Race and Class and What Happened in 2016 - The New York Times - 0 views
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race class 2016 election working class strategy gop Democratic party Crisis
shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 17
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I am obliged to argue once again that the most powerful liberal story about 2016, in which race overshadows everything and white nationalism explains the entire Trumpian universe, is an exaggeration of a partial truth.
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Adam Serwer’s essay in The Atlantic, “The Nationalist’s Delusion,” which has been praised to the skies by almost every liberal in my Twitter feed, and which comes on the heels of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s similarly themed Atlantic essay, “The First White President,”
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Both essays present themselves as arguing against a reductionist conventional wisdom that supposedly dismisses the role of race in Trump’s ascent; both tend toward a fatal reductionism in response, one that insists that hard truth telling matters more than hopeful politicking, but tells only enough of the truth to breed racial pessimism or despair.
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In his grim analysis Serwer insists that he’s just following the data, which point away from any economic explanation for the events of 2016. The allegedly populist Trump did not actually win large majorities among the lower middle class and poor, Serwer notes; rather, Trump won white voters of all income levels, and did best among what in the European context we would call the white petite-bourgeoisie, the group most likely to be threatened by a kind of psychological status competition from minorities.
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Thus Trump’s was not really a populist or “working-class coalition,” Serwer concludes, but a “nationalist one,” rooted in white panic over demographic change, with little to do with any genuine paycheck-to-paycheck anxiety or grim opioids-and-family-breakdown socioeconomic trends.
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He’s right that Trump’s “birtherism,” with its xenophobic cocktail, was crucial to building his initial support — which perhaps explains why it lurks in the president’s paranoid imagination to this day. He’s right that Trump’s campaign trafficked in casual bigotry, played footsie with legit white supremacists, and stoked white suspicion of minorities. He’s right that Trump’s supporters tolerated this noxiousness even if they did not endorse or embrace it. He’s right that the obvious mind-meld Trump has achieved with a part of the Republican coalition should tell conservatives something depressing about the role that white identity politics has played in their movement all along.
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But we will never escape from purgatory until these points are treated as complements to the role that other forces played in Trump’s success, not as substitutes that somehow make the “economic anxiety” or “anti-establishment” analyses of Trumpism into racism-denying crocks.
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Serwer is correct that Trumpian populism did not magically turn the Republican Party into a pan-ethnic party of the poor and working class. But to the extent that Trump did change the Republican coalition, he changed its class composition, not its racial composition. He actually won a smaller share of the white vote than Mitt Romney overall, the same rough percentage of black and Hispanic voters — and far more voters without a college degree
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This, along with Hillary Clinton’s bleeding support to third-party candidates, was the important electoral change between 2012 and 2016. Trump’s general-election coalition as a whole wasn’t a working-class coalition, but his most visible effect on American politics, in both the primary and the general election, was an effect on working-class voters
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No doubt that swing was racially mediated in some of the ways that Serwer suggests. But the swing also happened during a campaign in which Trump explicitly and consistently tried to move the Republican Party’s economic agenda toward the center or even toward the left — abjuring entitlement cuts, channeling Bernie Sanders on trade, promising a splurge of infrastructure spending, pledging to replace Obamacare with an even better coverage guarantee and more
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when a candidate makes many more populist promises than is usual for a Republican, and then wins more working-class votes than is usual, the straightforward explanation — that the promises actually resonated with voters — probably contains a lot of truth.
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Since entering the White House, Trump has mostly dropped his campaign populism and pursued conventional Republican policy goals (ineffectively in legislation, effectively in judicial appointments), while relying on tribal and racial and culture-war appeals to hold his base.
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This combination has enabled him to maintain a core of partisan support, which proves, again and alas, that large parts of the conservative coalition either tolerate white-identitarian forays for the sake of other ends (pro-life or pro-corporate tax cuts, depending) or else simply prefer identitarian nationalism to higher-minded forms of conservatism.
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his awful approval ratings in the midst of the best growth since the Clinton era strongly suggest that many of Trump’s supporters were hoping for something else from him besides just white identity politics and a repudiation of the first black president.
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The point of belaboring all of this is not to discourage racial analysis of Trump and his supporters, but to discourage racial reductionism — the idea that in analyzing American politics we have to choose between claiming that all Trump voters are entirely innocent of racism and damning them all as white nationalists
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“Nowhere did Clinton vow to use the power of the state to punish the constituencies voting for Trump,” Serwer writes at one point, while discussing the Democratic nominee’s famous references to the “irredeemable” and “deplorable.” But of course the entire drift of cultural liberalism in the West of late has been to use taxes and mandates and regulations and speech restrictions against groups that they deem bigoted and backward. It’s increasingly common for liberals to assume that the irredeemable don’t qualify for certain religious liberties and the deplorable don’t deserve the fullness of free speech
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Acknowledging this complexity is not the abdication of moral judgment that many liberals seem to think. Rather it’s the beginning of political wisdom, because it makes it possible to discern what are, I think, fairly obvious paths out of our present predicament.
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The path for conservatism is to do roughly the opposite of what the party in Washington is presently doing — to adapt to the experience of Trumpism by moving to the center on economics, as he did in the campaign, while rejecting his white-identitarian appeals.
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The path for liberalism is to treat Trump’s white working-class supporters as persuadable rather than deplorable, and to marry the economic critique that the present G.O.P. non-agenda deserves to a diminished absolutism on social issues where the Democrats have marched left faster than the country.