Yglesias is misrepresenting a study to blame the left for the right
No, a 2017 paper on the European right does not show that left pessimism drives right-wing politics.
In his new post Debbie Downer progressives aren’t helping, Matt Yglesias argues that even though leftists are criticizing Biden’s economy “in a left-wing democratic socialist kind of way,” their “pessimism” is likely to drive voters to Trump:
In Europe, pessimism about society is a major driver of support for populist right parties, and since Trump has reworked the GOP to be more like a European populist right party, I would expect to see the same thing here.
Here, Matt links to a 2017 paper in the journal West European Politics titled The appeal of nostalgia: the influence of societal pessimism on support for populist radical parties, written by Eefje Steenvoorden. While the narrow argument the paper actually makes is supported by the evidence, however, Matt’s extrapolation is at odds with it in several ways.
First, Matt is using “pessimism” in a very general way to implicate right-wing anxieties and left concerns about the economy. Steenvoorden, however, is using it in a special technical way, and explicitly cautions against generalizing his conclusions about right-pessimism to the left:
More research into the relationship between societal pessimism and [radical left] voting, in terms of these parties’ ideologies and the attitudes of their electorates, is also warranted…more research is needed to examine whether the RL ideology includes nostalgia and pessimism. Furthermore, it is important to investigate whether societal pessimism among radical parties of the right and the left is similar or instead differs in its object.
This is a direct warning against drawing the kind of sweeping conclusion Yglesias does when he writes that “If you convince people that everything is terrible…they are more likely to vote for Trump”. The left and right may both be pessimistic about the economy, but that does not necessarily imply that they are pessimisitic in the same way, or that one kind of pessimism can lead to another.
Second, Matt suggests that the paper’s insights about populist right parties in Europe map directly onto the GOP “since Trump has reworked the GOP to be more like” them. This is an extreme and misleading simplification. Ben Walker, covering a Harvard project that compares political parties around the world, writes that “On conventional left-right measurements, there’s not much distinguishing America’s Republican party from mainstream conservative movements in Europe.” And a 2021 Pew study found that “Right Populists” are still fairly marginal, accounting for 23% of the GOP and only 11% of the broader population.
Accounting for the heterogeneity of the modern Republican coalition is crucial for interpreting this paper because while right populists may be pessimistic, the mainstream right is not. In fact, the mainstream right is much less pessimistic than any other group:
Thus the effects of pessimism on mobilizing support for Trump are probably ambivalent, driving up Republican populists but depressing support from mainstream conservatives.
There are several other problems with Yglesias’s reading of this study, which he seems to have found by clicking the second Google Scholar result for “pessimism left right” — but they are more than enough to undermine his entire argument. Nothing in this paper establishes that left wing pessimism drives up support for the populist right, and even if it did it would not follow that this drives up support for the modern Republican coalition. Yglesias will have to come up with other reasons to delegitimize left criticism of the Biden economy because this paper does nothing to help his case.