> [WS:] ... I am more willing to
> go with the "motivated cognition" argument
>
> http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/jost.glaser.political-conservatism-as-motivated-social-cog.pdf
> which can be summarized as follows: individuals who have problems
> coping with ambiguity an uncertainty tend to gravitate to social
> environments that provide them with certitudes and rigidity they crave
> (e.g. religion or conservative organizations) and that affiliation
> socializes them into hateful conservative ideologies. That may
> explain why people of different social and cultural backgrounds join
> hate movements (like the right wing talk show radio) and become "the
> spiteful voter" http://exiledonline.com/we-the-spiteful/.
>
> But I think it is a very complex phenomenon and it really depends on
> individual circumstances.
Sure but desituating this from structural economic features is silly, isn't it. I argue this with my students all the time. When Title IX was passed, athletic programs and departments and public schools and universities were flush with cash and the idea was that women's sports would simply be added... boys, men, coaches, etc. were against it - it caused ambiguity and uncertainty - but it wasn't a direct threat to limited athletic resources. Since 1973, however, repeated rounds of fiscal crisis followed by growth insufficient to compensate for crisis-period losses at many levels have produced scarcity in athletic budgets but the mandate to equalize the participation of women continues and non-revenue mens sports have been cut apace. The men, who felt ambiguous and uncertain before are now angry... "dealing" with it by means of anger, as you basically put it, has been driven by manufactured scarcity far more than some sort of desituated social psychology.
The same thing happened on assembly lines and in academic departments, adding women and historically oppressed minorities cause tensions but so long as they were new jobs and FTEs tensions were more manageable... doesn't mean it went smoothly, doesn't mean it didn't reinvigorate/feed incipient/rampant sexism and racism but material conditions contributed to different social psychological ones.
In fact, I completely take back the sure at the beginning of this note... this situation can not be seen as primarily or secondarily driven by "individual circumstances." People make their lives but not under conditions of their own choosing - something embedded in both halves of the wine bottle you noted earlier.
What's happened since 1978-81 is that every area of the salary and wage, class and status structure - below the top 10% at least - has become more precarious, more uncertain at the same time the social movements and public institutions which fought for, defended and provided stability have been under ceaseless attack... unless they are romantic conservative forms like evangelical literalism, traditional family values, etc.
These structural features of insecurity are so robust that my students easily believe that the decline in personal racism, sexism and homophobia means that racism, sexism and homophobia are things of the past... they have no conception, without social movements and public institutions making it clear, that structural characteristics of society have any reality at all, much less impact on their lives.
The whole problem with almost all social psychology and pretty much all of symbolic interactionism - except its feminist moments - is its presentation as an alternative to structural analysis rather than explorations of agency within organizational forms and and structural conditions... where agency is seen as negotiated in the context of orgs/structures and variably reproductive of those more materially abstract phenomena.