Losing their Locus of Control
Will a mutation in the ideological DNA of America’s two parties result in permanent political realignment?
My life is determined by my own actions.
Take a moment to decide whether you agree with this statement. As trite and boring as the statement may seem, your willingness to agree with it reveals much about your psychology, and maybe even your political ideology. Believing your life is determined by your own actions exhibits a mindset psychologists call an “internal locus of control." According to a 2019 Cato Institute and YouGov poll, respondents agreeing with statements demonstrating an internal locus of control were likely to identify as conservative and vote Republican. Liberal Democrats on the other hand were much more likely to agree with statements that demonstrated an “external locus of control,” such as I feel like what happens in my life is mostly determined by powerful people. While liberals saw social status as influenced by impersonal systems, oppressive structures, and unaccountable elites, conservatives held fast to the belief that personal responsibility and individual choice guided our fates. In 1953, Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind emphasized the “inner order of the soul” as a defining feature of conservatism. For Kirk, the conservative saw internal moral choices as the main determinant of personal success and broader societal flourishing. From the dawning of Movement Conservatism in the 1950s to the twilight of the pre-pandemic era in 2019, the internal locus of control served as the bedrock on which the conservative psyche was built.
A lot has changed since 2019, but few things have changed more remarkably than the shift in locus of control within the Republican mindset. It’s not a stretch to attribute this startling mutation primarily to the radioactive presence of one man, Donald J. Trump. Trump propelled his rise to power by incubating an external locus of control in his followers (attributing their struggles to factors beyond their control like NAFTA, undocumented immigrants, and “unfair” trade deals with China) while simultaneously selling himself as possessing the superhuman internal locus of control of a “self-made” billionaire. Only Trump had the power to cast out the Deep State, Drain the Swamp, make America Great Again, and restore to his MAGA faithful the ability to control their own lives and regain the internal locus of control so central to their conservative self-image. Republicans’ lingering devotion to the internal locus of control would crumble with the closing of the polls in November 2020. Trump would not concede defeat to Joe Biden and stoked in his followers the delusion that shadowy forces beyond their control had rigged the election and denied him a second term. Election denial smuggled the external locus of control into the very heart of the Republican Party. The notion that “what happens in my life is mostly determined by powerful people” ceased to be a refuge for liberal slackers and became core to the conspiratorial bent in the mind of the MAGA Republican, sparking the rage that fueled the January 6th insurrection. The loss of internal locus of control extended to the very top of the MAGA hierarchy, with Trump himself declaring “I am a victim” in his 2022 announcement of a third run at the presidency. The festering sense of external locus of control has only grown over the years, most recently on display after Trump’s disastrous debate performance against Kamala Harris. “It was three to one. It was a rigged deal as I assumed it would be,” Trump declared, attributing his fate to the external bias of the moderators rather than taking personal responsibility for his own deranged, scatter-brained performance.
It is easy for Democrats to dismiss Republicans’ growing sense of victimhood to Trump’s personality disorders or the moral and intellectual failings of his followers. It is harder to grapple with the consequences of a potential tectonic shift in the mind of the American conservative, a permanent transformation from internal to external locus of control. The ideological 180 pivot of Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance suggests deep, elemental changes are in fact occurring within the Republican Party. Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy peddled a renewed affirmation of internal locus of control as the magic tonic to cure the socio-economic ills of Appalachia and the Rust Belt. “I don't know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better,” Vance scolded the white underclass, much to the delight of wealthy liberals who had watched those same “bootstrap” arguments weaponized by conservatives against economically distressed minorities for decades. Eight years later, Vance’s vice-presidential acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention would do away with personal responsibility sanctimony and validate every external locus of control excuse available to the rural poor to explain their lot in life. “Wall Street barons crashed the economy…Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens…China and the cartels sent fentanyl across the border.” Vance’s speech announced to the world that victimhood and an external locus of control had now replaced personal responsibility and an internal locus of control as foundations of the Republican psyche.
What about the Democrats? If the conservative mind has seen a paradigm shift in locus of control, are the affluent, educated liberals who comprise the backbone of the Democratic Party also experiencing a change to their psyche? Freddie DeBoer’s 2023 book How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement draws on John Hood’s analysis of the 2019 locus of control study by Cato and YouGov to explore a growing cognitive dissonance within the mind of the liberal elite. DeBoer notes that while elite liberals allow external locus of control arguments to guide their more compassionate social policy preferences they simultaneously exhibit extremely high levels of internal locus of control within their personal lives: they grind to get the best degrees from the most elite universities, their active lifestyles and hobbies often signal an intense drive for endless self-optimization, they push their children to load up on rigorous extracurriculars and build exclusive social connections. The typical educated liberal active in the Democratic Party now lives by a strange code of internal locus of control for me, external locus of control for thee. They recognize that structural forces of race, gender, and sexuality may excuse the less fortunate for their lot in life, while aggressively subjecting themselves and their children to the ceaseless drumbeat of self-improvement and personal responsibility.
The tone of Kamala Harris’s economic messaging suggests that liberals may soon reconcile their internal locus of control on personal issues with their external locus of control perspective on political issues. "We will create what I call an opportunity economy, an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and the chance to succeed," Harris declared in her DNC acceptance speech. The “opportunity economy” language used by Harris brings to mind a similar theme promoted by Mitt Romney in his 2012 presidential campaign. The “chance to compete” echoes a traditional Republican talking point, one used by Ronald Reagan in 1987 to promote tax cuts and deregulation to minority-owned small businesses. Of course, Harris’s economic platform includes policies like housing assistance, food price controls, and prescription price caps that would not appeal to the likes of Romney and Reagan. But her messaging still matters and the messaging being used evokes a sense of internal locus of control, a promise that in Harris’s Opportunity Economy, hard work will determine success, a traditionally conservative sentiment appealing enough to convince over 100 Republicans to endorse her for president.
Republicans will dismiss this liberal turn toward internal locus messaging as cynical election speak, an underhanded plot to use meritocratic language to cloak a secret “Cultural Marxist” agenda driven by Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs. By surrendering to these paranoid delusions, Republicans fail to see that Democrats may be within the chrysalis stage of their own metamorphosis related to the locus of control issue. What if rather than dismantling the meritocratic capitalist system, Democrats are seeking to use Harris’s economic policies and DEI initiatives to redeem and optimize that system, using technocratic adjustments to soften the impact of past discrimination and blunt the advantages of unearned privilege? What if Harris’s Opportunity Economy promises to resolve the tensions within the elite liberal mind, allowing Democrats to embrace a more universal ideology of internal locus of control and enjoy the reassurance that their success is truly determined by their hard work and individual choices rather than the structural benefits of White Privilege, Patriarchy, Heteronormativity or inherited wealth? As the Democratic Party increasingly becomes the home of the educated and successful, a stronger embrace of internal locus of control will give liberal elites the ideological justification to present their material success as deserved and their political power legitimate.
This shifting locus of control within the Republican and Democratic mindsets raises questions whose relevance extends far beyond election-year strategy. Are these deviations from long-term ideological trends momentary distortions caused by the chaos agent Trump’s impact on both parties? Or is this the beginning of a potential Left-Right inversion like the mid-20th century shift that saw Republicans go from the Party of Abolitionism to the Party of States Rights and the Democrats go from the Party of Jim Crow to the Party of Civil Rights? One thing is for sure, it’s going to take a heck of a lot more mutations in the two parties’ ideological DNA before Republicans can credibly present themselves as the anti-corporate party of the people or dismiss the Democrats as elitists in league with Big Banks, Big Tech, and the Military Industrial Complex. But Democrats must not ignore the danger that comes with a growing number of heavily-armed, economically vulnerable, and culturally isolated Americans believing their fate is controlled more by the decisions of shadowy coastal elites than by their own life choices. Kamala Harris’s mission to restore the Middle Class cannot be separated from the need to renew confidence in the internal locus of control that animates the American Dream. The legacy of a Harris presidency and the fate of our country may very well depend on whether Kamala can create an economy where significantly more Americans have reason to believe that effort and success go hand in hand.
Incredibly astute piece, Jon! This was such a great read, and I never thought of class/educational polarization having this dimension to it, but it makes a ton of sense. Again, really impressive post!