A recently-released research study sheds light on the values of white working-class voters in the United States and the reasons these voters strongly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
Three researchers from three different universities
authored the study, titled “White
Working-Class Views on Belonging, Change, Identity and Immigration.”
Open
Society Foundations, a network
of political organizations controlled by
left-wing billionaire George Soros, funded the study.
The trio of researchers conducted the study by visiting
four places between August 2016 and March 2017: Birmingham, Alabama; Dayton,
Ohio; Tacoma, Washington; Phoenix, Arizona; and — for some reason — the New
York City borough of Brooklyn.
The researchers spoke candidly with over 400 people who
identify as members of the white working class.
Here is what they found:
In 2016, Trump was the ‘hope and change’
candidate for white working-class voters
The participants in the study say they view Trump as
“strong” and “hardworking.”
The Trump campaign “personified an insurgent,
anti-establishment rage against ‘politics as normal,'” according to the study
participants.
“In many ways, Trump was the hope and change candidate in
2016, as Obama had been in 2008, albeit representing different constituencies.”
Some Trump voters say they were “appalled by” some of
Trump’s statements during the campaign but “they valued that he was a ‘straight
talker'” who appeared “‘direct’ and ‘honest’ in contrast with his opponents
during the Republican primaries and the presidential campaign.”
Here’s how an interviewee in Birmingham phrased it:
“He’s honest for the most part…isn’t afraid to say
anything and that’s the first time in my lifetime I have seen a politician say,
‘you know what, I don’t care. I’m going to say it.”
White working-class voters strongly favored Trump’s
stance against illegal immigration and his promise to abandon the North
American Free Trade Agreement. They believe the NAFTA agreement has been the
cause of factory closures across the nation.
These voters also say they appreciated Trump’s many
symbolic economic gestures — “for example: Trump donning a miner’s safety
helmet” at June 2016 rally in West Virginia to promote coal production.
Trump hit a very deep, very raw cultural and
economic nerve
Large swathes of Trump voters say they feel “disconnected
and disrupted by the conflation of economic and cultural change,” according to
the study.
“Trump’s message — ‘Make America Great Again’ — connected
with white working-class communities who looked back at a golden past and hoped
for a better future,” the authors of the study say.
Trump
supporters - Getty Images
“The refrain ‘I feel like a stranger in my own community’
was repeated in each of the case study cities, lamenting the negative changes
associated with increased levels of immigration and diversity as well as
economic disruption.”
White working-class participants in the study speak of
living “pay check to pay check” as a permanent economic reality. Economic crisis
is always close. “The social mobility promised by the American Dream had been
suspended and replaced by the lived experience of economic hardship.”
An interviewee in Phoenix frames the economic concerns
this way:
“I am working hard enough to have the American dream but
I don’t just have it. I am doing this whole living from pay check to pay
check.”
White working-class voters also say they see previous
eras as times when “crime was low and there was an expansive pipeline from
school to work, which enabled the white working class to comfortably support
their families. This nostalgia sits in jarring contrast with the current
situation.”
Trump was able to tap into the economic and cultural
angst of white working-class voters by speaking in terms of their values. “The
sense that at long last someone had decided to talk about sensitive issues such
as the impact of immigration on communities provided a basis for Trump to
access a deep well of grievances and concerns.”
At the same time, the study found that many
Trump-supporting members of the white working class hate Hillary Clinton much
more than they approve of Trump.
Throngs of white working-class voters utterly
detest Hillary Clinton
Many study participants describe Clinton as a duplicitous
elitist who is “very much outside a core set of working-class values.”
“White working-class perspectives on Hillary Clinton
ranged from visceral dislike to lukewarm support,” the researchers found.
“Typically, the views expressed about her focused on being untrustworthy and
dishonest, as well as accumulating a fortune from not working hard.”
Hillary
Clinton - Getty Images
Study participants strongly condemned Clinton’s use of a
private email server as “a blatant breach of the law.”An interviewee from Brooklyn summarized the criticism:
“Anybody else she would have been in jail. I am telling
you right now, she’s nothing but a disgrace to this country and if she wins
it’s going to be disaster and it’s going to be the same thing all over again.
Politics aside, I can’t stand it! I don’t like her…she’s very smug.”
Clinton’s description of some Trump supporters as
“deplorable” also proved to be a huge mistake. “‘Deplorable’ became a form of
cultural resistance against a sneering and out-of-touch elite.”
White working-class voters view themselves as
hard workers who value honesty
The researchers found that white working-class voters
have a huge variety of backgrounds, education levels and life experiences.
Their incomes vary pretty considerably.
The common denominator among people who see themselves as
members of the white working class is a shared set of values. These values
include an ethic of hard work, honesty and charity. Also critically important
is an ability to provide for your family without depending on welfare.
An interviewee in Phoenix defines some of the tenets of
white working-class voters thusly:
“Working class values? Well, you put pride in your work
or your profession. You try to do a good job, you try to have good attendance,
good work ethics. You know you’re dependable.”
White working-class voters say they are politically
aware. They read print media. They actively discuss politics. They watched
the presidential debates.
Also, members of the white working class use the terms
“working class” and “middle class” in an interchangeable way, according to the
study. “Working class” is often their current status. “Middle class” is the
status they aspire to attain.
White working-class voters are sick and tired
of political correctness and identity politics
White working-class Trump supporters “feel muzzled” by
politically correct dogma. They see political correctness “not as preventing
abusive language related to race or gender” but instead as “a government and
media campaign that prevents people from speaking in a direct way.”
“We can’t even say what we feel,” says a Tacoma
interviewee who voted for Trump because “he’s actually saying this stuff that
many people across America are thinking.”
Trump-supporting members of the white working class also
despise identity politics and they perceive the Democratic Party “as the party
of identity politics.”
“Some in our study had grown up in staunch Democrat
families and had previously supported Democrat candidates,” the researchers
explain. “Yet the view is that politicians are more interested in looking after
communities of color than white working-class communities.”
The three professors behind the study do manage to accuse
working-class Trump voters of secret racism. The researchers chide their study
subjects for using “racially coded” language “by referencing crime, welfare
dependency, and competition for housing and jobs.”
The researchers appear to perceive themselves as being
above any “racially coded” language — even though the words “white,” “black,”
“Hispanic,” “Latino,” “Asian,” “Chinese” and “Muslim” appear a grand total of
537 times in the study.
White working-class voters think ‘white
privilege’ is a bunch of idiotic claptrap
An interesting dynamic in the study is the way in which
the researchers desperately want to inject both race and the concept of “white
privilege” into the study but the study participants just won’t have it.
The study participants describe “white privilege” as
nonsense.
“Participants felt they were struggling because they
lived paycheck to paycheck, had two or three jobs, and worked hard to put food
on the table,” the researchers say. “Their limited economic means and lack of
upward mobility did not seem like white privilege.”
White
privilege at a clinic in Appalachia - Getty Images/John Moore
The white working-class study participants say they feel
like their “whiteness” is “a disadvantage in terms of ‘reverse racism’ in the
labor market, the preference for immigrants as the building blocks for economic
recovery or the way that politicians discounted the contribution of white
working-class groups in electoral politics.”The several hundred participants in the study largely “focused on the ‘working’ of white working class.” The “white” part is definitively secondary to them. They aren’t racist, they said, and they aren’t interested in agonizing over race in the way that, say, many left-wing activists are.
“Whiteness was mostly unspoken among participants in the
study,” the authors admit.
At the same time, the authors absolutely insist on the importance
of “whiteness.” They argue that the lack of concern about race among the study
participants can only mean that “white was nowhere and everywhere, especially
in referring to social change brought about by newly arrived immigrants, or the
growth of communities of color.”
“Immigrants and racial minorities were viewed largely as
a racial ‘other’ first and were seen as being outside the working class,” the
authors contend.
The study authors also frequently rely on a somewhat
mysterious group of “key informers” and “key stakeholders” to pass judgment on
the racial motives of white working-class people.
The study authors do offer some criticism of the “key
informers” and “key stakeholders.”
“Our key stakeholders tended to view the white working
class as having white privilege as well as being racist,” the authors say. “It
will be challenging for city government and not-for-profits to get beyond this
framework, and it may consolidate the view of white working-class residents
that they are being left behind.”
White working-class voters strongly oppose
illegal immigration
White working-class study participants say they are “not
opposed to immigration.” They agree that immigration has “been hugely
beneficial” to the United States.
However, the desire for law and order supersedes the
benefits of immigration. Members of the white working class say they are
greatly bothered that the initial act of illegal immigrants on American soil is
to break the law, according to the study. They want “documented migration to continue
and for people to be processed using legal channels so those who pose a
security risk can be rejected.”
Immigration
sign - Getty Images/Sandy Huffaker
“Resentment increases from white working-class people
because, rather than addressing the problem of illegality, government appears
to reward migrants by providing support services to ease integration,” the
authors conclude.
Here’s an interviewee from Tacoma:
“Illegal says you’re breaking the damn law. Let’s do
something about that. What are we going to do? We are going to give them some
housing, we are going to give them some welfare checks….And who’s paying for
it? Us! The working class.”
Immigration also takes a toll on the cultural fabric of
white working-class communities. White working-class voters believe immigrants
“do not follow protocols of established behaviors, norms, or codes.” Some
research participants complain that immigrants “seem unwilling to speak
English.”
“Getting to know people of different racial backgrounds
was easier when racial minorities or foreign-born residents shared the
working-class values,” the authors of the study note.
“The working class has been abandoned or
exiled by the Democrats”
The three researchers who conducted the study are Stacy
Harwood, a professor urban and regional planning at the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign; Harris Beider, a visiting professor
in Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs; and
Kusminder Chahal, a researcher at Coventry University in England.
While the study’s primary stated goal is to provide a
deeper understanding of the white working class, an unstated goal of the
study is to help the American left and the Democratic Party recapture some
meaningful chunk of the white working-class voting bloc.
“The working class has been abandoned or exiled by the
Democrats,” the study flatly concludes.
“This project begins to identify some pathways and
reframe the conversation,” Harwood said, according to a
University of Illinois News Bureau press release.
Harwood’s
Facebook likes include Racial Microaggressions at Illinois,
Mexico Solidarity Network and Black Students for Revolution.
Beider, the visiting Columbia professor, observed that
the white working class is very disparate group of people.
“There’s an assumption that they are a homogenous group,
but there’s depth and diversity that’s not given credit,” he said.
The three authors of the study thank the U.S. branch of
Soros’s Open Society Foundations “for funding this study.”
“Foundations such as Open Society work tirelessly” to
promote social understanding, the researchers say. “In this process, the voices
of white working-class people need to be heard by institutions and other
communities.
This study has demonstrated that they feel politically
marginalized, culturally isolated, and economically vulnerable. As a
consequence of their material reality, talking about white privilege to working
class white people who are working two or three jobs to keep their families fed
and a roof over their heads will be a difficult task.”
