Marxists are much more on-point here…people who might be on the edge are drawn to racist rhetoric and anti-immigrant rhetoric because they’ve been economically disenfranchised, and so they look for a scapegoat, and so the real problems are economic.22
Even conservatives got in on the-bashing-the-white-working-class act, in Kevin D. Williamson’s National Review article about the allegedly strong support for Trump among working-class whites. He states, “The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.” The conservative commentator continues: “the truth about these dysfunctional downscale communities, is that they deserve to die.”23 Marxists, liberals, and conservatives found common ground after Trump’s election in stereotyping and scapegoating working-class whites as broke and bitter and therefore especially prone to rabid irrationality.
This claim is deeply classist claptrap. It impugns the character of honest hardworking white people struggling to scratch out a living in America’s casino economy and implies that economic suffering somehow robs white people of moral agency, clouds their conscience, makes them especially susceptible to ethno-nationalist demagoguery, and impels them to make racially illiberal choices. Of course many white working-class people voted for Trump, but even more middle-class whites did. The insecurity they felt was not primarily economic. The 2016 election of Donald Trump provides a rare opportunity to test and debunk the class-anxiety canard. On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump went beyond racially charged dog whistles and code words and unapologetically wore his racism on his sleeve, rising to political prominence by pushing “birtherism,” a conspiracy theory that the country’s first black president was not an American citizen.24 He declared in his Presidential Announcement Speech that undocumented immigrants from Mexico were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” During his campaign, he tweeted an image of a masked, dark-skinned man with a handgun alongside a set of points about deaths in 2015, including the wildly false and inflammatory claim that 81% of whites are killed by blacks (in reality roughly 82% of white murder victims are killed by whites each year). He vowed to ban Muslims from entering the United States while signaling potential support for a Muslim registry (raising the specter of Manzanar-style internment camps). He asserted that a Latino US District Judge, Gonzalo Curiel, presiding over civil fraud lawsuits against Trump University, could not be impartial because he was “of Mexican heritage.” Amid protests over fatal police shootings of unarmed black people, he railed against a “war on police” and promised to institute a national “stop and frisk” policy that had already been struck down as unconstitutionally discriminatory in his own New York.25
Poor and working-class whites, the ones suffering the greatest economic distress in the four years leading up to Trump’s election, were not more susceptible to his brand of white identity politics than better-off whites, and indeed, it was well-off whites who were more likely to support Trump. Research shows that even whites who voted for Obama in 2012 and switched to Trump in 2016 were motivated to do so by racism, not economic anxiety, and that racism can make people anxious about the economy rather than the other way around. White identity politics carried Trump to the White House, not economic anxiety. Simply put, race trumped class in 2016. White nationalism trounced economic equity. Racism was a much more powerful force in the election of Donald Trump than white working-class economic disenfranchisement.
Facts matter in the fight against racial oppression in America, including facts about voter motivations. Those who see economic and financial insecurity as the root cause of Trumpism and other kinds of racially illiberal demagoguery will seek to curb racism through policies that strengthen the social safety net. But universal basic income, “Medicare for all,” or other redistributionist economic policies, although they deserve our support because they’re morally right and economically feasible, will not win over Trump voters—these voters are more fearful of losing their dominant status as white people within a demographically diverse and ever-evolving nation than they are about economic issues. In fact, the studies show that Trump’s supporters—again, most of whom were not poor or working-class—largely oppose policies that would reduce the economic distress of poor and working-class whites because, thanks to a decades-long campaign to destroy support for the safety net by racializing government programs with tendentious tropes of Cadillac-driving black welfare queens and the like, they view such policies as handouts for Blacks and other people of color. Deep-seated psychological resentment and racial anxiety rooted in a sense of group status threat are uniquely, independently, and irreducibly racial problems that demand racial solutions.
All too often, liberals pay lip service to the role of group status in the formation of political preferences, and yet they consistently lowball just how psychologically valuable it is to see one’s self as part of the dominant social group—they too often grossly underestimate the value of what Du Bois identified as the psychic boon of whiteness. They believe that people’s economic self-interest must logically take priority over other concerns. Alexander, for instance, argues that poor and working-class whites were persuaded by elites and capitalists to prioritize their racial status interests over their common economic interests with Blacks, “resulting in the emergence of new caste systems that only marginally benefit whites but were devastating for African Americans.”26 (Emphasis added.) But the data will show that the symbolic, psychic boon of whiteness—whites’ sense of dominance over America’s social and political priorities—is not some sop that “only marginally benefits whites.” As University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana C. Mutz points out, “what we know about American voters is that symbolic appeals matter a great deal.”27 Psychologically and emotionally, seeing one’s self as part of a dominant group can feel real good.
There is nothing “illogical” about people finding symbolic considerations more urgent and compelling than material ones. It is not “illogical” to weigh substantial psychic satisfactions against significant economic frustrations and conclude that the former outweigh the latter. Taking pride in one’s social identity, reveling in belonging to a certain social group—even an historically subjugated one—can bring as much psychic satisfaction to members of that social entity as great material compensation. As Maya Angelou puts it in “Still I Rise,” despite being trod in the dirt, “I walk like I’ve got oil wells/ Pumping in my living room.” It’s dangerous for a racially oppressed people in America to ever underestimate the psychic boon for white people of belonging to a racial group that has enjoyed social dominance in this nation since its inception, a feeling for many that is emotionally equivalent to (Angelou again) having gold mines “diggin’ in [their] own backyard.” To grasp the nuances of this nation’s primordial divide over race, we must never downplay its irreducible centrality and independent potency.
Of course, both race and class matter, and both are central to a radically progressive racial justice agenda, for civil rights without economic redistribution will leave far too many truly disadvantaged folks behind. But it’s a grave mistake to view class-based policies as likely to reduce the racial resentments or status anxieties of white voters. Elected officials who embrace the misguided “economic anxiety” narrative in hopes of reducing the appeal of racist demagoguery may pursue policies that will do little to assuage the racial anxieties of whites who cast their 2016 ballot out of deep-seated fear that they were slowly losing their social standing in America and that Trump was the best candidate to reinforce this nation’s racist hierarchy. When these voters hear about racialized mass incarceration or rampant police misconduct or “inclusion, diversity, and equity” in schools and workplaces, they’re listening with ears attuned to demographic trends, cultural shifts, and anxiety about their own future. Unlike economic threats, status threats—anxieties about power, identity, and group superiority—strike at the heart of who and what one is, and what it means to identify as a white man, woman, boy, or girl in America. It may prove hard to economically “bribe” fearful whites to accept a somewhat higher standard of living in exchange for what many view as existential annihilation or, in the pungent phrasing of some ethno-nationalist scaremongers, “white genocide.”
The economic anxiety explanation for Trumpism