by Rory McVeigh
WILL REPUBLICANS KEEP THE TRUMP CONSTITUENCY?
The Trump insurgency, unlike the Klan, largely played out within party politics. Since the realignments of the 1960s and 1980s, the Republicans have attracted white working-class and rural voters who turned to the party for its conservative stances on civil rights, abortion, LGBTQ rights, and the role of Christianity in the public square.25 Many of them even came to believe that pro-business policies would create more jobs and raise wages.26 In time, though, the working-class and lower-middle-class contingent have grown large enough to fundamentally redirect the party’s economic priorities—a potential unrealized until 2016. By then, nearly 60 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters were whites without a college degree, compared to only a third of Democrats.27
These voters grew skeptical about whether the benefits of probusiness policies and free trade would ever trickle down to them. Before 2016, the Republican Party offered little variation in the kinds of candidates from which they could choose. These candidates were almost uniformly for business and free trade and against high taxes and welfare programs to aid the poor. But Donald Trump was not bound by this orthodoxy. He promised to address working-class and rural grievances at their root, rejecting the free trade positions of his Republican competitors.
In 1924, when the Klan first aligned with the Republicans, Klansmen were willing to live with a contradiction: They would side with the party of industrial capitalism just because it accepted their nativism and bigotry. They took credit for electing Coolidge, and were pleased to see him sign massive immigration restrictions into law. But his concessions to the Klan stopped at the immigration-restricting Johnson-Reed Act, and his administration did nothing to halt the march of industrialization. The Klan lost steam, and then the Republican Party’s dominance came crashing down when the Great Depression arrived with another Republican, Hoover, in the White House.
Just like with Coolidge, Trump’s base believed they elected a man who would follow through on his promises and improve their lives. Still to be seen, however, is how his presidency will affect the movement that put him there.
Much will depend, of course, on the success or failure of his tenure. The political challenges facing the Trump administration would daunt any president. His victory energized a constituency that had once been willing to accept Republican economic dogma, at least until he appeared. He was an unorthodox—almost heretical—candidate, who acknowledged their economic struggles and promised to do something about them. And he won. So why should they ever return to conventional Republican economics? To keep the party intact, those Republicans who favor free trade, lower taxes, and deregulated industry must find a way to accommodate Trump voters without conceding their own agenda.
The early years of Trump’s presidency revealed the impossibility of serving both masters. Even with Republicans controlling the presidency and both houses of Congress, they struggled to pass legislation that would fulfill his campaign promises. They could not repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. They could not secure funding to build a massive wall along the Mexican border. Federal courts intervened and stopped early attempts to ban immigration from particular Muslim countries and to repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program—which allows undocumented immigrants who entered the country when they were children to work and attend college—through executive order.
Republicans were successful, however, in passing a massive tax bill, full of cuts that disproportionately benefitted large corporations and the wealthy. Trump also rolled back regulations on banks and industry, including sixty-seven environmental regulations that were eliminated, or in the process of being eliminated, in just his first year in office.28 Some of those were antidumping rules for coal companies, bans on harmful pesticides, and bans on offshore drilling in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. The tax plan, though it offered modest reductions for some poor and middle-class families, delivered the largest benefits to the wealthy and corporations. With lower tax revenue but without lower spending, the deficit is absorbed into increases in the national debt.29 Trump’s promise to rebuild America’s infrastructure seems to have gone to seed, along with the jobs that it could have provided for Americans without college degrees.
At least in the first two years of his presidency, it seems like Trump’s base, not unlike the 1920s Klansmen, have found themselves in an uneasy alliance with pro-business Republicans. In these first years it seems it has been easier for him to serve the pro-business contingent than his own base. Still, he has focused on preserving their loyalty—reassuring them that he is still committed to building a border wall, accusing immigrants of stealing the popular vote by voter fraud, and announcing protective tariffs on steel and aluminum. In March 2018 he wrote on Twitter, “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win.”30
Coolidge held his coalition together and remained popular with Republican voters. While the Klan leaders and Klan press took credit for his victory and expressed their admiration, he was never cornered into saying anything good about the Klan. Probusiness Republicans had every reason to expect he would continue to be a pro-business president. And those who backed the Klan seemed satisfied because he shared their nativist sentiments and because he signed the immigration bill in 1924. In 1928, Coolidge’s Republican successor, Herbert Hoover, won a landslide victory (83 percent of the Electoral College) over the Catholic Democrat, Al Smith. Hoover won strong support in the industrial Northeast, even winning Smith’s home state of New York. He also did well in former Klan strongholds like Indiana, where he took 60 percent of the vote.31
Unlike Coolidge, Trump has had to work to preserve unity in his own party. And unlike Coolidge (but like D. C. Stephenson and Hiram Evans), Trump could only gain such fervent support by energizing equally fervent opposition. He captured a huge chunk of the working-class white vote, but only by alienating everyone else. He took office with an unusually low public approval rating, which soon sank even lower.
After his presidency, Coolidge, who was affectionately nicknamed “Silent Cal,” wrote, “The words of a President have an enormous weight … and ought not to be used indiscriminately.”32 Given the prejudices of the day and hugely popular support for immigration restriction in the early 1920s, Coolidge could absorb much of the Klan constituency and carry on as usual. Things would have turned out differently if a movement leader like Stephenson had won the presidency. The corruption, chaos, and bad behavior that followed him everywhere would have infiltrated the White House and polarized public opinion in ways that did not happen when, instead, a mainstream politician coopted the Klan constituency. Trump, on the other hand, operated more like a movement leader who coopted a political party.
FIGURE 9.1 President Trump’s job approval ratings, January to December 2017.
Source: “President Trump Job Approval,” Real Clear Politics. The graph represents polling data from all major national public opinion polls that ask respondents to rate the job performance of the president. The mean value is plotted for polls collected during the same or very similar date ranges.
Trump’s diehard supporters puzzle those repelled by him and his agenda. Where does this unassailable support come from? In 2017, a sociological study aimed to solve one puzzle of the election: How could supporters view a candidate who repeatedly lied and flagrantly broke social norms as authentic?33 The researchers presented participants in their experiments with a hypothetical situation: a college campus election that hinged on a hotly contested issue, alcohol policy. In the story, one candidate—the demagogue—lies openly about something that is common knowledge. He accuses his opponent of using shoddy empirical research to back up claims linking alcohol use to sexual assault on campuses. This is a lie, and in the experiment he knows it’s a lie. He then adds, “Plus, the research that influenced the policy was conducted by two professors—obviously with a radical feminist agenda
—who hate the idea that sometimes girls just want to be girls, and a little alcohol helps.”34
So what did the participants think? With the basic story laid out, the researchers manipulated certain features of the story to assess whether they affected responses. Participants who identified with the demagogue’s position were more likely to view him as “authentic,” but this was only the case when the researchers said the election occurred in particular political environments. Especially if it occurred within a “representation crisis,” in which the demagogue’s opponent benefitted personally from the policy—in this case he was doing the bidding of school administrators and board members to advance his own career. Or if the opponent seemed to benefit from the emergence of a new political constituency, who were influencing the administration and “disrespecting the college’s proud traditions.”35
Under either of these conditions, participants were more likely to see their candidate as an authentic leader, even though they knew he was lying. To them, his lies were a sort of rebellion against the powerful, a finger in the eye of the elite who, they thought, weren’t playing fair.
The researchers later conducted a survey asking respondents about Trump’s claim that China invented the concept of global warming to make American manufacturing uncompetitive. They found that the vast majority of Trump supporters recognized that his statement about China was not true—but they still saw him as an authentic leader. They thought his lie, too, was a form of symbolic protest against the establishment.36
While the 2016 election highlighted deep divisions in the Republicans, it also exposed hairline fractures in the Democratic Party. The bedrock of the New Deal coalition that emerged in the aftermath of the Great Depression has eroded. Trump’s direct appeals to white working-class voters have forced them back into the sightline of Democratic strategists. Hillary Clinton’s primary competitor, Bernie Sanders, argued that addressing the stark inequalities of American capitalism would benefit the poor and working class within all groups. But building a strong coalition on common class is difficult as long as discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, citizenship, gender, and sexuality persists.37 The victims of this discrimination seek direct redress from their representatives, not class movements that shove discrimination in the back seat.
THE END OF WHITE NATIONALISM?
White nationalism is a product of segregation. All intergroup relations—from homicide to marriage—are more likely to occur in places that are diverse.38 It’s hard to fight someone or to love someone of another group a thousand miles away. Ethnic competition theory argues that intergroup conflict happens when segregation breaks down, when previously subordinate groups come into proximity of dominant groups and compete for scarce resources like jobs, housing, schools, and even public parks.39 But white nationalist politics do not require that these groups be neighbors. Klansmen in the South and Midwest in the 1920s mostly opposed Catholics and immigrants, who were all the way out in the Northeast.
So far we have explored where white nationalism in America comes from. We can anticipate its resurgence by looking at what leads to economic, political, and status losses among subsets of the racial majority. It is impossible, of course, to predict what will siphon power away from the majority in the distant future. In the 1920s, we could never have anticipated how globalization would set the stage for Trump a century later. Just so, we cannot imagine what economic production will look like one hundred years hence, and who will win and who will lose because of it. What we can do, however, is identify a single key that will determine whether white nationalist movements will erupt, again and again, or fade into historical memory.
In every rise of the Ku Klux Klan—and in the emergence of Trump—white nationalist challenges were potent because they linked lost power to collective identities. This gave supporters a target to scapegoat and a sense of solidarity among the losers. But it would have been impossible if socially constructed categories of race and religion did not correlate so strongly with positions in the American hierarchy. The first Klan would not have emerged, or would have taken a very different form, if whites hadn’t first used race to organize economic production in the South through slave labor. The Klan of the 1920s would not have taken off if religion, race, gender, and national origin did not dictate one’s position within capitalism, as a skilled or unskilled laborer. The civil rights–era Klan would not have emerged if not for Jim Crow segregation, which relegated black Southerners to the least attractive jobs, excluded them from political participation, and reinforced inequalities that bound race to status.
Would Trump have become president without the racial segregation that still exists? The transition to a global economy has harmed black Americans as well as white Americans. But the spatial separation of black and white communities made it possible for Trump supporters to imagine that the causes behind the struggles of urban black Americans were somehow different from their own. On the campaign trail Trump talked about problems in cities, but he never attributed them to college education, which left the inner-city population as poorly equipped for jobs in the new economy as it did the white working class. Trump did talk about jobs for white supporters, however, and presented himself as their champion. In a campaign rally in Charleston, West Virginia, he donned a hard hat and promised the enthusiastic white crowd that he would bring their coal mining jobs back. “These ridiculous rules and regulations make it impossible for you to compete, so we’re going to take that all off the table, folks.”40
Segregation is the lifeblood of white nationalist movements. A study of voting outcomes in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections examined how occupational segregation by sex and race influenced voting.41 Even after accounting for other factors that influence voting, like median income, education, religion, and race, occupational segregation strongly affected the vote. Counties where men were concentrated in some occupations and women in others—and where whites were concentrated in some occupations and nonwhites in others—were much more likely to vote for George W. Bush. This segregation makes it possible for white Americans to perceive lost power as an attack on shared identity, and increases the likelihood that racial and cultural identities will become political weapons.
From the Trump insurgency to the Ku Klux Klan, white nationalist activism is a recurrent feature of American society. But these outbreaks are predictable—if we know what to look for, we can see them coming down the road. This is important because, while white nationalism is not unique to America, we have an abundance of the ingredients that fuel eruptions big enough to elect a president.
America is the wealthiest nation in the world, but a small proportion of its people enjoy the vast majority of the wealth. In 2016, the top 1 percent of Americans held 40 percent of the nation’s wealth—and this income inequality has been rising steadily since the early 1970s.42 That means that most Americans scramble to make a decent living in a nation that produces enormous riches.
America is also a diverse nation—diverse in the race, religion, and national origin of its inhabitants. Throughout its history, categories of race, ethnicity, sex, and religion have represented hierarchies, where the group at the top erects barriers to preserve their advantages over less-privileged groups. Even today, we see occupational segregation. White men are concentrated in the best jobs, and women and minorities are more likely to work in jobs that pay less and come with little authority in the workplace.43 Residential segregation by race blocks minorities from good schools and connections to those who could employ them in good jobs.44
These conditions are ripe for white nationalism. When changes in society undermine the economic standing, political power, and social status of white Americans—who may themselves be struggling to keep their heads above water—they have an abundance of cultural weapons at hand. Given the durability of segregation in the United States, we will only see more white nationalist movements as this population shrinks into a numerical minority.
Integration is the key. Yet it m
ust be a type of integration that is based on equality and not just proximity. Rosa Parks once said, “Even when there was segregation, there was plenty of integration in the South, but it was for the benefit and convenience of the white person, not us.”45 Only once something close to true integration is achieved, geographically as well as socially, can white nationalism die.
CONCLUSION
Making America White Again
We began working on this book when the 2016 presidential election campaign was still in full swing. It was an almost academic exercise. The stakes, we thought, were low. We wondered how a man like Trump could come “so close” to being elected president of the United States. Admittedly, like most scholars and pundits—maybe like most Americans—we were confident that Hillary Clinton would become the first woman president.
Trump’s victory was not a complete shock. One of us, Rory McVeigh, after all, spent years investigating how the Ku Klux Klan recruited millions of members and became particularly popular in unexpected places. It was not hard, in hindsight, to see how the conditions that incubated the Klan a century ago are still with us now, driving support for Donald Trump. The circumstances were different, of course, but the general causes were the same. In both cases, angry white Americans latched onto a nationalism and protectionism that spoke to their economic hardships at a time when they were also losing political power and social status. They found themselves drawn into an alliance with the economic elite, who quietly resisted their economic nationalism but let their cultural animosity go unchecked.