Whether you have or only try to parade allies makes a difference.
Sometimes a sociologist finds a simple description of a social situation that cuts through a great g slighted or dismissed or badly handled and so resentful of the ways in which the social world worked. The idea is a repeat of Hegal’s idea that the slave knows better than the lord what are the conditions of the slave’s role, but Merton had generalized that deal of ideological verbiage and makes other argumentation superfluous, so much so that once the social characteristic is identified it seems so obvious that it had always been understood as such. Robert Merton did so in one of his late essays about insiders and outsiders. Addressing the political and ideological turmoil of the Sixties, he distinguished between people who were or identified with people within institutions and those people who were outsiders, each side claiming that they better understood what was going on in social life. Insiders included politicians and academics and corporation executives who knew how the world worked, understood the mechanisms of the social world, while outsiders were people who understood because they were on the receiving end of the results. They included poor people and students and people of color and women, members of each of these groups having suffered from and outraged about their conditions. Merton was like Hegel in pointing out that the slave understood his condition more than did his master, but Merton was transferring the issue to be a general state of knowledge, each with its own claims, rather than a difference in situations. Which group, the insiders and outsiders, had more legitimate knowledge or was there such an unbridgeable gap that a person could choose the wisdom of one or the other and that was all there was to be said? Professors pontificate and students talk straight and that is just the way things are never mind the intricacies of their alternative explanations. Either you don’t trust people over thirty or you don’t.
A sociological insight would be a poor one if it applied to only one generation. But that is not the case with this of Merton’s ideas. A good example of the division between insiders and outsiders is available today with the case of Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House. Johnson would seem to be an insider, a member of the American political establishment, and therefore given to the give and take of legislative practices that emphasize compromise rather than, as Weber thought, an outsider given to follow absolute and uncompromising principles. But Johnson has had few terms as a member of the House and has been sheltered in the confines of a Southern Evangelical point of view rather than the range of views exposed to in first rate law schools. (Desantis and Cruz did go to first rate law schools and so why they cultivate such retrograde points of view is a different matter.) But Johnson says that his point of view can be found in the Bible and suggests him as rather unsophisticated. I don’t see anything in the New Testament that has to do with abortion or states rights or the second amendment and Johnson has views on all of these. So he clearly rests on extra-Biblical sources. Johnson is an outsider aggrieved by a secular society that seems to dominate American life and he is defending himself from the outside of it to wrest power from the insiders. Indeed, many Trump supporters can also be understood as people who are marginalized and trying to assert themselves, having already accomplished a bit or more of leverage into wealth and prestige. The outsider mentality remains with them, ever insulted and humiliated, just as previous outsiders, like blacks and women can also feel slighted by their prior condition and therefore cling to their being insulted.
Another characteristic of a social movement that is clear but seems superficial can also serve to unpack the dynamics of some contemporary movements and time will tell how enduring this insight may be. Some movements are exclusive in that they appeal only to and wish only to be associated with their own kind while some social movements are inclusive in that they reach out to and prize people outside their own group as allies. Early Christians were interested in proselytizing to the gentiles while current day Jews do not encourage conversion to Judaism.
A good example of an exclusive social movement was the disabilities movement in the late twentieth century whose hallmark event had been the passage of the American Disabilities Act in 1990 which prevented discrimination against disabled people, allowing accommodations that led them hold jobs, and meant that, among other things, buildings added ramps so wheelchair people could access buildings and building elevators for important elevated railroad stations. The key advocate for ADA was Senator T%om Harkin, who had a deaf brother, and so was inspired to advocate for disabled people. I found that people I associated briefly with that movement thought that everyone involved in the movement had a personal connection to someone who was disabled. I also found that people who attended academic conferences on disability were more concerned about being mutually supportive of their various forms of distress than in listening to an academic investigation into an aspect of disability and so I stopped going to such meetings because I was not a fellow sufferer or associated with one personally.
A key source of friction was evident in the long running Jerry Lewis Telethon whereby the comedian and entertainer had raised many millions of dollars and had thereby supported the Muscular Dystrophy Association, funding both research and medical care and appliances to assist those who suffered from the disease. Alas, Jerry Lewis had found a cause which was not cured even after decades of effort while the March of Dimes had been successful by inventing a vaccine against Polio. Moreover, to add insult to that injury, some of those afflicted with Muscular Dystrophy had chastised Jerry Lewis for treating the victims as disabled rather than differently abled because it seemed to slight the victims, and Lewis was, after all, abled. The disabled wanted to be on their own rather than the healthy who were associated with them, which is not an unusual reaction, Blacks becoming uncomfortable at the end of the Twentieth Century for how much progress in Black advancement during the early part of the Twentieth Century depended on Jewish philanthropy.
That was not the case during the Civil Rights Movement, when Black leaders recruited whites of all types to join them in civil rights marches. Rabbis, priests, nuns and labor leaders marched with them across the Pettus Bridge in Selma at the start of their march on Montgomery. The idea was that the protesters were the moral leaders who were elevating the discourse about how to treat people and to be contrasted with the riffraff of the Southern White community and so to shame them in the eyes of the general American community, while Malcolm X and others thought themselves the spokespeople for the black underclass and so more threatening than uplifting. Who you side with or who you discard shows what you are.
Jews, in founding Israel, were reliant on others. There were large donations from American Jews and large scale reparations from Germany. But in Israel’s recent conflict with Hamas, it has presented itself as relying only on its own decision making, the United States claiming it is offering only friendly advice. The Israedlis take their own responsibility for having allowed Hamas to have gotten out of hand and engaged in atrocities on Oct. 7th and will decide when to end the war with Hamas. Israelis like to say they have nowhere else to go than in Israel and so their survival is a matter of self reliance though Palestine supporters say the Israelis can all go to Florida, even if they were born in Israel because Palestine was for 1300 years an Arab country. But Israel is dependent on the United States for its diplomatic coverage, vetoing Security Council resolutions when in earlier years Israel had cultivated African nations and presently courting Sunni nations, and because of the military aid and other assistance from the United States, possibly including intelligence and satellite surveillance. It is clear that if Biden told Israel to end tube war, it would be difficult for Israel not to comply. So Israel as exclusivist, not needing its allies, is posturing, meant to create an aura of independence which apparels to its population and leadership, just as other nations posture as being on their own, even though the mColonists admitted that they needed the help of France in their war against Great Britain, and England admitted it needed help from the United States in the Second World War. Nations can hide their dependence, but statescraft will allow them to recognize their allieds to be needed. Proclaiming exclusivity or inclusivity between nations is rhetorical and so done for effect.
The American political parties have over the last generation become exclusivist rather than inclusive and that is a major change, though that political process might not last because the proposition it is not an “iron law” of sociology which says that people are and always are subject t6o relative deprivation or to the basic fundamental functional prerequisites of any society but are only political science type patterns of a few instances without looking at the causes that make them happen and so are coincidences as when political scientists say that in the midterms of a first term candidacy the incumbent party loses a lot of congressional seats but which did not happen in 2022 when there was no red tide because Trump backed candidates lost.
But be that as it may concerning political science “regularities”, it does seem fair to say that in the past American political parties were inclusive in that each of the major parties had a solid base and vied with one another to appeal to the center or undecided to give one of them the majority even if that process was confounded by the power of regionalism, whereby some northern Republicans, including Everett Dirkso and Jacob Javits, supported civil rights and southern Democrats were uniformly opposed to civil rights. What has happened recently is that the two parties do not try to convert people to their side but to increase their own base by getting higher registration and turnout of those already in favor of their principles. Democrats want to increase black turnout knowing black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic and Republican efforts do not offer, Marco Rubio excepted, to try to win over Hispanikc voters to their own camp by offering a non-punitive immigration act. But which way things will turn depends on up to the minute events. Both Nikki Halley and Ron Desantis just two nights ago tried to be moderates and so appealing to moderate non Trump Republicans. Desantis didn’t invoke his anti-wokeness and Halley said she would, in effect, be stable and a bit boring in contrast to the volatile Trump. But neither of them are reaching to convert Democrats as of yet. We will see if they plunge into Democratic territory if either one becomes the Presidential nominee while it is clear that Trump will not do that, he already pledged for retribution, determined to mobilize his true believers.