There’s a good article at FiveThirtyEight by Clare Malone you might want to take a look at. Ms. Malone tries to get her head around what’s happening in the presidential campaign. Here’s a snippet:
Trump has offered people something more potent than party allegiance: empowerment. Bernie Sanders is presenting something similar, though his message is more catholic in its demographics; John Kasich speaks about empathy as a balm for the scathed electorate; but Trump’s silent majority, a mostly white, working-class cohort, wants to talk about their problems for once.
I sympathize with her. I don’t honestly understand what’s happening, either. I don’t think she quite captures the anger, even desperation, that’s motivating people or that it crosses not just party lines but all of the conventional dividing lines in American politics including ideology and race.
If you think you know what will happen, be prepared to be surprised.
When you think life is going okay and you believe your kids will have better lives than yours, you are inclined to be generous or at least indifferent as various other groups advance their own causes.
When you feel the ground shifting beneath you and can no longer look your kids in the eyes and tell them their lives will be good, you aren’t generous and you aren’t indifferent. If neither party has a program that eases your insecurity and pessimism, you look elsewhere and sadly, that elsewhere is Trump.
There are a lot of reasons. The promise of college as cure-all is looking increasingly like just another debt trap. Talk of a majority minority America leaves whites feeling left behind. The triumphalism of the Left after the SSM victory alienated people we should have reached out to. The vast gap between rich and working poor is like acid on the bonds of patriotism and undermines investment in the broader culture. The loss of any sort of national purpose, the withering of institutions, the reasons go on and on.
White working class folks feel they’ve been permanently dis-invited from the cool kids table, and there is now a gap between the poorly-educated white and the highly educated white that the latter class is doing absolutely nothing to ameliorate. The white working class is feeling dissed and obsolete and unlike blacks and Latinos they have no experience with this feeling, they have no resilience, yet like Glen Close, they will not be ignored.
IMO the very worst case scenario for both political parties and for the country would be for the Republican Party to become the white people’s party while the Democratic Party becomes the non-white party. It seems to me it would be worth both parties’ whiles to take affirmative steps to ensure that doesn’t happen but so far I’m not seeing it.
It’s probably worth examining the reason why early polls weren’t predictive. I think (1) Trump appeared to be a celebrity candidate with high favorabilities arrived at outside of the political arena. Not a lot of good analogues to this being successful, but there are a lot of candidates that poll high (Guillianani and Fred Thompson) and wither quickly. (2) those polls showed a good portion of Trump’s voters were marginally associated with the Republican party or politics in general, and probably wouldn’t vote. After the Iowa caucuses, and Trump’s seemingly coming short (of expectations), Rubio’s stock on the political markets skyrocketed. So there is motivation there among the unmotivated.
The other oddity, which I’m not sure when it emerged is Trump scores low, often last, in the category of “shares my values.” Most people don’t want to drink a beer with Trump. They think he “tells it like it is,” and “can bring change.” It sounds like they think Trump is an a$$h*le.
Dave:
I agree, it would be absolutely terrible for this country. It’s downright biblical – we can’t seem to get past our original sin.
Trump’s appeal goes well beyond the white working class, although he does have them:
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2016/03/trump-continues-to-win-among-educated.html
I would just add the deep sense of loss that white males have. If you were a white male, you were pretty much guaranteed a good job and respect in the not too far past. Then women started wanting to be equal. Minorities competed for jobs. The good jobs were sent away or immigrants and robots took them. Gay became cool and then it even reached the point where you couldn’t impose your religious beliefs on others. Things even changed at home where you are now expected to help clean the house and care for the kids. So much lost in such a short period.
Well, here’s a happy thought.
Dave,
I think the parties are already there, at least based on what they say and what they do.
As a long-standing independent (I’ve only voted for a major party Presidential candidate twice), I think the choices this year are the worst that I can remember. Given the choices, I have to wonder how many more than usual will vote third party or, more likely, not vote at all.
Steve:
I recall a conversation with my wife, probably 20 years ago, talking about the obsolescence of the male as male. All our gender-specific roles have been lost – hunter, provider, protector, soldier, lifter of heavy objects – all those things that were just “ours” and are now universal. Women by contrast retain their essential role in reproduction and have added all the formerly male roles.
Men have been losing relevance for a long time. The balance has shifted and we are far more trouble than we’re worth. We do all the murders and all the beatings and all the rapes. We make all the trouble and do far fewer necessary jobs to balance that off. There are just not a lot of hungry leopards to be fended off from the vulnerable pregnant woman.
We’ve been fending off the realization of our uselessness with games and movies full of muscle-bound he-men and sports. But let’s face it: civilization would run better all around if you thinned the male herd by 90%. And if thinned carefully, you’d improve the gene pool too.
Steve,
I think the problems with working-class while males are probably a lot more complex than perceived resentment of minority groups. The problems are actually real, quite disturbing and have little to do what perceptions or what others generalize about the white working class. Overall, I’d say that working-class whites are sinking into the same hole that destroyed much of the black working class over the last 50 years.
michael-I look at it a bit different, but get the gist of what you are saying. First, I think there really are some differences between men and women, on a statistical basis. Any given woman might be able to match any given man, and vice versa, in most abilities and areas. However, as a group men approach tasks differently and I think that tis hardwired, not just culture. For some tasks, that will be better. I think the way we approach relationships is also hardwired to a certain extent, and I think our kids benefit from that. I think we may have lost some specific roles that we claimed as solely ours, but I think what will happen is that while we may take the same roles as women, we will do so in a different, and I think mostly complementary manner.
Also, given what i have done for a living, I have worked with and around groups that included only men, only women and both. The mixed groups seem to me to function the best, and there is a body of research that suggests that may be the case. So no need to thin us out yet. Well, maybe those who cannot embrace the change.
Steve
Andy- I wasn’t trying to convey that this is all just perception. If I did, then I communicated poorly. I think it is just a matter of actual fact that white males lost out to women and minorities. Their jobs really did get sent away. If none of those things happened they probably all still have jobs, maybe even decent ones. A few years back the white male was at the apex of the social and economic pyramid. Now he is down in the scrum. (Mixed metaphors, crappy writing, but meaning clear I hope.)
Steve
Michael,
I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I was a full-time stay at home father for over eight years (though I still did some work part-time in as a military reservist and deployed a couple of times). I think there’s a lot of truth in what you say. There is a lot of social pressure to accept women into traditional male roles. There is comparatively less social pressure to accept men into traditional female roles. Parenting still takes a back seat to jobs and career in most cases. This isn’t just a problem with male attitudes – At the beginning, being an at-home father was an incredibly lonely and isolating experience. The mommy groups did not want me around and the worst of them thought that any man who was so interested in children is probably a pedophile. Meanwhile there were no other men in my situation except a few I found online. Working men would say dumb things like how much they wish they could stay home all day with nothing to do. Of course, there were a few of both genders that “got it” and I think things are a lot better today than they were back in the early oughts, partly because the great recession forced a lot family realignments.
But the basic problem remains – career, income generation and economic independence is more important than any other consideration for many people.
Steve,
“I think it is just a matter of actual fact that white males lost out to women and minorities. Their jobs really did get sent away. ”
That’s not a consistent argument. I think working class white jobs did “get sent away” but they didn’t get sent to women or minorities so whites did not lose out to them. In other words the decline in the white working class wasn’t caused by women and minorities coming in and taking their jobs.
Oh, and just as some evidence of something I’ve pointed out many times before – much of the world is a lot more racist than the USA. (be sure to read the update for important caveats).
My 2 cents, race has nada todo withit. We are tired of lies, lying, smiling, clever with bullshit politicians. I’m mostly angry that the Christian Work Ethic was a lie. Trump is not a cure for my anger, only the expression of it. Other pols cannot express it because they are deliberately embedded in the power structure and plan to rest comfortably there for life in one position or another.
@Gray Shambler
Spoken like a true racist. Who, but a racist, would deny being a racist?
One of the problems with charges of racism is that there’s no good, intuitively correct, objective definition of it. I’ve seen surveys that found that a majority of those in both American political parties were racists. Chew on that for a while.
It gets so that you’re talking about original sin rather than something that’s remediable.
Those polls were conducted by racists to condone their racism. There are people who are not racist, and we know this because they have assured everybody else of this. They are able to spot racism where it would seem to not exist or not be able to exist.
For the true race warrior, there is nothing and nowhere racism does not exist. The game of pool is racist. The white ball clears the table of the balls of color, and the game is won when the white ball is able to finally oppress the black ball.
Whiteout is designed for white people to cover-up what they perceive as black mistakes.
Only a racist would deny the racial aspect of these examples.