The Politics of Losing

by Rory McVeigh

  So how does this translate to public policy? For a long time, scholars believed in “pluralism,” which sees the government responding to the demands of different groups in an open competition to influence legislators. Pluralists recognize that not all groups are equal in power and resources, but they believe that no single group is so powerful that it can consistently dominate the political process.16 Because the economic elite are a numerical minority, they must form coalitions if they want to influence politics. This means they will compromise, conceding issues to less powerful groups and giving even the resource-poor a voice.

  Some social scientists take issue with pluralist theory.17 Economic elites clearly benefit from disproportionate access to policy makers through campaign donations.18 They can also drive or derail growth through their decisions to invest or divest in an economy. Campaign promises to raise taxes on the rich or increase industrial regulations, for example, can make business owners nervous, and they may decide that now is perhaps not a good time to expand. When they withhold investment, politicians are on the hook for stagnation and unemployment—even if those proposed taxes and regulations may have helped.19

  Still, democracy somewhat constrains the economic elite. They need allies if they are to bring pressure to bear on politicians. Those who wish to control public policy must drum up favorable public opinion for their proposals.20 Even disadvantaged groups can, at times, check the interests of elites through organized collective resistance.21 In the 1960s, civil rights activists in the South targeted local businesses with boycotts and sit-ins. If they could disrupt profits, they thought, business leaders might pressure the government to give in to movement demands.22 And they did.

  While pluralists conceive of alliance formation among groups with different priorities, we argue that different political interests—not just class interests—are arranged in hierarchies. In these hierarchies, one group enjoys privileges not shared by others, and that group wants to preserve those privileges. Economic elites typically work to protect their interests in the American political system, not by forming voting alliances with just any group, but with those who enjoy other privileges. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Southern elite forged an alliance with poor white Southerners—those who lacked economic privilege but benefited from being white. Together they disfranchised black Southerners for decades, at least until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Or consider the Christian Right, which adopted the economic politics of the Republicans in exchange for a place to house their own social conservatism. The more these dimensions of privilege overlap, the more unified the party of the privileged will be. But when overlap is minimal, these alliances must be nurtured and, at times, renegotiated.

  Not all privileges are equal. Some white men in the United States, for example, may enjoy racial privilege even if they are poorer than the average African American. This does not mean that a hypothetical beneficiary of white privilege enjoys privilege in the broader sense. He may well have a hardscrabble life. It simply acknowledges that class is not the only basis of privilege that structures society.23 Police, for example, may view white men with less suspicion when they’re walking down the street.24 Recent audit studies also show that racial discrimination persists.25 Researchers sent fabricated applications to potential employers or landlords to determine whether the race of the applicant affected their chances. In one case, they found that applications from black candidates with degrees from elite universities received fewer responses from employers than did white candidates with the same degree—in fact, the black candidates from elite universities fared no better than the white candidates from less selective colleges.26

  In the same way, some religions have the privilege to dictate moral standards in America, while others do not. Conservative Protestants and Catholics can push policy effectively around abortion or contraception,27 while lobbying from Muslim Americans carries little weight. Not all demands made by privileged religious groups win out, of course. And these hierarchies are subject to change. Throughout much of American history, for example, Catholics enjoyed little privilege in the religious hierarchy, as the Protestant majority discriminated against them at every turn.

  To understand movements within parties—intraparty movements, as we call them—we must look at alliances among privileged constituencies and among nonprivileged constituencies, and how parties try to promote internal cohesion. When a party fails to satisfy a privileged group whose power is slipping away, this group might splinter off and fracture the party alliance.

  INTRAPARTY MOVEMENTS

  Political parties are strongest and most stable when their supporters are not under cross-pressures that could drive them to the opposing party. What has been at times referred to as interest consistency28—a capacity to reconcile one’s interests with the agenda of a single party—doesn’t come naturally. Party leaders work to bring constituencies together, and their capacity to do so is shaped by the historical times in which they operate and the issues that are contested. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt cobbled together a “New Deal” coalition of unlikely bedfellows, all the voting blocs who stood to gain most from progressive economic policies: the working-class, Catholics, African Americans, farmers, and the poor.

  These alliances can be tenuous, and changes in the structure of society can strain them when a party cannot address one group’s grievances except at the expense of others. When a party cannot or will not act on constituent grievances, that disaffection can build and find expression in a movement. The Tea Party rose in response to anticipated spending from a Democratic president elected in a deep recession, but they were equally frustrated by Republican legislators who, they believed, were complicit in extravagant government spending.29

  Like the 1920s Klan, Trump found a strategy that worked. He identified significant discontent in society and promised to address it through protectionist economic policies—all while signaling that he would prioritize the grievances of white, working-class Americans. In the nation as a whole, Trump’s reception was mixed. A core group of followers supported him zealously, and through them he won the Republican nomination. Traditional Republicans—who, while unenthusiastic about Trump, saw him as more likely than his Democratic opponent to advance their interests—supported him grudgingly. Others, mostly on the left, saw him as unstable, dangerous, demagogic, racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic, and they opposed him with unusual intensity.

  The Klan uprisings, like Trump’s victory, occurred during extraordinary economic and political shifts. Trump’s base emerged where significant portions of the population were losing their economic, political, and social purchasing power. In places like Monroe County, Michigan, they turned out strongly for Trump. While Barack Obama carried the county in 2008 and 2012, in 2016 Trump received 58 percent of the vote, compared to a meager 36 percent for Clinton. Monroe is just over 91 percent white, and manufacturing jobs, once the lifeblood of this county, have been in decline for several decades. Today those jobs provide only 19 percent of employment. Low-paid and part-time retail jobs have taken their place. In Monroe and counties like it, Trump’s promises to revive the manufacturing economy attracted not just some former Democratic voters but also made him the favorite in the Republican primaries.

  In chapter 4 we consider how lost economic power propelled Trump’s insurgency in the Republican Party. What economic conditions produced a pool of disgruntled voters who felt that neither party cared about them or their dying economies? And how did these conditions intersect with social relations? Would-be Trump voters had to be convinced that he understood their circumstances, and that meant tapping into cultural identities—and animosities.

  4

  ECONOMICS AND WHITE NATIONALISM

  “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “and it was an age of satire.”1

  “This was the generation whose girls dramatized themselves as flappers, the generation that
corrupted its elders and eventually overreached itself less through lack of morals than through lack of taste,” he wrote. “The whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of chorus girls.”2

  This was the Roaring Twenties. New wealth was flowing into American cities and bringing with it a cultural revolution that shed off the Victorian morals of the past. It was the time of bootleggers and jazz clubs, bathtub gin and raccoon coats, the automobile and the vacuum-tube radio. Mamie Smith was singing “Crazy Blues” on the phonograph, and Joan Crawford was dancing the Charleston all night in the pictures.

  But before the champagne coupes of the jazz age overflowed, the decade had begun with a general economic downturn. From 1920 to 1922, unemployment rose from around 5 percent to almost 12 percent. It was not until 1923 that the economy rebounded, and from that point on America’s gross national product grew at a respectable—but not superb—annual rate of 3.5 percent.3 In the midst of apparent prosperity, President Coolidge addressed the American Society of Newspaper Editors: “After all, the chief business of the American people,” he said, “is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing, and prospering in the world. The great majority of people will always find these are the moving impulses of our life.”4

  But the decadence of the twenties was confined to the coasts. Outside the city centers, the American dream of wealth and security seemed to be slipping away.

  The Klan was a movement that reacted to the national economic transformations that undercut the prosperity of many native-born white Protestant Americans—particularly those in the middle class. Here, we define the middle class broadly: everyone who was neither an elite industrialist nor an unskilled laborer. When historian Robert Alan Goldberg examined Klan membership rolls in Colorado, he found that less than 1 percent of the earliest Denver Klansmen were unskilled workers. The majority of them were in “nonmanual occupations”—professionals, shopkeepers, small-business owners. The proportion of unskilled workers rose slightly while the movement grew, as the Klan attempted to form a united bloc of native-born white Protestants, regardless of occupation. Although Goldberg discounted the role of class in the Klan’s rise, he also found that the only two groups underrepresented in the movement were the elite and unskilled workers.5 Historian Nancy MacLean observed the same pattern in her study of the Athens, Georgia, Klan, where the vast majority of Klansmen owned small businesses, or worked in skilled trades, managerial jobs, or low-level white-collar work, like clerking and sales.6 Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans described this constituency as the “embattled American farmer and artisan coordinated into a disciplined fighting force.”7

  Klansmen bemoaned what they saw as the decline of lowercase r republican ideals, a Jeffersonian vision that no longer guided the nation. The Klan felt the United States ought to be a nation of small proprietors, who work their own land or craft their own goods to sell in their own shops. They would not depend on an employer for their survival and could participate freely in democratic politics without coercion. And this way, as voters, they would act in the interests of the country rather than in the interests of a single social class.8

  It was no coincidence that the Klan was popular among this middle class. The economy was shifting, and those communities still clinging to “Jeffersonian ideals” faced harder times. Industrialized northeastern states had already integrated mass-production capitalism, but most of the rest of the nation had not. Large-scale manufacturing was expanding dramatically outside of the Northeast, encroaching on the livelihoods of small-scale proprietors. In towns like Muncie, Indiana—made famous by sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd in their classic study of “Middletown”—transitions from skilled to unskilled labor drew workers from the countryside, which starved rural towns of farm labor.9 At the same time, manufacturers pushed out skilled artisans, who could compete with neither the scale nor the volume of factories. By 1924, in Delaware County, Indiana, of which Muncie is the county seat, there were nearly five thousand Klan members—approximately a quarter of the adult population.10 Census figures show that the average value of farmland in the county dropped 44 percent in just a five-year span, from 1920 to 1925. At the same time, value added to manufacturing in the county (which measures the difference between the value of goods produced and the cost of materials used to produce them) more than doubled.

  The strength of the manufacturing economy meant that factories produced goods more efficiently, making it difficult for small-scale producers to cut a living. “Machine production is shifting traditional skills,” wrote the Lynds, “from the spoken word and the fingers of the master craftsman of the Middletown of the nineties [the 1890s] to cams and levers of the increasingly versatile machine. And in the modern machine production it is speed and endurance that are at a premium. A boy of nineteen may, after a few weeks of experience on a machine, turn out an amount of work greater than his father of forty-five.”11

  The spread of mass production manufacturing did not have to be proximate to hurt small businesses. A Fisk tire produced in New Bedford, Massachusetts, might well be seen on the roads of Midvale, Idaho. Goods made on the cheap through mass production were now available to consumers everywhere. Inexpensive and faster transportation and the expansion of chain retailers like Sears, Roebuck made life more convenient for consumers, but not for those producing competing goods, who would eventually turn to the Klan. A Klan lecturer in Athens argued that the expansion of retailers like Sears would “spell ruination” for Georgia’s independent merchants.12 The economy was changing everywhere, and the Klan gathered together those whom it excluded.

  Across the nation, the average number of workers per factory had been relatively stable since the turn of the twentieth century. But that number leapt from twenty-six to thirty-two in just a five-year span, from 1914 to 1919, in the years leading up to America’s involvement in World War I. Along with it, profits soared.13

  FIGURE 4.1 Average number of workers per manufacturing establishment, 1899–1919.

  Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1924.

  In the agricultural economy, crisis came on the heels of good times. During World War I, European nations imported goods from America when their own citizens were drafted to fight rather than farm. By the time America entered the war, exports to Europe had nearly tripled, from almost $1.5 billion in 1913 to just under $5 billion in 1917. By 1916, one half of exports to Europe appeared to be made up of “cotton, gunpowder, mineral oils, flour, brass bars and plates, horses, wheat, oats, corn, lard, hams and shoulders, bacon, and mules.”14 But then the armistice of November 1919 ended the war, and demand for American exports dropped off a cliff. By the time Klan recruiters set out across the country in the early 1920s, mining for discontent, the foreign markets had entirely collapsed.15

  The bottom fell out of what little demand for exports remained when the government instituted tariffs designed to protect American manufacturing interests. “The manipulators of our national government,” declared Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson, “have seen fit to erect high walls of tariff to protect our industrial interest, which were not justified, and while they have permitted the Federal Reserve Bank to become a tool in the hands of selfish and sordid men, the great agricultural districts of America have been sorely neglected, to a point where they have suffered almost beyond hope of repair.”16

  FIGURE 4.2 U.S. exports of crude and manufactured foodstuffs (in millions of dollars), 1899–1926.

  Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstracts of the United States, 1926, Table 477.

  It is difficult to assess, systematically, the extent to which Klansmen suffered more economic losses than other members of their communities who never joined the Klan. But the economic conditions were the brass bell against which Klan messages resonated. When historian Nancy MacLean examined the financial records of Klansmen, she found a “grim testimony to the toll the postwar recessio
n and economic reorganization took of them: nearly half suffered economic losses between 1918 and 1927.” And, “The better their starting position was, it seemed, the worse their losses.” A Klansman named Grady Thrasher, whose father owned a hardware store, Thrasher & Sons, watched his family assets in 1910 drop from $22,415—nearly half a million in today’s money—to just $4,000 by 1918.17

  Because occupation and class overlapped with race and culture, Klan leaders capitalized on economic discontent by framing it in terms of culture. This new industrial production was fed by the growing masses of unskilled workers. And where did these workers come from? For one, black Southerners were leaving for Northern factories. Klan leaders tried to hobble this migration by claiming to offer them protection from Southern violence.18 The Grand Titan of the Realm of Texas claimed that it was, in fact, the Klan that prevented the lynching of a black man “in [his] own city, many miles south of the Mason Dixon line.”19 Elsewhere, a Klan writer described how Southern landowners, facing labor shortages, were now happily recruiting black workers. The Klansman complained about “a bunch of good-for-nothing loafers” trying to drive the black workers away. In one case, he described, a black man was shot and killed outside of his house. The Klan not only turned the white perpetrator over to authorities, according to this Klansman, but also “paid the undertaker’s bill and mailed the receipt to the negro widow with a letter explaining that the Klan had nothing to do with the murder, and offering her assistance in the future.”20