" that those qualities inspire. Without, say, a traditional class system - a "recognizable system of status," in Mr. Hofstadter's words - Americans suffer from "status anxiety." During times of great social flux, these fears play out in politics as people seek out enemies (which helps them reaffirm their own standing) and, at the same time, damn a social order they feel they can't dominate.

It's not a stretch to say that the election of the first black president, as well as the deep economic recession, have challenged Americans' sense of self. That a resulting status anxiety would play itself out on the right more than the left may have to do with the right's general discomfort with the kind of collective identities - unions, ethnics, gender - that the left tends to embrace. Instead of finding affiliations to secure their status, the right's "rugged individualists" get mired in the type of anomie that in turn increases the need to reaffirm one's place in a topsy-turvy world.

The personal, deeply vituperative tone of the debate over health care reform seems to suggest that Americans' anger is not just about whether a "public option" is part of a reform package. The fear is less about encroaching socialism than it is about getting lost and forgotten in a rapidly changing society. Change isn't slowing down, and the bad news is that these feelings of losing control are not likely to go away any time soon.

Gregory Rodriguez is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. His e-mail is [e-mail].