Why neoliberals alienated the white working class and drove them to Trump. via /r/rant

A family member in India asked me a question about the US election recently via email, and I started to answer. Then I started to bitch. Then I wrote and wrote and wrote. I feel a lot better now, but I'm not going to send this email since it's waaaaayyyy too long for anyone to read. So instead I looked for a place to post a rant, and here it is. Thanks for letting me scream into the void.

I'm here from the South. Half my family is white and working class. I'd like to add that while racism is undoubtedly a huge part of Trump and the GOP's wider appeal, it is not the only appeal. Just like religion- it is one factor of the GOP's appeal, and not one that concerns everyone, which is why a mostly secular candidate like Trump is in the lead over Cruz. Now I'm not pretending that the people around me are thinking clearly or rationally, and certainly I'm not advocating their point of view. But I think it's important for those of us on the left to stop misunderstanding and simplifying the GOP voter base.

You are correct that the GOP and Fox have created this monster, but they've done it in the absence of any left response to some real problems as well as the failure of many neoliberal policies. The left has not been organized, and the right came in to fill the void- look at the Tea Party and the midterm turnout. Working class and lower middle class people are rightly frustrated with growing violence in their neighborhoods, failing public schools, stagnant wages, Obamacare's impact on them (it did not help everyone- it's worth looking at income brackets to see what some people are now required to pay), expensive tuition, lack of vocational jobs, etc. Now I know that Republican policies do not accurately address these issues, but over the years, Democrats' public speech has not directly addressed these problems in a way that reflects people's lived experiences. They have a definite middle brow, urban, coastal bias, and you probably can't see it if you are in those circles too.

The Republicans acknowledge the discontent, and then (because they are borderline evil) construct an easy narrative scapegoating "others" (nonwhite mostly, but also this very savvy concept of urban elites) and painting liberals as monsters by pointing out things that resonate emotionally. This includes racism, and therefore if you are working class or poor but also black, you will vote Democrat, even though black Democrats (in general) are pretty conservative on all other issues (something white liberals don't often realize and part of the reason Bernie never really got a foothold in black communities). Loads of working class black people vote Democrat because the Republicans hate them, not because they agree with other aspects of the liberal platform. Most Hispanics (though certainly not all, look at Texas) will also vote Democrat for the same reason, again despite being a bit more conservative than white Democrats. White people though, even if they are not particularly racist, have the privilege to not reflect on this and vote according to their discontent. And so my pro-choice, atheist, white, working class father who is part of an immigrant family votes Republican because of what Obamacare did to his health insurance, what has happened to the property value in his neighborhood since lower income apartments were build right across the freeway, and the fact that the job that he took straight out of high school and then allowed him to raise a family and send kids to college no longer exists. It's his male white privilege that allows him to ignore all the issues with civil liberties that the Republicans present, but it's not his male white privilege that causes his totally legitimate discontent in the first place.

My point of all this is to say that if the GOP abandoned their racist scapegoating in the same way that they have currently mostly abandoned their religious fundamentalism, they could still expect the discontented working class vote so long as other aspects of the narrative stay the same and so long as the Democrats continue to not court working class whites. I think the GOP has done so much damage to black communities that they will never regain that demographic, but they could easily gain more of the Hispanic vote- they already vote around 30% GOP.

The solution to this is for the left to speak directly to people's real life problems and take on a sort of educator role in this regard by organizing at the grassroots level- and I don't know if it's too late or not given that Fox News has already had decades of presenting them as monsters and the national attention span has become so small that our campaigns are basically reality tv shows with a real life reality tv star leading the GOP ticket. But when working class white people say that Trump "speaks his mind" I know exactly what they are talking about and I can explain it. It's worth understanding what they mean if we want to respond to it- even though we know it's absurd, irrational, and often deeply racist.
A few things that constantly come up in white working class political talk that the GOP has grabbed hold of and turned into fear-mongering, with an attempt to present what it looks like from their (sometimes very racist) pov:

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION -It is true that illegal immigration is a drain on emergency rooms, health care, public education, housing markets, etc. It is also true that cartel violence has spread into border cities. Liberals will not say something so plainly, and this flies in the face of the lived reality of many working class white people- the ones who live in those same neighborhoods and go to those same schools and use the same clinics, etc. Acknowledging that there are major problems resulting from illegal immigration does not mean you have to take a hardline racist 'solution' or that you dismiss the benefits to the economy in other areas. The Democrats should be the ones talking intelligently about what to do about the problems (there are progressive solutions and platforms to address them) without scapegoating. But the neoliberal claim that diversity is always positive and that people will all rise to the same levels if given the same opportunities in school is just absolutely not true- and it's working class people who know it from their every day lives. Many kids who grow up in certain neighborhoods never learn to speak English at the same level as a native speaker. In immigrant-majority neighorhoods in Houston and Austin, etc, there are entire schools in which basically all the students speak Spanish most of the day, then go home and speak it exclusively. (I don't personally think bilingualism has to be a negative thing, I'm just pointing out that denying the reality of the conservative complaint "they come here and don't learn English" is gaslighting. It is true in some areas, and we should be having intelligent national conversations about what it means to be a bilingual country.)

WELFARE- If the Democrats would acknowledge that some people DO in fact take advantage of food stamps and welfare, then they could perhaps get people to see the problem in its larger context. Working class people give attention to this issue that is disproportionate to the actual reality of the problem, and liberals (especially in nicer neighborhoods) have trouble understanding the extent of the anger here. Pretending that no one takes advantage of the system flies in the face of the lived reality of working class people who stand in line at the grocery store behind people using food stamps. When you are working your ass off and still can't send your kids to school, it stings to watch someone use foodstamps for groceries and then pay cash for cigarettes. This is something that working class people complain about a lot because it is right in front of their face all the time. Brushing those complaints off as ignorant rather than addressing them directly drives them to Republicans who acknowledge and manipulate that frustration. The Republicans blow this issue way out of proportion and tap into that resentment and racism- they scapegoat and mislead. But the Democrats refuse to acknowledge it happens at all. Who is a working class white person supposed to believe?

THE GHETTO – That issue leads straight into the white working class racism against blacks that we see Trump exploiting. There are, in fact, low income neighborhoods where generations of mostly black people live in poverty, and it's harder to talk about these things conceptually if you live right next to or in them yourself. Those neighborhoods are in fact violent, the kids who grow up there do in fact bring constant disruption and an impossible amount of academic neediness into the classroom. Yes, institutional and systemic racism as well as decades (centuries!) of economic and legal policies favoring white people have created these problems. There are real socioeconomic and historical causes that continue right up until today. The country is deeply racist, still. But if you are a working class white person who sees the violence, volatility and dysfunction in low income urban neighborhoods up close every single day, then it's impossible to swallow the neoliberal line that diversity is all good and that everyone would rise to the top if they just go to the same schools and have enough assistance. It's obvious to anyone who actually lives/works in these areas that this is bullshit and that something more is needed. I don't know if most urban educated upper class people of any race really know what it's like to live in a low-income urban neighborhood- the constant dysfunction and violence are astounding and scary. I lived much of my life in these areas. You are constantly on guard, and it seems like encounters move from innocent to threatening in seconds- if you just look at someone the wrong way or say the wrong thing. So you learn to put on face all the time. Posturing is a defense mechanism; it will also get you shot by the police and thrown out of classrooms and into fights with your peers. There really are neighborhoods full of people on drugs who have no interest in working and who have children they can't afford and that they lack the energy/patience to raise. Now the thing is, it's the far left that is addressing these problems and considering solutions (BLM, Occupy, Bernie) by demanding the typical social justice line- holding the judicial system accountable, a reversal of wealth concentration, an expansion of subsidized and public infrastructure and education, reparations, etc. It's the old case of radical politics being interested in a new pie rather than just trying to give everyone an equal slice. Neoliberals though, have no interest in radical politics as they are served by the status quo. They invest heavily in trying to make unfair systems more accessible (welfare, Obamacare, public education) but they refuse to acknowledge how broken the system is in the first place. If you are sitting in a nice neighborhood in New England or something, then perhaps you can convince yourself that everything will be fine if kids are just bussed around the city to better integrate the schools. Working class white people though see their kids in failing violent schools, and unlike their middle class neoliberal counterparts, they don't have the privilege of being able to speak about integration in theory while sending their kids to suburban or private schools. Since neoliberals are not loud enough in talking about how working class white people and lower income black people are both being screwed by the same power structure, the Republicans come in and divide them against one another. This is why Trump's racism is so effective and why Democrats have utterly failed to reach working class white people and why Bernie and Johnson do resonate with them. It also explains the seemingly bizarre phenomenon of Bernie supporters who will vote for Trump.

MUSLIMS – The same thing is true about radical Islamic terrorism. You hear the right all the time complaining that Obama won't say those words. It puts a barrier in people's minds and they refuse to think afterwards. This is their fault, yes, but the longer you isolate them, the more polarized the country becomes and radicals like Trump end up resonating with them which is terrifying. There actually is a problem with Islamic radicalization. It is true that a small but alarming percentage of Muslim Europeans are joining ISIS and other terrorist groups; they also have a higher rate of violence against women. Radical Islamic terrorism, however, did not pop up in a void. It has a long history and includes mainly Saudi and Pakistani funded sunni extremists (wahhabists) around the world, and there is a pretty straightforward history that you can trace showing how this grew (including a history of struggle against Western imperialism and intervention and against Israeli aggression) and how the US has responded and why the problem is worse in Europe than it is in the US. Once you clarify this for people, they seem able to think more clearly about who is a risk and who isn't, and then you can talk rationally about refugees and the middle east, and it clarifies why no one on the left gives a damn about Hilary's emails and why war with Iran (pushed for by the GOP) is absurd and wrong-headed from every point of view. But if you just keep saying that Islam is a religion of peace, then you again insist on a worldview that opposes what people see in reality, and that drives them towards the right who confirm their lived reality but then simplify it and take advantage of it.

HEALTH CARE – Obamacare is another thing. It is not a good plan. Even those on the left are opposed- they wanted a single payer system. But it does hurt certain income groups. It's outrageously expensive for certain income groups, and the legal requirement to purchase it (if you are alive, you have to have insurance now) really does anger people who were already pinched in the first place and who are no more limited in their work/financial options. And whether or not liberals want to acknowledge it, it did in fact cause some companies to change their insurance policies, cause some rates and copays to go up, and cause some companies to decline coverage on the first request more often than before. These are legitimate complaints. Taken in total, I think it did more good than harm and extended coverage to more people than it hurt, but again if you refuse to acknowledge the discontent caused by a national program, you aren't going to be able to have productive conversations about what to do about it.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS – I hope by know you can see what people mean when they say Trump "speaks his mind". He is not saying anything thoughtful or rational, but he is at least saying things that are not politically correct. I think liberals and middle class and college educated urbanites really underestimate how much working class people are sick to death of what they see as liberal gaslighting. There is an intense desperation to talk about these issues, and there has been a failure of neoliberal policy to address them. It's really unfortunate that the Republicans have been the ones to set the tone of this dialogue since they've just managed to be nasty, racist and angry. But they did not create the discontent- they just channeled it and manipulated it. Wages are in fact stagnating. Families can't afford to send their kids to college. There aren't job and vocational opportunities. Health care is a mess, even under Obamacare. Working class families are watching their neighborhoods become unsafe even as their property taxes soar. All this is real. So it's natural that Republicans are going to tap into that resentment, and the easiest thing to do is to blame it on others by saying it's because of immigrants and welfare recipients- something that seems true if you are a working class white person living in lower income areas with a steady diet of Fox News. The Democrats ought to address that scapegoating directly. The left, historically, has been the party of the working class, and I do think working class white people could find their place in it.

I don't mean to say that the Republicans aren't also a huge force that has put bilions of dollars and decades of energy into creating the hateful, backwards narrative that we are seeing play out today. That is absolutely true. I'm just saying that it's also true that the left continued to ignore and dismiss working class discontent providing no alternative. We share in the blame.

I know that a lot of what I've said here takes the point of view of white entitlement, and that's on purpose since that is what we are talking about- white working class people who vote Republican. Half my family is white and the other half are Indian immigrants, and both are working class in rough neighborhoods in the South, then I went to college and have since moved in mostly wealthier professional circles so I get a pretty wide picture of this from all sides. Discontented working class white folks are a pretty big part of the country, and even though I agree that Hillary will win, they are also becoming radicalized and it's terrifying that they are this close to the presidency. So I think it's worthwhile to try to consider their point of view and figure out why they are so angry and how that anger has been manipulated and what the left can do to redirect it towards more rational policies.