When people feel threatened, they are less likely to use careful, fact-based, rational thought and decision-making processes and tend to depend more on intuition, gut feelings, and 'vibes' to assess the situation and decide what to do. When one senses danger, prompt and immediate action is called for. This preference under threat for what Kahnemann and Tversky termed System 1 thinking over System 2 thinking has a good evolutionary survival benefit: when an unknown large animal with big teeth and claws suddenly appears, that is a lousy time to sit and think. This approach is well suited for short-term survival in primitive settings with non-nuanced threats and has served our species well for millenia. It is not well suited for long-term thinking and decision making about complex and often abstract issues in our modern environment - but it remains hard wired in the human psyche.

When threatened and uncertain, humans seek feelings of comprehension, control, and community.

Comprehension. We do not like and tend to fear that which we do not understand. If we can discover (or invent) a narrative that explains what is happening, it reduces our psychological stress. This underlies the human drive to find patterns and created narratives, even where no pattern or actual narrative exists. And the more our chosen explanation is simple, comfortable (fits with our current beliefs and those of our group), the more likely we are to believe and act on it. Our understanding doesn't have to be correct - it just has to be comfortable and *feel* correct.

Control. When threatened or distressed, we want to believe we have an effective response. Since stress and threat tends to push us into rapid and intuitive rather than deliberative decision making, we gravitate toward simple (simplistic) solutions, generally opt for ideas that are readily accessible in our minds (salience and bias of availability), and tend not to weigh multiple alternatives or think about unintended consequences. Things that afford a sense of control can be identifying a cause that can be changed, an enemy that can be attacked, or an action that will change things.  Again, it is less important that we actually have control than we feel a sense of control.

Community. Individual humans are not big, strong, tough, fast, or armored enough to survive alone. As a species, we have survived and thrived to the point of dominating our world because we form groups where language, communication, stored communal knowledge, cooperation and collaboration, collective action make up for our individual frailty. The drive to be part of a group (family, clan, tribe, community, network, culture, region, nation) is deeply ingrained and powerful. Being a member in good standing of a group provides far more benefits like food, shelter, and safety than being right.

Over the last 50-70 years, the majority of Americans in the socio-economic middle have been left behind or thrown under the bus by both the left and the right. The left has advocated for abstract things important to the well educated or academic elite like truth, diversity, equality, theoretical science, philosophy. Partly to balance the vanity of this focus and partly because philosophy leads them there, the left has also advocated for the groups stuck at the bottom and most disadvantaged by the system. The right has advocated for the wealthy and powerful, employers, investors, and professionals. Both the left and the right have had some success advocating for their constituencies, but no one has been advocating for the other 75% - and their lot has steadily worsened. Blue-collar private-sector workers were actually earning more on average in 1972, after adjusting for inflation, than they are now in 2024. So today’s blue-collar workers are on average earning less in real dollars than their grandparents were 52 years ago.

Both the left and the right need the support of the large middle in order to enact and maintain the policies they support. But their paths to do this have been very different.

The left tried to add to their team the 75% in the middle using appeals to ethics, empathy, science, fact, and group values. They tended to use their own language and were often condescending and dismissive of the people they were recruiting. (Like the parent telling the 9 year old, when you are older you will understand.) With their way of life threatened, very distressed by their daily struggles to get by, and angry at the sight of others at the bottom being helped while those at the top succeed beyond belief - the 75% in the middle were not good candidates for this approach by the left.

The right much better understood the need for a sense of comprehension, control, and community. They also recognized the 'conservative dilemma' - a term for the fact that the economic and political policies espoused on the right tend to benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of the middle and bottom, making it impossible to gain control based on being clear about the most likely outcomes of their policies. As a result, they have depended increasingly on anger, outrage, victimhood, othering, and misinformation to prevent careful and rational analysis and push the middle into intuitive processes where they can be manipulated.

The left misunderstood the middle, expected them to think and act based on the kind of long-term and abstract thinking that the left sees as ideal. This kind of thinking and decision making goes out the window when one cannot afford groceries, rent, or gas and is living from paycheck to paycheck. The left should not be surprise that, having largely abandoned the middle, the middle has begun to abandon the left in favor of simple narratives and decisions that feel good but are not going to improve their real circumstances.

That's my internal framing for what has happened. YMMV.