First things first: the white working-class voter (WWC) voted for the popular vote loser. Overwhelmingly. According to the Washington Post, he won them by 39 percentage points, and they were one-third of the people who turned out to vote on November 8, 2016.
Why did they do that? Many exasperated liberals are asking that question.
Here’s my (current) explanation: it comes down to identity politics. Not ours — theirs.
For purposes of this discussion, the white working-class voter has the following characteristics:
1. They are blue-collar workers, in towns where the main work that brings blue-collar workers into a middle-class lifestyle has been (unionized) factory, textile, mining, or oil-related jobs. Those jobs have largely disappeared either due to outsourcing or automation.
2. They have no education beyond high school, and they largely scorn people who do.
3. They believe that terrorism and immigration are the most important policy issues we should be fixing, and although the economy in general worries them, they don’t really care about economic inequality.
Working-Class Culture and Identity
The Harvard Business Review recently ran a piece talking about the anxiety of the WWC voter and their cultural views of how the world should be. Here’s an important quote:
The [blue-collar] dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money.
Working Class Studies follows this up with this observation:
He talks and behaves like one of the guys, one of the white working-class guys. Working-class voters saw Trump as speaking to them, not down to them. He seemed like one of them, just one with more money. His promise to revive blue-collar jobs was likely read as a promise to preserve working-class values and cultures. Trump embodied the possibility that working-class people, or at least their progeny, could rise in income without changing their values and behavior. They needn’t join the ranks of the elites.
He is the walking, talking representation of their cultural values. His décor is a poor guy’s idea of how the rich live. He has a beautiful wife even though he’s old and sagging. And he “speaks his mind” without “political correctness.”
He’s their dream candidate. They identify with him because he embodies their cultural identity.
But What About Economics?
Many people claim that it’s economics - that WWCs feel that they are losing economic ground. Unfortunately, the facts don’t bear that out. Kathy Cramer, who has studied the white working class for nearly 10 years, had this to say:
The economic woes people communicated to me … were interlaced with their sense of who they are, who is a part of their community, what their values are, who works hard in society, who is deserving of reward and public support, and how power is distributed in the world. This complex set of ideas is the product of many years of political debate at the national level as well as generations of community members teaching these ideas to each other. This entwined set of beliefs was not something that any one politician instilled in people overnight — or even over a few months.
Vox reported research data that shows that the Trump voter, no matter how much they claim economic insecurity, are more motivated by their cultural beliefs about who’s supposed to be in, and who’s not:
Trump supporters are far more likely than Trump opponents to see immigration and terrorism — deeply tied to racial and ethnic identity — as America's top issue. They also seem quite unconcerned by economic inequality…. They do seem to care about “the economy in general,” though. But even that may not be quite what it seems. Because it turns out that racism actually seems to cause some Americans to say the economy is doing badly — not the other way around… [C]oncern about the economy has become, for some, an outlet for anxieties about the country being led by a black man…
Social science research in psychology and sociology repeatedly shows that many times, people will give what they feel is a plausible explanation for their behavior, without realizing it’s not the thing that’s actually motivating them. “We’re getting poorer and they’re not helping us” is a plausible explanation, but when you look at the data, their belief that they were worse off economically than the rest of the nation has been roundly debunked, as the Washington Post reports:
Trump's victory doesn't seem to be linked to any recent declines in people's economic circumstances. The economy has been getting better over the past four years. Median incomes have risen. The unemployment rate has plummeted including in regions won by Trump...
So economic issues are just the plausible excuse they’re giving for their behavior. The real motivator is their xenophobia and fear of change.
Aren’t You Just Bigoted Against WWCs?
I’ve been accused of being bigoted against WWCs in several comments to journals on this topic - my own and others. For example, in “RIP Rural America,” mHainds describes the mindset of the WWCs in the rural towns he’s lived in (note that this is the WWC’s perceptions of themselves):
But these people are superior to most of America. Trump and Limbaugh helped them to drop the political correctness, so many feel comfortable expressing their views openly. They are more moral than you are, because they are Christians. They are heterosexual. Their skin color is the same as the Founding Fathers. They are simply better people because they were raised in rural, white, heterosexual, Christian communities, and to deviate from any of these traits, is to lower one’s self in their eyes.
For that, mHainds (and I) were accused of bigotry against WWCs.
Sorry, but no. It’s not bigotry to report the truth. We may think it’s a stereotype, but by and large, that is how the people in these towns perceive themselves, and have since Bacon’s Rebellion was put down in 1676 and whites were encouraged to see nonwhites as lesser than them through law and religious pressure. It didn’t take long for them to adopt it as gospel: whites are better than blacks, even if the white is dirt-poor and the black is a wealthy man, because that’s just how it is.
The Takeaway Message: It’s Their Identity, Stupid
I’ve already said this in a previous diary, but it merits repeating:
We can’t talk them out of their beliefs or their rejection of facts, because it’s about their identity. It’s about their perception of reality, and their perceptions of themselves. We can throw facts at them until they’re buried and they will still insist that all their (perceived) problems are coming from the nonwhites, the women, the queers, the immigrants. If their kids find out about gay people, they might decide to be gay, and that means no grandkids. Climate change will deprive them of their livelihoods, so it must be a liberal conspiracy. Women leaving the home led to all kinds of costly programs that could be reversed if women would just get back into the kitchen as God intended. The influx of non-white people into their neighborhoods must mean that the non-white people are taking all the good jobs, even though the average paycheck of the WWC voter is a comfortable five- to six-figure income.
And so on. These are their perceptions of reality, as wrong and fact-free as they are, because their identities are tied to those perceptions and to give up their perceptions is to give up who they are. That’s why they’re so responsive to the siren call of “Make America great again.” It helps them hold on to their identities — people who are valued parts of a great, powerful nation.
What the WWC voter reacted to with their vote is their perception that they are being disrespected by non-WWC Americans. It’s a reaction to white privilege being stripped away from people who think they’re the pinnacle of American exceptionalism, and they can’t handle the reality that they’re losers and an embarrassment to the nation (which, for them, means not being the ones on top).
They still think they’re Joe and Jane Average American — but they’re not. More than 80% of the country’s population is now urban. The remaining 19-ish rural percent are anything BUT the “Average American.” And now, finally, the evidence of that truth is blaring at them in a way that they can only ignore by hitting out at people who aren’t like them. It’s the behavior of two-year-olds.
The bitter pill for liberals to swallow here is this: WWCs believe that liberals have been dissing their identity in several ways, and that’s why they voted for a man who had no experience but talked a really good line. They did it because he explicitly did NOT diss their identity, but rather embraced it and put a public face on it — his own. He became the working-class candidate because he spoke to what they felt, he gave them someone to identify with, and he appealed to their cultural prejudices. Yes, those prejudices include racism, sexism, and homophobia, but they also include a desire to work hard and to get what they deserve without someone cutting in line ahead of them. Yes, their perceptions are largely incorrect — but we can’t change their perceptions, because their perceptions are their identities.
That’s why they voted, and that’s why we lost.