Live from Trumpland: Who is attracted to voting for Trump? And why am I not--even as more than half of my income class is going to pull the lever for Trump this fall? Is it my urbanity? My education level? My unwillingness to fall for one of the most obvious grifts on the planet? The fact that I took too many American Studies courses as a child and so identify not as "white" but as "Yankee"--a descendant predominantly of East Anglian and Severn Valley Puritans, the position of whose culture and values in America today is not a result of relative numbers?
Josh Marshall wrestles with this hard problem, and comes up with a Polanyiesque interpretation: the disappointment by the market economic system of what had been thought as reasonable expectations leads to a politics of revenge--but not just of revenge against the Masters of the Universe, revenge against those who are somehow getting above themselves and getting free stuff:
Josh Marshall: Trumpism is a Politics of Loss and Revenge:
Trump support is highly correlated with areas experiencing rising mortality rates for whites--a massively important societal development, in addition to a tragedy....
The people responding most to anti-immigration politics and xenophobia are ones living in fairly racially homogenous and white communities.... I continue to believe that it is best understood as a reaction to the erosion of white privilege, supremacy and centrality in American life.... Trumpism is about loss. And that loss is real. It's not just about being haters or uneducated or stupid. The fact that what's being lost is in most respects something that wasn't legitimate to have in the first place--status, centrality and racial privilege--should not blind us to the fact that the loss is real and that it will have political consequences....
If you look at the language of Trumpism we see repeated references to getting stuff back, reclamation, anger.... The appeal of an extreme dominance politics is particularly to those who feel they've lost power and who feel increasingly marginal to the direction of the country as a whole.... I like being part of a genuinely multi-racial political party. The increasing diversity of American political life feels like an unalloyed good which I feel threatened by not in the least. But of course, if I'm stopped by a police officer alone at night, I'm 100% white. If I apply for a bank loan, I'm totally white. The privilege comes with me no matter what ideas I have in my head....
If your political identity is strongly tied up with your whiteness, you don't have to hate non-white people to find it profoundly unsettling to realize that at some point around the middle of this century most of the people in the country won't be white. You don't need to hate non-whites to be attached to the dominant position whites have historically had in American life.... Losing that dominance, if you don't feel able or ready or willing to relinquish it almost inevitably generates hatred and a desire for revenge...
