In the first part, I got into how the image of the White Working Class as predominantly rural, conservative, exceptionally racist, and so forth is largely fantasy by looking at the demographics. At the same time, I also commented on the fact that most in the White Working Class, for better or worse, are no longer employed predominantly in manufacturing or extraction industries, and in fact much of its shift towards Trump has less to do with defecting proletarians than one might imagine.
Now I’d like to go beyond pointing out that we’re misrepresenting who these people are as a demographic group, we’re also misrepresenting who they are as people. The press tends too often we tend to talk about Middle America as though it’s some weird, alien thing that we can’t relate to except through some sort of anthropological dissection reducing them into, at best, a sort of noble savage who we can project simple virtues on or, at worst, petty, inflexible, narrow minded bigots.
By doing this, we overlook the complex motives of a large section of the population (about 45%) through over generalization, and deny the fact that most people are either intimately related to plenty of people from this group*, or are a member of the group but simply don’t want to acknowledge it out of some misplaced sense of superiority. Most people can doubtlessly name dozens of people who don’t fit into the neat caricature of what a white working class person is supposed to look like, but we often go to absurd lengths to overlook them or act like they’re some kind of exception to the rule. Just to give one example, the other day I was listening to a back and forth on the whole “white working class: win them over or screw ‘em” debate, both apparently oblivious to the fact that one of them installed solar panels for a living while the other taught ESL.
* As one commentator from the part one put it, “The “white working class” is often the brother/sister, the brother/sister-in-law, the uncle/aunt, the cousin, of the upscale college-educated white vote”
The problem with this is that it precludes empathy. And I mean empathy here in stripped down neutral terms here. Not sympathy, not pity, simply the ability to place oneself into someone else’s head space to understand where they’re coming from by acknowledging common experiences. This sort of empathy is not only about being nice, it’s the basis of any sort of effective politics.
Part of the reason so much of this bothers me is that it talks down to so many people I know…
My family was more or less a textbook example of the sort of people you think about when they refer to things like Reagan Democrats. They were blue collar, Polish/Irish Catholics living in Graden City Detroit in a house my Grandfather, a union carpenter man’s man, was constantly modifying with his own two hands. They did pretty well, all things for themselves all things considered, and to a large extent Garden City itself seemed to remain largely a picture of a well to do, if somewhat modest suburb throughout my childhood, though regrettably in recent years the urban decay of the broader Detroit area has seeped in to the point that my Grandma now lives in a house whose value has plummeted to somewhere around $25,000.
Most of my aunts and uncles went on to college (oh, to live in the days when you could send 7 kids to college on a blue collar salary) and more white collar work, with the notable exception of one uncle who kept on as a carpenter and another who dropped out of college and went straight into sales (ironically he ended up doing better than almost everyone else). It wasn’t distancing or escaping from anything, it was just a natural progression of things. Of course they were going to try to move up economically from one generation to the next and acquit themselves to new circumstances. All in all, it worked out for us pretty well, though it wasn’t a total protection against the vicissitudes of the economy, or the hemorrhaging of the middle class. My mother was never really able to get back on her feet after divorce, and a number of my aunts and uncles have found themselves laid off a few years before retirement and virtually unemployable.
Judging by the families of people of the people I went to school with, who were themselves mostly Polish/Irish Catholics typically ranging from lower middle to upper middle class status, that was all fairly typical. A lot of them went on to college, grad school and eventually professionals. A lot of them went to community colleges or became line cooks, repairmen, and the like. If I had to guess, I’d say the center of gravity has been towards middling white collar jobs. As for myself, I ended up doing pretty well, however as much as I’m breathing the rarefied air that my job and Masters in Public Administration enables me to, it’s not like I didn’t spend most of my 20s bouncing around underemployed doing lousy day jobs, or that when my son was born after during that time I found the health insurance I had scrimped and saved so hard to get would be covering essentially nothing, and that these things collectively have left me in a hole that it will take me years to dig out of.
The point is that, demographically speaking, a lot of my family, friends, and so forth generally tend to fit pretty well into the profile of the Silent Majority/Reagan Democrats, or whatever that group has evolved into in the time between 1970 and today. For better or worse, a lot of them are exactly the people whose willingness to take a chance on Trump, or at least lack of enthusiasm for Clinton, was largely responsible tilted the 2016 election.
So it’s frustrating to me that all disheartening to me that all discussions on how to appeal to people like that needs to start from a caricature that sells them so short. From the popular telling of things, my Grandfather should have been a small minded pot of racial resentment who took a “love it or leave it” attitude towards patriotism and had no patience for those stupid hippies and their libertine things like feminism. In fact, he was intellectually curious (he left me his sizeable collection of history books when he died) and pretty adaptable when it came to social change. He never viewed the increasingly diversification of places like Dearborn with suspicion. On the contrary, he seemed to appreciate it as revitalizing the areas. In terms of his politics, he was a sort of old school working class Democrat, and contrary to the popular narrative decades of social upheaval and shifts in Democratic politics didn’t change that. He stayed that way throughout his life. He always saw the superficial appeals to blue collar social mores of George Bush as patently phony, and viewed the foreign entanglements of the war on terror with deep suspicion. And while I consider my grandfather exceptional in many ways, I think a lot of people can relate.
Nor was he a relic from a bygone day. Those friends who didn’t go to college or went to community college and ended up floating around working class jobs, they’re decidedly not small minded reactionary people. Actually, they’ve produced some of the most thoughtful, insightful commentary I’ve read, and they do it on a wide variety of subjects. Because, y’know, being in tough economic straights doesn’t somehow magically mean someone doesn’t have interests or can approaching the world with open eyes. As for their politics, if anything they’re more likely than my professional friends to post videos on their facebook feeds about police brutality and the excesses of Wall Street. Really, that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. And while maybe a small subset complaining about SJWs and the like (though really, that’s more common among my well-heeled friends) the majority just tend to regard that as dickish behavior because, as it happens, they’re not assholes.
… And that does extend to people from a more “Red State” setting as well…
I’ve sort of been talking down the importance of rural white working class people who are consistently Republican and made up the core of Trump’s support. Likewise, it’s not the culture I have roots in. Still, though, it’s not like I don’t have plenty of personal friends who easily fit that bill. Hell, the guy who introduced me to my wife was a retired plumber from southern Delaware whose evangelical family ran a house church.
And yes, a fair number of the stereotypes apply, and are prone to all the knee jerk reactions to cultural issues and politics that you’d expect. I got very sick of hearing them make some kind of sideways comment about Obama, without any explanation, and expecting everyone else would just agree with them. Yet at the same time, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t also be very generous, mentally flexible, well traveled, hard working, tolerant, open minded, and/or worldly people either. Nor are they so enthralled by Republican politics that they’re blind to the damage it does. Take that guy who introduced me to my wife. His family’s facebook feed is full of comments mortified about the travel ban (which makes sense, as they spent years doing missionary work) and the Republican attempts to repeal healthcare. Do I expect people like them to be reliably Democratic voters? Probably not. But there’s obviously a lot that can be done around the margins.
It’s worth stressing, again just how cartoonishly low the expectations for middle America are, and it’s worth remembering that as much as globalization and economic trends have devalued any given level of education, the requirements of being a fairly cosmopolitan person have never been lower. Living in a Podunk town towns aren’t shut off from the rest of the world, nor does it mean being totally shut off from any but the most folksy culture. If you drive around upstate North Carolina nowadays, you’ll probably see a lot of Korean Churches and nice historical downtowns, obviously maintained by a very active arts council. Green tea, which Candy Crowley once used as evidence of John Kerry’s out of touch elitism, goes for about a dollar a box at pretty much any supermarket nowadays. Hell, one of the few people I’ve met who speaks Chinese since I’ve moved back to the US was a gas attendant working in rural Virginia. His high school offered classes, which isn’t too surprising when you consider it’s two thousand goddamn seventeen and languages classes aren’t some extravagance restricted to only the highest rungs of urban society.
Conclusions
The point of all this is to say that very few people actually fit in this picture of the white working class we’ve been given. We naturally preclude ourselves from engaging them because we think we already know what they want to say/hear, and it’s diametrically opposed to what we’re offering.
Part of this comes from the common line of thinking in the 60s and 70s that, after a century of claiming to speak for the working class, left wing types really never really understood them. Conservatives, who love to imagine themselves to be representative of the norm, glommed on to the idea because it implied that they had their finger on the pulse of REAL Americans far more than those pointy head liberals. And since the REAL Americans in question were typically actually the sort of defecting white Democrats Republicans were actively courting at the time, that meant that suddenly everyone who worked a blue collar job or lived in flyover country was exactly as provincial, small minded, and decked out in red state ephemera as those particular voters were. Hence we get to the absurd point where we imagine that people like Elizabeth Warren, whose father was a janitor, or Barack Obama, who had a single mother, could never possibly understand working class concerns while the scions of wealthy elites families, like George W Bush or Donald Trump.
Democrats have largely internalized this view, in part because it flatters us. But we’re setting ourselves up to lose if we imagine that the white working class or middle America is automatically as parochial, jealous, and mean spirited as Republicans are. It inhibits our ability to understand and empathize with their plight, which is not only necessary for effectively appealing to them and or making policies that works for everybody. And by expecting so little from so many, we’re denying ourselves all sorts of opportunities.