Do Trump’s Supporters Deserve to Be Scorned?

A fierce debate erupts among conservative commentators over "working class white" identity politics.

By John Zmirak Published on February 10, 2016

There’s a dust-up among conservative commentators over how to address the presumed core of Donald Trump supporters: working-class whites worried about what they perceive as their collective interests, in the face of a grievance group-driven Democratic party, and a Republican establishment that cloaks pro-business politics in free market rhetoric. As I noted in a column about the accusation that Ted Cruz was playing “Christian identity politics,” the very idea of a one-time majority playing this game makes people understandably nervous:

[W]hen a group is in danger or has been long subject to injustice, our culture makes no objection to their employing identity politics, within limits: There is an official Congressional Black Caucus, and politicians do not refuse invitations from the American Israel Political Action Committee. On the flipside, we would have no patience for a Congressional White Caucus, or an American Gentile Political Action Committee — precisely because the advantaged group, by virtue of its stronger status, ought to practice magnanimity, and identify its self-interest with the broader common good.

But what about groups that no longer exercise power, which in fact are shrinking in numbers, influence, wealth and lifespan — like the white working class? This world’s Archie Bunkers — like me and Donald Trump, he hailed from Queens, N.Y. — can no longer be called a “silent majority,” as Nixon named them. Charles Murray has documented in grim detail the social pathologies (illegitimacy, drug addiction) that now afflict the white working class, which are now at least as serious as those that troubled the black community when Daniel Patrick Moynihan raised alarms in the late 1960s.

Even if we closed America’s borders tomorrow, thanks to their low birth rate, whites as a whole would cease to be a numerical majority in a few decades anyway, as Reihan Salam pointed out in National Review. That isn’t necessarily significant, so long as our country maintains the common Anglo-Protestant culture of morality and tolerance which we inherited from our founders — a solid core of English-speaking, freedom-loving Whigs. But West-bashing multiculturalists and bigoted, state-backed Progressives have hollowed out that heritage as well. The percentage of Americans unaffiliated with any church continues to grow, with each survey we see.

Union membership has plummeted and working class wages have been static for a lifetime, but the leading factions in both political parties favor continued, even expanded, low-skill immigration. A man like my father, who snored through high school and married a high-school dropout, would not today find a well-paying job with benefits carrying the U.S. mail on his back, which allowed his wife to stay home with the kids, and those kids to attend safe, decent (parochial) schools. That sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore. The America which John Patrick Zmirak, Sr., served in World War II under General Patton no longer exists. Is it okay to be angry about that, and look for answers? (Even if, like me, you think that Donald Trump’s answers are muddled or wrong?)

Conservatives (mostly of working class white origin themselves) seem to differ. Kevin Williamson, of National Review, wrote a scathing piece about the phenomenon which he sees at the heart of “Trumpism.” He summed up the core of support for Donald Trump — and before him, for the consistent, pro-life conservative Patrick Buchanan — this way:

The Buchanan boys are economically and socially frustrated white men who wish to be economically supported by the federal government without enduring the stigma of welfare dependency. So they construct for themselves a story in which they have been victimized by elites and a political system based on interest-group politics that serves everyone except them. Trump is supported by so-called white nationalists, as Buchanan was before him, but the swastika set is merely an extreme example of the sort of thinking commonly found among those to whom Trump appeals.

On policy issues, Williamson makes a number of accurate observations about the implausibility of Trump’s proposals. For instance, he notes correctly that the “tariffs and trade restrictions that Trump dreams of are simply a very large tax on one group of Americans that would be used to provide economic benefits for other Americans.” But Williamson goes a good deal further, asserting:

If the government levies a tax on your neighbors in order to fund an earned-income tax credit for your family, then you’re a welfare queen; if the government levies a tax on businesses that is passed on to your neighbors in order to subsidize your earned income through higher prices, then that’s economic nationalism.

On this line of argument, the largest flock of welfare queens in America can be found today on Wall Street, where investment bankers with deep, crony connections to the Federal Reserve and the highest levels of government threatened America and the world with a new Great Depression in 2008 if the taxpayer didn’t bail out their insolvent financial firms for their reckless, high-profit speculations on risky mortgages. Establishment Republicans heeded the warning, and duly violated every tenet of free market economics (and distributive justice) by bailing out those banks.

But working class Americans who feel that their economic and social condition are in a chronic “state of emergency” (the title of one of Pat Buchanan’s best books) do not have the ear of the Federal Reserve and the White House. So they turn to Donald Trump, or Bernie Sanders, by way of throwing a brick through the glass that houses our country’s elites.

Is it really the same thing to want a check directly from the feds for staying home and watching WWF, and to want your government to rig the free market in your favor so that you can work a 40 (or 50, or 60) hour week? Does putting people on welfare have the same effect on them and their families as subsidizing or protecting their industries? You can reject most tariffs for good economic reasons — as I do — without lumping in hard-pressed workers with third-generation welfare cases.

Conservative commentator Laura Ingraham wrote on Twitter of Williamson’s article:

Michael Brendan Dougherty responded in greater depth, and with considerable heat, at The Week — unpacking the reasons why blue collar whites feel unrepresented by the Republican party, and even “mainstream” candidates such as Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush. Dougherty wrote about two hypothetical Republicans, a stockbroker named Jeffrey and an unemployed blue collar guy named Mike, and what “movement conservatism” has to offer each of them:

The movement wants to lower Jeffrey’s capital gains taxes. It also wants to lower corporate taxation, which intersects with his interests at several points. It wants to free up dollars marked for Social Security so they can be handed, temporarily, to Jeffrey’s fund-manager in-law, who works in nearby Darien. The movement has sometimes proposed giving Jeffrey a voucher to offset some of the cost of sending his daughter to school at Simon’s Rock. If his household income falls below $400,000, Marco Rubio would give him a generous tax credit for each of his offspring….And, if Jeffrey gives some money to conservative causes, figures in the movement will at least pretend to cheerfully listen to him as he says that the problem with Republicans is all these religious wackos and their pro-life nonsense.

By contrast, movement conservatism offers blue collar Mike:

a child tax credit refundable against payroll taxes…. He could get a voucher for a private school, but there aren’t many around and he can’t make up the difference in tuition costs anyway. In truth, the conservative movement has more ideas for making Mike’s life more desperate, like cutting off the Social Security Disability check he’s been shamefacedly receiving. It’s fibromyalgia fraud, probably. Movement spokesmen might consent to a relaxation of laws against gambling near Mike’s congressional district, so that Mike can get a job dealing at a blackjack table. More likely Mike ends up on the wrong side of the table, losing a portion of the SSD check to Sheldon Adelson. Finally, the movement’s favorite presidential candidate would like to put American armed forces ahead of a Sunni army outside of Homs, Syria, to fight Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, and al Nusra simultaneously. Russia too, if they don’t respect a no-fly zone. Mike’s daughter will be among the first round of American women to get a draft card.

Tom Nichols responded at The Transom, suggesting that Dougherty condescends to working class voters by accepting the idea that they should engage in identity politics. Nichols said that in past generations, working-class voters

could resist this kind of doomed call to class warfare. They were part of a culture of civic virtue and religious faith that held impulses like victimhood, entitlement, and social revenge in check. They lived, not always happily, subject to a self-imposed code of obligation to their families, rather than drowning in self-absorbed grudge-nursing.

Today, working-class men (and women) are more susceptible to those appeals because they and their children have been seduced by welfare-statism, marinated in a therapeutic culture of excuses, and surrounded by the wreckage of small-town values that finally imploded under attack by leftist elites. They have been told, repeatedly, that their concerns are nothing more than racism and sexism, and that they should shut up. This makes them prime targets for hucksters like Trump or upscale socialist fantasy-peddlers like Bernie Sanders.

Dougherty’s advice to white working-class men in all this? Go with it. It’s your time, and none of this is your fault. Screw those guys. Get yours.

Is that the answer? To turn the Republican Party and the conservative movement itself into Trump’s angry, bastardized version of the Democratic Party?

For Nichols, statism is a toxic temptation that has damaged, even crippled other social groups that have turned to it for answers, and conservatives must avoid inflicting that same damage on working class whites, as well. The obvious rejoinder, of course, is that statism seems to be working out pretty well for those who know how to work it — the crony capitalists, left-wing public employee unions, military contractors and political consultants.

These writers have entered into a complicated argument, but it boils down to this: Can you ask members of a one-time majority to be disinterested and civic-minded, to renounce the perennial human temptation of identity politics, when they no longer think that their legitimate interests are being served by their own government? Can you expect its men to enlist in the U.S. military to defend abstract principles of civics and economic efficiency? The secret to having a successful country, as opposed to chaotic free-for-all among disgruntled, narcissistic interest groups, is to put forth a public philosophy that offers significant, visible benefits to all. When elites rig the system to benefit primarily themselves, sooner or later the peons notice the fact, and rebel. And the outcome is never pretty.

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