Commonplace Book #248

The White workers who voted in large numbers for Donald Trump in 2020 are often described as nationalists–or, better, as men and women who have bought into a nationalist politics. But they don’t have anything like a national history. They have a class history. Together, many of them fought for the right to organize, and then for higher wages and better working conditions, and then for pensions and health care. The disappearance of the industries in which they worked, the collapse of their unions, their abandonment by neoliberal elites, their new economic vulnerability–these are what shape their politics. It isn’t so much a nationalist as a populist politics; it isn’t directed against an opposing nation or against un-American groups at home. Its demagogues play with racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigration tropes, which obviously have resonance in America today. But how much resonance is unclear, since small but surprising numbers of Blacks and Latinos voted for Trump, apparently not considering themselves his targets but rather identifying with his populists politics. Those voters aren’t racists; their actual enemy, and that of their White allies, is the American elite or, specifically, the indifferent or predatory elites, plutocratic and meritocratic, that make-up a significant part of our ruling class. It is certainly true that (many of) our plutocrats and meritocrats are not committed to the Declaration’s egalitarianism.

Michael Walzer, The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” As An Adjective, 79-80

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