A recent column in The New York Times noted, “Mr. Trump’s biggest supporters are disproportionately white, middle-aged, working-class men without college educations.” You’ve heard it elsewhere, many times. It’s accurate, so far as it goes. The problem is how many readers will hear it: as a claim that those people—those ignorant, low-class, Walmart-shopping and trailer-park-dwelling types—are responsible for the monster that is Trump.
On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders leads among white voters without a college degree. When was the last time you heard that the working class was responsible for the rise of Bernie Sanders?
The Republican establishment does not doubt who is to blame for their undesirable frontrunner. Republican venom against “dysfunctional” white voters culminated in Kevin Williamson’s hysterical diatribe in National Review: “The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.”
Meanwhile, the left panics over the same demographic. The Huffington Post reports that Trump’s “strong support” from white, working-class voters has unions worried, while a Salon article warns, “Donald Trump Is a Fraud: I Am a Member of the White Working Class, and We Must Not Fall for His Lies.” Analyses of Trump’s rise focus on the anger issue—specifically, over the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs.
What gets lost is this: the majority of working-class voters are not Trump supporters. They can’t be. Why? Because a large number of working-class jobs are held by women of all races, and nonwhites. They make up the majority of today’s working class. And we all know that they are not Trump’s biggest fans: two thirds reject him.
In fact, taken as a whole, even the white working class recoils from the strange sideshow of the Republican campaign. According to Democratic pollsters Stan Greenberg and Nancy Zdunkewicz, as of March, the white working class views the “GOP more unfavorably than not." Meanwhile, Trump is “viewed unfavorably” by a majority of whites without college degrees.
It’s a subtle point, that bears restating: Saying that Trump voters tend to be working class is not the same as saying that working-class voters support Trump.
So why the misreading? The dramatic rhetoric suggests two reasons, one for each side of the political spectrum.
We have a long history, in this country, of reading “working class” as “white male.” Consider an example from Times columnist Thomas Edsell: “How can a party that is losing ground in virtually every growing constituency — Hispanics, Asians, single women and the young — even consider jettisoning a single voter, much less the struggling white working class?” Note the subtle opposition of “single women” and “young” to “white working class”—as if one cannot be both, or even all three.
It has always been an inaccurate portrait, but now it’s a particularly dangerous one for Democrats. If we attribute working-class anxiety to the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs, which were largely the province of white men, we treat the working class as a monolith. Working-class women, who are less likely to be married than their middle-class counterparts and more likely to be raising children alone, have different concerns. So do people of color. To learn from this election cycle only that we must address the needs of one shrinking segment of the working class would be a wasted opportunity.
Republican name-calling derives from a more fundamental error. The clue lies in that deservedly suspect term, “underclass.” It transforms “working class” from a position in an economic system to a faulty culture. As Williamson writes, “In the story of the white working class’s descent into dysfunction, they are the victims and the villains both.” The stunning increase in heroin use is an individual moral failing, not the fallout of a massive marketing campaign by pharmaceutical companies who assured doctors that oxycodone was not addictive; disability claims are mostly fraudulent, not the effect of years of repetitive or dangerous work; divorce is a selfish, hedonistic lifestyle choice, not the unsurprising result of that greatest of stressors on married couples, financial instability.
The culture critique allows the comfortable to dismiss the legitimate economic complaints of an entire class of people. It fits nicely into the blame game. If “they” are all irrational enough to be gulled by Trump, why listen to anything they have to say?
Finally, we can’t let the middle, and upper-middle, classes off the hook for where we find ourselves. There aren’t enough working-class white male voters to account for all of Trump’s support. As of 2007, the white working class, male and female, made up only 29 percent of the entire electorate. Other white men (not to mention some women and nonwhites) must be behind him.
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight found evidence of these more affluent supporters. His analysis shows that Trump voters enjoy higher median incomes than the average American--and higher than Sanders or Clinton supporters, too. They are also more likely than the average American adult to have earned a four-year college degree.
Bigotry is not the purview of a single class. As I moved from a working-class childhood to a middle-class adult life, I did not observe any great improvements in race or gender relations. I saw subtler discrimination, sometimes backed by clever legal departments. I also saw less diversity in schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods than I had grown up with. The middle class is not the oasis of rational thought I once imagined. As we fight one voting block’s prejudice and fear towards those who are different, let’s not replace it with our own.