Packer 2016 Trump American Despair

Comment MAY 16, 2016 ISSUE

Head of the ClassHow Donald Trump is winning over the white working class.BY GEORGE PACKER

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LILLUSTRATION BY TOM BACHTELL

ast week, Donald Trump became theleader of the Republican Party. Hethrashed his way to this summit byunderstanding what many intelligent

people utterly failed to see: the decline ofAmerican institutions and mores, from Wall Street and the Senate to cable newsand the Twitterverse, made the candidacy of a celebrity proto-fascist with noimpulse control not just possible but in some ways inevitable. It shouldn’t havebeen such a surprise. An early tremor came in 2008, in the person of SarahPalin, who endorsed Trump before almost any other top Republican. In hercontempt for qualifications, her blithe ignorance, she was an avatar for Trump.A lot of Republicans, many of them female, saw in the small-town commonwoman an image of themselves; many men see in the say-anything billionaire animage of their aspirations. Palin showboated her way from politics to reality TV,while Trump swaggered in the opposite direction. Together, they wore a paththat is already almost normal.

Trump also grasped what Republican élites are still struggling to fathom: theideology that has gripped their Party since the late nineteen-seventies—anti-government, pro-business, nominally pious—has little appeal for millions ofordinary Republicans. The base of the Party, the middle-aged white workingclass, has suffered at least as much as any demographic group because ofglobalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade. Trump sensed the ragethat flared from this pain and made it the fuel of his campaign. Conservativeorthodoxy, already weakened by its own extremism—the latest, least appealingstandard-bearer was Ted Cruz—has suffered a stunning defeat from within.And Trump has replaced it with something more dangerous: white identitypolitics.

Republican Presidential candidates received majorities of the white vote in everyelection after 1964. In 2012, Barack Obama won about forty per cent of it,average for Democrats in the past half century. But no Republicancandidate—not even Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan—made as specific anappeal to the economic anxieties and social resentments of white Americans asTrump has. When he vows to “make America great again,” he is talking aboutand to white America, especially the less well off. The ugliness of the pitch willdrive some more moderate and perhaps more affluent Republicans to sit out the

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fall election, or even to vote for Hillary Clinton, the nearly certain Democraticnominee. #NeverTrump and #ImWithHer are trending on select RepublicanTwitter feeds. Trump’s toxicity, combined with a decline in the white electorate—which, since 1976, has dropped from eighty-nine per cent of the Americanvoting public to seventy-two per cent—might make this a year of Democraticrouts.

The Democratic Party has a strange relationship with the white working class.Bernie Sanders speaks to and for it—not as being white but as beingeconomically victimized. He kept his campaign alive last week, in Indiana, inlarge part by beating Clinton nearly two to one among whites without a collegedegree. Coverage of Sanders has focussed on his support among the young andthe progressive, but he has also outperformed Clinton with the white workingclass. Even in losing, Sanders has shown that a candidacy based on economicpopulism can win back some voters who long ago deserted the DemocraticParty. It’s hard to know whether these voters, faced with a choice betweenClinton and Trump, will revert to the Republican side, stay home, or vote for aDemocrat who until now hasn’t known how to reach them.

Identity politics, of a different brand from Trump’s, is also gaining strengthamong progressives. In some cases, it comes with an aversion toward, evencontempt for, their fellow-Americans who are white and sinking. Abstractsympathy with the working class as an economic entity is easy, but the feelingcan vanish on contact with actual members of the group, who often arrive withdisturbing beliefs and powerful resentments—who might not sound or look likepeople urban progressives want to know. White male privilege remains alive inAmerica, but the phrase would seem odd, if not infuriating, to a sixty-year-oldman working as a Walmart greeter in southern Ohio. The growing strain ofidentity politics on the left is pushing working-class whites, chastised for varioustypes of bigotry (and sometimes justifiably), all the more decisively towardTrump.

Last fall, two Princeton economists released a study showing that, since the turnof the century, middle-aged white Americans—primarily less educatedones—have been dying at ever-increasing rates. This is true of no other age orethnic group in the United States. The main factors are alcohol, opioids, andsuicide—an epidemic of despair. A subsequent Washington Post story showedthat the crisis is particularly severe among middle-aged white women in ruralareas. In twenty-one counties across the South and the Midwest, mortality ratesamong these women have actually doubled since the turn of the century. AnneCase, one of the Princeton study’s co-authors, said, “They may be privileged bythe color of their skin, but that is the only way in their lives they’ve ever beenprivileged.”

According to the Post, these regions of white working-class pain tend to be areaswhere Trump enjoys strong support. These Americans know that they’re beingleft behind, by the economy and by the culture. They sense the indifference ordisdain of the winners on the prosperous coasts and in the innovative cities, andit is reciprocated. Trump has seized the Republican nomination by finding


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George Packer became a staff writer in 2003.

scapegoats for the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of working-classwhites, while giving these voters a reassuring but false promise of theirrestoration to the center of American life. He plays to their sense of entitlement,but his hollowness will ultimately deepen their cynicism.

The Democrats probably won’t need the votes of the white working class to winthis year. Demographic trends favor the Party, as does the bloated and hatefulpersona of the Republican choice. Nonetheless, the Democratic nominee can’tafford, either politically or morally, to write off those Americans. They need apolitics that offers honest answers to their legitimate grievances and keeps themfrom sliding further into self-destruction. ♦


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Packer 2016 Trump American Despair