Alan Elrod has a big brain for politics, and a big vision for the country. The prolific Bryant-based 36-year-old is an adjunct professor of politics and history at Arkansas State University-Beebe and the founder of The Pulaski Institution, a think tank focused on the threat of nationalism and overlooked regional dynamics in the larger political conversation. Through essays, conferences and policy research, Elrod is spotlighting some of the most urgent and complex issues facing the United States and the world. Elrod’s bylines in outlets like Foreign Policy, The Bulwark, MSNBC and Liberal Currents add to his growing reputation in national intellectual circles, and we wanted to hear more.
What is The Pulaski Institution?
We’re a nonprofit that is focused on researching and understanding the challenges to democracy and prosperity in heartland places — and what I mean by that is places away from the major centers of power and finance.
I wanted to do something where we were thinking about heartland places, but doing it from them. And so right now we’re essentially a virtual organization because our fellows are all non-resident. They’re everywhere, and everyone who’s involved has a foot in these kinds of places. A whole lot of them are located here in Arkansas, or are tied to Arkansas institutions. Other people are not in Arkansas, but they’re in other kinds of places that have these sorts of heartland concerns. We have people from Michigan. We have people from the Midwest. We have people from the north of England and regional Australia as well. So we’re trying to kind of reprint that both here and globally.
What we’re trying to do is blend the sort of academic stuff that a think tank tries to do, which is understand and write about the problems that are happening here, but also engage in a really practical way, by creating events and going out and having conversations with people. Doing stuff that creates opportunities for conversation, where people can get involved in their community and think proactively about what’s happening to their democracy, to the places they live and how they can be part of participating in making them more prosperous, making them more politically stable, making them more democratically engaged, making them places that live up to the sort of pluralism and freedom and openness that we think are good things.
What do you think is misunderstood about the current political moment?
I believe very strongly that we are in a moment of complete change in terms of philosophical and political categories. I don’t even really think right and left are super applicable to this moment. They’ve been completely blown apart. I feel like there is a certain lethargy in a lot of the public conversations to acknowledge that.
You talk a lot about status anxiety. What do you mean by that?
I’m a pretty big believer that status anxiety is a more important factor in our politics right now than, say, economic anxiety. Economic anxiety is not unimportant: People can feel pinches in their finances. But status anxiety is much more social and relative. And what makes it particularly potent is anyone can feel status anxiety. You don’t have to be on the brink of poverty to feel it. People who are middle class can feel status anxiety about the idea that they may be slipping in their position, or that other people are doing better than them. Status anxiety can be felt by immigrants who come here and assimilate and then feel that newer arrivals are not going through the same process they went through. I don’t think Protestant Christians or men are persecuted, but they can feel it, because the loss of relative position can still trigger status anxiety. We even have evidence that a lot of people that participated in January 6 came from blue areas or exurbs outside blue areas. Status anxiety opens up this kaleidoscope of competition and is much closer to the kinds of problems that plague democracies in general, where people feel acutely when their cultural cachet or economic position relative to other groups is gaining or losing.
Your work around nationalism is extra relevant in times like this, but you didn’t just come to it recently. How did you develop this focus?
I went to a school within New York University called the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and I designed a program in 2013 around nationalism and nation-state development. I’ve always been interested in nationalism, national identity, the politics of that and how it’s sustained. When I was there, I wrote specifically about Scotland and Hungary. Suddenly, now they’re a little sexier. I don’t know that it’s great that they are. They’re popular for some reasons that are worrying. But I’d always been interested in that stuff. I think growing up, having parents who were really interested in travel, having a dad who was a political scientist — mainly an international relations guy — helped that. And getting the chance to see a lot of the world from a young age also impacted that. I certainly came into my academic interests from a personal fascination with how people’s identities are developed, how political identity is developed, how culture shapes that, how different national identities come to be. And how they can be wielded for certain types of politics: for authoritarianism or for highly exclusionary forms of politics, but also how they sustain people’s sense of group identity and the kind of culture that springs from that.
I notice that you don’t use the word tribalism a lot.
You know, when you study nationalism, one thing you come to appreciate is that people inherently gravitate towards in-groups and out-groups. The instinct is just sort of a part of human psychology and biology. It’s part of who we are. It’s not always bad. And I think that’s the other thing that you come to appreciate when you study something as big and complex as nationalism. National identities are part of what makes the world work. We are organized into nation-states. There’s a mythic element to that, right? There’s an element of fabrication. But there’s an element of fabrication into most kinds of human identity. So it’s not that I don’t ever think about tribalism, because I do. It’s just that if you think that people wanting to be part of groups and wanting to differentiate those groups from other groups is something that has to be defeated, I don’t know that I have the magic key for that.
On the other hand, I do very much believe in globalization. I believe in trade. I believe in the movement of people and ideas. And so to me, part of what makes that compelling is the mixture and meeting of different groups. If you suggest that there’s no differences between us, then what is the value of people moving around the world and experiencing those actual ways in which culture and society are distinct in different places? That’s actually a beautiful thing. What I am concerned about is when our politics — and maybe to some degree our economic angst and our concerns about status — push us into a version of that where we are increasingly wary and afraid and hostile towards differences, and we retreat behind the moat. So I don’t want to eradicate difference. I don’t want to try to paper over the diversity of human culture and life. I want to try to promote a politics that is celebratory of how those things come together.
What is your opinion on the term “flyover country”?
Oh, I don’t like it. I mean, I understand that a lot of us use it in a tongue-in-cheek way. There’s a self-deprecating aspect to it, but it’s a terrible term, and people shouldn’t use it. My experiences in New York were mostly great, and I think that I had a really incredible set of opportunities at NYU in particular. But I remember being at an event during my first year of grad school, and someone asking me where Arkansas was. And this was an Ivy League-educated person. This is not an ignorant person. And the question also wasn’t malicious. They were not mocking me in that moment. In some ways that made it worse, because they weren’t trying to be elitist. They were genuinely not sure where my state was. And for me that was, that was sort of devastating, because I realized how unimportant we were. Now maybe you can make the argument that any American anywhere might not know where all 50 states are located, but still, it had that sense of like, “Oh, we really don’t matter.”
In an article for Liberal Currents, you wrote, “We have gone mad, and the consequence is that sanity now feels like a disorder.” Can you say more about that?
I think it’s really important for people who look around and say, “This is crazy” — and by “this” I mean a lot of things, right? The trade wars, the treatment of migrants, the constant lying, the use of executive orders to illegally blow apart federal agencies. But I do think that there has been a tendency to normalize. I think plenty of people feel like the responsible thing to do is to not freak out, that the responsible thing to do is insist that this isn’t fascism or that Trump doesn’t mean it when he says he might annex another country. But we can’t deny reality. I do believe this is a fascistic administration. The people sounding the alarm, those are the people who are most rooted in reality. Denying it is the fantasy.
How do you think social media has impacted nationalism?
Mostly badly. Social media is a great place for us to oversimplify our differences and then to sharpen them. We get really angry. We reduce people to the most combustible arguments that we might have with them, and then we just have those over and over.
You were adopted into an evangelical family. Do you believe those two factors are independent of where you ended up professionally?
Oh no, I don’t think they’re independent at all. I think one thing is I probably have an evangelical attitude to the world in general, which is to say, I’m always a little bit trying to convert people to my thinking. And I think being adopted gives you a feel for how much of life is contingent. I’m lucky. I had wonderful parents. I had very little control over any of that and it all turned out pretty well for me. But if you don’t have a political outlook that at least appreciates that, to some degree, people end up where they are by chance and by forces so far beyond their control, then I don’t know how you can have a politics that speaks to this human experience.
Given that the present feels dark, is there anything that gives you hope in our country?
Yeah, absolutely. People always give me hope. I can list the things that really worry me. On the other hand, there are people in the streets, there are people doing things in their communities. There are people who are signing up to run for office because they’ve realized that if they don’t do it, who will, and that if you want a democracy that is responsive to your concerns, and that looks like and cares about your community, then the best way to get that is for you to go ahead and do it. The very thing that is tough about this moment, the very thing that is discouraging, is also the only place where our hope rests: and that’s America.