The Future of American Populism: Voices of Neglect, Distrust, and Resentment Across the Southwest

“Take two stones of reality and rub them together to spark the imagination,” advised author Philip Roth. Indeed, this is how my thesis—a qualitative political science study proudly centered around the unheard voices of the American Southwest—came into existence.

Seeking to explore how people in the Southwest draw upon their social identities to relate to populist political attitudes—or the rhetoric of us versus them politics—this thesis was conceived with the concurrence of two seminal events during the fall of my sophomore year. That academic quarter I was taking a political science class called Populism and the Erosion of Democracy, in which we were assigned readings from Katherine Cramer’s influential 2016 book, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. Dr. Cramer, an academic from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote this book upon traveling across Wisconsin while listening to 39 different groups throughout a five-year period. Her book expertly weaved together transcripts of the conversations she took part in to demonstrate to her readers how people synthesized differences in their social identities to create a broader framework for understanding the politics around them.

Dr. Cramer’s theory about a pervasive rural-urban divide in Wisconsin’s political landscape became the missing puzzle piece in explaining why Wisconsin—a state previously considered a part of the Democratic-voting ‘Blue Firewall’ in the Midwest—voted for President Trump during the 2016 presidential election. Moving beyond the precursory statistical analysis of voting data, Dr. Cramer’s use of an ethnographic methodology—a model of studying politics by simply listening to people—provided a keen and unique insight for the rest of the country as to what was happening in Wisconsin and why.

I read Dr. Cramer’s book and became interested this immersive study of demand-side populism around the time of the all-important 2020 presidential election cycle. During the week-long election in November 2020, there were two unlikely consequential swing states that garnered a significant amount of attention from popular media sources: Arizona and Nevada. In particular, it seemed like every channel, every outlet, and every pundit was focused on two counties in these states: Clark County in Nevada and Maricopa County in Arizona. Within these two counties seemed to lie the political fate of America.

As I watched the election results trickle in from these two battleground states, I found myself wondering: what would we learn about these two swing states if someone were to replicate Dr. Cramer’s methodology in the Southwest? With the vote margins between the two different candidates in populist incumbent Donald Trump and more establishment-friendly Joe Biden being as close as they were in Arizona and Nevada, something interesting was clearly happening in these two states. In this understudied yet electorally decisive region of the country, how do people think about politics? Why do populist messages appear to make inroads here? Are there patterns in social identification in the Southwest that prime the population to be more receptive to populist politics?

I titled this thesis “The Future of American Populism,” because of the rapid but unceasing nature of growth endemic to the politically consequential desert Southwest. In every decade between 1950 and 2010, this region grew at twice the pace as the entire United States, exceeding a population growth rate of 40 percent (Mackun 2019). More than half of the populations of Arizona and Nevada, specifically in central Arizona and southern Nevada, live in the desert Southwest. At a time when most studies of contemporary American populism have focused on shrinking or economically distressed states in the Midwest and Appalachia, it becomes critical to disentangle our popular understandings of government distrust and neglect in this country from a certain set of regional trends. To grasp a more holistic picture of how populism captures public political interest in the US, it is also necessary to examine such attitudes in growth regions, especially since these states will only continue to have a larger impact on the country’s political system and economy. In envisioning this thesis, my thinking was, if populism—or any other trend, for that matter—is relevant in the growing Southwest, then this political attitude would be relevant to the rest of the country. As the Southwest goes, so goes the nation.

This thesis tells the story of how people across the Southwest make sense of the politics around them. Through inviting you into the conversations I listened to of Arizonans and Nevadans discussing local issues, I aim to show you something that goes beyond a superficial view of people’s issue-based stances. Instead, I hope to illustrate how people use their personal identities and experiences to derive larger, more abstract beliefs about how their governments and elected officials work. As I learned, people’s social identities shaped key conceptions around who gets what, who has power, how power is wielded, and who is to be blamed.

Before I went into the field, I expected my findings about salient social cleavage patterns to be generalizable and uniform across both of these two states. The two states’ shared geography of being Sunbelt states with a similar history of Western pioneer settlement, the rise and development of a military-industrial complex, and a mass population influx from California led me to an initial belief that the two populations of these states would also be similar. However, as this thesis uncovers, the divergent economic structures and development patterns between Arizona and Nevada has created distinct and enduring political institutions that have trickled down to how the residents of these states navigate their surroundings and experience daily life. More specifically, Nevada’s single-industry economy, which has constrained economic opportunity and fomented pervasive feelings of financial precarity in the region, has given way to popular class consciousness, whereby Nevadans use economic class to define themselves as haves and have-nots. In Arizona, a state with a much more diversified economy but has a an obviously tangible racial hierarchy, cultural consciousness—or social categorization based on racial, ethnic, and religious identities—dominates people’s resentment towards others in this border state.

The primacy of class versus cultural identities in these two states creates different flavors of populist attitudes. In Nevada, class consciousness encourages palpable anti-elitist sentiment; people’s class identities in the Silver State often anchor their perceptions about the gaping chasm between bureaucratic elites and their constituents. Yet in Arizona, cultural consciousness lends to a more personally motivated strand of populism based on exclusion of horizontal others.

The regional focus of this thesis, its methodology, and its findings constitute both novel and consequential contributions to the field of populism studies. This study suggests how listening might be an undervalued tool of study in political science academia, particularly in regard to humanely discerning the causes and effects of popular political phenomena. Moreover, by assuming a comparative lens of analysis to examine the social cleavage patterns between two states, this thesis is able to challenge the validity of contemporary narratives explaining the rise of populist movements around the world.

Currently, most scholars believe that populist sentiment arises among the general public due to either economic insecurity or cultural backlash. A binary wedge between these two camps of thought has constrained our ability to see how both of these theories may be true, just under different circumstances. Using Arizona and Nevada as case studies, this thesis newly postulates that a region’s economic structure and development patterns are the missing critical puzzle pieces in determining which theory holds when.

Of course, this thesis examines only four counties across two large western states. The geographical constraints of this study, which fixates upon southern Nevada and central Arizona, may produce findings that center around issues particular to just these parts of each state. However, I venture to state that the prevailing trends observed in this study would remain largely similar across the vast expanses of these states simply because of the effect certain economic structures have had on the development of statewide government institutions. After all, these effects are able to explain the reason why historical trends continue to influence the social identification patterns of these states’ transient populations.

Ultimately, this thesis is a love letter to the various social science disciplines. Through using a traditionally sociological methodology, this study borrows the language of social cleavages and identity framing made popular within psychology to understand a political science question. Its concluding theory uses economic concepts to arrive at a fresh political economy explanation for the rise of populist attitudes among the public.

The rest of this thesis proceeds as follows. In the next chapter, I will provide an overview of current scholarship performed in the subject areas of populism, social identity theory, and ethnographies of American politics. In chapter 2, I lay out the ethnographic methodology of this study, providing details about how I applied social science principles to the process of my fieldwork and data analysis. In chapter 3, I discuss an overarching commonality in social identity framing between Nevada and Arizona: a separation between the people and the power elites. This shared cleavage, a primordial precondition to the existence of populist sentiment, illustrates the existence and vibrancy of populism in the desert Southwest expressed through regionally specific issues surrounding rapid growth, housing, and water use. After discussing similarities in social cleavage patterns, the thesis shifts to examining the notable divergence in salient social identities between the two states. In chapter 4, I first scrutinize Nevada and its proclivity towards class consciousness. In chapter 5, I turn to Arizona to illustrate and understand its lean towards cultural consciousness. I provide an evidence-based theory as to why Nevadans and Arizonans develop different social identification patterns in chapter 6, which explains the role prevailing economic structure plays in determining salient identity cleavages.