The people who have been hit hardest by neoliberal policies such as slashed social services and banking deregulation are not Trump’s white voters—not by a long shot. These policies have done far more to compromise the financial status of Black and Latino families, and it is within communities of color that the deepest service cuts have been inflicted.
Moreover, the flip side of neoliberal economic policies that exile whole segments of the population from the formal economy has been an explosion of the state apparatus aimed at control and containment: militarized police, fortressed borders, immigration detention, and mass incarceration. The forty years since the neoliberal revolution began have seen the number of people behind bars in the United States increase by approximately 500 percent—a phenomenon, once again, that disproportionately affects Black and brown people, though whites are most certainly swept up in the system as well.
It’s also important to note that Trump’s base wasn’t mostly poor; it was solidly middle-income, with most of his voters earning between $50,000 and $200,000 a year (with a concentration at the lower end of that range). Since so many Trump voters are not destitute, some argue that their vote can’t be motivated by economic stress.
But that misses an important factor. A CNN analysis of exit polls found that Trump won 77 percent of the vote among those who said that their financial situation was “worse today” than it had been four years earlier. In other words, they may have been doing well compared with the country’s average, but many had lost ground. And indeed the losses began long before that.
Insecure on Every Front
Over the past three decades, but accelerating since the 2008 financial crisis, pretty much everyone apart from the one percent has been losing job security as well as whatever feeble safety net used to exist. That means a lost job has greater implications now for one’s ability to pay for health care or hold on to a home. This state of affairs hurts Trump’s working-class white male voters just as it does so many others. On the other hand, because many of Trump’s blue-collar voters had a notably better deal until fairly recently—able to access well-paid, unionized manufacturing jobs that supported middle-class lives—these losses appear to come as more of a shock.
This is reflected in a marked rise in deaths among white, middle-aged Americans without college degrees, mainly from suicide, prescription drug overdoses, and alcohol-related illnesses. And this is particular to whites: mortality rates for Black and Hispanic Americans in similar demographic brackets are falling. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the Princeton economists who noticed this trend dating back to 1999 and authored a landmark paper on what they term “deaths of despair,” explain the discrepancy as coming down to different prior experiences and expectations, or “the failure of life to turn out as expected.” Another way of thinking about it is: when a building starts to collapse, it’s the people on the higher floors who have further to fall—that’s just physics.
On top of those losses, there are also the ground-shifting uncertainties associated with living in a changing country, a nation rapidly becoming more ethnically diverse, and where women are gaining more access to power. That’s part of progress toward equality, the result of hard-fought battles, but it does mean that white men are losing economic security (which everyone has a right to) and their sense of a superior status (which they never had a right to) at the same time. In the rush to condemn the latter form of entitlement, we shouldn’t lose sight of something important: not all forms of entitlement are illegitimate. All people are entitled to a dignified life. In wealthy countries, it is not greedy or an expression of unearned privilege to expect some basic security in your job when you work hard for decades, some certainty that you will be taken care of in old age, that you won’t be bankrupted by illness, and that your kids will have access to the tools they need to excel. In a decent society, people should feel entitled to those things. That’s human privilege. And yet those sorts of entitlements have been under vicious attack by the Right for four decades, to the extent that the word entitlements—referring to pensions and health care—is a slur in Washington, DC.
It is this complex mix of factors that allowed Trump to come along and say: I will champion the beleaguered working man. I will get you those manufacturing jobs back. I’ll get rid of these free trade agreements. I’ll return your power to you. I’ll make you a real man again. Free to grab women without asking all those boring questions. Oh, and the most potent part of Trump’s promise to his base: I will take away the competition from brown people, who will be deported or banned, and Black people, who will be locked up if they fight for their rights. In other words, he would put white men safely back on top once again.
The power of that promise is part of why Trump’s election win was like a Bat-Signal for hatemongers of all kinds. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported close to a tripling of anti-Muslim hate groups in 2016 alone. In the month after Trump’s election, there were more than a thousand reported incidents of hate targeting people of color. Thirty-two-year-old Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an immigrant engineer from India, was shot dead at a bar in Olathe, Kansas, by a white man who reportedly yelled, “Get out of my country!” before opening fire. In the first two months of 2017, seven transgender people were murdered, prompting calls for a federal hate crimes investigation.
To a terrifying degree, skin color and gender conformity are determining who is physically safe in the hands of the state, who is at risk from vigilante violence, who can express themselves without constant harassment, who can cross a border without terror, and who can worship without fear.
The Identity Blame Game