immigration

I came across the Trump phenomenon up close yesterday. The cause was prosaic, I was having a technician fix our washing machine. How ordinary is that? During the usual chat back and forth we started to tread a little too closely to politics, but all was amiable so I didn’t care. Then the source of our machine’s problem became clear: a solitary and very well worn dime had found its way into the pump and brought it to a halt. I made the comment that such a small thing causing such a large fault seemed out of proportion and that — and this was my error — wouldn’t it be good were Washington’s problems also so easily remedied.

That benign comment was met with a very stern question:

“There’s so much anger out there, it will take a lot more than this”

Anger?

We have all heard about the anger of the white working class. Especially the men. After all their standard of living has stagnated for decades under the thumb of neoliberal economics and corporate shareholder value diktat. And, in contrast, we have all been chastened by women and minorities that Trump’s rise to power was a misogynist or racist moment rather than a cry from the heart of white workers.

The truth, as always, is a whole lot more complicated, and is more tractable through conversation than through the kind of modeling most social scientists indulge in nowadays.

The fact is that white male workers have borne the main brunt of the economic ideology of past forty years — they have suffered a tangible decline rather than a lack of improvement. Women and minorities have, during that same time, been enduring their own struggles, both of which deserve more attention and resolution, but those struggles were attempts to achieve equality and deserving respect, not attempts to retrieve something that hadalready existed. The psychology of the two situations needs to be borne in mind as we sift through the debris of that last election.

Whilst this sounds quite non-progressive to many I would reject any such notion, and I would caution my feminist friends against seeking to diminish the anger of the white working men of America: their angst is very real and needs to be taken into account in any liberal conversation. It is perverse, in my mind, to march in the streets to establish rights for women and minorities if, in the thoughts of this different and surly sub-segment of the population, all that search for equality is well and good but seems to ignore them. If ever there were a moment for a class based response, this is it. But we seem far from it.

A healthy progressive society is not fragmented into a series of parallel identities all clamoring for space in some zero-sum contest. It is one where the interconnections are recognized and the broader struggles for democratic freedom and economic prosperity are not bogged down by internecine warfare between groups that ought to be united.

We are constantly told by our elite — which includes people in both our main political parties — that our economy is constrained and that, therefore, certain aspects of the past cannot be carried forward. Usually this is simply a disguised attack on what we call entitlements. My personal opposition to Clinton was grounded on my belief that she was too attached to this point of view. Her neoliberal roots are strong and her conversion to a more strident defense of working people was too recent and too shallow to be much else other than a response to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

We must never forget that a great deal of the long term damage to the middle and working classes was done precisely as a result of Clinton policies. Deregulation, free trade, and welfare reform all are characteristics of a Clinton regime. They are not solely the province of right of center anti-social politicians.

Unfortunately the Democratic party is now plunged into a false self-reflection, with a large part of its elite arguing that Clinton’s defeat was due to a massive upsurge in misogyny and racism. I look at it differently: if this were the case, then Clinton would have performed better amongst women voters. She would have motivated more minority voters. She failed on both counts. Further: the ugliness of the election and its undoubted misogynistic and racist tones do not reflect the motivation for most voters in voting for Trump. I simply do not believe that every Trump voter is a raging misogynist or racist. But I do think they were angry enough to ignore the nastiness, which was, to them, a cost of getting the change they want.

The more strident of my feminist friends constantly talk of “white male privilege”, as if it is a constant across society. This gets me back to my conversation and that technician.

He is a white male. I doubt very much that he thinks he has much privilege. To throw such an aspersion in his face is certain to engender a great deal of hostility, where with a different approach he would be sympathetic. He is, for instance, very proud that his daughter is a pharmacist and doing very well economically. He has been supportive and is, in many ways, the very epitome of what was once thought to be the ideal of American Opportunity. He worked so that she could advance.

Only that narrative has a major flaw in it. She did advance, but he has fallen down. Instead of hard work producing a decent life with the prospect of a better future for his daughter, all that hard work has left him, not even in some steady state, but in decline. He no longer believes the narrative. So he is prepared to tear it down.

That’s the anger we must deal with if we are to protect what advances those parallel identities that comprise the Democrats have made. Those gains are fragile too. The neoliberal project is designed to reduce them also.

What were the two most aggravating sources of his anger?

Immigration and Obamacare. On neither did he have the full facts. On both his opinion was fueled by his own confrontation with them — Obamacare especially brought his ire since his own health care policy had risen in cost so much. Both are central parts of the leftist approach, both drew fierce attacks from my interlocutor. Yet he supports health care for all. What he wants, and what Obamacare failed to deliver, is lower costs for drugs and doctor visits. He thinks doctors earn too much and do too little. He thinks pharmaceutical companies ought to be forced to reduce prices. He is, in other words, a supporter of a more radical leftist agenda. But he is a Trump voter.

This voter would, I wager, support a united more class driven Democratic party. But he does not support its current incarnation as a set of parallel identities sitting on top of a neoliberal economic policy. A party, in other words, that seems deliberately to exclude him.

And, it is quite obvious, the left needs a response to the fears that immigration have stirred up other than to brand all those who urge a stronger response as racists. They are not.

Nativism, misogyny, and racism are all evils that we need to guard against. Trump incorporates all three. He is a vile person. But his supporters are not. They voted for him because of the bankruptcy of his opponents in both parties. After forty years of failure and the demise of the American Dream it is time for change. It ought not have been Trump, but in the absence of alternatives it was.

I hope this message gets through to the elite before Trump gets too far with his messianic project. Otherwise the descent into less moderate conversation will continue.