Social-class divisions Trump race-and-gender group identity

TV’s guru commentators are perplexed that the pollsters could have been so wrong; that so many “Hispanics” and black men and even white women could vote for Donald Trump; that so many of Trump's supporters vote against their own economic self-interest; and more.

They seem not to recognize what the Trump phenomenon is.

Trump has no personal following, no followers because of the human that he is. He is a successful populist, mobilizing a sizable social sector of frustrated, socially left-behind people by pressing the right emotional and cultural buttons, whose influence swamps facts and rationality, as is quite commonly the case with human beings.

Populists are in essence confidence tricksters, like psychic mediums, some financial tipsters, stage magicians, a variety of shamans, and others, whose success hinges on misdirection: they are up to one thing — personal power and gratification — while making people believe that they want to better the lot of their supporters. So a psychologically damaged [1] pseudo-billionaire, pseudo-business-genius who doesn’t pay his bills and has declared bankruptcy several times hit the right buttons with economically and culturally deprived and frustrated people, fooling them into imagining that he is their savior.

 History offers ample examples of the phenomenon: not only the often-mentioned Hitler and Mussolini, but also more recently Berlusconi in Italy, or perhaps Bolsonaro in Brazil. There had been in the past a few not-very-successful American populists, say Huey Long or George Wallace.

Successful populists are icons or symbols: They can lie, cheat, rape, commit any misdeeds that other people would be condemned for, without losing their supporters; because they are not being followed for what they are as actual human beings, they are supported because they represent an outlet for intense frustration that has typically built up over a long time. Germany after World War I, for example, had little to offer most people other than poverty, uncertainty, lack of opportunity.

All the plain assertions in the following are generalizations valid only to different degrees, expressing probabilities and tendencies rather than certainties. Nevertheless they suffice to explain what TV’s “analysts” have so far claimed not to understand.

The Trump phenomenon is owing largely to two strands of common confusion:

1.     Failure to recognize that our society consists nowadays, broadly speaking, of two social classes, the haves and the have-nots.

2.     Preoccupation of the Democratic Party with group identity and group differences while neglecting the blue-collar workers wo used to be their main base.

Batya Ungar-Sargon has described cogently how the United States became divided into social classes [2, 3]. One class is characterized by college education, white-collar occupations, and cultural elitism. The second (in both senses) class is characterized by lack of college education, blue-collar occupations, and plebeian (or redneck) culture. Just to illustrate that this division is not a figment of imagination nor too harshly described, recall Barack Obama's public reference to “people who cling to their Bibles and guns”; and Hillary Clinton's use of the term “a bunch of deplorables”.

The well-intentioned GI Bill following World War II brought to college a considerable proportion of people who would otherwise have gone into a blue-collar trade. Over time, there developed a general societal belief that a lack of college education is somehow a mark of inferiority. Only occasionally is the absurd falsity of that notion commented on in “the public square”.

Part of the confusion is the oft-quoted supposed fact that lifetime earnings are much greater for the college-educated than for those without a college education. But that was true only in the past, when the proportion of the population with a college degree was much smaller than now. Moreover, the increase in numbers of people with college degrees was not accompanied by any proportional increased demand by employers for such qualifications. Now that college education is not uncommon, earnings of the college-educated are not necessarily better than those of others. In particular, skilled trades people —  electricians, carpenters, plumbers, computer technicians — can earn more than many people in white-collar occupations; and those vocations have the additional benefits that work can be found almost everywhere; and that it is not difficult to freelance or to found one's own establishment.

The mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid!”, needs to be supplemented by the recognition that “the economy” is not the same for everyone. Financial analyst Steve Rattner presented a number of data charts on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” (7th November) showing how those earning in the bottom half of the national economy have been dropping further and further behind over the last half-century or so, while those in the upper half have been doing better and better. The traditional American Dream of children doing better than their parents has applied increasingly only to the “haves”, whereas in the bottom half, children have actually been doing progressively worse than their parents, not only in income but also in such assets as home ownership. Rattner also showed that blue-collar earnings during the Biden administration were in fact worse than they had been during Trump’s term. Furthermore, income inequality has increased substantially for the “Millennial” generation.

Trump was running against a Democratic Party that was making much of how the economy was exceeding all expectations, nationally and internationally. But that has been true only for those for whom the post-COVID inflation was an annoyance, while for the bulk of Trump supporters, the economy had not recovered at all from the increased costs of food, gas, and housing. In the lower half of “the economy”, it was perfectly natural to vote for Trump on economic grounds.

Moreover, the Democrats had long abandoned the blue-collar sector, allowing unionization to wither away and helping to create the Rust Belt through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); adding insult to the injury of the latter by boasting of its benefits for workers in other countries whose wages were supposed to rise to become comparable to American standards — the very opposite of what happened, which ordinary common sense or rudimentary understanding of commerce and capitalism  would already have known.

America's second-class citizens were asked to vote for a Democratic Party dominated by college-educated, white-collar elitists who have been mis-educated as academe began in the 1980s to succumb to political correctness [4], which has become sheer “wokeness” as the DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) lunatics took over the asylum [5].

The Democratic Party has become preoccupied with a supposedly “existential threat” of climate change, and the need to achieve gender and racial equity and inclusion. But any threat from climate change is hardly high priority for people hurt by the costs of essentials; and the biased mantras for “equity” ignore the obvious fact that preference for everyone who is an “A” is exactly the same as discriminating against everyone who is not an “A”. Preferences for women and POCs (People of Color) is the same as discriminating against men, especially Caucasians and Asians. What a surprise, that men voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Whether or not the not-preferenced have been substantially or actually damaged is irrelevant: they are being plainly told that they are less important, less worthy of being attended to, than others..

The aim of universal “equity and inclusion” has been pursued forcefully for decades even after all laws and official barriers to equity and inclusion had long disappeared. As many insightful observers have pointed out for several decades, to continue to call for “affirmative actions” implies the demeaning belief that women and “people of color” need a helping hand because they cannot effectively compete through their own efforts. How should an “Hispanic” react to being asked continually to specify supposed racial ancestry instead of being treated just like any other American citizen? On the telephone to government agencies or large companies, to be always offered the opportunity to communicate in Spanish, as though they had insufficient command of American English —- even if they happen to be not particularly fluent in Spanish.

The commentator class cannot understand why 45% of “Hispanics” and an appreciable percentage of black citizens could vote for Trump. The obvious answer is, “It's the economic class, stupid!”. Increasing percentages of women and “people of color”  have moved from second-class to upper class. It is not often enough recalled that Martin Luther King had begun to point out that he had already seen the Promised Land, that the struggle was now increasingly an economic one.

That the Democratic Party must shed its extreme Left of “political correctness” and “wokeness” has long been recognized by such experienced insiders as James Carville. The analogy to Britain is pointed out in a leading newspaper [6]. Batya Ungar-Sargon [3, 4] has described the situation in the USA, and it’s a pity that her books have not (yet?) been widely reviewed [4].

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[1]    Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, Simon & Schuster, 2020

[2]    Bad News: How woke media is undermining democracy
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/bad-news-how-woke-media-is-undermining

[3]    Speak truth to power and be ignored, not heard, suppressed:  Two books by Batya Ungar-Sargon
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/speak-truth-to-power-and-be-ignored)

[4]    For descriptions of politically correct absurdities, see the newsletter (Virginia Scholar) I edited:
https://web.archive.org/web/20131030115950/http://fbox.vt.edu/faculty/aaup/index4.html

[5]    Many e-mails from individuals at my university specify in the signature the proper pronoun to use about that person, and an acknowledgment of living and working on land once belonging to some supposedly indigenous tribe.
      At the same time, much of elite academe ignores the potential rights of one indigenous group, those of “Palestine”, all of which land had been peopled by Israelites, Hebrews, Jews, many centuries before Islam even existed and by more than a millennium before the Ottoman Arabs colonized it.

[6]    Allister Heath, “Trump’s triumph is a disaster for Starmer and the self-regarding, virtue-signaling elites: This resounding triumph is total repudiation of the Left’s brand of politics – and cataclysmic for Labour”, 6 November 2024;
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/06/trump-has-just-handed-smug-global-elites-their-worst-defeat