But the study concludes no such thing: Trump support, it found, was strongest amongst staunch conservatives, blue-collar workers and veterans’ families. Trump voters were likely to live in white enclaves, and in places with high white middle-aged mortality rate and low intergenerational mobility. Rothwell’s study, aside from its much-touted finding about the relationship between Trump support and manufacturing jobs — which says less than it may seem to at first blush — therefore lends credence to the argument Matthews and company are eager to reject: Many Trump voters have economic problems that they wrongfully interpret through the lens of xenophobia and racism.
Liberal commentators, overly eager to dismiss the notion that bigotry emerges within class and economic contexts, are ignoring the evidence — such as the fact that Trump and his supporters have been explicit about their economic populism, including their criticism of free trade. In doing so, liberals absolve the Democratic Party’s Clinton-era mainstream for its embrace of immiserating economic policies, and thereby playing a role in Trump’s rise. Democrats should not get off the hook so easily. [...]
If there is no economic context, and Trump’s supporters are just mired in primordial racism, then they are forever lost in the morass of right-wing politics. This bolsters the vision of the Democratic Party as comprising an alliance of affluent whites and people of color with a political agenda of multicultural neoliberalism, where economic reforms can be limited to improved educational options and after-tax redistribution. If Trump voters are just “idiots” appealed to “not at a low intellectual level but at a sub-intellectual level” (as Jonathan Chait has put it) then progressives can forget about the angry white guys.
The Bernie Sanders campaign, however, held out another possible future: a multiracial working-class movement with socialist politics, seeking a fundamental reordering of power relations. That Sanders did so well in many white working-class regions where Trump also won big, like West Virginia, made such a strategy seem feasible for the first time in decades, if not longer. This conclusion is bad news for both parties’ establishments and the interests they represent. It’s difficult to believe that it was exclusively the racism or sexism of Democratic primary voters in poor white states that motivated them to support a self-described socialist who likes to cite Denmark as a model country.
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