We’re told that Donald Trump tapped into the anti-establishment anger of a “declining middle class.” But it’s a peculiar world in which people who are supposed to have class interests — that is to say, worries about income, jobs, job security — embrace a candidate whose policies are designed to shatter those very things.
What’s striking about this notion is how loose the idea of class has become. If we look at the exit polls, we see race, ethnicity, gender, and age as more critical than indicators of class. White men across the income and education spectrum voted for Trump. One explanation is that racism and misogyny are at the heart of this. And there’s been plenty of evidence to suggest that there’s more than enough of those to go around.
But there is a cutting-off-nose-to-spite-face problem here. The American left and center were built on programs of inclusion, programs that from the New Deal forward, gave hope, opportunity, and security to working-class people. Why would prejudice win out over economic self interest? It’s not because white men are inherently awful — but that, for decades, the right has fought an unceasing war against the egalitarian state. It has deployed every cultural weapon it could find to redefine the notion of solidarity and to drive wedges between people whose real interests coincide a great deal more than they imagine.
What has worked spectacularly well for the extreme right is the deployment of a Manichaean world view, casting every issue in terms of black and white, good and evil. Gun control, feminism, abortion rights, immigration, crime, taxes, climate change denial — all cast as titanic struggles between good and evil. But if there are true believers on each of these issues, what is clear is that the overall pattern here has been a concerted and cynical effort to polarize debates in order to make it impossible to develop serious policies and consensus. In a world of Facebook (ironic, no?) and Twitter, complexity, nuance and reasoned discussion falter and fail.
This cynical Manichaeanism has served a variety of interests, sometimes monetary and sometimes personal ambition. The rogue’s gallery of Trump confidantes and supporters encompasses the whole range. But whatever the motive, the result has been the same: to replace complex and difficult discussions that necessarily result in compromise and conciliation with simplistic solutions that can be summarized in pithy slogans.
Class may be at the heart of America’s crisis: but it is because the dumbing down of public discourse — fuelled in part by politicians and journalists all too willing to accept the either/or, friend/foe, good/evil binaries — that the sloganeering of the right has triumphed.
The road back to a healthy America will be long. But it demands that we do something other than engage the Manicheans on their terms. We will have to be persistent, patient, and painstaking and work tirelessly to persuade our compatriots of the connections between causes and consequences, to dissolve the false binaries of the right, and to restore and replenish the grand and generous nature that has persisted in the United States.
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