The website fivethirtyeight.com examined what happened in Howard County, Iowa. Laura Hubka, navy veteran and ultrasound technician who chaired the county’s Democratic Party and knocked on doors for Hillary, shared her perspective on why Democratic voters switched to Trump. “We’re a blue-collar town. People who were longtime supporters didn’t want to hear what we had to say anymore.” As for Hillary, “she was an elitist, was what I kept hearing.”
Holly Rasmussen, an Obama voter, admitted she ended up voting for Trump “just to shake up Washington, to be honest. We’ve been in a rut for so long. People here don’t want to be multi-gazillionaires. They just want to get paid a decent wage.”
Before casting her ballot, Rasmussen went to see a movie that exposed the history of the Democratic Party. Quoting fivethirtyeight.com, “The week before the election, emboldened Trump supporters took out a full-page newspaper ad and rented out the historic, city-owned Cresto Theatre and Opera House—a long-ago vaudeville haunt—for screenings of conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary Hillary’s America and the Benghazi film 13 Hours. To Democrats’ dismay, the theater was packed.”12
I may have helped, but in the end it was Trump’s message that got through. A few weeks after the election, CNN’s Van Jones interviewed Scott Seitz of Trumbull County, Ohio, another lifelong Democrat and Obama voter who flipped to Trump. “We put Democrats in office,” he said, and they
turned around and forgot completely about us . . . We have a ton of mills that have seemed to close up and not only did they close up, but they’ve been torn down and removed. They look like ghost towns . . . We truly want to make America better . . . We hope that the bleeding can actually stop in our area.
. . .When we get a downturn in the economy, we need to still feed our families. And when they talk about the Second Amendment or taking our guns away, that’s exactly what we think of, all the time that we have hunting together and as a family, and we go out and we harvest and we put food in the freezer.13
Do these sound like people who are trying to force women out of the workforce, or to reestablish segregation and state-sponsored discrimination, or to send immigrants like me home? These may be Democrats, but they are not those types of Democrats. Outraged at the defection of these voters to Trump, progressives have concocted a narrative designed to discredit them, but it is maliciously false, just another big lie.
WHAT THE HILLBILLIES FIGURED OUT
We have so far an indication of why working-class Obama voters pivoted to Trump. But we need to probe deeper, because we also have to answer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ question: why didn’t the white working class following the black working class and the Hispanic working class in opting for the Democratic plantation? In other words, what differentiates the white workers from their black and Latino counterparts?
Let’s begin with a bit of white history. I realize this sounds strange, because we are accustomed to hearing about black history and Hispanic history. But the white working class has a history too, albeit one that is typically ignored in progressive scholarship. Progressives won’t tell you, for example, that historically whites around the world have been enslaved in numbers comparable to blacks.
The Roman slaves, for example, were mostly whites, and over the centuries several million whites were captured and enslaved by the various Muslim dynasties, from the Abbasid to the Ottoman. Indeed the very term “slave” derives from the Latin word for “Slav,” a reference to the large number of white slaves captured from that region of Central Europe.14
Nancy Isenberg’s recent book White Trash offers a useful account of the history of white workers in America. Their ancestors, she points out, were the dregs of Europe, cast off to clean out the continent and also to do the dirty work that needed to be done in the new world. These early settlers, in Isenberg’s account, included “roguish highwaymen, mean vagrants, Irish rebels, known whores and an assortment of convicts” including an English waif named Bess Armstrong, dispatched to Virginia for stealing two spoons.15
Although not slaves themselves, Isenberg portrays the “crackers” and “squatters” of Virginia and North Carolina as very much in the same low category. In theory, indentured servants were captives merely for a fixed period, usually between four to nine years, most typically seven. But during this period, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh write in White Cargo, masters had “more or less total control over their destiny.”16 And servants soon discovered that for relatively minor offenses, including attempts to run away, their terms could be extended.
In fact, planters employed these lowly whites to work in gangs alongside slaves, with the same overseer driving the whole operation, with the authority to flog the whites no less than the blacks. “The lives of white workers,” historian David Brion Davis writes, “were not significantly different from the lives of most slaves.”17 Sometimes planters gave the riskiest tasks to the whites, knowing that if they were injured or killed there would be no price to pay. The whites were wage laborers after all, while the slaves cost close to a thousand dollars apiece in the early to mid-nineteenth century.
The term “white trash” made its first appearance in print in this period, in 1831. But here Isenberg goes astray because she focuses too narrowly on the poor whites of the South, flaying them for their racist condescension toward black slaves without calling out the Democratic Party that cultivated these sentiments for political gain. Isenberg implies that today’s Trump voters are the descendants of those racist white Southerners.
This, however, is clearly wrong. The white working voters that delivered the election to Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are obviously descended from ancestors who fought on the Union side in the Civil War. Even the poorest of poor whites in the South, the Appalachians, were mostly independent-minded folk who resisted the demand for secession. When the white hillbillies of Virginia refused to join the Confederacy, Lincoln carved out a new state for them, West Virginia, which remained in the union.
So much for history. Fast forward now to the second half of the twentieth century. In the postwar period, the manufacturing boom across America—especially in the Northeast and Midwest—raised the standard of living of the white working class to the point where a blue-collar plumber or electrician had the same middle-class amenities as his college-educated white counterpart. The third quarter of the twentieth century was, one might say, the golden age of the white working class.
Not that this group experienced the meteoric rise in earnings that college-educated whites saw, especially in professions like medicine, finance, business, law and later technology. But working-class whites could expect to see a gradual improvement in wages from a couple of dollars an hour in the early 1950s to $20 an hour or more in the 1970s. Adjusted for inflation, this represents a doubling of real annual income for working-class households. The annual increases may have been small, but at least the jobs were stable and the trajectory was upward.
With a comfortable and steady wage, whites built working-class communities where young people expected to follow in the path of their parents. Their lives were not defined by moving up and moving out, nor by the need for creative individual self-expression. Rather, these people found solace in staying put, devoting themselves to providing for their families, and earning respect not only through their skilled trades but also through involvement in the civic life of the community, becoming, say, volunteer firemen or Little League coaches.
Today, many of those working-class communities have been obliterated. The high-paying jobs are gone, replaced by service jobs that don’t pay enough to comfortably provide for a family. Young people can no longer do what their parents did; they can stay, with much more dismal prospects, or they can leave. The disappearance of jobs doesn’t merely reflect a contraction of opportunity; rather, it reflects a breakdown of community. Even the family and civic associations that contributed to a decent life for these people have f
rayed and corroded.
In other words, the economic catastrophe of the white working class is now accompanied by a cultural catastrophe. Some of the same cultural pathologies that were once characteristic of black America are now also part of white America. In the mid-sixties, for example, Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a famous report, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action, declared a national crisis over the fact that the black illegitimacy rate was approaching 25 percent. But today the white illegitimacy rate is over 25 percent.
Just as crack has ravaged the black inner city, white communities have been devastated by a drug and alcohol epidemic that seems to have affected adults and young people alike. White working-class areas have seen rising rates of depression, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide. So serious are these problems that, according to a study by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, working-class whites who at the turn of the century had a mortality rate 30 percent lower than blacks now have a mortality rate 30 percent higher than blacks.
I make this comparison not to make a racial point; on the contrary, one can infer from these pathologies and their prevalence in white, black and Latino communities that there is nothing racial about them; rather, they are the product of dwindling prospects and the cultural dysfunction that often comes in their wake. Rather, my point is simply that the white working class now has the highest rate of premature deaths in the country. Case and Deaton chillingly term these “deaths of despair.”18
J. D. Vance’s recent book Hillbilly Elegies gives as good an account as can be given of what it actually feels like to grow up in these ravaged communities. Vance’s own mother is addicted to drugs and moves serially from one marriage to another—five at last count—which is why he was raised by his grandparents, whom he calls, hillbilly style, Moomaw and Papaw. Moomaw and Papaw have their own problems, Papaw being known to get rip-roaring drunk and deliver some heavy blows to his wife and Moomaw, in retaliation, to set the old man on fire while he is asleep.
Yet young Vance, somehow, manages to get out of all this insanity, to get a decent education, eventually to make his way to Yale Law School and to his current job at an investment firm in San Francisco, not to mention his part-time vocation as a successful writer. How did he do it? He attributes part of his success to his crazy-ass grandparents, who for all their eccentricities loved him unconditionally, and to the Marine Corps, which taught him to stop blaming his failures on society and to start taking responsibility like a man.
When Vance traveled abroad on a Marine Corps mission, he encountered children in Third World countries who didn’t have a fraction of what he did. He handed one such kid an eraser—just an eraser—and witnessed the child respond as though he had been handed the moon. This episode, and others like it, taught Vance not to see himself as a victim but rather, as he puts it, “one lucky son of a bitch.” Vance learned to appreciate not his white privilege but rather his American privilege, his good fortune to be born and raised in the United States of America.19
LIKE VOTING FOR HIS DAD
What can we conclude from all this? First, I conclude that while the white working class is still not in as bad shape as the black and Hispanic working class, its travails are no less hard to bear because they represent a sharp reversal of fortune. These white working-class communities once prospered, but now they are in ruins. Suffering is always harder to bear when it represents a steep fall from the way things used to be. The white working class seems to be the first generation in postwar American history to experience downward mobility in this way.
At the same time, it has not escaped the notice of the white working class that the Democratic Party reserves all its attention and sympathy for black and Latino suffering, and none for white suffering. On the contrary, progressive Democrats portray poor whites as racists who refuse to recognize their ongoing white privilege. Many working-class whites are hostile to Democrats not because they are racists but because they feel discriminated against, and in my opinion they are right to feel this way.
Second, the white working class remains as ornery, rebellious and independent-minded as it always was. It hasn’t given in; it hasn’t thrown in the towel. The Democrats have succeeded in convincing a large portion of working-class blacks and Latinos that they are better off on the urban plantation, living off the government and delivering their votes in exchange to the party that makes that happen. And the Democrats would like nothing better than to dump the white working class there as well.
Some working-class whites have of course fallen for this con, which is why they are Democrats. But a sufficiently large number of them continue to view the Democratic plantation as a degradation and an insult. They are down, but they are not yet out. They may not have jobs, but they still have a work ethic. Their families and communities may be hurting, but they still want to pull them together. They can see what has happened to their black and Latino counterparts on the plantation; their plight is if anything considerably worse.
So, tempted though they may be with the promise of free stuff, they are not about to become leeches off the state. Their stubborn attitude can be compared to the Spartans, whose land was sometimes called Laconia. As the story goes, when Philip of Macedon contemplated an invasion, he sent a message to the Spartan ephors that said, “If I take Laconia, I will kill all the men, rape all the women, and enslave all the children, leaving no stone on top of another.” To which the Spartans replied with a single word, “If.” And this is the attitude of white working-class rebels. They may be surrounded by all sorts of perils, but they are not done yet.
So why Trump? When they hear Trump pledge to make America great again, what they hear is that he cares about their plight and that he will try to make their communities whole. Let’s pause to consider the three forces that have combined to create this perfect storm of devastation across working-class America. These forces are: globalization, immigration, and technology. Jobs go abroad via one-sided trade agreements; immigrants come here and work for less; and technology puts machines to work doing what humans used to be required to do.
Now ask yourself: what has the Democratic Party done to address these problems? Answer: nothing. And the GOP record is not much better. Both parties, of course, are reconciled to modern technology. Both parties have in general welcomed globalization, allowing other countries to freely sell here even though they impose tariffs on American goods sold there. Finally, both parties have ignored the problem of illegal immigration, the Democrats largely because they want illegals on their plantation, the Republicans to appease their business constituency, which can get away with paying these people lower wages.
Trump, by contrast, refused to sign the Pacific trade treaty in its extant form. He vowed to reconsider the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). And to the consternation of many Republicans wedded to free-trade dogma, he imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum, 25 percent on steel, 10 percent on aluminum, exempting only Canada and Mexico, pending what Trump said was a fair rebalancing of existing trade agreements with those countries.
Trump also put the immigration issue on the map, forcing both parties to confront the impact of illegals on jobs, on crime and security and on the burden placed on scarce social services. Trump has even suggested the need to reform legal immigration, placing more emphasis on merit and on workers this country needs and less on the kind of “chain migration” that allows an immigrant like me to bring virtually limitless numbers of relatives to this country under the pretext of “family unification.”
In sum, while the Democrats do nothing and the Republicans do next to nothing, Trump at least promises to try. I have never heard Trump say he knows how to restore these working-class communities, but I have never seen any other politician address the issue with Trump’s forthrightness. And since his election Trump has been on it, cajoling and muscling corporations to bring their business and jobs back to the United States, and a number of them have.
Fiat Chrysler, for example, said it would shift production of heavy trucks from Mexico to a plant in Warren, Michigan. Toyota and Mazda announced the opening of a new $1.6 billion plant in Huntsville, Alabama, that will create 4,000 jobs over three years. Apple and ExxonMobil pledged to expand their operations in the United States. Trump’s solutions have been decried by Democrats and even some Republicans as trivial and ad hoc, but however inadequate they are, he is the only one attempting a cure.
Recall the stony-faced silence with which Democrats—notably the Black Caucus—greeted Trump’s announcement in his 2018 State of the Union that black unemployment rates had plummeted. Trump was right about this: the black unemployment rate dipped from 8.3 percent when Trump took office to 6.8 percent a year later.20 One might expect this to be welcome news to a group that purports to champion black welfare. Yet upon reflection there is no puzzle here. The Black Caucus is part of the overseer class. These guys don’t want people to leave the plantation.
The Trump voters certainly get it. I remember watching a working-class guy being interviewed on CNN shortly after the election. What he said was not what CNN wanted to hear. Trump, he said, reminded him of his own father, who had worked blue-collar jobs all his life, only to see that way of life essentially wiped out, not because he got lazy or stopped playing by the rules but because of decisions made by other people, by politicians and technocrats acting very much in their own self-interest.
“I don’t know if Trump will change anything,” the man said, breaking down and holding back tears, “and I don’t really care if he does. He is the only one who spoke to my dad’s broken heart. My dad is now gone, but when I voted for Trump, it was like voting for my dad.”
ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM
I believe I have vindicated Trump voters of the charge that they are all a bunch of white supremacists. Still, there are white supremacists in America. There are neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen and Skinheads—the very people who showed up in Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally. There are Richard Spencer and his cohorts performing Hitleresque Trump salutes. If fascism and racism are, as I have shown throughout this book, phenomena of the progressive Democrats, why are these guys on the right? How to explain their support for Trump? This is the elephant in the living room.
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