There is no one reason that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election. Actually, we know that she really didn’t lose at all since she received millions more votes than her opponent. But we also know that, despite these numbers, she is not the one in residence at the White House.
At any rate, there are lots of theories as to why this is so and many of them have merit: Russian interference, a flawed candidate to begin with, poor data and bad decisions about where to campaign, underestimations of the white working class’ anger, and “economic anxiety” are among them.
And racism.
While we can (and probably will) spend years debating whether or not all Trump voters are racist, it is clear that at the very least, racism wasn’t a deal-breaker for them. And, not surprisingly, many of them don’t even specifically see the Trump agenda as inherently racist.
Adam Serwer of The Atlantic spoke to Trump voters in order to understand their support of him. He says that, regardless of their own claims of being anti-racist, many Trump supporters are following an old playbook when it comes to saying that racism is bad but backing a candidate that supports racist ideas and policies.
The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal. [...]
These supporters will not change their minds, because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of.
Here’s what’s really fascinating in Serwer’s report: among the people he talked to, there is a clear awareness that to be accused of being a racist is to risk being shunned in American society. So to that end, people most certainly do not want to be identified as racist. And because of their blind, unwavering loyalty to him, they also do not identify Trump’s positions as racist. But they clearly have support for all kinds of racist ideologies and things that would punish non-whites and immigrants—like Muslim bans, stop-and-frisk policies, and immigration enforcement targeting anyone undocumented, even if they are students.
The plain meaning of Trumpism exists in tandem with denials of its implications; supporters and opponents alike understand that the president’s policies and rhetoric target religious and ethnic minorities, and behave accordingly. But both supporters and opponents usually stop short of calling these policies racist. It is as if there were a pothole in the middle of the street that every driver studiously avoided, but that most insisted did not exist even as they swerved around it.
There is an interesting disconnect here between what racism actually is, what Trump’s supporters think it is, and how their own basic need for self-preservation hijacks all rationality and reason—particularly in the context of a country (and world) rooted in white supremacy.
This transcends economics, particularly because as Serwer points out, while voters making under $50,000 a year went for Clinton, Trump won the white vote in every level of class and income. Therefore, this is not just about the white working class—no matter how much the Democrats try to say it is.
We need to understand Trump’s election with these things in mind. Trump voters don’t need to hold explicitly hateful views of black and brown folks to support and vote for him. They simply need to see themselves as disenfranchised, and Trump’s rhetoric allows them to channel that anger and despair toward groups of people who are unlike them that they can blame. And since the culture of white supremacy thrives on fostering an internalized superiority among whites which teaches that whites are inherently better than anyone else, it is easy to see how this makes for a toxic political and social mix.
Yet when social scientists control for white voters’ racial attitudes—that is, whether those voters hold “racially resentful” views about blacks and immigrants—even the educational divide disappears. In other words, the relevant factor in support for Trump among white voters was not education, or even income, but the ideological frame with which they understood their challenges and misfortunes. It is also why voters of color—who suffered a genuine economic calamity in the decade before Trump’s election—were almost entirely immune to those same appeals.
But perhaps most telling is how a large swath of people who consistently espouse that individual merit, hard work, and grit are values that can make anyone successful regardless of race, gender, or class are so quick to believe that their marginalization is not due to their own fault but is instead attributed to the external environment and systems around them. Individuality is a trait that is convenient when it suits them and their narrative. When you are white, individuality is responsible for one’s success—but not one’s failure. This is, ironically, the very inverse of what they often believe about people of color, who are always seen as deficient. If we are successful, it’s because we were given a handout and if we are a failure, it’s absolutely based on some lack of trying on our part.
This is what is so very intriguing and also maddening about whiteness. There is no logic to it and it’s remarkably inconsistent, except for its unrelenting commitment to preserving itself.
There is virtually no personality defect that conservatives accused Obama of possessing that Trump himself does not actually possess. This, not some uncanny oracular talent, is the reason Trump’s years-old tweets channeling conservative anger at Obama apply so perfectly to his own present conduct.
Trump’s great political insight was that Obama’s time in office inflicted a profound psychological wound upon many white Americans, one that he could remedy by adopting the false narrative that placed the first black president outside the bounds of American citizenship. He intuited that Obama’s presence in the White House decreased the value of what W. E. B. Du Bois described as the “psychological wage” of whiteness across all classes of white Americans, and that the path to their hearts lay in invoking a bygone past when this affront had not taken place, and could not take place. [...]
Trumpism emerged from a haze of delusion, denial, pride, and cruelty—not as a historical anomaly, but as a profoundly American phenomenon. This explains both how tens of millions of white Americans could pull the lever for a candidate running on a racist platform and justify doing so, and why a predominantly white political class would search so desperately for an alternative explanation for what it had just seen.
Do working-class whites have something to gain from aligning themselves with people of color and immigrants in order to access a more just society which benefits the folk at the bottom? Do almost all whites (save the very wealthy ones) have something to gain by doing the same thing? Absolutely. But it doesn’t mean that they will. Unfortunately, race and white supremacy are this country’s ultimate Achilles’ heel. Until we can learn to really lean into it and do the very difficult and unimaginable work of dismantling it, Trumpism and victories like his are going to continue to be the norm.