There is much dispute these days regarding exactly what motivates Donald Trump's supporters and, more broadly, the furious right-wing base. Is it economic insecurity or racial resentment?
Bernie Sanders believes it's mostly the former. He told Face the Nation:
Many of Trump's supporters are working-class people and they're angry, and they're angry because they're working longer hours for lower wages, they're angry because their jobs have left this country and gone to China or other low-wage countries, they're angry because they can't afford to send their kids to college so they can't retire with dignity.
What Trump has done with some success is taken that anger, taken those fears which are legitimate and converted them into anger against Mexicans, anger against Muslims, and in my view that is not the way we're going to address the major problems facing our country.
President Obama seems to agree. He told NPR that Trump is taking advantage of "all the economic stresses that people have been going through — because of the financial crisis, because of technology, because of globalization, the fact that wages and incomes have been flat-lining for some time, and that particularly blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck."
Lately there's been some pushback on this interpretation. In a recent post, Matt Yglesias criticized "Democrats' naive theory of Trumpism," saying that concerns about the loss of white power should be seen as concerns about the loss of white power, not some cover story for economic anxiety. Brian Beutler has started using "economic insecurity" as a euphemism for racism, mocking the disappearance of race from some political analysis.
This dispute strikes me as a bit of a red herring. I'm not sure, in the current case, that economic anxiety and racism can be easily distinguished, their relative power measured. In the dynamic at work in the US — which, as David Frum pointed out in a thoughtful recent piece on Trumpism, is also evident in a number of other wealthy democracies — they are inextricably linked.
A recent set of focus groups with members of the Republican base casts some light on the question. But first, some general background.
Most people don't vote on issues, but on interests
The kind of people who think of themselves as having particular theories of government or economic philosophies are a self-selecting group — and they are wildly overrepresented in politics. They talk about the role of government, the interplay of freedom and rights, the proper level of market intervention, the balance of democracy promotion and realpolitik, and various other abstractions.
For the most part, these issues are not what animate voters. As Chris Hayes wrote in a 2004 article on undecided voters (which remains one of my favorite things written about American politics), most voters don't think in terms of "issues" at all, not along the dividing lines used by political elites.
For most people, the relevant line is not between left and right but between Us and Them. Most politics is interest group politics, about securing benefits and protections for a particular Us and in some cases denying benefits and protections to particular Thems perceived as undeserving or in competition with Us for scarce resources.
This is most clear when the interest group in question is a demographic group systematically excluded from power — in the US, nonwhite non-men, basically. That's why we call feminism or Black Lives Matter or LGBT movements "identity politics." They manifest as political or economic demands tied to group identity.
Identity politics, i.e., "Please stop shooting people with my identity."
But as Yglesias argued in an earlier article, all politics is identity politics. The interests of the politically and culturally dominant group are woven into the status quo; they are simply "politics." Maintenance of the status quo is the assumption; changes to the status quo, which would shift the distribution of benefits and protections, are "demands." The dominant group is rarely seen as, or thinks of itself as, a distinct identity with common interests. It is simply the norm, the baseline.
There's a unique political dynamic that develops when the dominant group begins to lose power due to demographic and economic changes. It becomes a group, one identity among others, fighting for benefits. This is a profound and unsettling shift, inevitably seen as a corruption of the proper order, an assault by the undeserving on the resources of those entitled to them. The group experiences diminution as humiliation and seeks someone to blame, usually various subaltern groups. The process often involves backlash, even violence.
Declining hegemons often see competing demographic groups as the agents of their economic insecurity; their racial resentment and economic insecurity are not distinct.
Read more
http://www.vox.com/2015/12/30/10690360/racism-economic-anxiety-trump
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