by Rory McVeigh
Women’s advocacy groups criticized what they called an unusually blatant misogynistic tone in the Trump campaign. “We’ve made progress on rape culture and on sexism in the last two years,” said Nita Chaudhary, a founder of the women’s group UltraViolet. “It feels like the Trump candidacy is undoing all of that.”78 Trump attacked Clinton on the campaign trail (referring to her as “Crooked Hillary”), and threatened her with imprisonment (“Lock Her Up”) for her handling of classified materials and e-mail accounts during her tenure as Secretary of State. He stirred up the Republican primary campaign when he criticized the physical appearance of his only female opponent, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. During an interview with Rolling Stone, he said, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president? I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?”79
The misogyny of the Trump campaign was clearly attractive to the men of contemporary white nationalist organizations, who link patriarchy to white supremacy.80 Some, like the Proud Boys, forefront sexism as part of their white nationalist agenda. They venerate the housewife and white Christianity. The organization’s co-founder, Gavin McInnes, once said, “Maybe the reason I’m sexist is because women are dumb.”81
But keep in mind that many voters who were not extremists like McInnes found ways to overlook Trump’s sexism. A Pennsylvania woman who supported Trump told a New York Times reporter, “What he said about women was disrespectful. But I don’t get offended like some people do. You get through the bad and you focus on the good. Basically these were our choices, and I felt he was the better choice, and I had to overlook the negatives and focus on the positives.”82
Industrial development in the late 1800s and early 1900s brought about an ideology of “separate spheres” for men and women, underpinned by the idea that the family unit functions best when men leave the home to work and women take care of the children and the household.83 The assumptions underlying this separate-spheres arrangement justified employers paying lower wages to women and informed welfare-state programs that considered men’s income to be the sole provider of family wages.84 This family structure, which we now call “traditional,” gives a man power over his wife and tethers the wife’s economic dependence to her husband.85
But the more recent decline in well-compensated jobs for men without college degrees didn’t just create economic hardship for families, it also undercut the status of men as breadwinners. Unable to secure stable, lucrative employment, men lose authority in their households, or may even be unable to get married in the first place. Meanwhile, women’s participation in the workforce, their education (women now outnumber men in college enrollment), and their earning capacity have steadily increased.86 Contrary to the traditional male-breadwinner household that predominated in twentieth-century America, now more and more households include a husband and wife who both work. Not surprisingly, these dual-earner households fare better than families that depend solely on the husband’s wages. Compare the median income gap from 1950 to 2012 between traditional households and those in which both husband and wife work. Although dual-income households have always had an advantage, figure 7.1 shows that since 1970 this mild gap has yawned into a chasm.
Given the strong tendency toward homophily in marriage—meaning people often marry those within close range of their own education and class background—there is good reason to suspect even more inequality. As women match and even exceed men in education, the very basis of selecting partners has shifted. As the Atlantic puts it—and as sociological research confirms—marriage “has slowly become an arrangement pairing similarly rich and educated people. Ambitious workaholics used to seek partners who were happy to take care of the house. Today, they’re more likely to seek another ambitious workaholic.”87
FIGURE 7.1 Median income in single-income and dual-income households, 1950–2012.
Source: The Atlantic analysis of Current Population Survey data. (c) 2013 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic Magazine. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
The traditional family, it seems, cannot thrive in the new economy. The difference in family structure not only manifests itself in standards of living but also in the status that comes from traditional roles of breadwinner and homemaker. To put this in the language of power loss, the supply of breadwinners has increased along with women’s advancements. The role of childrearing has changed, as high-earning couples rely on daycare and sometimes boarding schools. The status resentment of those in traditional family roles—or aspiring to them—explains why Trump cares so little about closing the gender gap in voting, and how he intensified support among his base. Even women in traditional family arrangements often strongly support policies that prioritize men’s income, since men’s income supports their families.88 As our statistical analysis of voting outcomes in chapter 5 shows, Trump fared especially well in communities with fewer college graduates and whose inhabitants embraced more traditional gender roles.
THE STATUS OF RELIGION
Status can come from adhering to a particular moral code.89 These status benefits are a function of the extent to which that code is regarded in the broader population and whether it sets societal standards. A devout Christian in China, for example, gains little esteem from her devotion in a country where Christianity is irrelevant or even outright oppressed. At the same time, a Mormon in Salt Lake City doesn’t stand out much. She gains little prestige from her religion if everyone else is equally devout.90 During the Reagan presidency, conservative Christians aligned with the Republican Party and pressured Republican politicians to commit themselves to protecting and advancing their values in the public sphere.91 Given the number of conservative Christians in the electorate, and their strong commitment to Republican politics, Republican candidates spend considerable time and energy courting them.
But Christian affiliation in the United States is declining. A Pew survey showed an eight-percentage-point decrease in self-identified Christians from just 2007 to 2014.92 The study indicates there is a strong replacement effect underway: Younger respondents are much less likely to identify with Christianity than older respondents. The results also reveal declines in Christian identification across all age cohorts. There has been an increase in those who identify with no religion, and a slight increase in those who identify with non-Christian faiths.
In spite of the disproportionate influence of conservative Christians on Republican politics, these religious voters sense their approaching political impotence. In the 2000 and 2004 elections, George W. Bush benefited tremendously from the support of the Religious Right. According to data from the National Election Pool exit poll, 78 percent of white evangelicals voted for Bush in 2004.93 Since then, however, conservative Christians have seen Republican presidential candidates pander to them in primary campaigns, only to pivot to the center in the general election. Early in their candidacies, relatively moderate Republicans Mitt Romney and John McCain both delivered speeches at Liberty University, a conservative Christian school, to reach out to evangelical voters, while careful not to say anything that would cause them problems in the general election.94 Democratic candidates, meanwhile, have rarely attempted to appeal to conservative Christian voters and have more often run directly in opposition to them on issues like LGBTQ rights and abortion.
Although Republicans have enjoyed great success in congressional and gubernatorial elections and have captured majorities in state legislatures, they lost the presidency in 2008 and 2012, and prospects looked bleak for conservative Christians heading into 2016. Neither of the Republican nominees who lost to Obama (Romney and McCain) were strong favorites of the Religious Right. And many conservative Christians were skeptical about President Obama’s Christianity. Some believed he was a Muslim. Others thought his faith was rooted in too radical an ideology, given his prior relationship with the controversial mini
ster Jeremiah Wright, a proponent of black liberation theology. Others simply questioned whether he really was a Christian at all, and opposed his liberal positions on a host of social issues.95 Conservative Christians worried that another Democratic presidency would tilt the Supreme Court liberal—the next president would likely have two or three opportunities to appoint replacements on a court where several of the justices had reached retirement age.
Given that conservative Christians had good reason to worry about their declining influence in politics, the emergence of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee seemed particularly surprising. In primary and caucus voting, Trump fared better than his Republican opponents in counties with higher proportions of evangelical Protestants, even though he seemed to invest less energy than many of his opponents in courting them. Trump’s closest competitor, Ted Cruz, clearly had the inside track on evangelical voters. His father was an evangelical preacher and served as a spiritual adviser on his son’s campaign. As Christianity Today expressed it, “Unlike any other candidate in the 2016 race, Cruz has mastered the rhetoric first introduced by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and others on the Religious Right.”96
So how did Trump win evangelicals? His own lifestyle had little hint of religious piety. The Religious Right sensed that their values and practices were in decline. The Christian share of the U.S. population was dropping, support for abortion remained steady, and there was a striking shift in acceptance of LGBTQ rights in the general population, exemplified in no small part by the legalization of same-sex marriage. Under such conditions, religious conservatives were particularly sensitive to the ridicule of their faith in popular culture, and they believed that colleges and universities had grown hostile to Christian values.97
Billboard in Asheville, North Carolina. Even in a crowded field of self-proclaimed conservative Christian Republican nominees, Trump won strong backing from conservative Christians. Photo courtesy of Ninian Reid.
Though Trump offered no pretense of devout Christianity, he stood apart from his Republican competitors in how he appealed to conservative Christians. These voters had watched basically every candidate over the years proudly oppose abortion. But few promised to outlaw it. Instead, they talked about nominating strict originalists to the Supreme Court. In this way, they appealed to abortion opponents who believed that the Roe v. Wade decision misinterpreted the Constitution, without actually promising that the justice’s views on abortion would be an acid test for appointment. On the campaign trail in 1999, George W. Bush responded to the issue of abortion and Supreme Court appointments: “There will be no litmus test except for whether or not the judges will strictly interpret the Constitution.”98 Trump, on the other hand, had no problem promising that he would appoint only Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe.
Since the 1980s, Republican nominees have connected with conservative Christians by supporting their positions on the separation of church and state. More recently, in response to passage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and legalization of same-sex marriage, religious conservatives have advocated “religious freedom” laws that would allegedly protect Christians from religious discrimination. They objected to violations of their religious conscience, like mandates to cover contraception in employee health insurance packages or to provide services like baking custom wedding cakes for same-sex couples. Opponents, however, have argued that they’re just seeking a legal right to discriminate. Many Republican politicians have sided with the Religious Right on these issues, but Trump’s public ridicule of political correctness sent a different message to conservative Christians. A 2016 poll administered by the Brookings Institution indicated that 77 percent of Trump supporters viewed discrimination against Christians in the United States as a major problem.99
Trump’s base felt their status decline—they felt ridicule from the media, the universities, and Hollywood for their “backward” religiosity. Demand for their moral code was vanishing. Even though Trump himself may not have been a fellow believer, he alone seemed willing to defend them—sometimes artlessly—from their cultural enemies, and they hoped he might deliver policies that would restore their status where his more cautious predecessors had failed.
* * *
Today, the Republican Party represents the economic interests of large corporations and the wealthiest Americans.100 While class consciousness and class conflict have been somewhat muted in the United States compared to other countries, sociologists like Seymour Martin Lipset nevertheless argue that class struggle plays out and is contained within the framework of America’s two-party system.101 While voters align with the two major parties for different reasons, social class still strongly predicts voting behavior in the United States.102 But wealthy voters are only a small portion of the electorate. About 5 percent of Americans earn more than $150,000 per year,103 and even though they turn out to vote at high rates (about 80 percent), they cannot carry an election alone.104 To compete in national political contests, the party had to form alliances across different constituencies to build a dependable base.
In the 1960s, the Republican Party took steps to woo white voters disaffected by the threats civil rights posed to white privilege. In the 1980s, the party solidified its support from conservative Christians who found Ronald Reagan’s brand of social conservatism appealing and who were particularly drawn to Republican opposition to abortion.
For many Republican voters, their interests align with the positions of their party. Many are relatively wealthy and prefer lower taxes. Many oppose state interventions in racial inequality, like affirmative action. For these voters, a political alliance along different axes of privilege poses no trouble, since there is substantial overlap in the privileges from which they benefit. But other Republican voters are not wealthy, and they would likely benefit from Democratic economic policies. Repealing the Affordable Care Act, for example, would have harmed Trump voters more than Clinton voters.105 In 2016, the majority of those enrolled in Obamacare marketplaces lived in Republican congressional districts.106 Expanding the economic safety net provides workers with security from the threat of unemployment but also gives them bargaining leverage against employers to secure higher wages.107 Poor and working-class Americans disproportionately benefit from affordable health insurance and improvements in public schooling.
So why do they vote Republican? Because the benefits they receive from their racial or religious status keep them under the tent. But because their privileges are not perfectly aligned, their support comes at a price. The party left their economic interests unaddressed for too long, and the stream of corporate wealth trickling down to them has been too meager by far.
Because most poor and working-class Republican voters found the Democratic Party an unacceptable alternative, stable alignments in both parties became set, and both parties began polarizing, moving steadily away from the center.108 The correlation between partisan identity and political ideology—that is, to what extent voters would define themselves as both a liberal and a Democrat—grew substantially from the 1970s to the 1990s.109 Especially among the most engaged partisans, there were striking differences between Democrats and Republicans on issues like same-sex marriage: Nearly 70 percent of Democrats favored legalization compared to just 18 percent of Republicans. And Americans’ perceptions that there are important differences between the two parties has also grown. In 1972, only about 46 percent of respondents believed there were important differences. By 2004, that figure had risen to nearly 75 percent.110
But declining status has raised the cost of loyalty to the Republican Party. To would-be Trump voters, the party seemed less and less attentive to their interests. Republican candidates have not kept the country, their country, from abandoning their values—gays could get married, people could smoke marijuana in public, women could terminate pregnancies, and language once reserved for R-rated movies now appeared on their televisions. Trump’s candidacy destabilized the system of alignments that had polarized the parties. His br
and of politics bluntly—even crudely—signaled his distaste for the liberalization of America. He made explicit promises to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade and side with Christian conservatives on religious freedom laws. He broke with traditional Republican economic platforms by promoting nationalism and protectionism, rather than trade agreements that linked the United States to the global economy. This move, unusual for a Republican candidate, made room for poor and working-class social conservatives in Trump’s camp, where they hoped he would not only restore their status but revive their dying towns.
8
WHITE NATIONALISM VERSUS THE PRESS
In the 1920s, Klansmen identified groups to blame for their lost power—Catholics, immigrants, Jews—whom they believed thrived at the expense of white Americans. They accused capitalists who hired unskilled labor of “mercenary motives.”1 They accused immigrants and Catholics, who provided this labor, of moral corruption and deficiency. And they accused black Americans of inferiority, pawns susceptible to the manipulation of their other cultural enemies.
Like all movements, the Klan was involved in a project of social construction. People don’t automatically organize into collective action when faced with hardship. Instead activists lure participants by redefining reality in ways that make potential supporters see themselves as part of a group, especially an injured group.2 The sociologist William Gamson called this an “injustice frame.” Yet even when there is a chasm between reality and fact, people will not participate unless what the movement says seems true.3 In this chapter, we see how the Klan and the Trump campaign used remarkably similar press strategies—outshouting, befriending, and discrediting—to highlight their virtues and conceal their viciousness.