by Amy Chua
In America, it’s the progressive elites who have taken it upon themselves to expose the American Dream as false. This is their form of tribalism. A jarring amount of upper-income progressive activism serves as a vehicle for elite group identity formation. But this form of progressive tribalism didn’t work in 2016. As David Leonhardt put it in an essay called “How Democrats Can Get Their Mojo Back,” whites without college degrees “shifted sharply to Donald Trump,” and blacks without college degrees “affected the result by staying home in larger numbers. Both decisions . . . stemmed in part from alienation.”
Yes, inequality is fracturing our nation. But just as America’s foreign policy establishment repeatedly fails to understand the group realities that matter most to people abroad, America’s elites have been blind to—or dismissive of—the group identities that matter most to ordinary Americans. If we want to understand our current political turmoil, we need to open our eyes to the vastly different group identities of America’s rich and poor.
THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT
A City University of New York (CUNY) study of the participants at a major Occupy rally on May 1, 2012, found that about one-quarter were students. Of the nonstudents, 76 percent had a bachelor’s degree, and of this group, more than half had postgraduate degrees. The participants were also disproportionately affluent; more than half had incomes of $75,000 or more. Only about 8 percent earned less than $25,000, compared to almost 30 percent of New Yorkers as a whole. In a different study of Occupy protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park, veteran Democratic Party pollster Douglas Schoen concluded, “Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn’t represent unemployed America. . . . The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed.”
Yet another poll, which surveyed more than five thousand visitors to the OccupyWallStreet.org Web site, found that 90.1 percent had more than a high school education, and 81.2 percent were white (only 1.6 percent were black). While other surveys show considerably more racial and ethnic diversity, there is consensus that Occupiers were disproportionately young, white, and highly educated, which helps explain the movement’s oft-noted technological savvy.
Also striking, Occupy participants were unusually politically active—much more so than the American population as a whole. According to the CUNY study, 94 percent of those surveyed had previously participated in another political protest, and 42 percent said that they “had previously participated in 30 or more such events during their lifetimes.” Nearly 50 percent were also active in other organizations, including immigrant rights groups, women’s rights groups, and antiwar organizations. As the CUNY study concluded, “[Occupy Wall Street] was not a spontaneous movement that appeared out of nowhere. It was carefully planned by a group of experienced political activists.”
Other anti-inequality groups in America have similar attributes. Take, for example, The Other 98%, which describes itself as “a non-profit organization and a grassroots network of concerned people that shines a light on economic injustice, undue corporate influence and threats to democracy. We work to kick corporate lobbyists out of DC, hold elected officials accountable, and make America work . . . for the other 98% of us.” The team of six talented leaders featured on their Web site includes a former Wall Street analyst; a former Web designer for Bank of America; two graduates of Bard College, a highly selective liberal arts school; a veteran affinity group organizer; and a former Greenpeace worker who “has had the great fortune to be integrally involved in powerful peaceful actions all over the world: from the high seas with the Rainbow Warrior to the streets of Seattle,” and who now “works from his home-office on a sleepy little island in the Puget Sound where he and his wife Genevieve homeschool their 8 year old twins.”
Occupy Wall Street was, in the words of one of its creators, Micah White, a “failure.” White might have overstated it; the Occupy movement brought inequality to the forefront of public debate, and many attribute to Occupy the attention given in the 2016 presidential campaign to “Wall Street greed,” student debt, and increasing the minimum wage. But as journalist George Packer put it, “Occupy Wall Street flashed across the sky and flared out, more a meme than a movement.”
The most common theories for why the Occupy movement failed include the absence of a strong, visible leader, the lack of a concrete affirmative agenda, and the diffuseness of online activism. All those factors likely played a role, but what’s often missed—and arguably more important—is the fact that Occupy attracted so few members from the many disadvantaged groups it purported to be fighting for.
Imagine if the suffragette movement hadn’t included large numbers of women, or if the civil rights movement included very few African Americans, or if the gay rights movement included very few gays. Internal coherence gave all these movements an authentic and potent group identity that helped them persevere in the face of setbacks to eventually achieve significant results. By contrast, the participants of Occupy were not the hungry or exploited, but rather relatively privileged self-identified activists. Which is why when the next big thing to protest came along, Occupy’s participants moved on. (Sometimes they didn’t even have to move on physically, just virtually. As White put it in June 2015, “Social media has a negative side . . . [people started] to feel more comfortable posting on Twitter and Facebook than going to an Occupy event.”)
This is not to say that Occupy wasn’t a real movement, with a real group identity capable of mobilizing and galvanizing its members. Many young and relatively privileged Americans today are disillusioned with and frustrated by the world they are entering. As Michael Ellick put it, “You have generations of people graduating from high school and college who are in debt for careers that don’t exist anymore, were educated into a world that doesn’t exist anymore.” Occupy offered a meaningful tribe to such people. It gave members a sense of belonging and status. Protestors from Zuccotti Park to Oakland felt themselves part of a larger movement taking on a big, bad enemy; its motto was “We kick the ass of the ruling class.” But Occupy gave this sense of belonging and status almost exclusively to the well educated and relatively privileged.
It’s not just that the poor didn’t participate in Occupy. More often than not, they affirmatively dislike activist movements—more irony still. In the words of a writer from working-class America, “Many lower class Americans view protesters as disreputable and unhelpful, as ‘professional activists’ who are entirely disconnected from the working class because they’ve never experienced struggle in their own personal lives, and who protest mainly to find personal validation.” In a related context, Nigerian American novelist Teju Cole once tweeted, “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”
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In contrast to the extremely politically active Occupy participants, America’s poor are far less politically engaged. They are starkly less likely to work on political campaigns, contact elected officials, or vote. In part, this is because historically marginalized communities tend to distrust strangers and large organizations they see as controlling the levers of power from afar. It’s hard to get excited about politics and elections when no matter which party comes into power, your life never changes.
In addition, low-income Americans seem to be withdrawing from traditional communal and civic activities. In his 2015 bestseller, Our Kids, Robert Putnam shows that the poor in America are less likely to join athletic leagues, youth groups, and volunteer organizations, leaving them with far fewer social connections and networks. Consistent with Charles Murray’s observations in Coming Apart, Putnam also finds that church attendance among the poor and working class is declining, most strikingly among the young. On the basis of this evidence, Putnam concludes that among America’s have-nots, “we have witnessed . . . a giant swing toward the individualist.” But this is not the right conclusion.
America’s underclasses are intensely tribal.
To begin with, many among America’s lower classes are deeply patriotic, even if they feel they’re losing their country to distant elites who know nothing about them. The ranks of America’s police and armed forces, two organizations famous for group loyalty, are filled predominantly with nonelites. Beyond this is a whole world of other group affiliations. It’s just that the groups that America’s have-nots belong to are often ones that elites view as antisocial, irrational, or even contemptible, if they even know about them at all.
SOVEREIGN CITIZENS
In 2014, a survey was taken of hundreds of officials from law enforcement agencies around the country. Whom did these officials identify as the single greatest threat to their communities? Not Islamic extremists or violent street gangs, but a bizarre antigovernment group known as the sovereign citizens. Although the movement dates back to the 1980s, its numbers began to increase dramatically after the 2008 recession, and experts attribute the movement’s rapid growth to high unemployment and economic dislocation. Gavin Long, who shot six policemen in Baton Rouge in 2016, three fatally, was a sovereign citizen—evidently one of many African American members unaware of the movement’s white supremacist origins.
With an estimated three hundred thousand followers, the movement is based on an elaborate conspiracy theory. Some of its central beliefs include:
At some point in American history, the legal system set up by our Founding Fathers was secretly replaced by an illegitimate government. We know this to be true because of the gold fringe that adorns flags in courtrooms.
The illegitimate government currently in power induces Americans to enter into “contracts,” which turn them into federal slaves. These “contracts” can be formed, for example, by applying for a Social Security number.
The U.S. government uses every newborn’s birth certificate to establish a secret corporate trust in the baby’s name, which is then used to siphon off future earnings into a secret bank account. Fortunately, sovereign citizens can access the secret bank account through a series of highly complicated legal maneuvers.
The creation of the newborn’s corporate trust establishes two entities: a corporate shell person and the natural person. We know this because most government documents, like driver’s licenses and tax bills, use all-capital letters to spell names.
It is possible to avoid being tricked by the illegitimate government by clearly identifying oneself as a natural person as opposed to the corporate shell. This might be done, for example, by specifying, “I am Spencer Todd, representative of SPENCER TODD ©.”
Through correct formatting of legal documents, sovereign citizens can separate the natural (free) person from the corporate (enslaved) legal entity, liberating themselves from government jurisdiction. Thus, a sovereign could avoid paying tax bills or cable TV bills addressed to JOHN SMITH by claiming that JOHN SMITH is a separate legal entity.
The only governmental authority that is actually legitimate in America today is the county sheriff.
Sovereign citizens specialize in “paper terrorism.” Sovereigns involved in even minor disputes—for instance, contesting dog-licensing fees—deliberately inundate courts with filings. Sovereign filings in tax cases often exceed a thousand pages, overwhelming prosecutors, public defenders, and judges not only with the volume of filings but with “the nonsensical language the documents are written in.”
Richard Posner, one of the most distinguished judges in the country (now retired), presided in 2015 over the criminal trial of a sovereign citizen. After a deluge of motions, Judge Posner summarized the defendant’s arguments:
He also asserts “Lack of Jurisdiction over the Person (contracted Artificial Subject vs Natural Borne)”—whatever that means. He also asserts that “Queen of England, entered into a Treaty with the Federal Government For the Taxing of Alcoholic beverages and cigarettes sold in America. The Treaty is called—The Stamp Act and in this Act, the Queen ordained that her Subject, the American people, are Exonerated of all other Federal Taxes. So the Federal Income Tax and the State Income Taxes Levied against all Americans is Contrary to an International Treaty and against the Sovereign Orders of the Queen.”
Judge Posner responded as follows:
The Stamp Act was enacted by the Parliament of Great Britain in 1765. It did not relieve Americans of any taxes; on the contrary, it imposed a comprehensive tax on the use of paper by Americans. The Act was not a treaty between Britain and the federal government of the United States, for there was no United States; there were just the 13 British colonies that 11 years later declared independence from Great Britain. There were no federal taxes that the Act could have relieved Americans from having to pay. The sovereign of Britain at the time was a King, not a Queen; the King’s wife (Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz) was Great Britain’s Queen but had no governmental authority.
As absurd as sovereign citizens’ beliefs sound, the psychological appeal of the movement is easy to understand. Far from being nobodies, sovereigns see what’s really going on. Like America’s Founding Fathers (to whom they compare themselves), they are revolutionaries waging war against a tyrannical government. They flock to exclusive seminars and conferences where they bond and strategize with like-minded visionaries. The Washitaw Nation, an African American subgroup of the movement, claims a particularly noble provenance. According to one of its recent leaders—who calls herself Empress Verdiacee “Tiari” Washitaw-Turner Goston El-Bey—members of the Washitaw Nation fall outside federal authority because they are the descendants of the “Ancient Ones,” blacks who occupied North America tens of thousands of years before the Europeans arrived.
To top it all off, sovereign citizens offer their members the alluring possibility of hitting pay dirt—of eventually, through legal maneuvers yet to be honed, tapping into the giant secret bank account. As the Southern Poverty Law Center put it, “sovereigns believe that if they can find just the right combination of words, punctuation, paper, ink color and timing, they can have anything they want—freedom from taxes, unlimited wealth, and life without licenses, fees or laws.”
Conspiracy theories are strangely common all over the world. But there’s something distinctly American about sovereign citizens, and the group’s existence tells us a lot about America’s class divide. Its members are among America’s most disadvantaged—unemployed, in debt, with little or no opportunity to rise—just the kind of people Occupy was trying to help. But sovereigns are not against inequality. They are not opposed to wealth; on the contrary, they want to get it for themselves. Moreover, they are deeply suspicious of the establishment. They believe the entire government is involved in a labyrinthine scheme to keep them down, to deny them the American Dream.
STREET GANGS AND NARCO-SAINTS
It’s a searing indictment of America that so many enterprising urban youth end up joining the Crips, Bloods, Sureños, Asian Boyz, or another of America’s twenty-seven thousand street gangs, often engaged in drug trafficking or other criminal activity. Few groups are more tribal than gangs, which in the United States frequently have a racial or ethnic identity, whether African American, Haitian, Cambodian, Dominican, Somali, Vietnamese, or Salvadoran (like the famously violent Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13).
As reflected in gang names like All About Cash, Cash Ave, and Cash Money Boys, gang members are often fixated on acquiring money any way they can, in order to afford flashy cars and the latest fashions. Many are also ambitious, willing to hustle, take risks, and sacrifice for a chance to rise in the hierarchy. In a sense, street gangs offer doomed versions of the American Dream. Most active gang members end up in prison or dead by the age of twenty. But for all too many disaffected, unemployed, often minority young men “with few skills and a contempt for low-wage jobs,” street gangs offer exactly what the legitimate system doesn’t: status, a strong tribe, and their best—perhaps only—shot at real upward mobility.
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Also connected t
o drug trafficking is a very different group popular among America’s poor, especially those of Hispanic descent: the cult of Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte (Our Lady of the Holy Death).
If you walk around San Francisco’s Mission District, or Melrose Avenue in Central Los Angeles, or Mid-City in New Orleans, you’ll see cheap storefronts with female skeletons in the windows—life-size skeletons, clad in long black, white, or red robes and usually holding scythes. These are worship houses or in-store altars for followers of a faith that started in Mexico but has now spread into every American city with a significant Hispanic population. Santa Muerte is, in religious studies professor Andrew Chesnut’s words, “the fastest growing religious movement in the entire Americas.”
A syncretic blend of Catholic and Mesoamerican traditions, Santa Muerte is “Mexico’s saint of delinquents and outcasts,” as Vice put it, fantastically popular among petty thieves, prostitutes, gang members, smugglers, and drug dealers, who tattoo her image on their necks, arms, and backs. Because she doesn’t share the Catholic Church’s opposition to homosexuality, Santa Muerte is also the patron saint of many members of the LGBT community, including transgender sex workers. “She’s the saint who doesn’t discriminate, so she accepts all comers,” says Chesnut. Although most of her devotees are not drug traffickers, she is known as a “narco-saint,” who assists smugglers and is far more understanding than the Virgin Mary. As Chesnut explains, “[Y]ou can ask her for anything—to bless a shipment of crystal meth, for example.” (Santa Muerte was featured in the first scene of season three of Breaking Bad, when a sketch of Heisenberg was pinned to her statue.)
