Vox’s Dylan
Matthews wants
the media to stop making excuses for Trump supporters. The Trump phenomenon isn’t
about “post-industrial decay,” he writes. It’s not happening because “neoliberal
capitalism is failing.” Such depictions, by Beltway media types on one side and
“leftists and social democrats” on the other, willfully ignore the obvious.
“The press has gotten extremely comfortable with describing
a Trump electorate that simply doesn’t exist,” Matthews says. If you want to
know the Trump supporters’ concerns, you just have to look at what they’re
saying in polls: It’s about racial resentment. It’s about white nationalism. Matthews
has the data to prove it.
For one thing, they’re not working class, or even
economically struggling; “Trump’s supporters are not the wretched of the earth.”
Matthews points out that at the national level the median income of Trump’s primary
voters was higher than Hillary Clinton’s. Support for Trump in polls was
“correlated with” higher income, even among whites. Yet, perversely, the media
has been pumping out feature stories about the fervor for Trump in
hard-scrabble places like Leetonia,
Ohio, or Creston,
Iowa -- places that, statistically, don’t even exist by Matthews’s
calculations.
It’s not that Matthews doesn’t care about real economic
suffering; he’s no conservative. He recognizes that globalization has been hard
on many Americans. He knows that there are poor whites in this country as well
as poor blacks and Latinos. “The government should help people who are
materially struggling,” he writes. “And Hillary Clinton, to her great credit, has
offered programs…that will leave millions of white Trump supporters much better
off.”
But for Matthews, the key point is this: “This isn’t worth
doing to win back their votes; it’s worth doing because it’s the right thing to
do.”
That’s a curious idea. If Matthews supports the Democratic
party’s agenda, why wouldn’t he want it to win back as many Trump votes it can?
How can the Democrats gain the kinds of majorities they need to push through
all the beneficent policies he cites if they fail to win votes away from the
other side? Isn’t that one of the ways parties win elections -- by taking votes
from the other side? In fact, isn’t that why Hillary Clinton’s campaign is now
wooing anti-Trump Republicans?
Obviously Matthews wouldn’t want Democrats to use racist appeals
to win Trump votes, and neither would I. But neither does he claim that
anyone’s calling for such a step. He certainly doesn’t cite anyone who is.
What he does complain about is the “unprecedented outpouring
of sympathy” for Trump voters that he sees in the media: the earnest pleas, often
written by conservatives or Beltway-pundit types, that we should listen to the
concerns of “the
millions of white voters living on the edges of the economy,” the “decent,
sincere people who feel disregarded,” and so on.
Matthews finds these stories exasperating. And you do have
to agree with him when he points out that there was never any comparable litany
of hand-wringing about the “concerns of Mitt Romney voters” or the “interests
of Hillary Clinton supporters.”
But then again, when I look at my Twitter feed, which is
full of elite media types, the main outpouring I see is just the opposite: a
flood of contempt and disgust for Trump supporters, not just for the
irresponsible votes they cast, but for their defective character as a group. Come
to think of it, that might help to explain the rash of sympathetic pieces.
Matthews’s admonition against trying to win back Trump voters
reminds me of one my favorite quotes from the ever-colorful Grover Norquist. In
a 2006 American Prospect roundtable, the conservative
anti-tax impresario was asked about the gay rights issue -- at the time, he was
taking heat from fellow Republicans for his work with gay organizations:
I speak to the Log Cabin Republicans
and work with them on a whole host of issues … The Human Rights Campaign on
certain things … So I get trashed from time to time by some of my friends. I
think it’s a mistake to write off any group.
I was in Romania, they’re having
elections in four weeks, and I was organizing the non-communists. And I had
them write on a blackboard: Who’s Voting for Us, Who’s Voting for Them. And
they had to list [the voter groups and] understand why everybody was [voting
that way].
They had the gypsies voting for the
Communists. And I said, “OK, I get why the Communists are voting for the
Communists, and the Army and the police and the guys with government jobs. But
why the gypsies?” If I were a gypsy I’d want to live outside [even] touchy-feely
U.S. law, much less harsher communist law.
And they said, “Well, the
communists buy them liquor and then they vote for them.”
And I said, “We can do this. George
Washington did this, it’s OK.” And they said, “No, the gypsies are scum and we
won’t talk to them.” And I said, “OK, I guess you’re not getting the gypsy vote
then.”
In politics, you want to have as
few gypsies as possible, as few groups of people who are not voting for you
because you’re not talking to them.
Maybe it’s not surprising that a conservative like Norquist
and a liberal outlet like Vox would
have differing views of politics. What’s surprising is Vox’s preference for the outlook of the Romanian right.
***
But aren’t the Trump voters inseparable from the racist
appeals of Trump himself? That’s what Matthews seems to argue, with the aid of
a raft of studies and data.
In doing so, he sheds useful light on the standard liberal
way of thinking about politics. Matthews seems to take individuals as the elementary
particles of political life. The individual is apparently endowed with a more
or less well-defined set of attitudes on all the major issues of the day. If
you sum up the aggregate of those opinions, what you get is “politics”: election
returns, opinion polls, legislative roll calls, all the quantitative mass
phenomena of national politics. These are just the sum of individual brains.
As for how those opinions got manufactured and sorted into
all those brains, that’s a question for psychology, or history, or economics, not
politics.
You can see this methodology at work in the studies Matthews
cites to make his case. Almost all of them follow the same approach. First, they
measure the attitudes expressed by Trump supporters in multiple-choice polling
questions. Then they compare them to the answers of non-Trump supporters. (Usually
they control for other factors as well.) Whichever issues most sharply distinguish
the Trumpist group from non-Trumpists are assumed to reveal the Trump
supporters’ innermost feelings, hopes, and fears – in short, their motivations.
Individual motivations, it’s assumed, can be inferred from group differences.
In summing up all the correlations and cross-tabs, Matthews
is very clear on this point: “Trump’s voters [are] motivated by genuine political disagreement about race”; “these
people [are] motivated by racial
resentment”; “Trump’s supporters are not, in fact, motivated by economic marginalization.”
I’ve seen most of the studies Matthews links to. As far as I
can tell, none analyzed polling questions that actually asked people what was “motivating”
them. Instead, they used standard polling questions like: What is your
household income? Do you approve of Obama? Should taxes be cut? Should
immigration be reduced? Is black poverty caused by a lack of effort? Actual motivations
were never recorded: they were inferred by researchers, using math, and then
imputed to Trump supporters en bloc.
For example, one of the studies Matthews cites analyzed
questions from the 2016 ANES
pilot survey. According to Matthews, the study concluded that while “support
for Trump is correlated most strongly with party ID, the second biggest factor…was
racial resentment.” The study’s author concluded
that “Trump support isn’t about the economy.”
Meanwhile, the same ANES survey had actually included a battery
of questions that did try to ask
respondents about their motivations. It listed 21 different political issues
and asked: “Which of the following issues are the most important to you in
terms of choosing which political candidate you will support?”
Trump’s three signature racially-coded themes -- immigration,
terrorism, and crime – were among the possible choices; a third of Trump
supporters picked one of those as their top issue. Two-thirds did not. 51% chose
traditional kitchen-table issues like the economy, health care, Social Security,
taxes, or the national debt. Another 8% chose culture-war issues like abortion,
gay rights, or “morality.” And the remaining 8% chose “military strength,”
“foreign policy,” or gun control.
***
Let me be clear. All of the following are true: From the
start, Trump has put naked appeals to racism at the center of his campaign. In
the process, he has magnetized a congeries of alt-right eugenicists,
Confederate flag-wavers, and paranoid Mexican-haters to his cause. And then he went
on to win 52% of the Republican vote in the primaries; he’ll probably win at
least 40% of the popular vote in November.
Those facts aren’t in dispute. The question is what to make
of them. There’s no doubt that the nation’s “white nationalists” provide
disproportionate support to Trump’s racist campaign – and given the campaign’s
tone, it would be very strange if they didn’t. Presumably, the nation’s
socialists also provided “disproportionate” support to the Bernie Sanders
campaign. And that sort of effect seems to account for how all the studies Matthews
cites arrived at their findings, mathematically speaking.
For example, Matthews points to a study by UCLA’s Michael
Tesler who found that “support for Trump in the primaries strongly correlated
with respondents' racial resentment,” and did so more strongly than McCain’s
support in 2008 or Romney’s in 2012. What that means concretely, if you look at
Tesler’s charts,
is that on the one hand Trump did a lot better than Romney and McCain among the
more racially-resentful half of Republicans; but on the other hand, he did equally
well as them among the less racially-resentful
half. From eyeballing Tesler’s charts, it appears that the more racially-resentful
half of Republicans contributed a bit under 50% of Romney and McCain’s primary
support. For Trump, the number was about 60%.
If that difference doesn’t seem all that big, it’s because while
Trump has been very effective at mobilizing the most obsessively racist fraction
of Americans to his cause -- and great at winning Republican votes overall -- he
hasn’t been manufacturing more racists.
Indeed, amid the flood of “explainer” articles reporting the
findings of complicated regression studies on racist attitudes, it’s striking how
rarely you see simple aggregate numbers. The heated polarization of the Obama
and Tea Party era in particular gave rise to an outpouring of intricate studies
on the political correlates of “racial resentment” – dozens of which have been
reported in Vox. Meanwhile, in a
co-authored academic article
published this year, Donald Kinder, the University of Michigan social scientist
who first developed the concept of racial resentment, reported: “Racial
resentment is essentially stationary over the last quarter century, as measured
by the ANES or by the GSS. We detect no sign here that White Americans’ racial
resentments hardened during the Obama Presidency.”
Likewise, Gallup regularly asks the question, “Should
immigration be kept at its present level, increased, or decreased?” Anti-immigration
sentiment has been in long-term decline among non-Hispanic whites. In 2002, those
wanting less immigration exceeded those wanting more by 43 percentage points.
This year that number was 22 percentage points.
And that seems to be the case all around the world. Take the
example of France, where the level of racism in political discourse seems to
reach new heights every week and the far-right has been on the ascendant for decades.
Yet, the percentage of the French who say there are “too many immigrants in
France” fell from 75% in 1988 to 50% in 2012. The percentage who think
immigration is a “source of cultural enrichment” rose from 44% in 1992 to 75%
in 2009. The percentage who agree that immigrant workers “should be seen as
being at home here, since they contribute to the French economy” rose from 66%
in 1992 to 84.5% in 2009.
In one sense, these figures -- taken from a comprehensive
2013 study
of long-run French public opinion by a team of political
sociologists led by Vincent Tiberj of the Center for European Studies at Sciences-Po
-- shouldn’t come as a surprise. As the authors note, it’s long been
understood that tolerance rises with education levels, and education levels
have been rising for decades. Older and less-educated groups, in turn, are
affected by the liberalizing cultural climate driven by younger and
more-educated cohorts, albeit with a lag.
Thus, over the long run, each generation tends to express
more tolerant attitudes than the last, and each generation tends to get more tolerant
as it ages. “In all Western countries,” Tiberj says, “electorates are,
generally speaking, more open and more tolerant than they’ve ever been.”
Yet you’d never guess any of that from watching the reactionary
spiral of French political discourse. Tiberj explains
the “paradox” this way:
Historically, France has never been
more tolerant. Yet polarization on cultural values has never been as strong,
either. The explanation is simple: If there’s a rightward shift, it’s above all
a shift in the political debate.
When Mitterrand was reelected in
1988, the electorate still voted according to its socio-economic values. To put
it simply, white-collar professionals voted for the right and workers voted for
the left.
Starting with Nicolas Sarkozy’s [hard-right]
2007 campaign, things changed: voters started to vote according to both their
socio-economic and their cultural values….
[And] while Nicolas Sarkozy didn’t
hesitate to assert a right-wing ideological narrative to push a wedge into the
debate, François Hollande has a lot more trouble with that….
Generally speaking, political discourse
re-shapes the logic of voting: the rightward shift isn’t a demand coming from
the electorate, it’s a result of the political supply… Our study tends to
demonstrate the primordial importance of ideological combat.
Sensational events like riots, scandals, or terrorist
attacks do cause short-run declines in tolerant attitudes, Tiberj finds. Eventually they're forgotten and tolerant attitudes resume their long-run rise. But in the meantime, they can have long-run effects on politics by altering the terms of political debate -- the ideological formulations offered by visible representatives of the left and the right. These are crucial in determining
the tenor of the political discourse. And that tenor, in turn, alters how
individuals understand their own relationship to politics, their own interests
-- even their own “motivations.”
“The same individual can simultaneously present dispositions
to tolerance and to prejudice,” write Tiberj and his co-authors, “with the prevalence
of the one over the other being strongly dependent on the environment, the
information received, and recent events that have made an impression on them.”
***
In one of those journalistic forays to the struggling
pro-Trump hinterland that Matthews finds so annoying, the Guardian’s Paul Lewis and Tom Silverstone recently traveled to West Virginia for a video
reportage on the most pro-Trump county in the state's Republican primaries: McDowell County.
A former coal mining area that lost its mines, McDowell is about as destitute and decrepit as you
might expect.
One man they spoke to, a poor and elderly former coal miner
of 26 years, was a life-long member of the United Mine Workers. “I voted for
that black guy two times,” he says with a laugh. Asked how he’ll vote in
November, he says he’ll vote for Trump. His reason is, “Donald’s going to put
all the coal mines back.”
Historically, being a member of a union – especially a
combative union with an active internal life – is the most important instance of
the kind of external force that Tiberj points to as having the potential to transform how individuals translate their “dispositions to tolerance and to prejudice”
into their political outlook and behavior.
West Virginia’s history is a fine example of this. In the
1920s, when the UMW was weak and declining, the state’s politics were
reactionary, dominated by ruthless coal operators and the Ku Klux Klan. But the
resurgence of the UMW in the 1930s on the back of militant mass strikes transformed
West Virginia politics, integrating its otherwise insular working class tightly
into a national labor-liberal New Deal coalition that depended for its survival
on black workers and black voters.
That’s why in 1964, four months after Lyndon Johnson signed
the Civil Rights Act, West Virginia voted for him against the anti-labor
Goldwater by the sixth-largest margin of any state. It’s why in 1968, when the
Democrat on the ticket was the labor-liberal Hubert Humphrey – a figure who for twenty years had been more visibly committed to the civil rights issue than any other national politician – West Virginia's vote for him was the seventh-largest in the country. (And its vote for George Wallace was far
lower than the other border states.)
And remarkably, that union effect continues today, on a
smaller scale: in 2012 Barack Obama’s deficit among non-college whites in the top half of the racial-resentment scale
was 26 percentage points smaller among those who belonged to unions than those
in non-union households, according to data from the large-sample Cooperative
Congress Election Study.
What’s remarkable about this is that union
membership today is so often a lamentably low-intensity, low-commitment affair. It’s almost surprising to find it having any aggregate effect
at all. And yet by re-shaping the individual’s understanding of the stakes of
politics, being in a union still has a powerful effect on how “dispositions to tolerance and to prejudice” translate into political
behavior.
***
Trump’s voters in November will come in different
varieties. There will be McMansion-dwelling evangelicals in the Atlanta
suburbs. There will be owners of prosperous construction businesses in rural
California. And there will also be voters like that West Virginia ex-coal miner in
the Guardian report.
A charitable reading of Matthews’s piece is that he
merely wants us to keep those first two types in mind, lest we succumb to the
illusion that the Trump phenomenon was all about downtrodden coal miners. A
less charitable reading is that he wants us to forget that it was about that,
too.
Given the long, slow slide in the Democrats’ performance in the House of Representatives, the governors’ mansions and the state legislatures, many will ask what the party could do to strengthen its position. As analysts sift through the returns, Trump’s eye-popping margins among non-college whites will generate a great deal of commentary. (In 2012, Obama lost even whites with a college
degree but without postgraduate training.)
The numbers will be clear: downscale whites are a big pool of untapped votes. Yet if a cordon sanitaire is placed around that demographic
territory and hung with the notorious label, “Trump Vote,” the Democrats will be even more likely to let the party system drift down its current path: into the culture-war
politics of the reactionary Tammany-vs.-Klan 1920s, rather than the class-based politics that
followed.
