Financialized populist voting mirrors nationalist sacrifice by feeling emotionally plausible despite self-interest

Evidence

Even though the emergence and “sedimentation” of imagined communities was colonial capitalism’s unwitting effect, the impassionate investments of people such as Latin America’s middle-class Creole groups in nationalism presented Anderson with a riddle: why were such groups willing to sacrifice for an idea going against their own interests? In tackling this question, Imagined Communities moved beyond class-oriented theories of nationalism, arguing that they cannot explain sufficiently how anti-Spanish Creole sentiment was “emotionally plausible” in the “separate zones” of Venezuela, Mexico, Chile, and Peru during the early nineteenth century (Anderson 1991, 51). Drawing on Victor Turner, Anderson argued that imagined communities require meaning-making experiences like the “secular pilgrimage”: the shared journey made by Creole functionaries toward colonial administrative centers to take up their assigned posts. Religious pilgrimages under preprint capitalism bound otherwise isolated pilgrims to God. By contrast, succeeding secular pilgrimages bound individuals to government bureaucracies, such that the administrative hierarchy between the Old World and the New was made plain: “the Creole was always laden with the knowledge that someone from the Old World would always be above him” (Ullock 1996, 431). Today’s advance of a speculative populist politics presents us with a similar riddle: why do constituencies most affected by years of continuing market deregulation come to endorse finance-driven populists such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Narendra Modi? Why are people seemingly voting “against their interests”? Reading Hochschild’s (2016) influential ethnographic account of Tea Party activists in the years leading to Trump’s rise to power, we can see parallels between the Creole sentiment of unjust treatment and post-2008 Louisianans’ remorse for Americans who are “cutting the line.” — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 99

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s thesis: financialized populism is not voting against interests but affective identification, parallel to Anderson’s nationalist riddle. — connects to: Crisis paralysis reflects ordinary voters’ own disavowed desires, not merely elite ideology — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1422
• DEFINE: Establishes the ‘secular pilgrimage’ mechanism Anderson used, the structural template the book will map onto speculative communities.