The Politics of Losing

by Rory McVeigh

  WHITE NATIONALISM AND THE RISE OF TRUMP

  When Donald Trump won the presidency in November 2016, he received votes from millions of party-line Republicans. When we examine the proportion of the electorate who voted for Trump by county, we see that the vote for him was highly correlated with the vote for Republican nominee Mitt Romney in 2012. So why characterize his rise to power as a white nationalist insurgency? To understand why, remember the angst his candidacy caused for mainstream Republicans and the strong opposition within his own party before and even after he secured the nomination. When he defeated a crowded field of Republican rivals in the primaries, he drew the most support in states that were the least likely to have voted Republican in the last general election. In these primaries, he handily won many Republican strongholds, but he also dominated Democratic states like California, New York, and New Jersey.

  Trump broke with Republican principles on free trade and foreign policy. He said virtually nothing on the campaign trail about reining in government spending—a pillar of Republican orthodoxy—and instead promised to spend billions, even trillions, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure. He demonized his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, (and some of his Republican primary opponents) for their close ties to Wall Street and promised to “drain the swamp” by taking on entrenched special interests in Washington.

  FIGURE 2.1 Percent vote for Trump in 2016 Republican primaries and caucuses by state.

  By distinguishing himself from his Republican rivals, he attracted fervent support from many white voters across the country who felt ignored by other politicians. His slogan, “Make American Great Again,” resonated with them. It suggested he would fight for those who believed they were losing their country to racial, ethnic, and religious minorities; to women; to LGBTQ rights activists; and to a highly educated coastal “liberal elite.” They responded to his promises to return manufacturing jobs to America and instate economic policies that would “put America first.” Many Republican voters jumped on the bandwagon after he secured the Republican nomination and before the general election—or at least grudgingly voted for him rather than Clinton. But even without them, he ran roughshod over Republican primary opponents, pulled by voters who were deeply unsatisfied with the Republican—and Democratic—status quo.

  The climate that incubated the Trump constituency and the conditions that fostered the Ku Klux Klan are the same. The Klan emerged when enough of the population was on the losing end of significant economic transitions. For the post–Civil War Klan, the context was the dismantling of the slavery economy. For the 1960s Klan, it was the elimination of Jim Crow segregation. In the 1920s, a massive wave of immigration, the flood of Southern blacks to northern industrial cities, and women entering the labor force fueled the expansion of the new industrial economy. The towns disconnected from large-scale manufacturing did not fare well. And so came the Klan, which crafted an economic agenda that opposed concentrated capitalism and whose rhetoric played on the grievances and prejudices of native-born white Protestants.116

  America today is in the throes of a new economic restructuring. Globalization and technology have opened borders to the flow of capital and labor. Although many have benefited from this, many others have not. Low-skilled workers must compete with an ever-expanding global supply of labor, even as mechanization reduces the demand for that labor. The Great Recession that began in 2008 has widened the chasm between the winners and losers of globalization. The college-educated have benefitted most from the focused efforts to rebuild the economy after the financial crisis;117 those without college degrees, however, have been left behind. The jobs that once paid well and did not require college degrees have either been mechanized or offshored to countries where labor comes cheap.

  To appreciate Trump’s appeal to voters, consider the clustering of prosperity and poverty in the new economy. The high-paying jobs have moved where high proportions of college graduates live who can fill them. Typically, that means cities. Meanwhile, Americans in small towns struggle to make ends meet, often unemployed or underemployed. Low-paying retail jobs have moved into the vacuum left by manufacturing jobs.118 The Great Recession exacerbated the problem—Americans without college degrees lost more than 5.5 million jobs, and have regained only a sliver of those in the recovery.119 Much in the same way that the Klan targeted communities hurt by the economic shifts of emancipation, desegregation, and industrialization, Trump appealed to those on the losing end of the newly global economy.

  Despite seventy-five consecutive months of overall job growth in the lead-up to the presidential campaign, Trump spoke about a hidden crisis, a crisis that only he, an accomplished businessman, could fix. He blamed past administrations for the “job-killing” trade deals that hurt blue-collar Americans, and he promised to apply his business acumen to renegotiations—or else abandon them altogether. He promised to “build a big, beautiful wall” that would stem the tide of immigrants who, in the minds of some of his supporters, were stealing jobs from white Americans.

  “The country is going to hell in a hand basket,” said one Trump voter in Louisiana, “and we need a strong leader to get back on track.”120

  Each rise of the Klan coincided with the expansion of voting rights or a noticeable increase in eligible voters—a situation that compounded the economic troubles of native whites. New voters either opposed the political interests of Klan members or destabilized political alliances in a way that made political solutions to these grievances unpredictable at best. The Klan mobilized in part to reclaim political influence by increasing the demand for their votes (pledging the Klan bloc to candidates who backed their interests) or by limiting the supply of votes coming from other groups (by voter intimidation in the South in the 1960s, or by opposing new immigrants in the 1920s).

  On January 25, 2017, just days after his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order to strengthen border security along the U.S.-Mexico border, as he had promised on the campaign trail. Photo © Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images.

  Today, changes in the composition in the electorate have increased the political power of some social groups and decreased the power of others. The share of the electorate composed of non-Hispanic white voters has shrunk from around 85 percent in 1986 to 74 percent in 2016.121 Census estimates project that whites will be a numerical minority by 2044.122 For some time, these projections were fuel for conservatives stoking fear among white Americans. In his 2007 book, State of Emergency: The Third-World Invasion and Conquest of America, conservative author and one-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan wrote that by 2050 “there will be as many Hispanics here, 102 million, as there are Mexicans today in Mexico.”123 The electorate has become much younger, and now there are as many millennials eligible to vote as there are Baby Boomers.124 More voters are college-educated, women are turning out in higher numbers than men, and the proportion of nonreligious voters has exploded.125

  In the same way that the growing urban immigrant population in the 1920s eroded the political power of native-born whites poorly positioned to take part in the industrial economy, today demographic shifts have weakened the political sway of older, white, non-college-educated Americans. They believe that politicians ignore them, more concerned with attracting minority voters and enacting policies for the younger and better educated.

  Klan leaders capitalized on the conditions degrading the standing of their supporters. In each Klan resurgence, once-disadvantaged groups were advancing. Emancipation opened a host of opportunities to former slaves; the rise of parochial schools expanded education for predominantly Catholic immigrants in the 1920s; and school desegregation aimed to level the playing field for black children in the Jim Crow South. Native-born whites, who previously enjoyed these privileges all by themselves, saw these changes diluting their social status. So the Klan constructed narratives that depicted ascendant cultural groups—former slaves, Catholics, immigrants, Jews, or black Americans—as morally and culturally inferior. “The present
and recent flood of inferior foreigners,” they wrote, “has vastly increased our illiteracy, vitally lowered the health level and visibly menaced America by inheritable mental and moral deficiencies.”126

  “Our inner cities, African Americans, Hispanics are living in hell because it’s so dangerous,” Trump said during his debate with Clinton. “You walk down the street, you get shot.” And then to black voters: “You’re living in poverty. Your schools are no good. You have no jobs.”127

  3

  POWER AND POLITICAL ALIGNMENTS

  In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan appealed to the prejudices of native-born white Protestants by smearing Catholics and immigrants, whom they accused of stealing their economic and political dominance. The Klan paper, the Imperial Night-Hawk, claimed that “fifty thousand Mexicans have sneaked into the United States during the past few months and taken the jobs of Americans at wages on which a white man could not subsist. All of the Mexicans are low-type peons. They are all Catholics, and many of them are communists.”1

  Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans pointed out that the industrial factories that sabotaged the livelihoods of skilled manufacturers were manned mostly by Catholic European immigrants. He called for a complete halt to immigration, allowing time to gather “full knowledge of the foreign influx, the facts relative to our needs for rural and urban labor.” Before 1880, he argued, “ninety-five percent of our immigration was of the Nordic types—kindred, desirable, easily assimilable people.” Since 1910, on the other hand, the immigrant stream “was a Mississippi of inferior foreign elements, mostly utterly and eternally hopeless from the American point of view.”2 Compounding the problem, Catholics were turning out at the voting booth and involving themselves in political organizing.3

  The Klan’s framing strategy, therefore, was particularly effective: It spoke to a range of grievances of those who believed their political, economic, and social influence was in decline. If immigration would only stop, they believed, their problems would be solved.

  * * *

  When political scientists and sociologists use the term social movement, we might think of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, or the Tea Party. Protests, marches, and rallies—any organized challenge to government or corporations. But in 1977, sociologists John McCarthy and Mayer Zald put forward a more expansive definition. “A social movement,” they wrote, “is a set of opinions and beliefs in a population which represents preferences for changing some elements of the social structure.”4 This fits the case of the Klan, but it also applies to the forces that carried Donald Trump to the presidency. Throughout the campaign, opinion polls consistently showed that Trump voters were interested in a candidate who could bring about change, and he was elected even when those same polls indicated Hillary Clinton had a clear advantage in experience and expertise.5 In this chapter, we describe what we call power devaluation, a theory initially developed to explain right-wing movements like the Klan, but modified here to explain how movements like these can play out within political parties. When certain groups lose power, it can destabilize alliances inside political parties, making room for a candidate like Trump.

  Although McCarthy and Zald thought of social movements as sets of beliefs in a population, theories of social movements tend to focus on how groups organize to advance their goals, not what leads people to adopt the beliefs that define movements. These theories argue that social movements don’t typically emerge in response to new grievances or worsening conditions. Instead, they surface when conditions are improving—when an oppressed group has more resources to bring to the fight, and when political obstacles are less daunting.6 The civil rights movement became most formidable once the black church, black colleges, and the NAACP had grown strong enough to carry their activism.7

  But these theories don’t fit the conservative movements that organize to preserve, restore, or expand privileges that they already enjoy.8 In these cases, movements react to threats to their privileges rather than to circumstances that boost their ability to organize. To understand these movements, the trick is to identify what kinds of threats provoke a collective response—and when.

  POWER DEVALUATION

  When power is threatened, the powerful may react collectively.9 Our theory here lays out an intuitive logic to predict when, where, and for whom changes in society are threatening. Sociologists say that people engage with three distinct markets of exchange—markets of economics, politics, and social status. We can understand a sort of “purchasing power” in these markets through the basic principles of supply and demand. Power is lost when the demand for what members of a group offer decreases, or when the supply increases.

  In a political market, people exchange votes and campaign donations for political representation or patronage. To the extent that elected officials depend on a group’s votes to stay in office, there is a high demand for those votes and, therefore, the group has some measure of political power. But voters lose power when politicians no longer need their votes and contributions (a decrease in demand) or if other voting blocs are growing quickly (an increase in the supply). On the demand side, publicly funded elections could eliminate a candidate’s ability to take contributions from wealthy donors, severely undermining the political power of those donors. On the supply side, restoring full voting rights to convicted felons would increase the overall supply of voters, diminishing the power of their political opposites, like law-and-order Republicans.

  In an economic exchange market, where people exchange labor for wages and money for goods and services, there is a more obvious form of purchasing power. With the advent of the computer, the demand for typewriter manufacturers plummeted. On the supply side, if you worked on a factory floor, how could you bargain for a pay raise when each year millions of teenagers who could immediately replace you graduate from high school?

  There are also social exchanges, which we use to distinguish ourselves from others. Within this status market, people exchange cultural traits, knowledge, and behaviors for esteem. Someone loses his status when his traits become more common or less appreciated.10 For example, if his status came from driving a Lamborghini, that status would decline if Lamborghinis suddenly cost five hundred dollars. Now almost everybody who wants one has one. On the demand side, a new green car technology could make Lamborghinis obsolete and tacky in the way that Hummers have become, abruptly dropping the esteem of owning such a gas-guzzler.

  In terms of race, whiteness would bring little esteem in a society where everyone else is white. On the demand side, whites may resent when the racial composition of their community changes. Take today’s anti-immigrant activist John Tanton, who writes, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”11

  Or Ann Coulter, who in her book, Adios America, writes, “It can be difficult to discuss America’s immigration policies when it’s considered racist merely to say, ‘We liked America the way it was.’”12 Some white Americans fear that their culture is no longer dominant, and what used to attract esteem no longer does.

  In later chapters, we unpack these three forms of lost power and compare the Klan of the 1920s to the movement that fostered Trump. For now, we simply underscore that structural changes in society—whether demographic changes, economic restructuring, changes to political rules and procedures, or technology—can diminish power by affecting supply and demand in these markets. Those who find themselves on the losing end are often susceptible to remedies that call for restricting supply or stimulating demand. This was not lost on Klan leaders like Hiram Evans and D.C. Stephenson, and neither was it lost on Donald Trump.

  POLITICAL ALLIANCES AND MULTIDIMENSIONAL PRIVILEGE

  Political parties promote alliances among different constituencies that, for different reasons, believe the party can best represent their interests. To cohere their party, leaders must convince supporters that their particular interests match the interests of other con
stituents.13 Psychologist Angus Campbell argues that this party identification is the lens through which voters view and interpret all issues.14 A sense that the party agenda reflects an overarching worldview in opposition to the worldview of the opposing party creates partisan loyalty and spurs voter turnout and campaign contributions. We see this today, as Republicans and Democrats have become so polarized they can hardly find a square inch of common ground. Before polarization, voters faced “cross-pressures,” meaning that they might favor one party’s positions on one set of issues but agree with the other party on different issues, and this made them more prone to compromise.15 A voter who sided with Republicans for their race politics, but who felt the Democrats better represented his economic interests, would be less loyal to either party. To shore up loyalty, therefore, parties had to persuade voters that there are no real issue trade-offs. Republicans argue that conservative economic policies fit naturally with conservative social policies, as each prizes personal accountability and self-restraint. Democrats, on the other hand, argue for the equal treatment of all groups in social issues, which they present as a close cousin of economic equality.