Here & Now

Revisiting Politics of Resentment

Frederica Freyberg:

Now to politics and reflections on the 2020 Wisconsin vote by a UW-Madison political scientist and author. Katherine Cramer’s 2016 book “The Politics of Resentment” explored how rural Wisconsinites perceived their place in society. It’s an exploration that revealed a resentment of so-called “liberal elites,” that partly defined the successful wedge politics of former governor Scott Walker. The book’s release not only coincided with the election of Donald Trump. It largely predicted the class-based identity politics that led to his presidency. We check in with Professor Katherine Cramer for her take on the current Wisconsin political landscape and thank you so much for being here.

Katherine Cramer:

It’s my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Frederica Freyberg:

So today post-2020 election you say “the shock of the closeness of the election suggests we are still unaware of the depth of this resentment.” Who was shocked by the closeness?

Katherine Cramer:

I think commentators like ourselves, right, people who are close political observers who pay close attention, try to understand what’s going on in the electorate and nevertheless the outcome of the 2020 election was a bit of a surprise. So there are undercurrents that we still don’t understand.

Frederica Freyberg:

Who then is resentful right now and why?

Katherine Cramer:

Well, honestly, I think it’s a broad swath of people. So in my 2016 book, as you mentioned, I focused on the rural versus urban divide in Wisconsin. But it’s not just people in rural Wisconsin who are feeling resentful. I think the things we’ve experienced in this state over the summer acutely with respect to race relations underscores that there are people in our urban settings who are feeling quite resentful, too. There are many people feeling as though their government, the people in charge, the people making decisions don’t understand the challenges that they’re facing. And my goodness, after this pandemic I think that’s more acute than ever.

Frederica Freyberg:

Who are the cultural elite?

Katherine Cramer:

The way I think about it is they’re the people who put the ideas out there for other people to consume. So people like myself, who create knowledge and communicate it, people in the news media who report on what’s going on in the world and communicate to other people. But also I think people who create popular culture content, whether it be movies or television, the books we read. But also our decision-makers, people in government, people in business, just the people in charge who are making ideas and communicating them to the broader public.

Frederica Freyberg:

So why do people get left out of the elite?

Katherine Cramer:

That’s a great question. I think a lot of it has to do with economic inequality. I think just as time goes on, since roughly the early ’70s, there’s just this increasing gap between people who have resources and those who don’t. And the cultural elite, we tend to be people with resources. And the way we live our lives, how we spend our time, where we live is often very separate physically, in terms of the information we consume. It’s separate from people who don’t have resources. So we’re often not seeing their lives.

Frederica Freyberg:

You hearken back to the 1970s, but hasn’t it always been this way, this kind of split?

Katherine Cramer:

I don’t think so. If we think about the rural versus urban divide in particular, you might say, yes, ever since there were things called cities, there were people in the cities and people outside. But there’s something different that has changed here in Wisconsin and around the country, and just even in the past two decades we can see in Wisconsin with respect to politics, there’s just an increasingly crisper divide between the way our rural counties are voting and the way our urban counties are voting and that was certainly true in 2020. Even the contrast between 2016 and 2020 shows there’s a divide in what people want, whether we’re talking about politics or perhaps more generally than that. So I don’t think it’s always been this divided.

Frederica Freyberg:

Isn’t there more kind of vitriol now, even violence with this divide?

Katherine Cramer:

I think that’s true. And so violence, but it’s small things like our ability to talk with one another, right? So in a recent Marquette poll, roughly a third of the Wisconsin population reports not talking to people, people close to them in their lives, about politics, because it’s difficult to do these days. And so I think there is more vitriol. There’s more resentment. There’s more vitriol and unfortunately more violence, too, yeah.

Frederica Freyberg:

We talk about all these issues and we talk about resentment, but there’s good cause for that resentment. It’s not as though people like us that you suggest that we are in the cultural elite should say, oh, get over it. Of course you can do this if you want.

Katherine Cramer:

Right. No. That’s true. We have to pay attention to it, not just because of violence and vitriol, but because there is — there’s a reason that people are feeling resentful. And we need to understand why it is that people are feeling that the challenges they’re facing are just insurmountable, that they’re feeling that they need to turn to vitriol and violence. Those are important signals for us to listen to.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. We leave it there. Katherine Cramer, thanks very much and thanks for your work.

Katherine Cramer:

Oh, thank you so much.