White supremacist mass movements recruit on status anxiety, not economic hardship

Evidence

But Chip Berlet, a left-leaning researcher who focuses on right-wing extremism and conspiracy thinking, found that to be an overly simplistic, ahistorical framework to explain how hatred takes root. “How come the KKK grew in the boom cycle in the twenties?” he asked in a phone interview. “As many as five million or more joined. If you go back and you read the newspapers being put out by the Klan, that newspaper was obsessed with the Jews taking over America and destroying the country. It wasn’t economic. Most people were doing well. It was the fear of falling, as Barbara Ehrenreich puts it. The middle class is always afraid of falling down the economic, social or cultural ladder.” Or, perhaps, the fear of losing one’s place on a narrow ledge to someone seen as inferior. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 770

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Barbara Ehrenreich’s concept of ‘fear of falling’ in the middle class; parallels the KKK’s 1920s boom-era surge with modern white nationalist recruitment.
• QUESTION: The claim that status anxiety rather than material deprivation drives mass hatred is testable against later movements and data on Trump-era white nationalist recruitment.