In 2016 I asked: what have Trump and Russia got in common? At that time there was a debate – still visible – about a revolt against ‘the elites’. But electorally, there has never been a consistent way for Russians to express similar sentiments – although in 2016 I tried to show how the many Russians still meaningfully cast ‘social’ protest votes. One observation at the time was the ‘insiderness’ of figures like Nigel Farage, Trump, and indeed Zhirinovsky, was irrelevant to voters. Such figures channelling of impotent and inchoate anger was much more animating. While Russians still have no meaningful way of expressing discontent electorally, surely, in 2024, emotional resentment as a global political vernacular fully come of age.

More than a few people note the misunderstanding about Trump’s undeniable ‘charisma’ among a swathe of people who’d like to stick it to the ‘man’. Or among those who misguidedly think he can improve their material lot by deporting illegals and imposing tariffs. What’s surprising was the number of observers puzzled by the Biden-Harris punishment for an economy than on paper is supposedly booming. This for me is indicative of the tyranny of ‘presentism’ as revealed in the pundit’s favourite type of analysis. We’ve had growing consumer spending, growing wages, falling inflation – surely voters would thank Biden-Harris for that? What this ignores is that people have a feel for the longer-term rises in inequality and increases in economic insecurity, the very real hollowing out of the middle-class, not to mention lower-middle. There’s good evidence that the latter are core to Trump’s support. Russian (not quite) parallels too: the big war spending by the government hardly fools people. They know that they are net losers from the war. And this sentiment is growing ever larger.

Another point of connection (between vernacular politics in Russia and America) is the substitution of muscular foreign policy in the absence of meaningful policies addressing domestic crisis. In the liberal Twitter bubble we see endless expressions that Harris lost part of her ‘base’ because of her business-as-usual attitude towards Israel. But more open-ended group studies have found that, unprompted, some opted for Trump because of anxiety about the USA’s loss of prestige and ‘face’ in the world. Rings any bells in the Russian context? Is this another ‘resentment’, or an ‘anxiety’? Is it a sublimation of domestic fears? Or deep-seated imperial thinking? It’s getting to the point where we might have to unpack these words a bit better.

In my 2016 work I pondered the paradox of ‘outsider-loyalty’ identity among Russian voters. This was my ethnographic version of the ‘Crimea consensus’ view among my political science colleagues. That people might harbour deep resentment about elite corruption, social decay, and the hegemonic discourse of social Darwinism that reigns in domestic politics, but that geopolitical victory over adversity had the potential to consolidate diverse people around the symbol of the leader. But this consolidation, like the current Ukraine-war-based one is hollow and brittle because it offers no satisfaction beyond the immediate distraction from worldly cares.

Another topic back in 2016 was that of competing ‘structuring feelings’. If the political histories weren’t so different, it might be worth comparing Russia to the Jacksonian world-view of middle- and lower-class Americans that is argued swung Trump’s 2016 and 2024 elections. Jacksonian tradition is not an ideology, but a political ‘feeling’ of self-reliance, opposed to big federal government and in favour of the 2^nd amendment. It’s a ‘folk belief’ opposed to the other Jeffersonian and Wilsonian traditions when it comes to foreign policy, channeling atomized and lonesome feelings about a hostile world (of ‘chaos and darkness’) in which the US needs to act tough merely to maintain its position. If you object to this rather gauche characterization of Americans, pause for a minute to think about the broad strokes painted about Russian historical (or maybe even ‘genetic’) ‘disposition to tyranny’ that a respectable scholar near you is pitching as we speak.

But we can turn this around another way. Stories about national values are also about who has the right to tell them. And we’re all affected by the fact that Americans tell the best stories about themselves. Jacksonians are ‘rugged individualists’ and all about ‘self-reliance’. Surely that’s a good thing? Once again, turn that around and it maps uncannily on to a set of values that scholars have imposed on post-1991 Russians but negatively: focussed on a ‘cult of the winner’, ‘aggressive pursuing of self-interest’, seeing ‘personal independence as the new ideology’. Or, from a different school of thought, Russians are like Trump voters in another deficient way: they are ‘unable to adapt to liberal values’, lack empathy for those unlike them, are cultural incompatible with contemporary modernity and all its complexities.  Does every (post-) imperium have its intersectional politics that allow domestic hurt to be sublimated into resentment of the Other? Or are so many of these deficiencies actually symptoms of our own search for a too simple answer to the question: ‘why Trump?’ Like in Russia, America must just have the wrong kinds of people (ne tot narod).  

[I could say more about the Jacksonian tradition and foreign policy: skip this if you like. As one observer pointed out back in the Bush era: it is not so much that the US public takes pride in the overwhelming superiority of firepower at the disposal of the United States, it needs to see it demonstrated from time to time. ‘Realist’ emotion is also a thing. (Proxies in Isreal don’t cut it – if anything they make it seem like the MIC is not acting in the interests of the United States). If it’s not clear what the point of a digression about US ‘values’ is, then perhaps you haven’t been paying attention to what this blog is about.]

The inadequacy of an interpretation of Trump as ‘white working-class’ identity politics writes off more intersectional and structurally feeling-based approaches relating to resentment. Again, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016) should be getting renewed attention. Hochschild links anti-establishment voting and ‘deep story’ – internalised emotional value systems. Deep story for lower middle-class white Americans, for Hochschild, is a story of resentment of being overtaken by Others, of exclusion and neglect. Hochschild followed this up later with another book more squarely focussed on Trump voters.  

To revisit a point made in 2016: whether we’re looking at Russia or the US, we must move closer to the social worlds that quantitative social science largely fails to adequately represent.  How to plot the intersection of ‘unfairness’ and ‘prospectlessness’ as a representation of resentful values? These are, essentially, the Hochschildean ingredients for Trump’s (mercurial) popularity. Whatever else he is, he can channel dark desires of the moment.

Dominant narratives attempting to explain the war continue to focus binaries (pro- or anti-war) which continue the ‘pro or anti Putin’ tales we’ve been subject to for a long time. But thinking again about the adequacy of interpretation, unfairness and prospectlessness, the long-term structuring of feelings of hurt are intersectional ‘deep stories’ which animate the Russian people in my research. And war only exacerbates them. More on this soon.