What Pundits Keep Getting Wrong About Donald Trump and the Working Class
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/05/what_pundits_keep_getting_wrong_about_donald_trump_and_the_working_class.html
Most analysis of Donald Trump’s electability hinges on his working-class appeal—specifically, working-class anger at the economic arrangements of a post-recession America. “The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them,” writes Andrew Sullivan, now of New York magazine, in an essay on Trump, his rise, and its threat to American democracy. “The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages.”
But something happens in this discussion of working-class anger. Sullivan, like others tackling the subject, moves from an analysis of the “working class” to an analysis of the “white working class,” gliding between the two as if they’re synonymous. “This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living,” he writes. “This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are hanging by a thread.”
This is a critical conflation. If the “working class” and the “white working class” are synonymous, then Trump is a genuine threat—a demagogue who can channel and ride mass frustration to the White House. And it bolsters Sullivan’s (and others’) subordinate point: that liberals bear a great deal of blame for Trump for having stigmatized working-class morals and attitudes and ignoring their anger and economic anxiety, thus alienating them from mainstream politics and leaving them ripe for a figure like Trump....
Sullivan is right that the times call for vigilance. Against an unprecedented figure like Trump, complacency is dangerous. But we should also have clear eyes. Insofar that he represents any of it, Trump just speaks for a portion of working America, and the same divisions of race and religion that make broad working-class movements rare also limit the ability of a Trump figure to succeed. Why pundits can’t see this—why so many consistently miss the degree to which America is browner and blacker than it’s ever been—might have something to do with who they are. America’s commentary class is largely white. America’s voters, increasingly, are not.
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