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Trumpism: Made in the United States by Republican Hate and Democratic
Hypocrisy
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/trumpism_made_by_republican_hate_and_dem
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Posted on Aug 16, 2016
By Paul Street
Donald Trump at a rally in Reno, Nev. (Darron Birgenheier / CC -BY-SA
2.0(https://www.flickr.com/photos/darronb/24224402311) )
The Republican, white-nationalist Donald Trump slanders and insults Latinos,
Muslims and women. He promotes violence. He mocks the disabled. He refers to
himself as brilliant, citing his fortune-obscenely accumulated over decades
of predatory business practices that cheat workers and consumers-as "proof."
He feuds with the gold star parents of a Muslim U.S. soldier killed in Iraq,
claiming that he too has "sacrificed" (like the dead soldier and his
parents) by employing "thousands and thousands of people." It was a
remarkable comment: Being born into wealth and in a position to hire a large
number of people is not a "sacrifice." If Trump isn't reaping profits from
all those workers under his command, he must not really be the brilliant,
capitalist businessman he claims to be.
A military veteran gives the Republican presidential candidate his Purple
Heart medal, bestowed on soldiers injured in battle. Trump quips, "I always
wanted a Purple Heart. This was a lot easier." Unreal. Donald Trump, Mr.
Sacrifice, used college deferments to avoid the draft during the Vietnam
War.
How is this noxious candidate even within shouting distance of Hillary
Clinton? Let's separate the fact from the fiction.
The Donald and the White Working Class
One easy, elite answer is to blame the supposedly stupid and racist white
working class. It is common to hear mainstream (corporate) media talking
heads proclaim that Trump is the candidate of the white working class and
"low-income whites"-those that The Wall Street Journal and Trump himself
like to call "the forgotten Americans." These are who Barack Obama described
in
2008(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/14/barackobama.uselections20
08) as people who "get bitter" and "cling to guns or religion or antipathy
to people who aren't like them."
How accurate is this narrative? According to exit polls, the median
household income of Trump's primary
voters(http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-c
lass-support/) was $72,000, $11,000 higher than the corresponding figure
for Bernie Sanders' and Clinton's primary voters.
In his analysis of survey data gathered from more than 70,000 interviews in
June and July, Gallup economist Jonathan Rothwell found that Americans who
favor
Trump(http://www.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/193898/economic-hardship
-favorable-views-trump.aspx) have incomes that are 6 percent higher than
that of nonsupporters.
Trump is less popular with the white working class than Mitt Romney was four
years ago. In 2012, Romney garnered 62 percent of votes by
"non-college-educated whites" (researchers' and journalists' longstanding,
if imperfect, stand-in term for the white working class). According to the
latest NBC-Wall Street Journal
poll(http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/nbc-wsj-poll-clinton-jumps-n
ine-point-lead-over-trump-n623131) , Trump isn't even backed by a majority
of this group, with just 49 percent on his side. Earlier this summer, his
support among these
whites(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/upshot/the-one-demographic-that-is-
hurting-hillary-clinton.html?mtrref=go.redirectingat.com&_r=0) hovered
around 60 percent, suggesting that they are capable of processing
information on his toxicity.
When you consider that the nation's abysmally low voter-turnout rate falls
the further one moves down the U.S. income
scale(https://theintercept.com/2016/08/10/the-great-white-hype-no-one-is-ene
rgizing-the-white-working-class-not-even-donald-trump/) , it seems highly
improbable that Trump-currently behind Clinton in national polls-will ride
some great wave of white-proletarian, Brexit-like sentiment to victory in
November.
Still, Trump is doing better than Clinton with working-class whites. In the
aforementioned NBC-WSJ survey, she trails him by 13 percentage points among
whites without a college education and by 21 points among men in that group.
In former union strongholds and deindustrialized, white working-class
enclaves like Pennsylvania's Luzerne County and Ohio's Mahoning Valley, Arun
Gupta recently reported on teleSUR English that voters are "flocking" to
Trump(http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Clinton-Brings-Back-Triangula
tion-and-the-Politics-of-Fear--20160806-0022.html) .
Where did Trump do best in the primaries? A New York Times
analysis(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/upshot/the-geography-of-trumpism.
html) found that his strongest base was in predominantly white areas where
a proportion of workers toil in jobs that involve "working with one's hands,
especially manufacturing"; a big share of working-age adults are jobless; an
unusually high number of people live in mobile homes; and all but a few
residents told the U.S. Census Bureau that their ancestors were "American."
Jon Flanders, a retired railroad machinist and former union leader, told me
that he recently "asked a question about who the union workers in the
railroad shops predominately supported. The question was asked on a Facebook
page with about 1,000 members. The answer? Trump, overwhelmingly."
Rothwell, the Gallup economist, determined that "the prototypical Trump
supporter" is white, male, Christian (but not Mormon), heterosexual and
without a college degree. He found Trump supporters significantly correlated
with low intergenerational mobility, weak income growth and employment in
"blue-collar occupations that have been exposed to competition with
immigrants and foreign workers."
The higher-income figures of Trump supporters relative to Democratic primary
voters and non-Trump supporters is largely explained by race. Republicans
are far more likely than Democrats to be white, and whites receive
considerably higher average incomes than nonwhites.
The Elite Liberal Thesis
So what's this white working-class preference for the bombastic Trump all
about? It might seem counterintuitive, even absurd, that a vicious,
opulence-flouting, uber-narcissistic plutocrat and Republican like Trump
garners more support than a Democrat from working-class people of any race.
We can be sure that many residents of affluent, liberal enclaves nodded
their heads in approval when Obama said this about
Trump(http://www.newsweek.com/barack-obama-full-text-democratic-national-con
vention-speech-donald-trump-484836) at the Democratic National Convention
in Philadelphia: "Does anyone really believe that a guy who's spent his 70
years on this earth showing no regard for working people is suddenly going
to be your champion? Your voice? ... If so, you should vote for him. But if
you're someone who's truly concerned about paying your bills, if you're
really concerned about pocketbook issues and . creating more opportunity for
everybody, then the choice isn't even close. . You should vote for Hillary
Clinton."
Then why are so many white workers failing to vote in accord with their
purported obvious economic interests, Mr. President? How do we explain this
great anomaly? When it isn't simply writing non-college-educated whites off
as irredeemably racist, the standard, elite, liberal-Democratic, campus-town
line is that all those poor, pitiful, xenophobic, gun-clinging white proles
have been tricked into foolishly "voting against their own pocketbook
interests" by clever Republican strategists who divert white workers with
convenient scapegoats and social issues-inner-city black criminals and
"welfare cheats," Mexican immigrants, guns, gay rights, abortion and
religion. All these ugly cards are played to prevent the white working class
from fighting the selfish billionaires who profit from the plutocratic
agenda of the Republicans, "the party of big business."
There's some truth in this venerable, liberal trope, of course. The
divide-and-conquer Machiavellianism this "What's the Matter With
Kansas?(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansas%3F) "
(WTMWK) narrative points to has helped Republicans win white working-class
votes since the days of Archie Bunker (at whom much of Trump's rhetoric
seems
aimed(http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/norman-lear-trump-archie-bunker-
223875) ) and through the age of blue-collar Reaganites and "Joe the
Plumber."
What's the Matter With the Limousine-(Neo)Liberal Democrats?
Still, the prevailing, liberal, WTMWK narrative is plagued by four basic
difficulties. The first and most obvious problem is that post-New Deal era,
neoliberal Democrats are no less captive to the 1 percent than the GOP. Like
the Bill Clinton and Obama presidencies, the likely presidency of the
heavily Wall Street-backed Hillary Clinton will be loaded down with economic
elites(https://www.amazon.com/American-Grand-Strategy-Corporate-Networks/dp/
0415844983) linked to the top financial institutions and transnationally
oriented corporations and to elite corporate policy-planning
bodies(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_shell_game_of_the_economic_el
ites_hamilton_project_20160809) like the Council on Foreign Relations, the
Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institution.
It's true that the Sanders challenge and the broadly populist mood of U.S.
voters in the current New Gilded Age of extreme inequality pushed Clinton's
rhetoric to the progressive-sounding left during the primary campaign. But
this is just another example of what Christopher Hitchens once described, in
his bitter and acerbic study of the
Clintons(https://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/145
5522996) , as "the essence of American politics"-"the manipulation of
populism by elitism." Clinton's Wall Street backers have never been
concerned about the populace-pleasing rhetoric she's had little choice but
to wield in chasing middle-, working- and lower-class votes. They know "it's
just
politics(http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/hillary-clintons-wall-street-
backers-we-get-it-117017) ." They expect a President Hillary Clinton to drop
her current opposition to the arch-corporatist Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP) as soon as possible.
Look at her first major action after locking down the Democratic nomination:
She selected Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate. Kaine is a
financial-sector darling who backed fast-tracking the TPP and supported his
state's anti-union, right-to-work laws.
It is little wonder that top Wall Street operatives flocked to the
Democratic National
Convention(http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/hillary-clinton-wall-street
-226061) after the Sanders specter advance-surrendered and Kaine was
tapped. The large, socially liberal and economically neoliberal wing of the
elite financial sector was pining to reunite with the more functional and
effective of the nation's two reigning state-capitalist political parties.
But the Democrats abandoned the working class and embraced the economic
elite, including the professional elite (more on that below) long ago (as
journalist Thomas Frank noted in his book, "What's the Matter With
Kansas?"). And Democrats of the neoliberal era are no less adept than
Republicans at deploying the politics of identity to hide their captivity to
the nation's unelected dictatorship of money. They just play the other, more
multicultural, side of the same identity-politics game. Both parties make
sure that, in Chris Hedges'
words(http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31
&Itemid=74&jumival=10461) , "Goldman Sachs always wins," since "there is no
way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs."
Is it really all that clear that workers of any race have obvious and
rational "pocketbook interests" in the presidential ascendancy of yet
another identity-politics-wielding, hedge-fund Democrat like Hillary
Clinton?
A Beast of a Different Sort
Second, Trump has hardly restricted his appeal to the white working class by
pushing racist, sexist, nationalist, religious, gun-toting and nativist
buttons. Making repeated overtures to Sanders supporters, he has mimicked
the language of Franklin Roosevelt with denunciations of "big business" and
its corruption of government and politics. He's denounced the North American
Free Trade Agreement and "free trade" more broadly, blaming multinational
corporations for abandoning working people. He altered the Republican
platform to include a plank calling for the breakup of big banks via the
reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall
Act(https://theintercept.com/2016/07/19/the-republican-platforms-surprise-re
vival-of-glass-steagall-legislation/) . He's dropped standard Republican
assaults on social-democratic "entitlements." He's attacked the globalism of
the corporate elite and criticized related imperial entanglements the GOP
has joined top Democrats in advancing for more than six decades.
Sincerely or not (his profile of advisers and top funders and his most
recent economic policy
addresses(http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/campaign/290777-transcript-o
f-donald-trumps-economic-policy-speech-to-detroit) certainly suggest the
latter), Trump has tacked further to the
liberal-populist-social-democratic-sounding left on economic policy than any
Republican presidential candidate in history. This is something the
Democrats in Philadelphia seemed not to understand. In one Democratic
convention speech after another, they depicted Trump as little more than the
usual Republican monster spouting ugly, nativist, racist and patriarchal
narratives to hide his allegiance to the wealthy Few. They showed little
understanding that Trump is a different type of Republican beast.
Labor-Market Economics 101
Third, it is misleading to draw too firm a line between workers'
"pocketbook" concerns and nativist calls for immigration restriction. It
doesn't take an advanced academic degree to realize that the movement of
poor and desperate workers from one part of the world capitalist system to
another poses threats to the working and living standards of working people
who are in the receiving nation. Of course, white workers have rational
economic reasons to want to restrict the size of the "reserve army of labor"
that employers can use against the working class in the "homeland."
In a similar vein, it's a mistake to think that white workers in, say, West
Virginia coal territory or the North Dakota oil fields have no cogent
pocketbook reasons to feel threatened by Democrats' claim (more progressive
fluff than serious environmentalist reality) that they will address climate
change by cutting back on the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.
Those who find such proletarian pocketbook calculations ethically horrifying
might want to recall one of Bertolt
Brecht's(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertolt_Brecht) more cutting lines:
"Grub first, then ethics." Times are desperate indeed in the burned-out coal
fields of Appalachia and the ever more opiate-addicted and suicide-plagued
provinces of deindustrialized, post-family-farmland, white America. The
"forgotten" counties where Trump did best in the GOP primaries are the same
counties in which middle-aged, working-class whites have been experiencing
high death
rates(http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising-for-middle
-aged-white-americans-study-finds.html?_r=0) .
We Are Not the 99 Percent: Between Labor and Capital
Fourth, liberals making the WTMWK argument often seem to operate with a
simplistic, two-class model dividing the U.S. into the superrich (let's call
them the 1 percent), linked naturally to the Republicans, and everybody else
(the 99 percent), linked naturally to the Democrats. Besides deleting the
Democrats' captivity to the wealthy corporate and financial Few (really the
0.1 percent or even the 0.01 percent), this dichotomy provides undue
privilege-cloaking cover to "lesser" elites-professionals, managers,
administrators and other "coordinator-class" Americans in the nation's top
20 percent.
The privilege and power of the professional and managerial elite is no less
"true," "real," substantive or vital to contemporary hierarchy than that of
the financial super-elite. In the U.S.-as across the world capitalist system
and even in non- and anti-capitalist workplaces and bureaucracies-ordinary
working people suffer not just from the private, profit-seeking, capitalist
domination of workplace and society. They also regularly confront what
longtime left economist and activist Mike
Albert(https://www.versobooks.com/books/85-parecon) calls the "corporate
division of labor"-an alienating, dehumanizing and hierarchical subdivision
of tasks "in which a few workers have excellent conditions and empowering
circumstances, many fall well below that, and most workers have essentially
no power at all."
It is through regular subordinate and often humiliating contact with the
professional and managerial, or "coordinator class" (Albert's and his fellow
radical economist Robin Hahnel's term), not the 1 percent, that the working
class experiences class inequality and oppression in America.
I talked earlier this summer to "Big Frank," a 40-something, white,
graveyard-shift, parking ramp and parking lot cleaner at the University of
Iowa. He doesn't like "rich bastards" like Trump, but it's not the financial
and corporate elite he deals with daily. He sees Trump and other rich and
famous Americans like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett on television. He
carries out "ridiculous orders" and receives "idiotic" reprimands from
well-paid, "know-it-all pencil-pushers who don't give a flying fuck about
regular working guys like me." Frank is voting for Trump "just to piss off
all the big-shot [professional-class] liberals" he perceives as constantly
disrespecting and pushing him around.
Listen to Green
Party(http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/what-if-the-green-party
-stopped-being-kooky-and-started-getting-real-214149) leader Howie Hawkins,
the Teamster union activist who got 5 percent of the vote in New York's last
gubernatorial election. "The Democratic Party ideology is the ideology of
the professional class," he says. "Meritocratic competition. Do well in
school, get well-rewarded." Unfortunately, perhaps, his comment reminds me
of the bumper sticker I've seen on the back of more than a few beat-up cars
in factory parking lots and trailer parks over the years: "My Kid Beat Up
Your Honor Student."
"The biggest threat to the Democrats isn't losing votes to the Greens,"
Hawkins says. It is losing votes to Trump, who "sounds like he's mad at the
system. So they throw a protest vote to him."
It doesn't help that the professional and managerial class is largely
aligned with both the politically correct, pro-immigrant multiculturalism
and environmentalism that many white workers have genuine economic (and
other) reasons to see as threats to their well-being, living standards and
status.
Members of this privileged class beneath the 1 percent may not ride in
limousines, but they also don't go around in the beat-up pickup trucks that
"Big Frank" drives both on and off the job. We might designate some of its
more liberal members as "Prius Progressives."
A Trump victory in November seems ever more unlikely. The gaffe-prone and
highly unprofessional nature of the candidate, the vastly superior ruling-
and professional-class resources being marshaled around the de facto,
moderate-Republican Clinton, the racial and ethnic demographics of the
national electoral map, and the relative weakness and likely low turnout of
his supposed "white working-class base"-all this and more points to a major
defeat for "the Donald."
Progressives should view the alleged threat of a great wave of racist,
nativist, white, working-class anger ready to "Brexit" the toxic Trump into
the White House with a healthy dose of skepticism. Trump's white proletarian
base is not big or energized enough to make that happen. The notion that it
is seems calculated to scare left-leaning progressives into voting for the
Wall Street-favored, right-wing Democrat, war hawk Clinton and to reinforce
the very neoliberal and identity-obsessed politics that helps explain the
existence of such white working-class Republicanism in the first place.
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