How Donald Trump is winning over the white w...

Comment MAY 16, 2016 ISSUE

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Head of the Class

How Donald Trump is winning over the white working class.
BY GEORGE PACKER

ILLUSTRATION BY TOM BACHTELL

ast week, Donald Trump became the

leader of the Republican Party. He
thrashed his way to this summit by
understanding what many intelligent
people utterly failed to see: the decline of
American institutions and mores, from Wall Street and the Senate to cable news
and the Twitterverse, made the candidacy of a celebrity proto-fascist with no
impulse control not just possible but in some ways inevitable. It shouldnt have
been such a surprise. An early tremor came in 2008, in the person of Sarah
Palin, who endorsed Trump before almost any other top Republican. In her
contempt for qualifications, her blithe ignorance, she was an avatar for Trump.
A lot of Republicans, many of them female, saw in the small-town common
woman an image of themselves; many men see in the say-anything billionaire an
image of their aspirations. Palin showboated her way from politics to reality TV,
while Trump swaggered in the opposite direction. Together, they wore a path
that is already almost normal.
Trump also grasped what Republican lites are still struggling to fathom: the
ideology that has gripped their Party since the late nineteen-seventiesantigovernment, pro-business, nominally pioushas little appeal for millions of
ordinary Republicans. The base of the Party, the middle-aged white working
class, has suffered at least as much as any demographic group because of
globalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade. Trump sensed the rage
that flared from this pain and made it the fuel of his campaign. Conservative
orthodoxy, already weakened by its own extremismthe latest, least appealing
standard-bearer was Ted Cruzhas suffered a stunning defeat from within.
And Trump has replaced it with something more dangerous: white identity
politics.

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Republican Presidential candidates received majorities of the white vote in every

election after 1964. In 2012, Barack Obama won about forty per cent of it,
average for Democrats in the past half century. But no Republican
candidatenot even Richard Nixon or Ronald Reaganmade as specific an
appeal to the economic anxieties and social resentments of white Americans as
Trump has. When he vows to make America great again, he is talking about
and to white America, especially the less well off. The ugliness of the pitch will
drive some more moderate and perhaps more affluent Republicans to sit out the

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fall election,
or even
for w...
Hillary
How Donald Trump
is winning
over to
thevote
white

Clinton,
the nearly certain Democratic
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/1...
nominee. #NeverTrump and #ImWithHer are trending on select Republican
Twitter feeds. Trumps toxicity, combined with a decline in the white electorate
which, since 1976, has dropped from eighty-nine per cent of the American
voting public to seventy-two per centmight make this a year of Democratic
routs.
The Democratic Party has a strange relationship with the white working class.
Bernie Sanders speaks to and for itnot as being white but as being
economically victimized. He kept his campaign alive last week, in Indiana, in
large part by beating Clinton nearly two to one among whites without a college
degree. Coverage of Sanders has focussed on his support among the young and
the progressive, but he has also outperformed Clinton with the white working
class. Even in losing, Sanders has shown that a candidacy based on economic
populism can win back some voters who long ago deserted the Democratic
Party. Its hard to know whether these voters, faced with a choice between
Clinton and Trump, will revert to the Republican side, stay home, or vote for a
Democrat who until now hasnt known how to reach them.
Identity politics, of a different brand from Trumps, is also gaining strength
among progressives. In some cases, it comes with an aversion toward, even
contempt for, their fellow-Americans who are white and sinking. Abstract
sympathy with the working class as an economic entity is easy, but the feeling
can vanish on contact with actual members of the group, who often arrive with
disturbing beliefs and powerful resentmentswho might not sound or look like
people urban progressives want to know. White male privilege remains alive in
America, but the phrase would seem odd, if not infuriating, to a sixty-year-old
man working as a Walmart greeter in southern Ohio. The growing strain of
identity politics on the left is pushing working-class whites, chastised for various
types of bigotry (and sometimes justifiably), all the more decisively toward
Trump.
Last fall, two Princeton economists released a study showing that, since the turn
of the century, middle-aged white Americansprimarily less educated
oneshave been dying at ever-increasing rates. This is true of no other age or
ethnic group in the United States. The main factors are alcohol, opioids, and
suicidean epidemic of despair. A subsequent Washington Post story showed
that the crisis is particularly severe among middle-aged white women in rural
areas. In twenty-one counties across the South and the Midwest, mortality rates
among these women have actually doubled since the turn of the century. Anne
Case, one of the Princeton studys co-authors, said, They may be privileged by
the color of their skin, but that is the only way in their lives theyve ever been
privileged.

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According to the Post, these regions of white working-class pain tend to be areas
where Trump enjoys strong support. These Americans know that theyre being
left behind, by the economy and by the culture. They sense the indifference or
disdain of the winners on the prosperous coasts and in the innovative cities, and
it is reciprocated. Trump has seized the Republican nomination by finding

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scapegoats
for the
economic
hardships
How Donald Trump
is winning
over
the white
w...

and disintegrating
lives of working-class
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whites, while giving these voters a reassuring but false promise of their
restoration to the center of American life. He plays to their sense of entitlement,
but his hollowness will ultimately deepen their cynicism.
The Democrats probably wont need the votes of the white working class to win
this year. Demographic trends favor the Party, as does the bloated and hateful
persona of the Republican choice. Nonetheless, the Democratic nominee cant
afford, either politically or morally, to write off those Americans. They need a
politics that offers honest answers to their legitimate grievances and keeps them
from sliding further into self-destruction.

George Packer became a staff writer in 2003.

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